"The traditional gender gap is losing ground as a key factor in politics to intragender gaps that have emerged among Republican and Democratic voters along the fault lines of masculinity and femininity."

Asserts Thomas Edsall, in "The Gender Gap Has Taken a Strange Twist" (NYT).

I'm not agreeing (or disagreeing) with this take. I just thought you should know:

Men — specifically white men — who see themselves as extremely masculine tend to support President Trump, while those who are weaker in their assessment of their masculinity — or in how they think about masculinity — are far less likely to support Trump. The gap between the two is just as significant if not more significant than the gender gap.

A similar, but more complex spread has emerged among women....

Are there men who think of themselves as "extremely masculine"? That made me think of this: 

For some reason, this old post is the post of mine that got the most traffic in the last 12 months.

March 9, 2016

Elite media slowly absorbs the meaning of Donald Trump.

In the NYT this morning.

1. A photograph that exemplifies Donald Trump voters as they ominously approach a polling place. The sky is dark, the couple is old and funereal, the man is grim, the woman a clown.

2. A photograph that's mostly black space, with Donald Trump's face all the way over to the right, emerging from the gloom, and the shadows giving his neck the appearance of a scrotum.

3. The Editorial Board is "Trying to Read Donald Trump, in Translation." This is not — as I'd originally imagined — the NYT people translating Trump's simple statements into the language of the elite so they can understand it. It's attempting to imagine how Trump's statements are heard by people in other countries.

4. "Does Donald Trump represent a legitimate expression of the people’s will? Is his rise a manifestation of justifiable resentment among less privileged whites at their neglect by higher caste Republican leaders?" A columnist (Thomas B. Edsall) wonders.

"How Many People Support Trump but Don’t Want to Admit It?"

Asks Thomas B. Edsall, in the NYT (gift link).

Oh! Ha ha. I thought this was a new article.

Seemed to go along with today's episode of The Daily, "48 Days Until the Midterms: Is a Blue Wave Coming?" (gift link)[based on "A ‘Blue Wave’ May Be Building, but How High? A Times/Siena national poll suggests Republicans are reeling. Can they come back by depicting Democrats as too far to the left?].

But now I see that Edsall piece was published on May 11, 2016.

Ha ha ha. I guess we found out.

Edsall ends with: "[T]he simple fact that Trump has beaten the odds so far means that it is not beyond the realm of possibility that he could beat them again. If he does take the White House, much, if not all, of his margin of victory will come from voters too ashamed to acknowledge publicly how they intend to cast their vote."

"It’s Not Going to Get Any Easier for Democrats After Trump."

That's a NYT headline for a column by Thomas Edsall. 

Key sentence: "The precariousness of the Democrats’ position in the coming decade hit home for me after reading 'The 2026 Midterms Are Critical. But 2032 Could Be Existential,' a March 24 essay that Steve Schale, a Democratic strategist based in Florida posted on The Bulwark."

I have no gift links left to give on this, the last day of the month, but even if I did, I wouldn't use one for this. Just go read Schale's piece at The Bulwark. It's not paywalled. Or don't even do that. The big point is just that the 2030 census is going to be very tough on the Democrats.

"Trump and the Republicans held leads on... being for working people (a 7-point advantage), standing up to elites (8 points)..."

"... being able to get things done for the American people (12 points), feeling safe (12 points) and keeping wages and salaries up with the cost of living (17 points)... [and] patriotism (11 points), crime (17 points), immigration (20 points) and border security (22 points)... [and] opposing extremism (3 points), getting beyond the chaos (6 points) and protecting the Constitution (8 points)."

 
Writes Thomas Edsall, in "'This Is Grim,' One Democratic Pollster Says" (NYT), reporting the results of a poll of voters in battleground states and competitive House Districts. The poll was done by James Carville's group, Democracy Corps.

Biden and the Democrats only came out ahead on "women’s rights (ahead by 17 points), climate change (15 points), addressing racial inequality (10 points), health care (3 points), the president will not be an autocrat (plus 2) and protecting Democracy (plus 1)." 

Edsall quotes various pundits, but let me highlight one, Will Marshall, "president and founder of the center-left Public Policy Institute think tank":

"There has always been a certain ambivalence on the part of many liberals regarding the actual implementation of affirmative action."

"I thought that it would ultimately be done in by the sheer collapse of the categories such as 'white' or 'Black,' and the impossibility of clearly defining who counts as 'Hispanic' or 'Asian.'"

Emailed lawprof Sanford V. Levinson to Thomas V. Edsall and quoted in Edsall's NYT column "The Liberal Agenda of the 1960s Has Reached a Fork in the Road."

The column is about "the strikingly different public responses to two recent Supreme Court rulings, one on abortion, the other on affirmative action." The idea of a "fork in the road" suggests a need to pick one or the other option, but liberals could forefront both issues. They're not mutually exclusive. They've simply chosen to use the abortion issue and forget about affirmative action, and the reason is obvious. Polls show that a big majority of Americans — including a big majority of Democrats — support what the Court did with affirmative action. 

I just wanted to pull out that Levinson quote, because I remember thinking — for a brief while, back in the 1990s — that affirmative action "would ultimately be done in by the sheer collapse of the categories." But I couldn't seem to find other lawprofs who saw that problem. Applicants identified themselves by race, and we took their word for it. Then there's no "impossibility of clearly defining who counts" as what. It's completely clear: You are what you say you are. What could go wrong?

About that "fork" (if there is a fork):

And "Fork in the road" has a Wikipedia article. Excerpt:

"When I asked a Pikeville, Ky., businessman why he thought the Democratic Party had become 'unhinged,' Henry, as I’ll call him here..."

"... studied his cellphone, then held it for me to see a video of two transgender activists standing on the White House lawn in Pride week. One was laughingly shaking her naked prosthetic breasts, the other bare-chested, showing scars where breasts had been cut away. The clip then moved to President Biden saying, 'these are the bravest people I know.'"

Said the Berkeley sociologist Arlie Hochschild, quoted in a NYT op-ed by Thomas B. Edsall, titled "'Gut-level Hatred' Is Consuming Our Political Life."

"Appropriately titled 'Tightness-Looseness Across the 50 United States,' the study calculated a catalog of measures for each state..."

"... including the incidence of natural disasters, disease prevalence, residents’ levels of openness and conscientiousness, drug and alcohol use, homelessness and incarceration rates.... The South dominated the tight states: Mississippi, Alabama Arkansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Louisiana, Kentucky, South Carolina and North Carolina. With two exceptions — Nevada and Hawaii — states in New England and on the West Coast were the loosest: California, Oregon, Washington, Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Vermont...."

I'm reading "Do You Live in a ‘Tight’ State or a ‘Loose’ One? Turns Out It Matters Quite a Bit" by Thomas B. Edsall (NYT).

"He lied to people in his advertising; he had more money to spend because he represented corporate interests; states changed their voting laws and let illegal people vote; the Russians intervened..."

"... they suppressed turnout; the press was biased against him; He was wrongly blamed for [insert here]; some people voted twice; etc."

That's what people whose candidate lost have said about why the winner won after every election since 1996, according to University of Pennsylvania polisci prof Diana Mutz, who's been taking surveys on this question. 

Quoted in "America, We Have a Problem/The rise of ‘political sectarianism’ is putting us all in danger" by Thomas B. Edsall (NYT).

Edsall wants to say that now people must stop behaving like this, but why would that happen? The idea — which doesn't strike me as too promising — is that with Trump people have finally gone too far. And Trump himself stoked these ideas. Edsall quotes Harvard psychology prof Steven Pinker: 

What’s extraordinary about the present moment is how far most Republicans have gone in endorsing beliefs that are disconnected from reality and serve only to bind the sect and excommunicate the unfaithful. 

At some point, Pinker says, "reality will push back." 

"'Defund the police' is the second stupidest campaign slogan any Democrat has uttered in the twenty first century."

"It is second in stupidity only to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 comment that half of Trump’s supporters belong in a 'basket of deplorables.'" 

Said University of California-Irvine polysci prof Bernard Grofman, quoted in "'The Far Left Is the Republicans’ Finest Asset’/An intense battle between moderates and progressives has already spilled into public view" by Thomas Edsall (NYT). 

Edsall also quotes from a report by 4 progressive groups — New Deal Strategies, Justice Democrats, Sunrise Movement and Data for Progress — "What went wrong for Congressional Democrats in 2020":

The latest choice for Democrats to locate our fear and blame is the slogan from many Black and young activists who marched the streets this summer: “Defund The Police.” Conservative Democrats may change the terms and people we blame and fear year-by-year, but Democrats must take on the Republican Party’s divide-and-conquer racism head-on and not demobilize our own base.... This election, the Black youth leading the Black Lives Matter movement have turned their power in the streets into votes.... When Democratic leaders make unforced errors like showing off two subzero freezers full of ice cream on national television or cozy up with Wall Street executives and corporate lobbyists while Trump tells voters we are the party of the swamp, it is not surprising that we lose.

Edsall links to this especially good Trump ad, which magnificently exploited Pelosi's posing with her refrigerators: 

Anyway, which side does Edsall take? (Do you care?) I'll just quote his last line:

Liberal advocacy groups have become more in-your-face, more intense, partly in reaction to the intransigence of the Trump regime, a development that is in turn irrevocably linked to the intensity of the conflicts across the country and within the Democratic Party itself.

Trump only gets credit when it seems like blame. Oh, he's intransigent! But what Edsall is admitting is that Trump suckered the Democratic Party into fighting itself. How did he do that? It was quite a bit more sophisticated than just being "intransigent" and thus causing other people to become "more intense." 

NYT columnist Thomas Edsall lists 5 things Biden supporters should worry about.

Here:

First, there are indications that Trump’s base of support — whites without college degrees — is more energized and committed to voting this year than key Democratic constituencies. And there is also evidence that polling does not reflect this.

Second, Latinos, who are key to the outcome in several crucial states — Arizona and Florida, for example — have shown less support for Biden than for past Democratic nominees. Many Hispanic voters seem resistant to any campaign that defines them broadly as “people of color.”

Third, absentee voting is expected to be higher among Democrats than Republicans, subjecting their ballots to a greater risk of rejection, a fate more common to mailed-in votes than to in-person voting.

Fourth, the generic Democratic-Republican vote (“Would you be more willing to vote for a Republican or Democratic candidate for Congress?”) through early July favored Democrats by more than 10 points, but has since narrowed to 6 points.

Fifth, the debates will test Biden’s ability to withstand three 90-minute battles against an opponent known for brutal personal attacks.

I haven't looked at the comments yet, but I will. I predict intense denial, premised on: 1. The polls favor Biden so much!, 2. Everybody knows Trump is horrible!, 3. ???...

To my surprise, the top-rated comment is about something Edsall barely mentioned: the riots. It's a response to another commenter:

"On the plus side for Democrats, persuadables agree 'on ending racial discrimination, on the negative impact of divide and conquer tactics, on the value of working together, on the reality that African Americans face greater obstacles than whites.'"

"On the negative side of the ledger, according to the report, these middle ground voters 'have concerns about "reverse racism" and discrimination against whites;' a sizable majority agree 'focusing on race doesn’t fix anything and may even make things worse;' and 'persuadable adults believe that people of color who cannot get ahead are mostly responsible for their own condition.' In other words, these persuadable voters provide fertile ground for conservative appeals to racial resentment.... [Democratic p]oliticians, according the report, should say 'our opponents point the finger for our hard times at blacks, new immigrants and Muslims' instead of saying 'our opponents are racist against blacks, new immigrants and Muslims.' Why? 'Framing scapegoating as tied to economic concerns allows audiences, including whites, to see that their well-being is tied to rejecting racial resentment.'"

From "Does Anyone Have a Clue About How to Fight Back Against Trump’s Racism?/Moderates and progressives have a lot to lose by ignoring each other on this crucial question" by Thomas Edsall (in the NYT).

Edsall quotes lawprof Ian Haney López, who has recommended "cross-racial solidarity as the key to both racial justice and economic fairness" and received pushback from progressives, who tend to be "wary of any alliance with working and middle class whites." Haney López says that "racial justice activists" resist "the race-class approach" because they don't like the way the Democratic Party elite always seem to be telling them to "subordinate their concerns to larger goals."

Here's a highly rated comment from over there:

It boils down to this. Racial resentment IS American politics. America was born of racial resentment, built from racial resentment and is still divided by racial resentment.

Framing the resentment along economic lines gives people an excuse to view the resentment as being nonracial. But is just that, an excuse. The core motivation is race, more specifically white privilege. No one want to be called a racist.

The whole package is then wrapped in the flag as a patriotic position. Actually, it is because America has always been about race.

Which side is full of resentment — the left or the right? The people who think in terms of economics or the people who think in terms of race? Reading that comment, I wasn't really sure, but I presume the commenter is perceiving resentment as a quality possessed by the side he's not on. Isn't that how it always goes?

I looked up "resentment" and got halfway down a rathole labeled "ressentiment." I'll just point it out. Just so you know I know it's there.

"The reality is that Barr is... marketing apocalyptic hogwash because, for his boss to get re-elected, Trump’s supporters must continue to believe..."

"... that liberals and the Democratic Party are the embodiment of evil, determined to destroy the American way of life. Relentless pressure to maintain the urgency of that threat is crucial to Trump’s political survival. It is embedded in the president’s rhetoric, core to his manic ambition and essential to his re-election strategy. The unanswered question is whether it is necessary not only to bolster Trump’s at once inflated and fragile ego, but also for the continued competitive strength of the Republican Party. Based on the evidence before us now, it certainly seems that it is."

Those are the last few lines of "Liberals Do Not Want to Destroy the Family/Or society, for that matter. How did this preposterous idea leap to the forefront of conservative thinking?" by Thomas Edsall (NYT). He's reacting to the recent speech in which Barr railed against "licentiousness — the unbridled pursuit of personal appetites at the expense of the common good."

I'm too jaded to take any of that seriously. Don't liberals also rail against "the unbridled pursuit of personal appetites at the expense of the common good"? And don't Democrats, to get elected, seem to think people must believe that the GOP is the embodiment of evil, determined to destroy the American way of life?

"The Trump Voters Whose ‘Need for Chaos’ Obliterates Everything Else/Political nihilism is one of the president’s strongest weapons."

Headline for a NYT op-ed by Thomas Edsall. I'm blogging this because an order-and-chaos theme has happened to emerge on the blog this morning and also because I think it suggests that Trump voters are not fascists. I'm assuming fascism is grounded in an excessive need for order.

Let's read:

Last week, at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, the winner of the best paper award in the Political Psychology division was “A ‘Need for Chaos’ and the Sharing of Hostile Political Rumors in Advanced Democracies.”... [Michael Bang Petersen, Mathias Osmundsen, and Kevin Arceneaux argue] that a segment of the American electorate that was once peripheral is drawn to “chaos incitement” and that this segment has gained decisive influence through the rise of social media.

I don't know about "decisive," but otherwise this seems like a good observation. But I'm going to resist Edsall's idea of making the problem specific to Trump voters.

The circulation of [conspiracy theories, fake news, discussions of political scandals and negative campaigns] has been “linked to large-scale political outcomes within recent years such as the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”

But that doesn't mean that only the winner's voters were susceptible to that sort of material! Also, I wouldn't limit the problem of "chaos incitement" to social media. Mainstream media does it too.

The authors describe “chaos incitement” as a “strategy of last resort by marginalized status-seekers,” willing to adopt disruptive tactics. Trump, in turn, has consistently sought to strengthen the perception that America is in chaos....

That sounds like an appeal to people who don't like chaos! Does Edsall even notice this blatant contradiction?

"The Democratic Electorate on Twitter Is Not the Actual Democratic Electorate/A detailed look at the voters with the numbers to decide the 2020 Democratic nominee."

The NYT delves into something that shouldn't surprise anyone: The noisiest people are atypical.

The outspoken group of Democratic-leaning voters on social media is outnumbered, roughly 2 to 1, by the more moderate, more diverse and less educated group of Democrats who typically don’t post political content online, according to data from the Hidden Tribes Project. This latter group has the numbers to decide the Democratic presidential nomination in favor of a relatively moderate establishment favorite, as it has often done in the past.

If you look only at Democrats who don't "post political content to social media sites," you find 53% of them say they are "moderate or conservative" and 70% say "political correctness" is a problem.

There are also more than twice as many black people in this group — 24%, as opposed to 11% in the group that posts political content. And that's according to the Hidden Tribes Project. The NYT did its own "informal poll of Democrats on one of our Twitter accounts," and only 2% were black.

These people who are less active on social media are also — as the NYT puts it — "under-represented in the well-educated, urban enclaves where journalists roam" and "under-represented in the Northern blue states and districts where most Democratic politicians win elections."

Less engaged and less ideological voters tend to be cynical about politics. One might think cynicism would translate to support for outsider candidates, and it probably could against an establishment favorite with enough flaws. Instead, it has more often meant skepticism of ambitious, idealistic, pie-in-the-sky liberals and progressives who offer big promises with no record. It has meant an appreciation for well-known, battle-tested politicians who have been on their side or even delivered in the past.... 

Subtext: You hot-headed NYT readers better wake up and smell the hair of Joe Biden. 

ADDED: The article linked above went up at the NYT yesterday. Today, the theme continues, with "How Radical Is Too Radical for 2020 Democrats?/Or is that question beside the point in the Trump era?" a column by Thomas Edsall. Democratic Party candidates are embracing the Green New Deal and slavery reparations, which might work in the primaries but prove deadly in the general election. Edsall ends inconclusively:

Three years ago, Trump threw out conventional wisdom and went on to win the nomination and the presidency. Maybe, this time around, Democrats can gamble successfully on a similar strategy and win. Or maybe not.

If you ask the question like that, out loud... "Can Democrats Follow #MeToo to Victory?"...

... I hope it's because you believe the answer is no. If this is your actual strategy, you better keep it to yourselves. If you can. Don't repeat the Jennifer Palmieri screwup. Remember, earlier this month?

The Center For American Progress (CAP) Action Fund circulated a memo... co-authored by former Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri...  “The fight to protect Dreamers is not only a moral imperative, it is also a critical component of the Democratic Party’s future electoral success..."...

"Can Democrats Follow #MeToo to Victory?" is a NYT column by Thomas B. Edsall. I haven't read it yet, but I suspect that he's posing the question to answer it in the negative. Let's see:

The issue has the potential to accelerate the growing discontent among well-educated white women with the Republican Party. But it could also intensify hostility to the liberal agenda among conservatives, particularly white men, many of whom view women’s complaints of discrimination as “an attempt to gain advantage” in the workplace....

Edsall goes on to quote a lot of academics and pollsters in a way that should inspire caution about using this issue too much. He mostly lets data and experts do the talking for him, and the closest he gets to answering the question in the column title is "what looks like a favorable climate now for Democrats is in fact highly volatile."

One of the pollsters — Alex Castellanos — says something so interesting that I'm going to make it a separate post. So if that's what you're inclined to talk about, please save your comment for a post that will come up next and very soon.

Oh, come on. I'm sure it's possible. And now I feel challenged. The GOP tax bill is going to kill us all!

I'm reading the NYT headline: "You Cannot Be Too Cynical About the Republican Tax Bill."

The most cynical thing I actually think is that the GOP benefited itself by shifting a big burden onto taxpayers in the high-taxing blue states while channeling a generous new advantage to the taxpayers in red states.

The above-linked column (by Thomas Edsall) quotes an unnamed "tax expert" on this subject:

Restriction on state and C local tax deduction — consciously vindictive imposition of double taxation on citizens of certain Democratic states; corporations and pass through businesses, the darlings of the Republicans, still get to deduct those very same taxes in full.

I don't know what the "C" in "state and C local tax deduction" is supposed to mean. Some editing glitch, I'm guessing.

Anyway, I don't think it was so much "consciously vindictive" as it was consciously convenient. Why not burden people who weren't going to vote for you anyway? There was a tax benefit — the state and local deduction — that helped taxpayers in high-taxing/Democratic-voting states and was unavailable to people in lower-taxing/GOP-voting states. The people in the GOP-voting states were providing a higher proportion of the money that went to the federal government, even as these GOP-voting people tend to support less federal spending than the Democratic-voting people who were supplying less of the federal money. I can understand the GOP wanting to rebalance that out of a combination of fairness and their own political advantage.

I don't really see calling it "vindictive." That really is too cynical. And I'm saying that as someone who believes I will pay a lot more federal tax because of this change.

IN THE COMMENTS: Eleanor eloquently explains why it's fair and not vindictive:

What the tax package does is remove the "discount" feature of the relationship between federal and state and local taxes. We won't be able to vote to spend money locally with the idea the price will be discounted by a reduction in our federal taxes. If a local project is going to add $300 to a property tax bill, then it's going to cost the full $300. I don't see any unfairness in this at all. The rules are the same in all 50 states. If we want something, we should pay for it and not expect people outside the service area of the project to subsidize it. We all benefit from military bases and farm subsidies. Federal money going into states that provide national security or feed the nation is in everybody's self-interest. Why should someone in Nebraska subsidize bus service expansion in Boston?

Democrats don't feel your pain either.

It's all a con.

That's my reaction to "Republicans Don’t Feel Your Pain," by Thomas B. Edsall in the NYT.

"[O]ne way to better understand the intensity of Trump’s appeal is by looking at something called 'psychological reactance.'"

That's "the feeling you get when people try to stop you from doing something you’ve been doing, and you perceive that they have no right or justification for stopping you. So you redouble your efforts and do it even more, just to show that you don’t accept their domination. Men in particular are concerned to show that they do not accept domination."

Elite media slowly absorbs the meaning of Donald Trump.

In the NYT this morning.

1. A photograph that exemplifies Donald Trump voters as they ominously approach a polling place. The sky is dark, the couple is old and funereal, the man is grim, the woman a clown.

2. A photograph that's mostly black space, with Donald Trump's face all the way over to the right, emerging from the gloom, and the shadows giving his neck the appearance of a scrotum.

3. The Editorial Board is "Trying to Read Donald Trump, in Translation." This is not — as I'd originally imagined — the NYT people translating Trump's simple statements into the language of the elite so they can understand it. It's attempting to imagine how Trump's statements are heard by people in other countries.

4. "Does Donald Trump represent a legitimate expression of the people’s will? Is his rise a manifestation of justifiable resentment among less privileged whites at their neglect by higher caste Republican leaders?" A columnist (Thomas B. Edsall) wonders.