Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: More post election analysis (and don't forget the Georgia runoff)

[Brexiter]

Perry Bacon Jr/WaPo:

What drove the Democratic Party’s strong performance? Not its leaders.

The heroes of the 2022 midterm elections were Democratic voters and activists, not the party’s leadership. Those leaders should remember that and not try to distance themselves from the party’s base as they have at times in the past two years.

...

Perhaps the Democrats would have done even worse with White voters without degrees if not for their strategies over the past two years. But what drove the Democrats’ surprisingly strong performance in this month’s elections was the backing of groups that the party really hadn’t delivered for or prioritized over the past two years.

To me, the story here isn’t how a prominent pusher of hate against Jewish people ended up at a table with Trump. The story is the response of so many so far in a party that could nominate him: a shrug or indifference. All as many shrug or ignore his nods toward Q Anon conspiracy.

— Robert Costa (@costareports) November 26, 2022

Nicole Narea/Vox:

The guy who got the midterms right explains what the media got wrong

“There was a massive media failure this cycle,” [Simon Rosenberg] said. “The failure that just took place is more grave than the polling error [in 2020] because there were a lot of really smart people who basically misled tens of millions of people through their political commentary in the final few weeks.”

It’s hard to know whether there was a practical effect of the doom-and-gloom stories about Democrats in the months before the election — whether it suppressed turnout by demoralizing voters or motivated them to show up because they feared what would happen if they didn’t. But even if any negative effect was small, that might have made a big impact.

“My own view is that it probably net cost us. It could have cost us the House,” Rosenberg said.

Here’s what he thinks went wrong.

this is part of a continuing media atmosphere where what Republicans think is more important than what Democrats think. See diner interviews (and has been pointed out by others, who is is a diner mid weekday?)

— Greg Dworkin (@DemFromCT) November 27, 2022

Who's voting early in Georgia? well... see the demographics here.

Pro tip: If you’re ever waiting in a line this long to vote, someone powerful doesn’t *want* you to vote. So stick it to them and actually vote. https://t.co/h3DOu4bTDo

— Garrett M. Graff (@vermontgmg) November 27, 2022

So maybe that why Republicans put up obstacles. Early vote will be a much smaller proportion than in the general, so it’s tough to make anything out of it re predictive value, but it's a fun look. Franklin County, eg, had a 84.7% voter win for Walker and/but so far as of this writing, 1 voter (Black, male, 50-64 yo) has voted early! We are winning!!

“I am (confidentially and off the record) appalled at Trump dining with anti semites. There is no (again to reiterate this is on background and not for attribution) place for him in our Party. This is the final straw (unless it looks like he’s winning and then I’m all in.)”

— Brian Schatz (@brianschatz) November 26, 2022

Marc Caputo/NBC News:

‘F---ing nightmare’: Trump team does damage control after he dines with Ye and white supremacist Nick Fuentes

The former president's campaign claims he didn't know anything about Fuentes, who joined the rapper under fire for his antisemitic remarks.

But despite Trump suggesting that the event was “uneventful,” the fallout over his dinner with Fuentes appears to have thrown Trump’s campaign into damage control mode. The former president took hours to respond publicly after multiple media outlets reported that Fuentes was present at the dinner.

Even the [confidentially and off the record] two Trump advisers winced at how a Holocaust denier like Fuentes was able to wind up with Trump at dinner — even if it was by mistake — along with the rapper, who had just had his Twitter account restored but lost major endorsement deals for making antisemitic remarks.

Accidentally had dinner with a white supremacist while intentionally having dinner with an antisemite. Oookaaaaay https://t.co/5lzZ1ZW3yM

— Gabriel Malor (@gabrielmalor) November 25, 2022

Isabel Hardman/The Spectator:

Will any Tories be left at the next election?

I understand that Rishi Sunak and his team have been working extremely hard to convince a lot of wavering MPs who wonder what the point is. Most of them expect their party to go into the misery of opposition at the next election, and don’t want to be stuck in those doldrums. Many are worried that they will be among those who lose their seats in that defeat, and can’t face the exhaustion of the campaign followed by the indignity of losing their job in public. Sunak’s basic pitch to his colleagues has been that there is still a path through to rescuing this, that the party is on the way to fixing the first big problem of the economic turmoil, and that things will start to look up soon.

Reasons to be cautious about claims of the 'crisis of democracy' everything everywhere all at once. European satisfaction with democracy suggests: 1) complex patterns of gains & losses, 2) specific volatile cases, & 3) avoid sweeping generalizations from cherrypicked cases. pic.twitter.com/Q2JsW1DAvZ

— Pippa Norris (@PippaN15) November 27, 2022

Karina Tsui/Semafor:

Amazon workers went on strike in more than 40 countries on Black Friday

Demonstrations at Amazon’s global warehouses, offices, and outside Jeff Bezos’ New York residence in New York were planned in advance, as part of a “Make Amazon Pay” campaign.

"We are workers and citizens divided by geography and our role in the global economy but united in our commitment to Make Amazon Pay fair wages, its taxes and for its impact on the planet," the campaign website said.

International unions representing hourly workers were also involved in planning protests.

The company is planning to lay off approximately 10,000 of its employees in corporate and technology roles, accounting for 1% of its global workforce of 1.5 million, the New York Times reported.

This is currently the biggest worry for a lot of the researchers I talk to about #COVID19. Vaccination of elderly people is also worfully inadequate in China, meaning a big wave presents a huge risk for the health system. https://t.co/S2Aq7nvz9q

— Kai Kupferschmidt (@kakape) November 27, 2022

Katherine J Wu/Atlantic:

The Pandemic Broke the Flu ... Again


COVID knocked flu, RSV, and other respiratory diseases out of whack. When will they be back to normal?

The experts I spoke with are mostly optimistic that these cataclysmic infection rates won’t become an autumn norm. But they also don’t yet fully understand the factors that have been driving this year’s surge, making it tough to know with certainty whether we’re due for an encore.

Insightful thread on why Ukraine has advantages through winter fighting. Recent step-up in support from Finland and Sweden, two countries who know a lot about winter warfare, also seems like bad news for Russia. https://t.co/WMuf2oF84K

— Shashank Joshi (@shashj) November 27, 2022

Annie Lowrey/The Atlantic:

Harassment in Economics Doesn’t Stay in Economics


When women in the profession face mistreatment, everyone suffers.

Betsey Stevenson, a professor at the University of Michigan and a former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor, told me that when she hit her mid-40s, she had an “aha moment.”

“I was thinking, It’s so great having gotten to this stage of my career where I’m a little more established. It’s very freeing,” she told me. “And I realized: Oh, I think I just aged out of sexual harassment.” The leering, the inappropriate commentary, the talking over her—much of it had stopped, perhaps because she had become so accomplished, perhaps because she had reached an age where men in her profession did not automatically treat her as a sex object. “There was nothing like having babies to change the male gaze,” she added.

Trump had dinner with this guy https://t.co/72Kh3TcSQC

— Molly Jong-Fast (@MollyJongFast) November 27, 2022

Politico:

Republicans shrug off Trump '24 bid: 'The excitement’s just not there'

The former president is not bending the GOP to his will like he used to.


A super PAC supporting Trump’s chief rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, plans to begin airing TV ads in Iowa on Friday. And even the news that Elon Musk was lifting Trump’s ban on Twitter wasn’t breaking through.


The morning after his account was reinstated — a development once viewed as a significant lift to Trump’s candidacy — Fox News Sunday spent more time talking about the ticketing debacle surrounding Taylor Swift’s upcoming tour.

“The people talking about [Trump’s campaign announcement] in my circles, it’s almost like it didn’t happen,” said Bob Vander Plaats, the evangelical leader in Iowa who is influential in primary politics in the first-in-the-nation caucus state and who was a national co-chair of Sen. Ted Cruz’s campaign in 2016. “That, to me, is what is telling, where people believe we probably need to move forward, not look in the rear view mirror.”

Also, I will say it again: if Ron DeSantis really were such an ironclad alternative to Donald Trump, all the Trump-agnostic Republicans would be consolidating around him right now, not forming groups and PACs that would let them run for president themselves.

— Matthew Chapman (@fawfulfan) November 27, 2022

And your Boomer palate cleanser:


Ian Leslie/Substack:

64 Reasons To Celebrate Paul McCartney

After all these years, he's still underrated.

McCartney’s reputation has never fully recovered from the shredding it took when The Beatles broke up. He is still compared unfavourably to his most important creative partner. Lennon is soulful, deep, and radical; McCartney is shallow, trivial and bourgeois. That dualism, which took hold in 1970 and was reinforced by Lennon’s horribly premature death, still holds sway. Probably if you asked most people who know a little about The Beatles to say who they found most interesting, John would be the most common answer. If you surveyed Beatles nerds I suspect they would be more likely to say Paul, since the more you learn about the band you more stunned you are by what he brought to it.

For those who saw it, this was on display in the recent “Get Back” video put together by Peter Jackson:

YouTube Video