"In much of Wisconsin, 'Madison and Milwaukee' are code words (to some, dog whistles) for the parts of the state that are nonwhite, elite, different..."

"... The cities are where people don’t have to work hard with their hands, because they’re collecting welfare or public-sector paychecks. That stereotype updates a very old idea in American politics, one pervading Wisconsin’s bitter Statehouse fights today and increasingly those in other states: Urban voters are an exception. If you discount them, you get a truer picture of the politics — and the will of voters — in a state. Thomas Jefferson believed as much — 'the mobs of great cities add just so much to support of pure government,' he wrote, 'as sores do to the strength of the human body.' Wisconsin Republicans amplified that idea this week, arguing that the legislature is the more representative branch of government, and then voting to limit the power of the incoming Democratic governor. The legislature speaks for the people in all corners of the state, they seemed to be saying, and statewide offices like governor merely reflect the will of those urban mobs. 'State legislators are the closest to those we represent,' Scott Fitzgerald, the majority leader in the Wisconsin Senate, said in a statement after Republicans voted on the changes before dawn on Wednesday. They’re the ones who hold town hall meetings, who listen directly to constituents across the state. Legislators should stand, he said, 'on equal footing with an incoming administration that is based almost solely in Madison.'"

So writes Emily Badger in "Are Rural Voters the ‘Real’ Voters? Wisconsin Republicans Seem to Think So/A last-minute power grab by state lawmakers draws on an argument as old as the nation."

You see what she did there? Fitzgerald spoke of Madison, not because of the "urban" people of this city, but because it's the state capital, full of government workers. He was making an argument for rebalancing government with more weight in the legislative branch. Of course, he likes that now, because his party will continue to hold the legislative branch of state government, while the other party is taking over the executive branch after 8 years of the GOP's holding both branches. And it's fine to criticize that.

But it's a real twist to turn that into a RACIAL argument. Even if Fitzgerald were talking about the general population of Madison — as opposed to the government workers (the "incoming administration that is based almost solely in Madison") — he wouldn't be talking about RACIAL minorities. Emily Badger is a great name for someone who knows a lot about Madison, but did she even bother to look up the demographics before she lobbed her accusation of racism? Madison is overwhelmingly white — 78.9% White, 7.3% African American.

Badger seems to know she stretching it, because she adds:

Robin Vos, the Republican speaker of the Wisconsin Statehouse, drew this distinction even more explicitly after the midterm election.

“If you took Madison and Milwaukee out of the state election formula, we would have a clear majority,” he said. “We would have all five constitutional officers and we would probably have many more seats in the Legislature.”

What you have to click on the link to see is that the Vos quote was reported on November 8th, just after the election, and he was addressing the question of why the statewide elections went Democratic when the legislative majority came out Republican. There's a big lawsuit about gerrymandering in Wisconsin, and the Republican explanation for the way things are is that people who vote Democratic live in the geographically concentrated places, Milwaukee and Madison.

Even that wasn't calling city people a "mob" that can't be trusted with government! Vos was talking about the election results, not justifying the legislation that's been going on in Wisconsin this past week, and it's deceptive to use his quote for that purpose. How hard did Badger look for support for her theory before stooping to taking the Vos quote out of context? I assume she looked pretty hard, so using that quote — along with Fitzgerald's quote, which is only about Madison — reads like a confession that she couldn't find anything at all.

"Nothing would have been worse than a midterm result vindicating President Trump’s first two years in office."

"It’s particularly nice to see Vladimir Putin’s favorite Republican member of the House, Dana Rohrabacher of California, voted out of office."

Says Bret Stephens, one of the the NYT's conservative columnists, quoted in "For a Second There, We Stopped Talking About Trump/What else does the Democrats’ new House majority portend?," which is a conversation between him and the liberal NYT columnist Gail Collins, who responds, "This is the world Trump has made: Bret Stephens sitting in front of the TV cheering whenever a Republican goes down."

There's also this from Collins: "You know that I’ve always had a thing about how the country’s divided between empty places and crowded places. It’s partly based on a perfectly rational assessment of needs. But it’s also partly based on a longstanding distrust that Trump has made truly poisonous. Kind of scary."

I think that means the people who don't choose to crowd together in urban areas are wary, suspicious creatures, and Trump figured out how to activate them by playing upon the character flaws and neuroses that were the reason they were living out there in the first place.

CNN: "Trump says he's not a racist. That's not how white nationalists see it."

"White supremacists are saying they were winners in last week's midterm elections."

I'm going to pause my boycott of the recounts to give you this one Trump tweet.

The Florida Election should be called in favor of Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis in that large numbers of new ballots showed up out of nowhere, and many ballots are missing or forged. An honest vote count is no longer possible-ballots massively infected. Must go with Election Night!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 12, 2018

This is very close to the argument the lawyers for George W. Bush made, repeatedly and sternly, after the 2000 election. I remember it drove me crazy at the time. I'd voted for Al Gore, and I kept hoping the count would come out my way. But I must say that, unlike a lot of people who wanted Gore, once the Supreme Court gave the opinion that shut down further recounting, I accepted the result and regarded George W. Bush as the legitimately elected President of the United States. It has always bothered me that other people didn't do that.

Anyway, of course the side that's sitting on the higher total is going to insist we've gone far enough, but one of the strongest arguments against recounting is that conditions are such that the recount will be less accurate than the first count, and at least the first count was done before it was known how many votes the erstwhile loser needed to find to flip the result. In the 2000 election, there were punch cards with incompletely punched holes and the handling of the ballots seemed as though it could change the degree of detachment of the "chads." That created a tremendous amount of anxiety about human tampering that made the machine's first reading of the cards feel superior (except to the extent that one simply wanted, as I did, the other candidate to win).

So Trump is making a strong argument, stoking worries that human beings are tampering and interfering and a changed result will be a less accurate result. Of course, that's the argument of choice for the side that won the first count. It's hard to believe anyone who's hoping for a flip will stand down.

"I’m boycotting the recount stories. They make me feel terrible and there’s nothing my watching them can do to help."

Said I, in the comments in last night's café. Some commenters insisted I needed to shout about the outrages in the works, and I said, "I can’t shout about anything without studying and understanding what’s going on and I am not going to be goaded into doing that." And, "There’s so much alarmism from all sides these days. I am unimpressed." The pressure continued, and I said:

Those of you who are alarmed about "stealing" the election have a taste of how many anti-Trumpists have felt for 2 years. He "stole" the election.

I simply do not know the facts and don't think I can learn them, so I am declining to add noise to the noise.

IN THE COMMENTS: Joan wrote:

All of you calling bullshit on Althouse saying "Trump stole the election" need to check your reading comprehension. That's not Althouse's opinion, it's the opinion of the anti-Trumpers who have been saying it for 2 years.

Sooner or later we're going to hear "turnabout is fair play" from them. They miss the fact that Trump didn't actually steal anything. They fielded a bad candidate and failed to cheat enough to overcome her deficiencies. They're desperately trying, after repeating the first half of the losing formula, not to repeat the second half of it.

FWIW I'm with Althouse. I have nothing to contribute and don't need the anxiety. Somehow the Republic will survive, no matter the outcome. We survived Obama, and Trump has already undone a lot of the harms that were inflicted during his terms.

And Jessica wrote:

I feel the same on a broader level. Substitute "recount stories" with "all political news stories" and that's where I am. I research enough to cast a responsible vote at various intervals, but that's it. When I stopped all ingestion of political news, I emerged from a fog of worry, dread, and anguish. And guess what: All that worry, dread, and anguish was uttlerly pointless. As in, literally, it had no point, other than clicks for the purveyors and entertainment (however masochistic) for me. When I decided to find my entertainment elsewhere -- in my job, my children, my home, my faith, novels, history, apolitical TV -- my entire life got better. I feel happier, I'm more grateful, I sleep better. I still check in with you, Althouse, a few times a week, but that's it. No more politics. A weight has been lifted and I've lightened my steps.

"Blue wave or no, Trumpism lives on. And it continues to be America's loudest voice."

An L.A. Times editorial. Excerpt:

Many Americans had believed that Trump’s election two years ago was a brief deviation from the norm that would be reversed once rational voters saw what he was like in office. The [midterm election] returns were a depressing wake-up call to the true extent of division in the country. In fact, tens of millions of people turned out to vote in favor of Trumpism....

That message is horrendous. It is a message suffused with alt-right, racist ideology.... It is a message that manifests itself in shocking policies....

The battle to quiet Trump and Trumpism did not end on Tuesday. It will be a long slog, and the voters who spoke up in opposition Tuesday will have to keep speaking for at least another two years — loudly, courageously, unmistakably.

I'd say it's not enough to speak up in opposition — however long and loud. You need to respond convincingly on the issues, especially the issue of illegal immigration. It's not enough to say Trump's message is crude and inhumane and horrible. You need your own answer to the question, an answer that can be stated clearly and that will appeal to enough people (so it can't be open borders or don't do anything new).

"The fact that the state of Colorado, in 25 years, has gone from being dubbed the 'hate state' to a place that can elect someone who is not just openly gay, but publicly gay, that’s historic."

Said Annise Parker, a gay-rights activist, quoted in "Colorado, once the infamous anti-LGBT ‘hate state,’ becomes first to elect an openly gay governor" (WaPo).

The new governor is Jared Polis:

"Republican Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is not conceding defeat to Democrat Tony Evers."

"Unofficial results show Evers beat Walker by about 29,000 votes, or just over 1 percentage point, out of more than 2.6 million votes cast. State law only permits recounts for losing candidates who are within 1 percentage point. Walker campaign spokesman Brian Reisinger says 'we need the official canvass and for military ballots to be counted before any decision can be made.'... Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's campaign is alleging that 'thousands of ballots were damaged and had to be recreated' in the election that saw Democrat Tony Evers score a narrow victory. Walker campaign spokesman Brian Reisinger says until the ballots can be examined, there is no way to judge their validity.... Counties have until 9 a.m. Tuesday to canvas the vote."

AP reports.

AND: In Georgia, Democrat Stacey Abrams refuses to concede.

UPDATE: Walker concedes.

A good column title "How to argue about whether these midterms were a 'blue wave.'"

That's for a piece by Colby Itkowitz at WaPo.

She's ignoring the question whether we should argue about whether these midterms were a "blue wave." In my perfunctory live-blog of the results last night, I said, mid-evening, "Seems fair to say it’s not a 'blue wave.'" Time stamp: 7:51 CT. Does that mean I want to argue about it?

I think Itkowitz is offering arguments for people who want to contend that it was a "blue wave." I think these people are like Trump and other Republicans who want to claim "tremendous success" for themselves. I'm not impressed by any of it. As I said in my live blog, "But I always assume things will be boring!" And I always assume things are boring, and I react very slowly, if not actively negatively, to efforts to nudge me to get excited and to think something huge is happening.

Is it in the interest of Democrats to fight over the label? Should they even respond if they're taunted by people like me saying it wasn't a wave? Maybe the "wave" spin is helpful in justifying a highly active House majority in the next 2 years, but then what if they're held to account for not doing enough with the power and authority represented by the idea that it was a wave? There was a wave, you said it was a wave, but you did not surf it. Shouldn't they manage expectations?

Itkowitz has a good, succinct list of arguments for those who want to argue that was a "wave." Example:

As of the early hours Wednesday morning, Democrats were projected to win the national popular vote by nearly 9 percentage points, which is greater than the Republican “waves” in 1994, 2010 and 2014 and the Democratic “wave” in 2006. If those elections were waves, then this one is, too.

That idea of "the national popular vote" is a good way to focus on what happened in the House races. The Senate races only covered some of the states, so the total there is more of a random number, based on which one-third of the seats happened to be up this time, and the states are all different sizes.

On Itkowitz's not-a-wave list of arguments, there's:

The massive repudiation of Trump that Democrats hoped for simply didn’t happen. In fact, in many states where Trump campaigned hard for Republicans, it seems the opposite occurred. He focused throughout the campaign on saving the Senate for the GOP, and it appears his efforts paid off.

I think the how-to-argue list is helpful in deciding whether to argue (and I'm guessing Itkowitz knew that and was really implicitly answering the question I said she "ignored").

"How the Midterms Are Making Us Feel/Choose an emoji to add it to your approximate location."

At the NYT, it's about feelings. My feelings are neutral, but I didn't participate because the "neutral" face (purple) doesn't look neutral enough. It looks a little confused and ill at ease, and yet its neighbor "happy" (pink) looks too happy.

Excellent midterm election day graphic at Drudge.

It means: These elections are a referendum on Trump, and we don't know the answer yet.

Perhaps Drudge will lighten the image as the results come in and he's ready with a smiling face or a grim face. Perhaps something in between — or some face of puzzlement if it's close and there are recounts in the offing.

You know what Democrats are going to say if they don't win the House?

You might think Trump has set the midterms up as a referendum on himself, and I think that's true. But if the GOP wins, Trump antagonists are not going to give it to Trump and say his referendum passed and bow to democratic choice. They're going to say that racism won, and resisting and fighting is even more important now that we know so many Americans have been caught up in Trump's horrible scheme.

ADDED: I shouldn't have put a question mark in the post title. I really did mean you know. I'm not trying to be inventive. Sometimes there's reason to put the obvious down in print, to make a record in case anyone might doubt that we all knew. Also, it saves the trouble of having to write, after the fact, about not being surprised or wheel out the old "shocked, shocked" cliché one more time.

"[P]urely from the vantage point of Trump’s self-interest — particularly as it relates to winning reelection in 2020 — there is a compelling case to be made that a Democratic House might be a good thing..."

Writes Aaron Blake in WaPo.

The first reason is that voters seem to like divided government... The second is that it gives Trump a boogeyman — or, more apt, a boogeywoman... Nancy Pelosi...

Trump could also blame the Democratic House for his continued failures to live up to his many, many promises.... If you are going to have gridlock, you might as well have someone on which to blame it who is not in your own party.

And, finally, even that subpoena power could pose some tough choices for Democrats. There will be pressure from the party’s base to go after Trump heard and even impeach him, but we’ve seen how that can lead to overreach — most notably, when Republicans impeached Bill Clinton in the late 1990s. And Democratic leaders have already telegraphed a wariness about that. What happens when they actually have power and the base wants them to go further than they think is prudent?...

"Trump’s use of Air Force One is raising questions about the ethics and protocol of using a military asset for political purposes."

"But ethics experts said there is no law preventing Trump from campaigning within view of the plane. And they note that the president, as well as the vice president, is exempt from the Hatch Act, which bars federal employees from engaging in political activity. 'It’s a question of appearance,' said Richard W. Painter, ethics czar in the Bush White House and an outspoken critic of Trump’s ethics practices. 'It’s highly inappropriate, but there’s nobody who can go sanction him for standing in front of the plane to give a political speech. It’s not illegal.'... The president does not have the option of flying commercial or using his personal plane for political events. He is required to fly Air Force One for all of his travel, including vacations, because of the security and communications systems aboard. During the 2016 campaign, Trump used his personal Boeing 757 — branded Trump Force One — at his rallies, pulling the plane up to near the stage to great fanfare... But in February 2017, when Trump held his first airport hangar rally as president, the White House said it would not use Air Force One 'in the background as a prop.' That policy was clearly dropped as the president’s campaigning picked up pace, however...."

From "A ‘there-it-is’ moment: Trump wows fans by using Air Force One as a campaign prop" (WaPo).

"My God... he’s black," said Norman Lear, introducing Andrew Gillum, and his joke "killed"...

... according to the NYT, in "Jimmy Buffett and ‘MAGA’ Hats: Scenes From the U.S. Just Before a Tight Election" (an article that has a correction note about misspelling Buffett's name in the original headline.)

Andrew Gillum is the Democratic Party nominee for governor in Florida. Norman Lear is the ancient TV producer and political activist. Lear is 96 years old, so maybe he has the privilege to use the sort of humor that Americans less obviously close to the end no longer risk.

"The mystery of Donald Trump is what impels him to overturn the usual rules. Is it a dark sort of cunning or simple defects of character?"

"Because the president’s critics tend to be educated and educated people tend to think that the only kind of smarts worth having is the kind they possess — superior powers of articulation combined with deep stores of knowledge — those critics generally assume the latter. He’s a bigot. He’s a con artist. His followers are dumb. They got lucky last time. They won’t be so lucky again. Maybe this is even right. But as Trump’s presidency moves forward, it’s no longer smart to think it’s right. There’s more than one type of intelligence. Trump’s is feral. It strikes fast. It knows where to sink the fang into the vein.... The truth is that there is no easy fix to the challenge of the caravan, which is why Trump was so clever to make the issue his own and Democrats have been so remiss in letting him have it. The secret of Trump’s politics is to mix fear and confidence — the threat of disaster and the promise of protection — like salt and sugar, simultaneously stimulating and satisfying an insatiable appetite."

From "Why Aren’t Democrats Walking Away With the Midterms?/Democrats miss Trump’s political gifts and the real threat he represents" by Bret Stephens (NYT).

I tried to read the comments, but what I saw was, as I expected, a lot of no, no, no, Trump is evil and his followers are idiots.

By they way, are we allowed to speak of human beings as non-human animals or not? "Trump’s is feral. It strikes fast. It knows where to sink the fang into the vein" — portrays Trump as a snake.

ADDED: It's funny — isn't it? — that people who pride themselves on their own intelligence and sneer at others for lacking intelligence, cannot understand what the hell is going on. I think it's that emotion reigns in the human mind, and they cannot settle down and coolly analyze the situation, and they are afraid of having any ideas that would inspire the contempt of people whose love and respect they feel they need. What is there to do then but hate Trump and think half the country belongs in the basket of deplorables?

"Those horrible pink hats': midterms divide women in era of #MeToo."

A nicely done, nicely balanced little film, from The Guardian. Watch the whole thing. I love the low-key, steadfast demeanor of the filmmaker, Paul Lewis:

I didn't know it was still predicted, but "A blue wave is predicted for the midterms. I’m not convinced" is...

... the title of an essay in WaPo by Paul Theroux, who wrote a book I like a lot — "The Mosquito Coast" — so I'll give it a read. I doubt if the author wrote the headline, but it is what caused me to click — only because I was just thinking that the term "blue wave" had been abandoned and the elections were now being discussed as some sort of dead heat to the finish line.

Ihave quite a lot of sympathy for certain Trump voters, and (wait, please, let me finish) I've been making a list of some concerns that Donald Trump the candidate (I beg you to stop interrupting me — this won't take long) raised when he was on the campaign trail and in the White House...

Ihave quite a lot of doubt about the copy editing at a news site that runs the first words of an essay together like that. They've got an eminent author, and they serve him that poorly! And here he is tripping off to a lovely start, conjuring up clamorous readers objecting and shouting him down.

Writing from Oaxaca, Mexico, Theroux is concerned about the poor labor conditions in Mexico: "the visible obscenity of American factories a few hundred yards over the border at, say, Mexicali or Ciudad Juarez or Reynosa, merely to allow these companies to pay workers $8.50 a day." What do Democrats propose to do about that?

And what will Democrats do about immigration? Theroux asks, even as he rejects "building the Murus Hadrianus Trumpus at the border.

Trump's hostility to immigration and his appeal to old-fashioned Americana is seen as nativist and sometimes racist.... Anyone who came of age in 1950s America has witnessed a doubling of the U.S. population and an enormous cultural shift. Its upside is diversity, of course; its downside is an erosion of historical memory, and culture shock.

Yes, it's a pity that young immigrants, and plenty of young people generally, have never heard of Elvis, Screamin' Jay Hawkins or Annette Funicello. It's of greater concern to me that the names Emmett Till and Rosa Parks are so seldom invoked; that there is so little awareness of America's tradition of dissent, or of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s hope to live in a nation where people "will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."...

To write off Trump's message, or to see his voters as racist and deplorable, is to miss the point.... There are many loud Trumpers, but there are shy Trumpers, too. So I distrust polls more than ever.... I discovered that many in my large and lovable and liberal-minded family, and maybe yours too, revealed themselves as shy Trumpers.

A Democrat makes an impassioned plea for Democrats to vote for the Republican nominee for Attorney General in Wisconsin.

"Brad [Schimel] has been an attorney in Wisconsin for 28 years. He has handled over 16,000 Wisconsin state cases. Josh Kaul, since coming back [to Wisconsin] in 2014, has handled one Wisconsin state case and it wasn't even a criminal matter. The Wisconsin Attorney General represents the state of Wisconsin, and most importantly law enforcement.... There are hundreds of attorneys in Wisconsin who are Democrats who are qualified for this job. In my opinion, Josh Kaul is not one of them. He has handled one Wisconsin state case. One. Compared to Brad's 16,000."

The lawyer in the video, Saul Glazer, is someone I know, and I'm surprised to see him supporting a Republican.

ADDED: Saul emails that he is not a Democrat. The group is called "Democratic and Independent Voters for Brad Schimel."

"Trump's attack on Ryan seen as advance scapegoating."

The Hill headlines, based on the Trump tweet, "Paul Ryan should be focusing on holding the Majority rather than giving his opinions on Birthright Citizenship, something he knows nothing about! Our new Republican Majority will work on this, Closing the Immigration Loopholes and Securing our Border!"

The Hill writes:

Now, as the House majority appears to be slipping away from Republicans, Trump is suddenly lashing out at the Speaker.

It's not as though the chance of winning has suddenly slipped away. We used to hear about the "Blue Wave," as if a big loss in the House were inevitable. The future is hazier now, the majority isn't "slipping away." The elections seem to be drifting toward something more like a tie, so I don't see the sense of saying Trump is "suddenly" reacting to a loss he sees coming. And Trump seems to be the last guy in the world to lurch into pessimism about an impending election.

Trump's political team has pointed to the high number of GOP retirements and poor fundraising totals among sleepy incumbents as the main source of the party’s troubles in the House. In the third quarter, 110 Democratic challengers outraised their Republican opponents.

GOP strategists said it was incredibly unhelpful to attack Ryan, which is further inflaming Republican tensions and knocking the party off message in the final stretch before the critical midterm elections.

They also maintain it will be impossible for the president to escape blame, given that he has urged his supporters to envision him on the ballot this fall.

I don't know which Republicans talk to The Hill, but it looks like these are people who don't want the immigration issue at the forefront, which used to be just about all Republicans, didn't it? So their pitch to The Hill is that losing the House — which they are resigned about — will be Trump's fault, and his effort to push a big, powerful issue is only designed to shift the blame. I think it's more that he's built a big beautiful win-win for himself: Either his campaign choices worked or they failed because Republicans didn't align themselves strongly enough with him. And Republicans will be stuck with Trump's choice of issues whichever way the House goes. And we're already well into the 2020 campaign.