Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Impeach Hunter Biden! But don't mention extremism.

[Brexiter]

Nicholas Grossman/Arc Digital:

Another Hyped “Hunter Biden Laptop” Reveal Flops

Elon Musk and Matt Taibbi said the "Twitter Files" would show a political scandal, but the information itself did the opposite

In advance of the release, MIT computer scientist and Musk booster Lex Fridman called it “historic,” and claimed it will “strengthen our democracy” because “transparency helps keep people honest and minimize undue influence from politics and money.”

Selectively releasing internal information without external oversight is not transparency, especially not when attempting to support a preconceived narrative. The public knows this is a fraction of Twitter’s internal documentation, but doesn’t know what they chose to hold back, and for what purpose. Taibbi said he “had to agree to certain conditions” to review what Musk showed him, but didn’t say what those were.

The release was a marketing gimmick. The inaccurate claim of transparency is another.

Dear @MerriamWebster, We may need a new definition for “moderate.” Thank you. https://t.co/ESUCrmWRXb

— Bill Grueskin (@BGrueskin) December 4, 2022

Dave Karpf/Twitter:

The thing to understand about the Hunter Biden laptop story was that it was SUPPOSED to be the Trump campaign’s “October Surprise.” Mainstream media and social media were supposed to take the bait and focus on the appearance of scandal for the last weeks of the election. (1/x)
They didn’t take the bait. The New York Post story was shunned. Social media platforms treated it as manufactured propaganda with questionable sourcing. And conservative elites have been PISSED ever since.

Simple question for @GOPLeader & @LeaderMcConnell: is someone who expresses these views-these plans-fit to serve as president of the United States? Would you support him as the 2024 GOP nominee understanding, more explicitly than ever, this is something he wants to do? https://t.co/FIEAX4XAMp

— Ronald Brownstein (@RonBrownstein) December 3, 2022

NBC News:

Georgia Senate runoff smashes early voting records — and attracts new voters

More than 76,000 Georgians who didn't turn out in the general election have voted early in the Dec. 6 race between Raphael Warnock and Herschel Walker, according to an analysis.

More than 1.85 million Georgians have voted early, according to the office of Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, breaking two single-day records in about a week.

Among those who have already turned out, 56% were women and 44% men. White voters made up 55% of early voters, 32% were Black, and Latinos and Asian Americans each accounted for less than 2% of the total.

Ronald Brownstein/Atlantic:

The GOP Can’t Hide From Extremism


A perfect storm is brewing among Trump, Fuentes, Ye … and Twitter.

The backlash against former President Donald Trump’s meeting with Nick Fuentes, an avowed racist, anti-Semite, and Christian nationalist, has compelled more Republican officeholders than at any point since the Charlottesville riot in 2017 to publicly condemn those extremist views.

Yet few GOP officials have criticized the former president personally—much less declared that Trump’s meeting with Fuentes and Ye, the rapper (formerly known as Kanye West) who has become a geyser of anti-Semitic bile, renders him unfit to serve as president again.

People who grew up in Germany are much more attuned to the vibes of Trump's outrageous call for suspending parts of the Constitution It is an '88 words' vibe. Don't miss what it is. https://t.co/CHU7GjY5V9

— Greg Dworkin (@DemFromCT) December 4, 2022

Paul Blumenthal/HuffPost:

New Polling Shows Democracy Mattered In The 2022 Midterms

The findings indicate that concerns about protecting democracy helped Democrats beat expectations in November’s elections

The press and some Democratic Party allies panned the president’s remarks. His speech was “head-scratching,” according to CNN’s Chris Cillizza. It was “important” but “puzzling,” said Politico’s Playbook newsletter. “[As] a matter of practical politics, I doubt many Ds in marginal races are eager for him to be on TV tonight,” tweeted David Axelrod, former President Barack Obama’s top political aide.


The results of the election, however, speak for themselves. The predicted Republican “red wave” disappeared before it reached shore, with the GOP only picking up 8 seats to narrowly take control of the House. It could still lose one seat in the Senate. Democrats flipped control of more governorships and state legislature chambers than Republicans. And, most importantly, nearly all high-profile election deniers lost their races, including competitive secretary of state competitions in Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota and Nevada and gubernatorial contests in swing states like Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.


Now, one poll of the 71 most competitive House districts backs up the importance of the democracy issue in Democrats’ midterm success. Concerns about threats to democracy motivated Democrats and independents to turn out while also helping independents decide to vote for Democrats, according to a voter survey from Nov. 11-16 by Impact Research, a Democratic polling firm.

important focus in an important story: (Georgia’s runoff rule, requiring another election when no candidate gets 50 percent of the vote, was created in the 1960s to keep Black politicians from winning in crowded races.)https://t.co/vu8jVy9tUc

— Greg Dworkin (@DemFromCT) December 3, 2022

Susan Milligan/US News:

Why the GOP Can’t Quit Trump


Trump, wounded by midterm losses and ripening legal troubles, has become a weightier albatross around the GOP neck. And because he won’t step aside, he threatens to take the party with him.


"Let me just say that there is no room in the Republican Party for antisemitism or white supremacy. And anyone meeting with people advocating that point of view, in my judgment, are highly unlikely to ever be elected president of the United States," McConnell told reporters, addressing the Trump question even before it was asked.


It was meant to get the GOP elephant in the room out of the way, so McConnell and the Senate Republican leadership team could talk about issues they wanted to address – and Democratic priorities they wanted to thwart.


It didn't work.


Trump, wounded by the losses of his endorsed candidates in the midterms and facing ripening legal troubles on several fronts, has become a weightier albatross around the collective GOP neck. And since the famously defiant Trump won't step aside, the former president threatens to take the rest of the party with him.

Kristen Soltis Anderson/NRO:

Republicans’ Lost Youth

And yet, if we wish to understand why Republicans aren’t notching more victories, we should consider the Right’s continuing struggles with Millennials and Generation Z.

Political-data types disagree about the impact of the youth vote on the midterms. On the one hand, some say young voters surged in their turnout and that this blocked a red wave. John Della Volpe, the longtime chief of youth polling for the Harvard Institute of Politics, projected that the jump in young-voter turnout seen during the 2018 #resistance midterm would continue. He found that 40 percent of voters under age 30 said they would “definitely” vote in the midterms, a figure similar to findings in the blue-wave year of 2018. Similarly, Anthony Salvanto, the head of elections and surveys at CBS News and one of my favorite analysts, touted youth turnout as decisive.

Supporting his analysis are the scholars at Tufts University’s Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, who projected that young voters would have an outsize influence in Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, critical swing states that have kept the Senate in Democratic control. Stories from campuses such as that of the University of Michigan add images to the data, with reports of lengthy lines to vote.

This, paired with the network exit polls’ estimates that voters under age 30 broke for Democratic candidates by a two-to-one margin — roughly the same margin by which they broke for Democrats in the 2018 midterms — all paint a picture of a generation that behaved the same way they did in a blue-wave year, even as the rest of the electorate shifted rightward. (Voters in their 40s, for instance, broke for Democrats by six points in 2018 but swung to vote Republican by seven points this time around.)

Thread:

When political operatives shop evidence of a "bombshell story" weeks before an election, but dictate publication timelines as a condition of providing the evidence, skepticism is fully warranted. Publishing without validation in that case is journalistic misconduct IMO. 2/

— Jake Williams (@MalwareJake) December 3, 2022

There’s more, if you don’t want to read it on Twitter.

WaPo:

Final push for votes in Ga. runoff tests parties’ sway in battleground

Steve Williams is the type of voter Republicans have been working furiously to court over the past four weeks in Georgia’s Senate runoff race.


The 33-year-old laments high inflation and voted for Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R). During an interview in a park here in Duluth, he criticized Democrats’ stance on “culture war” issues such as gender identity, which GOP Senate candidate Herschel Walker has played up in campaign ads.


Yet Williams backed Democrat Raphael G. Warnock for Senate in November and plans to do so again on Tuesday. He said he wants to underscore a message that he thinks many voters sent this midterm cycle: Republicans “can’t expect us to vote for garbage candidates.”


Georgia remains “culturally red,” he said. But “we’re not just partisan machines.”


Democrats are hoping that many independents and Republicans will vote similarly on Tuesday, allowing the party to bolster their slim majority in the Senate. For both parties, the runoff election — triggered when neither Senate candidate won a majority of the vote in November — provides a final test of their ability to motivate their base and persuade the political middle in an increasingly purple state.

…

Trump, however, has continued to make headlines as he rails against the 2020 election. That has drawn some rebukes, including in Georgia, where many Republicans believe Trump’s false election claims helped Democrats flip the Senate last year. On Saturday, the former president suggested terminating the Constitution if necessary to throw out his 2020 loss to Biden.

“It’s ridiculous,” Georgia elections official Gabriel Sterling, a vocal critic of Trump’s unsuccessful efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, said during a CNN interview. “It’s insane. To suspend the Constitution — come on, man, seriously?”