Category: Politics

Joe Biden, touted as the first US climate president, is presiding over the quiet weakening of his two most significant plans to slash planet-heating emissions, suggesting that tackling the climate crisis will take a back seat in a febrile election year.

During his State of the Union speech, Biden insisted that his administration is “making history by confronting the climate crisis, not denying it,” before reeling off a list of climate-friendly policies and accomplishments. “I’m taking the most significant action on climate ever in the history of the world,” he added.

However, recently the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said it would delay a regulation that would reduce emissions from existing gas power plants, most likely until after November’s presidential election. The delay comes as the administration waters down requirements that limit pollution from cars, slowing the country’s adoption of electric vehicles.

The backtracking could jeopardize Biden’s goal of cutting US emissions in half this decade, which scientists say is imperative to averting disastrous effects from global heating, and shows the competing pressures upon a president looking to hold together a wobbly coalition including climate activists, labor unions and centrist swing state voters before a likely showdown with Donald Trump later this year.

Biden is faced with a cohort of younger, progressive voters who have denounced him for the ongoing leasing of oil and gas drilling on public lands, as well as a large slice of the electorate who have barely heard of Biden’s landmark climate bill and are more worried about inflation and the costs of a green transition. The EPA still has to complete a slew of climate-related rules in time to avoid them being easily overturned by an unfriendly Congress or Supreme Court, adding to the pressure.

“They are really walking a tightrope,” said Paul Bledsoe, a former climate adviser to Bill Clinton’s White House, now an environmental policy expert at American University. “Biden has to retain the full-throated support of younger voters but he also has to speak to moderates in swing states who are focused on consumer issues. It’s a real balance.”

The realpolitik of this calculus means that the US has decelerated on climate action, amid record-breaking global temperatures that will soon breach internationally agreed-upon thresholds and a looming election with the former president, who has vowed to dismantle all of Biden’s climate policies.

A Trump victory could lead to an additional 4bn tonnes of US emissions by 2030 compared to those released during Biden’s term, the equivalent of the annual emissions of the EU and Japan, according to an analysis this week by Carbon Brief.

“There’s a lot at stake, and if Biden needs to modify vehicle emissions standards to help tip the balance in his favor, he will go for it,” Bledsoe said. “This is the starkest choice on climate change for any election in history.”

Biden’s climate policies are colliding with the election in four key areas:

The EPA has said it is on track to finalize rules that would curb greenhouse gas emissions from existing coal and new gas plants by April, but that doing the same for existing gas plants will take longer, likely until after the election.

This will offer a “stronger, more durable approach” to cutting emissions, Michael Regan, the EPA administrator has said, and the administration hopes the longer timeline will allow it to craft a set of regulations that will survive an inevitable onslaught of legal challenges from Republican-led states heavily wedded to fossil fuels.

Power plants are responsible for around a quarter of the total US carbon emissions, and a previous attempt by Barack Obama’s administration to curb their planet-heating pollution was effectively killed off by the Supreme Court.

The EPA now has to overcome this tortured history by making a new rule that will survive not only the courts but also reversal by Congress and a potential new Trump term. For some, the delay is unbearable given the gravity of the climate crisis and the election stakes.

“It is inexplicable that EPA, knowing of these emissions, did not focus this rule-making on existing gas-fired plants from its inception,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), who added that “time is not on our side, and the agency’s generally lethargic rule-making pace does not leave one optimistic”.

Nearly one in 10 cars sold in the US last year was electric, going some way to fulfilling a Biden administration goal to transform the types of vehicles Americans drive so emissions from transportation—the largest source of carbon pollution in the US—can come down quickly.

This transition is bumpy, however. EV prices remain higher than most gasoline- or diesel-powered cars, the recharging infrastructure remains patchy and some drivers have found it difficult to find available models that qualify for the generous EV tax rebates offered by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

On top of this, EVs have been dragged into the morass of a culture war, with Trump calling their adoption “lunacy” and wishing that EV proponents would “rot in hell.” Trump has claimed, falsely, that Biden is looking to ban conventional cars in favor of EVs that fail to work in cold weather.

In the midst of this, and following lobbying from large car companies and labor unions, the administration appears set to dilute stringent new pollution standards for cars, easing the pace of EV adoption.

While carmakers will still have to meet new fuel-efficiency rules that make EVs overwhelmingly more economical to produce, the timeframe for doing so will be pushed back. There will be an emissions cost to this, even as Biden hopes it will negate a political headache.

“EVs have been made into a huge culture war meme and they’ve become a key political issue,” Bledsoe said. “The president has now got to focus on consumers so they are not losing out in the EV transition. That is what the revision is about from a political perspective.”

Amid the dialing down of climate initiatives, there has been a shining victory for environmentalists in the form of a Biden administration pause on new liquified natural gas (or LNG) exports.

The temporary halt in January of new LNG export licenses is not expected to severely curtail the booming growth of gas infrastructure along the Gulf of Mexico coast, which will double gas exports from the US, already the world’s largest gas exporter, by 2027.

But it was a notable triumph for those pushing Biden to do more to temper the runaway oil and gas activity that threatens climate goals. The pause, to better consider the climate impacts of the exports, is “truly monumental for our communities”, according to Roishetta Ozane, an activist in Louisiana, where much of the LNG buildout is happening.

Politically, it provides Biden some needed credit with younger, climate-conscious voters who have been enraged by rampant, record oil and gas drilling during his presidency. He will need these voters if he hopes to defeat Trump again in November.

“It was nakedly political to appeal to that cohort of voters,” Bledsoe said.

With Australia, to use the succinct words of Malcolm Turnbull, “mugged by reality” on nuclear submarine construction by the United States, once again the implausible nature of the AUKUS agreement to deliver nuclear vessels to Australia is in the spotlight.

Part of the problem for the US construction program even before AUKUS was the extent to which labour shortages were slowing construction on new vessels. The Pentagon’s recent National Defense Industrial Strategy identified workforce shortages as a continuing problem and forecast the US would need an additional 117,000 workers over the next decade. Luckily, there’s the other AUKUS party, the Brits… except their defence and aviation sectors are plagued by a lack of skilled workers too. As is the French defence industry, from which we were previously attempting to buy boats. As is the rest of Europe.

The other problem never addressed in the AUKUS debacle was where we’d get the submariners to crew the nuclear boats from, as they require much bigger crews. There were already concerns we wouldn’t have enough crews for the French boats, based on recent years when Royal Australian Navy boats sat in drydock due to lack of crews, as part of a long-running problem of lack of Australian Defence Force recruitment.

Australia also faces a serious shortage of cybersecurity workers, in both government and the private sector, according to last year’s cybersecurity strategy.

But labour shortages are a problem right across the economy, not just in defence and the defence industry. We recently significantly increased remuneration for aged care workers in an effort to address decades-long workforce shortages in that sector — the aged care royal commission warned that we’d need an additional 130,000 aged care workers over coming decades just to maintain the existing, sub-standard system. This week’s aged care taskforce warned that changing demographics were “creating significant ongoing challenges to delivering quality care”.

Labour shortages in the broader health sector are not as bad as they used to be, but in regional areas, and in specific areas like mental health, there are serious shortfalls in skilled workers. The shortage of childcare workers is the biggest crisis in that industry. The health and care workforce is not only by far the largest employing sector in the economy but the fastest growing, and needs to continue to grow rapidly to keep up with demand from an ageing population and rising female participation.

The latest assessment of our infrastructure capacity released in December found a national shortage of public infrastructure workers numbering 229,000 and concluded the shortfall would persist above 200,000 for years to come. Last year, the engineering peak body warned of an emerging engineering skills crisis. Plans to accelerate the construction of housing to meet the ongoing crisis are plagued by labour shortages, with developers saying there just aren’t enough workers to meet government goals. The clean energy transition? That too will be plagued by labour shortages. Meanwhile, we’re regularly warned of a worker shortage in the agriculture and horticulture sectors (oddly enough, since they’re Australia’s most abusive and exploitive industries).

Despite many of our key industries facing labour shortages, policymakers are still stuck in a mindset that the benefit of any policy can be measured in the number of new jobs it creates and new industries it encourages. Labor is obsessed with a return to heavy and complex manufacturing, peddling the idea of subsidising our way to becoming a “clean energy superpower” and a battery manufacturer, along with wasting taxpayer money on building trains here that can be built far cheaper elsewhere. The Coalition, with its inane nuclear power policy, wants to embark on an entirely new industry we currently don’t have and don’t need.

Instead of politicians being allowed to talk about how many jobs will be created, the media should be challenging them on where the workers will come from. Will they simply rely on our female participation rate continuing to increase in defiance of demographic trends? Or will they rely on immigration? Every new industry policy and taxpayer-funded project should prompt the question “which country will you import the labour from and how many migrants will you need?”

In fact, instead of an industry policy, we need an anti-industry policy — one that identifies which industries we need to discourage in order to free up workers for defence, infrastructure, aged care, childcare, and for building homes. It could start with a commitment not to waste taxpayer money on pipedreams like nuclear power or battery manufacturing. Then it could identify industries that we need to shrink. Some suggestions:

• The gambling industry: In 2021, the Australiasian Gambling Council claimed gambling employed over 200,000 workers (in fact, they’re mostly bar and wait staff employed by pubs and clubs with gambling in them). Those alleged 200,000 people, freed up and retrained, could move to higher-paying, higher-skilled jobs in industries that actually add value to the Australian economy and society, rather than degrade it.
• The consulting industry: While currently shrinking due to the federal government turning away from relying on consultants, one source claims over 160,000 people work in consulting. Imagine freeing up over 100,000 skilled, tertiary-qualified workers for more useful activities than selling the same PowerPoint presentations and managerialist inanities over and over?
• Financial services: Financial services employs over 560,000 people. A substantial proportion of those, however, work in sub-industries that have inserted themselves between Australians and their money — financial advisers, bankers, dealmakers, brokers and other ticket clippers who extract substantial fees from our $3.5 trillion superannuation industry without providing any service of actual value — though that doesn’t stop them being lionised in the media.

The serious point behind this is that workforce shortages will be a persistent feature of Western economies going forward. But policymakers, and the media, are stuck in the past. “Where will the workers come from?” should be an issue for every policy idea peddled by politicians.

Which industries should be first on the chopping block for labour shrinking? Let us know your thoughts by writing to [email protected]. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.

For nearly a decade, the House Freedom Caucus has disrupted the way business is done in Congress. Now, that same model is spreading to state capitals across America.

State Freedom Caucus Network President Andy Roth is no stranger to Washington’s policy fights after spending years with the Club for Growth. A few years ago, he decided it was time to turn his attention to the states. Today, the State Freedom Caucus Network is growing and currently active in 11 states that span the country.

On this episode of “The Daily Signal Podcast,” we talk about the how these conservative lawmakers are challenging the status quo and shaking up the establishment. The transcript was edited for length.

Rob Bluey: You spent nearly two decades in Washington at the Club for Growth. You and I got to know each other fighting earmarks and all sorts of other bad things that Congress was doing. What inspired you to refocus your attention on state legislatures?

Andy Roth: The network was based on the House Freedom Caucus business model. The House Freedom Caucus launched in 2015 and almost immediately—because of my position at the Club for Growth—I had a lot of state lawmakers come to me and say gosh, “I wish we had that at the state level.” So we’ve been talking about this for years.

In 2019, we were like, we’ve got to make this happen because there are 50 swamps in the 50 states that people don’t know about. And they’re arguably, I would say they are worse than the swamp in D.C.

Because of the COVID stuff, school choice, there are so many issues that impact people and their families at the state level, and no attention was paid on them. So in 2019, we launched the network.

The Georgia Freedom Caucus was the first one. Then we went to South Carolina, South Dakota, Illinois, on and on. And now we have 11 of them.

Bluey: What’s your strategy in terms of how you identify a state?

Roth: These state Freedom Caucuses have to originate organically, meaning that the lawmakers themselves have to come to us and say, “We’ve got the members. We’ve got the desire. We have the principles. Let’s do it.”

We then talk to them and we help put it together and then we launch. We found the members in Georgia, South Carolina, and elsewhere because they were ready to go. That’s the process now going forward.

A lot of state lawmakers all across the country know about us, but there are some that still don’t. But once they do, they come to us and then we go through the process and hopefully we’re able to launch.

Bluey: Could you speak to some of those characteristics of people who are involved?

Roth: They are full-spectrum conservatives, but more importantly than that, they are conservatives before they’re Republicans.

If there are Republican leaders—whether it’s the governor, whether it’s the speaker of the State House or the Senate majority leader—if they’re pushing policies that are not conservative, we only want lawmakers who are willing to fight back against them.

Not only do they have to be great on policy, but they have to be willing to fight Republicans and Democrats at every turn.

Bluey: Some of those politicians haven’t exactly welcomed the State Freedom Caucus Network. What are some of the conflicts that are playing out right now in the states?

Roth: The best example is Wyoming. It is the reddest state in the union based on Trump-Biden numbers. [Donald] Trump won that state more than any other state.

The Wyoming House has 57 Republicans to only five Democrats. So you would think that they could pass school choice, ban transgender surgeries on minors, and get pornography out of the classroom.

But when you look at the actual voting records, instead of 57 to 5, it’s 26 conservatives to 36 liberals.

Liberals are in charge of the Wyoming House and the Senate, frankly. And that’s because big-government liberals know that they cannot win in Wyoming with a D after their name. So they simply put an R after their name, run, get elected, and then vote like liberals.

Wyoming is not an outlier. Every red state is like that. And that’s why you’re seeing headlines in South Carolina, Missouri, Idaho, all the states that we’re in where we are provoking the establishment and exposing their conceit.

?BREAKING: The “What Is a Woman Act,” which would define a woman as a woman in state law, just FAILED in the WYOMING House of Reps.

Not California. In WYOMING.

20 “Republicans” voted against it.

Here is @WYFreedomCaucus member @jwforw explaining her bill.? pic.twitter.com/OwYOeypnqM

— State Freedom Caucus Network (@SFC_Network) February 15, 2024

Bluey: What are some of the tactics that you use to achieve your goals?

Roth: In Missouri, our most recent state, we launched on Jan. 5, and in two weeks, our lawmakers got kicked off their committees, had their parking spots taken, and even some of their staff got pay deducted because they committed the horrible sin of pushing leadership to pass the conservative priorities that the entire state GOP has advocated for.

Our lawmakers in Missouri merely said, “We’re going to filibuster all gubernatorial appointments until you guys commit to actually putting good legislation on the floor.” Well, they didn’t like that, so they kicked them off committees and took their parking spots away, and so on.

In South Carolina, it was even worse than that. At the very beginning of last year’s session, leadership required every member of the Republican House to sign a loyalty pledge. And this loyalty pledge had a lot of stipulations in it, but one of them said, you cannot criticize any of your Republican colleagues.

One of our South Carolina Freedom Caucus members raised their hand and said, “So if I take a picture of the vote board after a big vote, vote and tweet that out, am I criticizing my colleagues?” And they said, “Yes.” So our South Carolina Freedom Caucus members refused to sign the loyalty pledge.

Within a couple of days, they got kicked out of the House Republican Caucus. They’re now off on an island. And I’ll tell you candidly, our Freedom Caucus members were kind of wringing their hands when leadership was threatening them. But ever since they’ve been kicked out, it’s been liberating for them because they don’t have to attend the stupid meetings where leadership finger wags at you and says, “We have to pass this huge corporate welfare bill.” They don’t have to listen to any of that anymore.

Bluey: You’ve mentioned some of the issues that they’ve confronted in the states. What are some of the other policy debates that are coming up?

Roth: In red states, budgets pass almost unanimously. If you’ve got Republicans and Democrats voting for budgets, you should be worried and the data bears that out. States are increasing their budgets year after year after year.

We fight on the budget first and foremost. And we use every opportunity to offer amendments to cut this or that. And, unfortunately, we’re still losing because the state Freedom Caucus only has a small number of members compared to the overall legislature. But in South Carolina, last year’s budget had more no votes than any time in the last 50 years.

All of the big hot topic issues that you see in the headlines our guys are fighting on—like school choice, banning transgender surgeries for minors. We really like are hitting every issue possible.

Bluey: What motivates these conservative leaders to keep the fight going and recruit others to the cause?

Roth: Honestly, each other. I knew that the establishment would retaliate. What I didn’t fully appreciate at the time is that these members really love and respect each other and they stick together.

And they do that not just on the floor of the chamber when they vote, but they meet a lot of time, they pray a lot of time with each other. And when you know you’re in a trench, fighting against somebody, knowing that the person to your left and to your right have your back, that motivates everything.

In a lot of these red states, the grassroots are kind of demoralized. They see what’s going on in D.C. They see that nothing’s going on in their state capital. But now, for the first time, they have a Freedom Caucus at their state capital not only voting with them, but being very loud and vocal.

Did you know that teachers unions are spending millions of dollars in GOP primaries?

In IL, they’re spending over $250K on primary challenges against @ILFreedomCaucus members Reps. Blaine Wilhour and Adam Niemerg.

All because they support school choice.https://t.co/DXk8F5MfN4

— State Freedom Caucus Network (@SFC_Network) March 5, 2024

Bluey: Can you share any thoughts on where you might go next?

Roth: Texas just had their big primaries last week. It was beautiful. The governor, the attorney general, the lieutenant governor, even President Trump endorsed candidates against liberal Republican incumbents, and in a lot of cases they won.

We have had our eye on Texas for a long time, but things were so corrupt there and so bad in Austin, I joke that it’s like a Spanish soap opera because it’s not only policy disputes, it’s personalities disputes.

Then there’s other states like Oklahoma and Ohio that I think we could be in fairly quickly.

I am worried about Florida. Gov. Ron DeSantis has done such a great job there that there’s almost an attitude of we don’t need a Florida Freedom Caucus.

My argument to them is DeSantis isn’t going to be there forever and the great thing about state Freedom Caucuses is that they live in perpetuity. Lawmakers will come and go but you can always count on a state Freedom Caucus to advance conservative policies.

Bluey: How can people support your organization?

Roth: I love that question. We are a 501(c)(3) and a 501(c)(4), so what that means is that we have an educational arm and an advocacy arm. The State Freedom Caucus Network is our mothership. And then State Freedom Caucus Foundation is our educational arm. Just go to our website and you can give to either one.

Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email [email protected] and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the URL or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.

Adult. Human. Female.

Three simple words. Three simple words that effectively and accurately describe a woman. You’d think this would be easy stuff, right? 

Well, not if you are a woke Supreme Court justice in Canada, it’s not. 

This morning, The National Post in Canada reported yet another ridiculous case of mental and linguistic gymnastics handed down by Canadian Supreme Court Justice Sheilah Martin in a sexual assault case that has been going on up north for seven years. 

FIRST READING: Supreme Court decision say that the word ‘woman’ is confusing, ‘unfortunate’ https://t.co/iPMhtR2Vcy pic.twitter.com/2GT8swgzgT

— National Post (@nationalpost) March 13, 2024

According to The National Post, the ongoing case involves a sexual assault allegation made by a woman against Charles Kruk. We won’t delve too deeply into the details of the case, but in short, Kruk took an intoxicated and lost woman home with him in 2017, ostensibly to call her family, but when she passed out, she woke to find her pants off and Kruk penetrating her. Kruk claims that this did not happen and she was just ‘startled awake’ after she had removed her own pants. 

That’s the ugly case summary, but it is important to have that context to understand the full depravity of what happened in the Supreme Court, where Martin added an even further insult to women everywhere, not to mention the one who had allegedly been assaulted. 

At trial in 2020, a B.C. judge rejected Kruk’s defence in part on the grounds that the complainant was not likely to be mistaken about the sensation of vaginal penetration. 

‘She said she felt his penis inside her and she knew what she was feeling. In short, her tactile sense was engaged. It is extremely unlikely that a woman would be mistaken about that feeling,’ read the initial decision.

It was this line that drew Martin’s approbation, and the seeming implication that the passage should more appropriately have been ‘it is extremely unlikely that a person with a vagina would be mistaken about that feeling.’

A person with a vagina. Unbelievable. This is a Supreme Court justice speaking. Here are Martin’s exact words: 

Hear that, ladies? It is ‘unfortunate’ for you to call yourselves women.

Better stick with ‘birthing person,’ ‘person who menstruates,’ ‘egg producer,’ or ‘breastfeeder.’ Or now, according to Martin, ‘person with a vagina.’

There was no “confusion”. The complainant was female (& referred to as ‘she’), the accused was male (& referred to as ‘he’). There was never any “trans” component in this case – so what “confusion” could there be? This judge is creating confusion, not erasing it.

— The Countess In Cowboy Boots (@LooneyOldLady) March 13, 2024

This is so appalling. What hopes do Canadian women have when the Supreme Court says “woman” is confusing and instead refers to rape victims as “people with vaginas.”

As @TristinHopper wrote, not a single person involved was trans.

This is so disgusting. https://t.co/1KLEuNorQo

— Amy Eileen Hamm (@preta_6) March 13, 2024

Not that it would make a difference even if there WAS a trans person involved, but setting that aside, this is a clear case of a man and a woman. There’s nothing ‘confusing’ about it. 

We are ruled by a global conspiracy of midwits https://t.co/onGtFT40x1

— Wesley Yang (@wesyang) March 13, 2024

‘Midwits’ might be too generous, to be honest. 

“The Supreme Court of Canada ruled in a recent sexual assault case that it was “problematic” for a lower court judge to refer to the alleged victim as a “woman,” implying that the more appropriate term should have been “person with a vagina.”

After generations of women fighting… https://t.co/rxa8SXVusr

— Tracey Wilson (@TWilsonOttawa) March 13, 2024

The rest of that tweet concludes, ‘After generations of women fighting to be equal, recognized – we have been reduced to an organ.’

I am not a *person with a vagina* , I am a woman.
You are woke apologists sucking up to a squealing microminority who demean women and you are helping to set back hard fought women’s rights by decades.
Not surprised though, since Trudeau appointed so many of you.
Pillocks. https://t.co/eiCwzT10KZ

— Gillian Flavell (@FlavellG) March 13, 2024

Say it louder for the Supreme Court justices in the back. 

How women can put up with this continued woke erasure of their entire existence is beyond comprehension. But it sounds like most women — at least all of the sane, rational ones — are not willing to tolerate it any longer. 

Our highest court is tainted. https://t.co/HLjWff4H8W pic.twitter.com/vuu2WgRUd2

— Mary Elle (@prettypatriotCA) March 13, 2024

I laughed when Trudeau said “people-kind” instead of saying “mankind” because I thought he was joking…. Canada is in deep trouble. https://t.co/EGCWon2v4y

— Our Bou 💫 (@happy_foxxy) March 13, 2024

Trudeau is a cancer and he has infected the entire nation, right up to its highest court. 

If the Supreme Court of Canada doesn’t know what a woman is, they shouldn’t be adjudicating any case that involves them https://t.co/IJj7pYE5kT

— The world has gone mad 🍎 (@HaveWeAllGoneM1) March 13, 2024

Not much behind those eyes. pic.twitter.com/UsLZ8Y2QCc

— Whiskeytomcat (@whiskeytomcat) March 13, 2024

It’s always in the eyes. Always. 

Adult.

Human.

Female.

— Anti-Taxxer (@colossusPhD) March 13, 2024

See? Not confusing in the least. Let alone ‘unfortunate.’

The next relevant question is whether the words ‘wise’ or ‘intelligent’ are confusing and unfortunate with regard to describing certain Justices of the Supreme Court of Canada.

— Ragnar Danneskjold (@Beaf333) March 13, 2024

Now THAT is a good question worth debating. 

Awkward https://t.co/g5VcluI5Hl

— DILLIGAF (@DawsonsLeftPeg) March 13, 2024

Hey, that’s weird, isn’t it? It seems that Martin CAN understand what a woman is without confusion … when she wants to. 

Can you imagine every March 8?

Happy International ‘person with a vagina’ day !

Ony in Canada 🙄 https://t.co/uX9QcthdMk

— June Marie (@auntiemlin) March 13, 2024

What better way to celebrate Women’s History Month than to completely obliterate the entire meaning of ‘woman’ throughout history? 

I just heard the camels back snap. https://t.co/HCekfbHVcD pic.twitter.com/d9tkEBUHgh

— Meagra (Mac/Meags) (@MeagraMac) March 13, 2024

We can only hope. 

There is a plus side to the story. Despite Martin’s ridiculously woke phrasing for women, she did make the correct ruling in the case: Kruk’s defense is laughable and there is no way that the woman he allegedly assaulted was confused about the feeling of penetration.

But it is baffling how she could come up with that sensible conclusion while simultaneously — and insanely — finding the word woman confusing.

There is a famous tweet by the comedian, author, and podcaster Bridget Phetasy on this topic. It’s just one word. 

It goes like this:

https://t.co/tbq3AwYFlG pic.twitter.com/aOJPXvYsvF

— Bridget Phetasy (@BridgetPhetasy) June 30, 2022

We’d highly recommend that Justice Sheilah Martin watch that tweet over and over on a loop until it sinks in for her. 

A Clockwork Orange style, if necessary. 

***

 

Notre Dame law Professor Derek Muller—a leading election law scholar—has posted a study he conducted of the partisan distribution of political donations by law professors between 2017 and 2023. Not surprisingly, they skew overwhelmingly towards Democratic candidates:

I identified 3148 law faculty who contributed only to Democrats in this 5+ year span—95.9% of the data set of those identified as contributing to either Democrats or Republicans in this period. Another 88 (2.7%) contributed only to Republicans. And 48 others contributed to both Democrats and Republicans.

The dollar figures were likewise imbalanced but slightly less so. About $5.1 million went to Democrats in this period, about 92.3% of the total contributions to either Democrats or Republicans. About $425,000 went to Republicans. (Around $6000 went to others.)

The overall result here is far from surprising. Lots of previous studies find that law professors are skew towards  the political left. Still, the extent of the imbalance is notable. Exclusively Democratic contributors outnumber exclusively Republican ones by over 35 to 1. That’s a larger disproportion than in previous studies.

In addition, Democratic contributors outnumber Republican ones at every single school included in the study, usually by large margins. My own law school (George Mason University) is often considered right-wing. Nonetheless, Muller finds we had 11 Democratic contributors and only six Republican ones; two people contributed to candidates of both parties [I was one of the Republican contributors, for idiosyncratic reasons explained in an update at the end of this post]. That figure of six is the highest number of exclusive GOP donors at any school in the study.  By contrast, there are many schools with dozens of Democratic contributors.

The disproportion is comparably large measured by money totals, rather than numbers of contributors. Faculty at only two schools (Northwestern and Wayne State) contributed more to Republicans than Democrats. In the case of Northwestern, the disproportion is very great: $167,245 contributed to Republicans versus $64,460 given to Democrats. But this figure is misleading. Muller’s data shows that Northwestern had 32 faculty who contributed to Democrats, compared to only one who gave to Republicans (this individual apparently also gave money to at least one Democratic candidate, as well). This one professor is so committed to the GOP that he or she gave more than twice as much to their campaigns as his 32 Democratic-contributing colleagues gave to the Democrats combined!

Muller notes a few caveats about the data, most notably that faculty with strong political views don’t necessarily donate to candidates. For example, Muller’s own school, Notre Dame, had 14 Democratic contributors during the time-frame studied, and no Republican ones. But Notre Dame does in fact have several prominent conservative or libertarian legal scholars. Similarly, Northwestern had more than one right-of-center faculty member during this period (I know of about four or five). There are cases like this at other schools, too.

In addition, the time-frame likely reduces the number of Republican donors, compared to previous eras. The period covered in the study (2017-23) is the era of the Trump takeover of the GOP, which famously alienated many highly educated people who previously backed the party. Almost by definition, lawprofs fall in the highly educated group. I myself stopped voting for the GOP in presidential elections during the Trump era, and likely some other conservative and libertarian lawprofs did the same. A 2005 study of elite law school faculty campaign contributions also found a large Democratic skew, but a bit smaller than that in Muller’s study of the 2017-23 period.

Another caveat is that people might donate to a candidate because they think he or she is a lesser evil compared to the available alternatives, not because they actually like that person’s ideology or the agenda of their party. I voted for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden in 2016 and 2020 on such lesser-evil grounds, even though I have little love for them or their party. I just found Trump to be even worse. While I did not donate any money to Clinton or Biden, myself, it’s possible some lawprofs donate to lesser-evil candidates as well as vote for them. We cannot always assume that people who donate to a candidate or party necessarily share their ideology.

Finally, a disproportionate number of non-left wing legal academics are libertarians (myself included). For obvious reasons, they may be disinclined to contribute money to candidates from either major party. Some might instead give to the Libertarian Party or its candidates (Muller found a total of only $6000 in donations to third-party campaigns). But many might not because they believe the LP has no chance of winning or because they are disillusioned by the awful Mises Caucus takeover of the party in 2022 (near the end of the study period).  Studies focusing on campaign contributions probably undercount libertarians.

There are likely other limitations to the data, as well. Still, when all is said and done, the ideological and partisan imbalance in legal academia is very large. Muller’s data further confirms it.

At this point, readers may wonder why it matters what law professors’ views are. It’s not like lawprofs are an important voting bloc, or a major source of campaign funds (with the possible exception of the big GOP donor at Northwestern!). I explained why lawprofs’ views matter in a previous post:

[L]aw professors can influence the views of law students, who—of course—go on to be the next generation of lawyers. Lawyers, in turn, have disproportionate influence on a wide range of public policies. A high proportion of politicians and other policymakers are lawyers, as—of course—are nearly all judges. Maybe lawyers shouldn’t have so much influence. But they do.

Finally, a good many lawprofs have a direct influence on the development of law and public policy. Courts often adopt ideas that were first developed by academics….

Even outside the courts, lawprofs sometimes have significant influence on government policy. For example, Harvard law Prof. Cass Sunstein has helped influence governments around the world to adopt policies based on “nudging” and other forms of “libertarian paternalism.”

Because of this influence, it would be good if there were more ideological diversity in legal academia. Studies indicate that ideological diversity can improve the quality of discourse and scholarship. If all or most scholars in a given field have similar views, that increases the likelihood that some key issues and arguments will be ignored or at least relatively neglected.

As I have emphasized before (e.g. here and here), the desirability of greater ideological diversity doesn’t mean schools should adopt affirmative action for non-left-wing legal academics, or that we should strive for a legal academy that “looks like America” in terms of the distribution of partisanship and ideology. But much can be achieved simply ending or significantly reducing ideological discrimination in faculty hiring.

As with racial, ethnic, and gender discrimination, ideological discrimination not only reduces diversity, but also reduces the quality of scholarship and teaching. Lower-quality candidates with the preferred views get hired in preference to better-qualified dissenters. Thus, we can potentially increase diversity and quality at the same time.

Even if discrimination ended completely, we would likely still have a disproportionate number of left-wing and Democratic lawprofs relative the proportions of these groups in the general population. Among other things, highly educated people—especially in the Trump era—tend to skew left, or at least against the conservative right. But ending discrimination would nonetheless make legal academia more ideologically diverse than it is now.

UPDATE: In the original version of this post, I said I had not made any political contributions during the period in question. However, my wife reminds me that, back in 2017, I made a $250 contribution to anti-Trump Republican Senator Jeff Flake’s abortive reelection campaign (who also had a lot of libertarian leanings). I did not donate to any Democratic campaigns during this time, though I did vote for the Democratic nominee in both the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. Thus, I am included in Muller’s data as one of George Mason’s six Republican contributors! This is one of those cases where the donation data doesn’t accurately reflect a person’s overall partisan/ideological leanings.

 

It is a well-known science fact that everything in outer space is queer (except for Pluto, which is cis and straight yet a remarkable ally) but the lamestream media won’t talk about THAT. What they WILL talk about is the stupid contretemps over a trans person in Alabama not only existing but also having a job at space camp. Today I read even more via Parker Molloy’s newsletter. And as a former Space Camper of the Week (holding for your applause), I shall now weigh in.

The deal is this: A local father called Clay Yarbrough decided to claim he was concerned about children’s safety when he found out there was a transgender employee at space camp — space camp where his daughter doesn’t even go, because Clay Yarbrough’s disgusting. Have there been any kind of whispers of hints of allegations of inappropriate behavior by said individual? Shut the fuck up, of course there haven’t.

In an interview with AL.com, Clay recounts calling the camp VP to ask her about it.

“She said, ‘I can assure you that your kid’s safety is my number one priority, and no males are allowed in female dorms, and no females are allowed in male dorms.’ So I asked, do you allow transgenders in?”

He says she told him that a trans woman was permitted to be in the dorm hallways in an area where girls stayed in unlocked dorm rooms. I don’t know why this would be an issue, unless you believe anyone born with a penis is inherently predatory and dangerous, including (or especially?) someone who identifies as a woman.

In the manner of all people who definitely aren’t excited about trying to attract major media attention to make up for the emptiness in their lives, Clay posted about it on Facebook. If you’d like to see it, Evan Urquhart at Assigned Media has it and more.

Don’t worry, though, Clay told AL.com that he does not hate “these people.” LOLOL.

Racists don’t like to be called racists. Transphobes don’t like to be called transphobes. And regardless of your particular flavor of hate, most humans do not like to be called “hateful.” It’s part of the bullshit performance of “kindness” as a virtue that the most vicious and vituperative people looooooove to put on.

Don’t worry, Republican politicians jumped on the story! US Reps. Robert Aderholt (AL-4) and Dale Strong (AL-5) posted statements on X, as did US Sen. Tommy Tuberville. (I dunno if Sen. Katie Britt has weighed in from her spooky kitchen yet.)

US Rep. Gary Palmer (AL-6) said, “When parents send their kids to Space Camp in Alabama, they should be confident they are going to a safe, educational environment.” Again, to my current knowledge from reading accounts by Molloy, Urquhart, AL.com and NBC Huntsville affiliate WAFF, the employee in question has not been accused of any behavior, criminal or even icky, on or off the job.

Here’s an excerpt from the response by the US Space & Rocket Center:

We are aware of rumors circulating on social media about a Space Camp employee. We would like to assure parents, teachers, and the public that the safety and security of Space Camp students is our number one priority. Any allegations of misconduct are taken very seriously. We are working to determine the facts in this case, after which we will take appropriate action.

The U.S. Space & Rocket Center adheres to all state and federal laws regulating hiring practices […]

We also have rigorous standards and procedures regarding the behavior of Space Camp employees to ensure the safety of students. These include:

No physical contact between staff and students beyond a fist bump or high five.

No staff is allowed to be alone with a student behind a closed door […]

No discussion of religion, sexual topics, politics, or sharing of opinions and beliefs that may be controversial.

Additionally, staff sleep in separate rooms from students and use separate bathroom facilities. We also provide 24-hour onsite security including round-the-clock video surveillance, regular foot and vehicle patrols, and controlled campus and building access.

We are an apolitical organization with no social agenda. Our singular mission is to inspire and educate.

Space Camp has been a trusted institution since its founding in 1982 with more than one million graduates from all 50 states and 150 countries. Many of those graduates have gone on to apply the leadership, teamwork, and problem-solving skills they learned at Space Camp to successful careers as scientists, engineers, teachers, doctors, and astronauts.  We will continue to work hard to foster trust with each family and student that walks in our doors.

Give us your space dollars once pls

You know what we don’t see in that letter? Any recognition that these “rumors” are rumors entirely and solely that someone on staff might not be cisgender. There is no standing up for their employee, a person devoting their life to making science awesome and fun. There is no pointing out that in fact, the employee hasn’t been accused of jack shit. Instead, they buy into the premise entirely. They buy into the idea there might be “misconduct” that they are “investigating” which might require “action.” Based on what? That asshole up there!

So that’s fucked up!

Now let me tell you about the one of the best experiences of my entire damn life. In eighth grade, two nerdy little friends and I convinced our parents to shell out major ducats for us three girls to go to Space Camp at the US Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. I assume this went on a credit card with some reasonable ‘90s APR that was not 29.99%, because it was surely not cheap. We probably sold them on it by claiming it would further our interest in careers in science, enabling us to make major money and provide cushy retirements for them.

Unlike my higher-achieving friends, I got poor grades in math and mediocre grades in science. In truth, I just thought space was cool, and this was the place where some of the actors for the panic attack-inducing film Apollo 13 had done their training, and I also thought that was cool.

The result? Not only did I fall in love with Space Camp, I became a lifelong fan of NASA funding and research as well as space education. The only propaganda Space Camp spews is space is cool and we should know more about it and do more cool stuff in space to make life better for everybody and also invent new forms of ice cream and give jobs to space people who like space.

Oh, and as the Flight Director of our simulated space mission (I’m holding for your TEARFUL standing ovation) I can say that it was a great opportunity to meet kids from all around the country as well as interesting, thoughtful and kind adults who had devoted their lives to science education.

I have no doubt some of the staff were LGBTQIA+, as was I (though I certainly wasn’t out yet). That’s because anywhere humans are gathered in groups, some of us are queer. But for trans individuals, the queerness is often more visible than it is for cis folks. This puts them at risk for all kinds of violence. The type of verbal attacks launched by Clay Yarbrough are nothing unusual, really, but going after somebody’s job is just another way to keep oneself busy pretending to care about the kids, I guess.

I’m sure various Republican politicians were thrilled by the chance to jump on this story instead of doing something that might actually make life safer for children in Alabama, like changing the fact that a quarter of their kids live in poverty and attend some of the worst public schools in America.

I am terribly sorry for what this employee has to go through. But I am still very glad that an out trans employee is part of the educational staff at a space camp in Alabama. I am certain there are trans and nonbinary children among the participants. The visibility of an out queer person really matters.

Just existing in one’s own skin, presenting in one’s own way, doing one’s own nerdy job, is absolutely a revolutionary act, particularly in a state riddled with MAGA cult members. And it is a good and healthy thing for children — not just queer kids, but all kids — to see that adults come in all shapes, sizes, colors, and genders.

Also, Joaquin Phoenix was in this very serious documentary about SPACE CAMP when he was called Leaf. So. We must protect it at all costs!!!

And Space Camp? Be a wee bit — no, a lot! — better at protecting your people, please.

Via the indispensable Greg Price, we get this bit of news from Trump’s criminal case in Georgia—the one involving RICO Madness.

BREAKING: Six counts in Fani Willis’ indictment against President Trump have been “quashed” by Judge McAfee. pic.twitter.com/Ncg0ZcEhG1

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) March 13, 2024

That highlights a trivial inaccuracy in our headline. The technical name of the motion was a ‘demurrer’ which is pretty much the same thing as a motion to dismiss in many other jurisdictions—including federal courts. Furthermore, the judge didn’t technically dismiss the claim, but quashed it—but it’s just another name for the same thing. We wrote it the way we did because we believe that non-lawyers will be more likely to get what we are talking about.

In any case, Price also helpfully provides a link to the full order:

Full orderhttps://t.co/NF4P6hN3tM

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) March 13, 2024

It isn’t a very long order, so we can summarize this pretty quickly. One of the most basic requirements of due process is notice and an opportunity to be heard. But the notice provided by the indictment has to actually give the defendant half a chance to prepare a defense. That means that in crucial ways it has to provide a sufficient amount of detail.

Let’s give you a practical example. Let’s say that you were indicted tomorrow for murder and the indictment said ‘the defendant did in fact murder a person sometime between 1994 and 2024.’ Well, if that is all you know about the allegation, that isn’t enough to allow you to prepare your own defense. You aren’t told who you murdered or when you allegedly murdered them. How could you possibly begin to defend yourself against a claim like that? For instance, could anyone provide an alibi for thirty years of their life? So if there isn’t enough specificity, that is a cause to dismiss (i.e. quash) a claim.

With that principle in mind, let’s look at the problem in the Trump indictment in Georgia. One of the crimes Trump and his co-defendants are charged with is soliciting a public officer to violate their oath of office. The judge notes that Georgian officials take an oath to support the U.S. and Georgian Constitutions, and the claim is that different defendants basically asked them to violate the state and federal constitutions and Judge McAffee held that this was just too vague:

While the averments [allegations by the government] do contain a reference to the terms of the violated oaths, this Court finds that the incorporation of the United States and Georgia Constitutions is so generic as to compel this Court to grant the special demurrers. On its own, the United States Constitution contains hundreds of clauses, any one of which can be the subject of a lifetime’s study. Academics and litigators devote their entire careers to the specialization of a single amendment. To further complicate the matter, the Georgia Constitution is not a ‘mere shadow[]’ of its federal counterpart, and although some provisions feature similar language, the Georgia Constitution has been interpreted to contain dramatically different meanings. … This is in marked contrast with say, aggravated assault with a handgun, which can be perpetrated in only a limited number of ways, and an indictment that merely refers to a handgun is not too vague because it infers that the weapon was used either as a firearm or as a bludgeon.

(Internal citations, quotation marks and footnotes removed.) In other words, saying ‘you asked someone to violate one of these two constitutions’ covers so much potential ground, they could mean anything.

Of course, we have long thought that this was questionable from a constitutional perspective, anyway. People solicit a violation of the Constitution all the time. For instance, just the other day we talked about how the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that Colorado could not take Trump off the ballot. This means that all along the way, the lawyers who lost that case was soliciting the Supreme Court to do something it could not legally do. Yet, no one would think to drag those lawyers off in chains—most basically because people have disagreed on the meaning of the Constitution from pretty much the moment the ink was dry on it. The only way we think that this law could be interpreted in a way that doesn’t violate the right to petition your government for a redress of grievances found in the First Amendment is if they can prove that the person doing the solicitation actually knew what they were asking for was unconstitutional, or limited the solicitation to quid pro quo offers, rather than just asking a person to do something.

Moving on, one person did raise an important point:

Good news, but they still have six months from today to reindict on these six counts. pic.twitter.com/FDdNenCkHB

— Brick Suit (@Brick_Suit) March 13, 2024

He is highlighting text from the opinion that reads as follows:

This does not mean the entire indictment is dismissed. … The State may also seek a reindictment supplementing these six counts. … Even if the statute of limitations has expired, the State receives a six-month extension from the date of this Order to resubmit the case to a grand jury.

(Citations removed.) So, the state can reindict Trump and put more detail into the indictment, solving the current problem, but … there’s another problem, and this is where Professor Turley comes in:

…The defense is allowed discovery and time to prepare for the new alleged crimes. That will take time off the clock. The court has indicated that they can still rely on the underlying conduct to make out the general racketeering charge. However, that theory was alreadly thin…

— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) March 13, 2024

The cut off text reads:

However, that theory was alreadly thin soup and it just got a bit thinner…

Ugh, Turley is good at many things, but his humor is a bit too milquetoast for our taste. Still, whether or not he is good at being funny is not as important as whether or not he has insight (and he does). He goes on:

…Part of the value of the multiplicity of counts was to convey a pattern criminality as a foundation for the more serious racketeering charges. This does not disable the case, but it adds yet another set back for the prosecution as it awaits the disqualification decision.

— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) March 13, 2024

So today’s decision presents a possible dilemma for the prosecutors: go forward with a significantly weaker case, or reindict and risk losing the ability to try Trump before the election.

The only possible bright spot in today’s decision from the prosecution’s perspective is that it makes it less likely that Trump will get the full Fani spanking dismissal of the case due to the Fani Willis scandal, which we are hereby labelling ‘Fanigate.’ We are still waiting to see what McAfee rules on that issue, but many judges would not grant a partial dismissal before resolving an issue that might get the whole case dismissed, unless he or she wasn’t planning to dismiss the entire case. But that is only a tendency among ‘many judges,’ and doesn’t mean this judge will definitely approach things the same way. Indeed, since McAfee is facing a request to reopen the evidence, his current approach might be to keep his mind merely open to the dismissal, after another round of testimony in court. Since at one point, Willis herself asked to reopen the evidence, we find it hard to believe that McAfee won’t reopen the matter for a hearing—unless he thinks he has already heard enough to justify disqualification.

In other words, we don’t feel super confident that this is a sign of the judge’s thinking on Fanigate. But we might look back on it as a sign. We shall see.

Returning to Turley’s point about timing, this isn’t like the Federal cases where Trump could literally hope to push the case back past the election, win the election and then either attempt to pardon himself or otherwise stop the cases. This is a state prosecution and he can’t make it go away that easily. Indeed, we could face a scenario such as Trump being prosecuted while being president of the United States, or Trump being convicted and sentenced to prison while he is also supposed to serve as president.

Now, people have been elected to office and been sentenced to prison. For instance, this is not exactly a moment of pride here in Virginia:

Controversial lawmaker who served time for teen sex scandal wins Virginia state Senate seat https://t.co/EN4HqfbRQu

— Diane (@SoCalValleyGal) November 11, 2019

That case involved Joseph Morrissey, who seduced his underage intern, pled guilty to contributing to the delinquency of a minor and actually served prison while serving as a lawmaker. Literally, he would be let out of prison in the morning, serve in the Virginia Senate during the day, and then go back to the prison at night.

But the President of the United States is a one-of-a-kind office in America. As Hillary Clinton famously pointed out, he or she has to be ready at four in the morning to deal with a crisis. Imagine if on the morning of September 11, 2001, Goerge W. Bush wasn’t reading to schoolchildren, but was instead due in court to defend himself in a criminal case? Even if the court doesn’t require Trump to attend the trial, he has a right to do so and he can’t be said to have a fair trial unless he has a meaningful opportunity to do so. And similar problems arise if they try to go the Morrissey route and try to have Trump serve in prison during his off hours—because for the President of the United States, there are no ‘off hours.’

To say we would be in uncharted legal territory, then, is an understatement. Indeed, this could lead to a constitutional crisis.

Moving on to a few other reactions:

LOSER! Big Fani Willis just had six charges against Trump quashed by the court. https://t.co/chBT6Ru45p

— @amuse (@amuse) March 13, 2024

While it’s past time to remove Willis – her entire case is just one of many attempts to use our courts to interfere in elections.

They decline to prosecute Biden’s actual crimes, but the fact that the Trump cases are allowed to continue is the bigger issue.

This is a… https://t.co/QyNySKzzds

— Kelly Loeffler (@KLoeffler) March 13, 2024

The cut off text reads:

This is a distraction from the serious damage Biden is doing to America.

Of course, we don’t think a court can validly rule that Trump is immune to prosecution because Biden sucks, or something like that, we do think that the courts are giving short shrift, so far, to the notion that they are being used as an instrument to interfere in the election and Trump is the victim of selective prosecution.

If Fani Willis and Nathan Wade were Republicans everyone on both sides would call for their resignations and for the DOJ to investigate them immediately. Our “media” and institution-wide Democrat coddling are national disgraces. https://t.co/cAyR2kUErX

— FOOL NELSON (@FOOL_NELSON) March 13, 2024

Off topic, but he’s not wrong.

The walls are closing in. https://t.co/OVbHY8rOnv

— NotYourJewishMom (@CaffMomREDACTED) March 13, 2024

We feel confident that she is being ironic. As a point of fact, the walls have withdrawn slightly, if we are going to use a trash compactor in the original Star Wars metaphor. 

And no, George Lucas, we are not calling it ‘Star War: Episode IV: A New Hope’ and you can’t make us. Sod off with your overly convoluted revised titles.

Good start.

Now throw Fani Willis and her lover off the case and end this sham prosecution completely. https://t.co/F8J9RCJV0O pic.twitter.com/CtufRfL7pF

— Steve Cortes (@CortesSteve) March 13, 2024

One thing we have observed is momentum is important in legal cases to a degree that doesn’t entirely make logical sense. Right now, Trump actually has some good momentum in his favor.

When will he decide on Willis and Wade? https://t.co/YzF5BOOBgp

— sarainitaly 🐰🌷🐥🌷 (@sarainitaly) March 13, 2024

Bluntly, when he feels like it. Judges are the proverbial 800 pound gorillas.

How embarrassing for Fani Willis. https://t.co/rVRZIj0iHQ

— House Judiciary GOP (@JudiciaryGOP) March 13, 2024

Finally, we get this.

When the booty calls are legit you must acquit

— Stinson Norwood (@snorman1776) March 13, 2024

It’s not actually relevant, but it is pretty funny.

***

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Did you know that a mere 44,000 votes spread across Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin kept Joe Biden and Donald Trump from an Electoral College tie in 2020? That was even tighter than in 2016, when 80,000 votes in three states gave Trump a decisive Electoral College win. 

Patrick Ruffini is a Republican pollster at Echelon Insights and author of Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP. Reason‘s Nick Gillespie talked with Ruffini about why the major parties continue to leak market share, why 2024 is going to be another super-close presidential race, and whether small-l libertarian voters will make the difference in November.

Nick Gillespie: What’s the elevator pitch for your book, Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP?

Patrick Ruffini: I think that it’s no secret to anyone that there have been quite a few changes in our politics over the last decade or so. Specifically, a lot of those involve changes in who’s voting for the parties and, fundamentally, who the parties are for. What do they seem to stand for? I go back to my early days in politics, which were at the tail end of an era in which Democrats were primarily pitching themselves to voters and receiving the votes of people who were in the working class. They really seemed to hold the moral high ground when it came to issues of who’s really going to care about someone like me, an average person in this country. And [Democrats] would routinely pillory Republicans as the party of the rich, as the party of the well-to-do, the disconnected elite. 

I think what we’ve seen is that has largely flipped. Specifically, it flipped after 2016, when Democrats really seemed to [begin to] have a lot of trouble holding on to the broad mass of working-class voters, which are today defined as voters without college degrees. Sixty-four percent of voters do not have college degrees. We obviously saw in 2016 how they lost some of those blue wall states—Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin—largely because Trump was able to appeal to this electorate in a way that no Republican had before and flipped states that no Republican had won since 1988.

Gillespie: Early on in the book, you write, “I had egg on my face in 2016.” Can you talk a little bit about why you had egg on your face? Of course, it wasn’t just you. It’s virtually all pollsters, strategists, and activists.

Ruffini: The presumption, I think, heading into the 2016 election was that Trump was a sure loser in the election. If not in the Republican primary, then he’s a sure loser in the general election. There is always a question of, “Will he succeed in this hostile takeover of the Republican Party?” Initially, I was skeptical, but not long after, it was very clear he was the odds-on favorite because he had really captured a large chunk of the electorate. Everyone else was squabbling for scraps at the table. Even if only at 35 percent, no one else was higher than 10 percent, practically speaking, at the time. But the idea was [that] maybe he can win the Republican nomination, but he’s a sure loser in the general election based on just his off-color commentary, his unhinged rally speeches. Everything that was really conventional wisdom among political observers in 2016 [pointed to] a Trump victory—a victory of somebody who just flouted political norms as he did—being flat out unthinkable. 

I was part of that conventional wisdom. Hillary Clinton seemed to be doing herself no favors. I didn’t completely discount that. A lesson that I learned after that is voters also don’t really care about the integrity of political norms as a whole. There are some segments of voters that absolutely deeply care about them. But in terms of the center of the electorate, I don’t think most voters are saying, “Oh, politics is this noble thing that Donald Trump is degrading.” I think they see politics as something that’s down and dirty, dishonest, corrupt in large measure. Lots of people see it that way.

Gillespie: It’s an interesting kind of issue, because one of the reasons why Hillary Clinton was so vulnerable was because she was seen as almost uniquely corrupt and in bed with all sorts of bad interests.

Ruffini: The idea is that for people like me who work in politics, and particularly for a political class, that are just trying to see the people we work with as basically well-intentioned people who are trying to make a positive difference for the country—it turns out just very few people actually see it that way. And Hillary Clinton was absolutely somebody who was painted that way.

I write about the parallels between Trump and Bill Clinton. Because Bill Clinton too was kind of viewed as this unsavory, seedy type of figure during his campaigns and his presidency. He was Slick Willy. He could get away with anything. In the same way, Trump was somebody who maybe had disreputable things, both that he had said and that he had done in his past, and he always seemed to evade accountability. I think that there’s something to the idea that you can succeed in this environment if people view you as sort of being authentically that rascally, scoundrel-like figure who is in some way honest with voters about what they’re getting. It’s when you’ve got people who are trying to portray themselves as Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts and then don’t live up to that image, that they get in trouble.

Gillespie: Trump, the billionaire who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and was a TV star, was talking about the forgotten man. He spoke for the forgotten man. Whereas Biden—who is not working class—talked about [the working class] incessantly and coming from Scranton, Pennsylvania, etc. He’s dumped a ton of money into the country, but that doesn’t seem to be resonating with voters, does it?

Ruffini: I think it’s ultimately who does the working class identify with? Somebody who is not fundamentally a creature of Washington, D.C., and not fundamentally a creature of this dirty, unsavory political game—I think that’s what they saw in Trump. They saw a certain authenticity, and they saw somebody who spoke like them, somebody who was angry at the same people that they were angry at. I think that carried the day, ultimately.

Gillespie: It’s worth pointing out that he squeaked into office with a historically low popular vote. Clinton in ’92 got in with a smaller amount, and about the same amount or a little bit more in ’96. 

I want to zero in on what working class means. Biden carried voters who made less than $50,000. He carried households making between $50,000 to $100,000. Trump took those making over $100,000. What you say in the book is that the key divide is education, and maybe also geography, instead of economic class. It’s socioeconomic status or education level. How is that functioning differently than just the amount of money that a household is bringing it? 

Ruffini: It’s true that at some level, the amount of money that you have in your bank account does actually dictate a lot about the way you view the world. There may still be some truth to that. 

But the point I’m making is that, in terms of what manifests politically and what we’re seeing happen politically in the country, education is by far the better variable that predicts everything that’s happened, and particularly what’s happened among white voters. So I put in the book the caveat that non-white voters don’t necessarily act the same way in terms of there not being a class divide. There’s more of a different pattern of behavior.

Gillespie: What percentage of the electorate is white? Is it still a vast majority?

Ruffini: In 2024, it’s mid-70 percent.

Gillespie: So votes by white Americans are going to comprise the vast majority of ballots cast.

Ruffini: I would say whatever 70 percent is, if it’s the vast majority, but it’s still a pretty strong majority. But increasingly that white vote does not really behave as a unit, does not really matter in terms of anything politically. You’re really talking about white voters without a college degree and white voters with a college degree, that used to be back in the ’90s very similar in how they voted. You could kind of talk about there being a “white vote” in the 1990s. Today, you can’t talk about it that way. The 40 percent of voters are going to be white non-college and the 30 percent of voters who are going to be white with a college degree. Those used to vote very similarly, and are [now] 40 points apart on the margin in who they’re voting for.

Gillespie: Then you talk about the distinction between cosmopolitans and traditionalists. What does that mean?

Ruffini: It maps pretty cleanly onto this idea of white college, white non-college. I’m really interested in where things are moving. Because even though, as you cited some statistics, Biden is still winning some of those lower income voters, but what’s happening there is that you still have quite a few low income minority voters in that pool of people. So Biden wins. But that gap between sort of the low income and high income voters, it is nowhere near where it was in 1996, 2000—it’s just a completely different ballgame there. 

When I say that, it means, who is a group of voters that is uniquely motivated by these sort of more abstract ideals of protecting democratic norms? Those are the same groups of voters, who live in cities, embrace ideas about diversity, are just generally more progressive or liberal in their outlook, but are uniquely motivated by these questions of social equality. 

Then you’ve got a large group of voters that are not motivated by those issues. They’re either motivated on the other side by a more traditional cosmopolitan view. But when it comes to some of these minority voter communities that still vote Democratic, what you find is, they are very much the conservative wing of the Democratic Party in terms of their views on social issues. They don’t really place any sort of prioritization on these animating issues behind the Democratic coalition today on this Dobbs [v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization] and Democracy message. Their allegiance to the Democratic Party is more historic. It was rooted in this identity of the Democratic Party as the party of the working class, of the marginalized minority communities.

Gillespie: So as the faces of the Democratic Party become more of a multiracial coalition or a rainbow coalition, they are actually losing touch with the very people they claim to be representing more directly?

Ruffini: In the revealed preferences of voters, what you actually don’t find is either Hispanic or Latino voters being motivated by identity politics. In 2016, you had Trump throw every insult in the book at Mexicans, saying they’re rapists, bringing crime, drugs over the border. He didn’t really seem to lose a whole lot of Latino support. I mean, you would think he would. Similarly, you had Trump after the [Black Lives Matter] protests in 2020 sort of behaving badly in that context, saying that police should shoot looters and all those things. He gained support among black voters in 2020. The revealed preferences of these voters are not that they are uniquely motivated by this kind of racial identity rhetoric that is coming from the left.

Gillespie: How much of the swing from Democrats to Republicans is Trump appealing to people? How much of it is Democrats not addressing people whose votes they’re taking for granted?

Ruffini: Absolutely, you can’t write Donald Trump out of the story completely. You have a catalyst for the shifts we’ve seen. It appears that he’s obviously very, very highly likely to be the Republican nominee. When you look at polling for 2024, we’re seeing a further shift of African-American and Latino voters in his direction. In fact, that’s most of the gains that he’s been getting in the polls. To the extent that those partly materialize in 2024, what I think we’re going to see is this realignment that he helped bring into being. The question is what happens if and when Donald Trump fades from the scene, and whether or not we believe we will see some sort of return to the old coalition line, to a more Romney 2012-style coalition. 

The entire history of our politics suggests that that’s not going to happen. I think you’ll see some mean reversion. I think if Nikki Haley were the nominee—very unlikely to happen—you’d certainly see her do better in the suburbs. You’d probably see her frankly do better overall in the election. Not quite as polarizing a figure, but I don’t think you would ever see a return back. And there’s a good reason for that. That’s because this kind of thing is happening throughout Western democracies, where the working class sort of is aligning itself more and more with the parties of the right. The more highly educated voters are aligning themselves more and more with parties on the left. Those countries don’t necessarily have a Donald Trump. But this does seem to be something that is naturally occurring—was to some extent occurring before Donald Trump. So I don’t think it’s exclusively on him, but he was a catalyst for accelerating.

Gillespie: Is any of this generational in nature? Overwhelmingly younger people voted for Democrats, at least in presidential elections.

Ruffini: This is a big issue. This is a big debate right now. Are you actually going to see people as they grow older becoming more conservative? That’s what we’ve seen in generations past. But there’s a lot of discussion that millennials aren’t quite following that same trajectory. Partly the big generational divide that I really talk about is that we now have an electorate that is entirely passed through the education sorting machine, in terms of when they were coming up and they were young, they had the opportunity to go to college or not go to college, and that was a legitimate choice, as opposed to maybe for those in the silent generation where most people just didn’t go to college. 

As a result, you’ve just got much more education polarization because more people have made the decision. If you have made that decision, “Yeah, I’m going to leave my hometown and kind of not pursue knowledge and, maybe move to a big city after college and really be part of this knowledge economy,” that’s just fundamentally a different kind of person than the person who stays closer to the people in places they knew growing up. I think that’s part of the generational story. 

I also think the generational story can’t be separated from the question of race, because you just have a younger generation that is much, much more diverse. The silent generation and boomers are just much more white. You actually do see that they are more liberal and traditionally have been much more liberal as a result in the younger generation. But it’s really a function of race, I think that that’s true. I write about the ways that’s changing. 

I don’t really tackle this question of generations directly because I do think it’s downstream of race. I think that to the extent that younger Hispanics are not tied to the voting patterns of their parents, younger African Americans are not tied to the same voting patterns of their parents—what you’re actually going to see is more of them voting Republican. You see it as a whole, diverse, younger generation that is going to be more politically balanced.

Gillespie: You point out the fact that the country is more mixed than ever. There is a huge amount of what would count by various measures as desegregation going on—younger generations, millennials, and Gen-Z are more multi-ethnic. How do you consider yourself, if let’s say, you’re a third-generation Puerto Rican who married an Asian woman, then you divorce them and marry a black person? What are your kids? I think we’re seeing an attempt to kind of keep two or three categories intact when the social reality is just vastly outstripping that.

Ruffini: As of today, the number of voters who are genuinely more than one race—it’s actually a pretty small number. But when you look at the children born in the United States, one in five children being born today are of some kind of mixed racial background, and that doesn’t even count Hispanics, because we don’t have a really good way of actually accounting for Hispanics because of the way the census collects data. 

I do think that this assumption we’ve had about non-white groups being a loyal Democratic bloc, especially within the African-American community, was predicated on the idea that this was a marginalized, discriminated-against group that needed to organize under the banner of one political party to advance their interests. What happens when that identity is no longer salient? That identity of, “I don’t view myself as a victim.” I don’t view myself as somebody who is going to be discriminated against as a result of my skin color, and that’s just fundamentally not who I am. I am many different things. I am potentially of many different races. But I also live in a suburb with people of all different sorts of racial and ethnic backgrounds. I think that’s fundamentally, in one way or the other, just going to change voting patterns over time.

Gillespie: The idea that Trump actually was getting more minority votes than somebody like a Mitt Romney or a John McCain…What was the swing in black support for Trump? It’s still low, even historically going back to somebody like [Dwight D.] Eisenhower. But what’s the swing? What are the issues that black voters—if we can talk about a median black vote—care about?

Ruffini: There’s different data sources on this. If you look at precinct data, there’s something like a 5 to 6 point swing on the margin from a very low base. But that means in some cases, you had precincts where there were literally zero voters and they go to, all right, maybe Trump gets five voters or ten voters in 2016 or 2020. 

Gillespie: But he did particularly well among black men, right?

Ruffini: Yeah. In general, you’ve seen a little bit of recovery and some other data sources have it as much as 10 or 12 points among black voters, from 2016 to 2020, when you had a swing of about 18 points among Hispanic voters. So you’re right. That was something that kind of blew my mind too early on. But when you kind of start to see that this is actually part of the same trend of white working class voters. The vast majority of Hispanic and African-American people in this country are working class in terms of not having a college degree. It’s a part of the working class shift more broadly, even as college educated shifted to Democrats, the non-college educated are shifting Republican. I do think that that has been the shift. 

I think that particularly Trump—a lot of it goes back to his personal demeanor, which I think if you talk to people along the coast, people like us would say that’s a liability. But it turns out that’s not a liability to a lot of people in the country. In fact, it’s something that attracts a lot of people to him, including some unexpected voters. So when it comes to, again, these younger minority men, who I think are a key group, kind of heading into this election cycle, who themselves speak pretty bluntly and forthrightly, this idea of somebody who does not necessarily adhere to the genteel mannerisms of political discourse is, on balance, more appealing than somebody who does.

Gillespie: If Trump’s appeal to blacks is growing and that’s partly powered by an appeal to non-college-educated black men who like blunt speaking, what is it with Hispanics? 

Ruffini: I think number one, it’s the economy. This is an upwardly mobile, striving community. It’s a community where that old historic pattern of if you have more money, if you’ve made it in the country, you actually are voting more Republican. It just turns out there’s a pretty good upward trajectory and upward trend in Hispanic incomes over the last few generations. You actually do see a lot more loyalty to the Democratic Party in the sort of lower income first generation communities that you see moved to second and third generation communities.

Gillespie: As you point out in your book, your name ends in a vowel. It is Italian. I am Italian on my mother’s side, who grew up in Waterbury, Connecticut, not far from where you grew up. Michael Barone, 25 years ago wrote The New Americans: How the Melting Pot Can Work Again, and likened the Mexican-American experience to the Italian-American experience. Part of his argument was that two or three generations in, they are indistinguishable from native-born people. 

Yet we fail to grasp that because Latino or Hispanic immigrants keep coming to the country. We keep thinking everybody is here for six months or a couple of years. And we don’t recognize that since Reagan’s second administration, if not longer, Latinos, particularly Mexicans, have been here, and now they’re in their second or third generation. So they’re really as American as Italians, right? 

Ruffini: That’s right. I think there’s a big divide by generation in terms of partisanship. But you mentioned that the group is not a monolith. There’s no shared unique experience among Latinos in America. You’ve got Mexican Americans, got Puerto Ricans, got Cuban Americans. All the different [groups] came from incredibly different contexts. When you look at the issue of why does Trump actually make gains after he elevates the issue of immigration? It’s because Hispanics who are already in the voting public, do they see the people coming across the border today as people like them or do they see them as fundamentally different from them? I think they see them as more different than they do similar. If you’re voting and if you show up in these election statistics that I talk about, you’ve probably been here for a while. You’re a citizen of the United States. You are a legal immigrant to the United States, if you have immigrated at all to the United States. It’s just a fundamentally different experience. 

In particular in the polling, in the work I’ve done on the southern border, it’s very clear that the people down there do not see the people crossing as being one of them, especially in the current wave. What you see also increasingly is, the people here in those communities tend to be more Mexican-American. And what you see is people from Venezuela, but you’re also seeing non-Latino people crossing. You’re seeing people from Haiti, the Caribbean and further afield, who are part of this migrant crisis. It’s just fundamentally different. A typical Latino voter is as far apart from the people crossing today than a typical white. And that’s the reality.

Gillespie: Has immigration been defined by the chaos at the border or the inability to control the border?

Ruffini: There is no question that this situation on the southern border has overshadowed and dominated the whole question of immigration, such that when you even bring up the question of immigration in this survey, people see it as an issue that is a liability for the Biden administration. People want to go back to something like the Trump administration policies. But you did see increasingly, post-2016, there was a backlash among Democrats to what was seen as Trump’s xenophobia, intolerance of immigrants, and so they, as a result, putting on their jerseys to some extent, decided to be a party that was openly advocating for immigration, whereas you wouldn’t have seen that in the Democratic Party of yesteryear, which was where labor was a big factor. Labor, in and of itself through the 1990s, was very skeptical of open immigration.

I think that the old populist Democratic Party went away. As a result, Biden had to commit to a much more open set of border policies that has invited political disaster for him.

Gillespie: At the same time, Bill Clinton in ’96 spent a huge chunk of his renomination speech saying he was going to get rid of illegal immigrants. He was going to remove them from the country.

Ruffini: That is a really good point. I think there’s a world of difference between Bill Clinton and what Joe Biden is going to do. You don’t really see Biden touting the fact that he is now tough on the border, like he is the one who was tough and wants to get something done on the border, in such a way that it would register with voters. 

The other day on Twitter, I imagined, what would a Bill Clinton-style ad look like about the current border crisis? I know he’d be talking about the Biden border plan to crack down on illegals. If you were rerunning the Bill Clinton 1996 playbook, which, by the way, I think that would work, I think that would still work today. But you won’t see him do it because the climate within his own party has just dramatically changed when it comes to anything that’s adjacent to diversity or anything like that. It’s just unimaginable that he would do something like that.

Gillespie: Let’s talk about Asian Americans. How do they factor into the multiracial coalition that might remake the GOP? How bad is it to characterize all Asian Americans as peas in a pod? But then what is the highest-salience set of issues for them?

Ruffini: This is a very bifurcated community because about half of the Asian electorate is college-educated and votes in many ways similar to the white, college-educated electorate. You have a large number of Asians in California, which is a very blue state. They started out from a very democratic baseline. But if you look at the Asian American professionals in one of the major metro areas, they’re pretty indistinguishable, actually, from a white educated professional. 

In terms of the places where you have an identifiably Asian voting bloc—places like Little Saigon in Orange County or in San Jose, California, or places in Queens, which have received a lot of attention over the last couple election cycles—those are oftentimes first generation immigrant communities where a lot of people speak the original language. These voters are very different from this professional class that you’ve seen a shift in? You actually start to see more of a class divide in the Asian community. 

But you look at places like in New York City—and particularly this realignment kind of gained steam in 2022—[former Rep.] Lee Zeldin [R–N.Y.] won a lot of those voters. You had three Asian American Republicans getting elected as Assembly people in Brooklyn, when no one was really expecting that. It is a very different community. You really see it particularly among Koreans, among Vietnamese, to some extent Chinese Americans. Less so among Indian Americans, I don’t think you see it as much there. But there’s a huge divide by education.

Gillespie: What about groups like Chinese and Japanese, who might be a very small population? Do you see the same kind of pattern where if they’ve been here for three generations or more they have become indistinguishable from white voters or native-born Americans?

Ruffini: It depends on the context of what are they moving to. To some extent, the Hispanic working-class voter is essentially this generation’s version of the white working-class voter of yesteryear. They’re moving into places like Northeast Philly, which was a traditionally more conservative place. We had a pretty conservative white electorate. But they’re living a solidly middle-class existence. This is not like, “Oh, we’re living in the barrio.” We are living a solidly middle-class existence. There’s a pathway where you can see how they’re becoming more Republican. 

Look at the Asian American voter. It’s a little bit more complicated because you mentioned The New Americans by Michael Barone, where he drew these parallels. The parallel he draws with Asians, is if Hispanics were the new Italians, Asians are the new Jews, in terms of they seem to be a very highly educated group, with very high levels of educational attainment, very high levels of rising up the income ladder, almost in a very steep pattern where they’re leapfrogging every other group. There is a sense that that has led to a more Democratic outlook among a newer generation or people entering the professional class. You see that more and more among Asian voters. 

But to some extent, the Democratic Party has spurned the Asian American vote. The progressive movement has spurned the Asian-American voter in the push for diversity, ironically, in higher education, where it’s really Asian-Americans who are the losers. If you de-emphasized merit in higher education—I’d love to see your Republicans actually do more to seize upon that issue in Asian communities.

Gillespie: We all know that the 2016 election was unbelievably close. It was as tight as it could get. But in 2020, Joe Biden won overwhelmingly in the popular vote as a percentage and in the Electoral College. But how close was that election? Was it a blowout, or was it actually pretty close to 2016 when you factor in things?

Ruffini: I’m smiling because actually the perception that it wasn’t a close election, it’s just completely wrong. It’s actually, technically speaking, closer than 2016 when you look at the number of votes needed to have flipped in the Electoral College. People forget how close Trump came to winning the election—just a shift of 0.7 percent in the popular vote spread uniformly across the country would have won. That means he would have been the president, squeaking by with 6 million fewer popular votes than Biden. Why is that? Partly it’s due to this working-class coalition. 

The working class is concentrated in states that are more just electorally significant to the outcome of the election. Part of the reason that this realignment really is the best avenue and bet for Republicans to win elections moving forward is because they’re overrepresented in the electoral college. Now, we’ll see if that happens again in 2024. But, it was a very, very close election, and particularly compared to the polls going into the election, which Biden I think was up by eight points in the last polling average. He only wins by four and barely squeaks by in a way that allows Trump to make an argument to his voters that it was stolen from him. 

Gillespie: Do you believe that or are you saying that Trump made that argument?

Ruffini: No, I don’t believe it was stolen from him. But I do think that had we seen Biden actually win the election by as much as he should have won the election, as much as polls were saying, and was expected to win the election, then I think Trump would have just had a much harder time convincing people. 

Gillespie: Assuming the 2024 election is Trump vs. Biden and assuming each of them is brain damaged in their own unique, special ways, is it totally up for grabs?

Ruffini: I think that it would be. It’s a fair assumption about any election, no matter what the polls say at this point. You start from the prior that it’s a jump ball. But, it’s a very different election right now. Right now, Trump is polling ahead and that’s been very consistent, no matter what the economic numbers seem to do. I don’t think you could ignore that. It’s not a fundamentally different election from the standpoint of pre-election polling than it was in 2020. That said, I think we will likely still see a very, very close election. But, right now, Trump seems to be doing a lot better than he was at this point in 2020. 

Gillespie: The economy compared to 2020 is doing relatively well. Inflation was a big issue then. Despite Biden being terrible on the economy, things for most people are doing pretty well. Is that because voters don’t really care about the actual reality?

Ruffini: I wouldn’t say the results are reality and the ground doesn’t matter. If the economic situation kind of quiets down, he’d rather have that than the alternative. But a perception has set in particularly as it relates to Biden’s fitness and his age that is very hard to recover from, unless something dramatic happens, either in the form of a Trump conviction or in the form of Trump has his own health crisis, that does seem to be something that is weighing down Biden pretty heavily, independently of the state of the economy. But also just a pretty deep-seated perception that the grass was greener on the other side of the street. 

Even if Biden is able to somehow recover on the economy, and maybe make it a little bit more of a draw, does he still win the debate with Trump over who best is able to manage the economy? They still win that retrospective look back, I was better off. The perception that set in, that things were at least under control on the global stage when Trump was president, I seem to be making more money.

Gillespie: Towards the end of your book Party of the People, you say, “I come to tell the younger me that the libertarian dream of smaller government is debt.” You also talk a fair amount when you’re looking at the future of politics about a quadrant chart that Lee Trotman put together, which shows that what used to be called the libertarian quadrant—the shorthand is fiscally conservative, socially liberal—there are no voters there. How do you justify that?

Ruffini: That’s something your colleague Stephanie Slade tackled very aptly in a feature piece at Reason recently. Growing up, I very much drank the Kool-Aid, supply-side economics and a lot of, not just maybe a more libertarian economics, but the whole Reagan view of, let’s say, limited government. The reality is that not a lot of voters are motivated by those sorts of questions in the real world. You see both parties increasingly motivated on cultural questions and activated on cultural questions. That’s particularly true of Republican voters, and particularly around the issue of immigration. We saw that very clearly with Trump in 2016. I also don’t think that a whole lot of voters are motivated by a left-wing ideological critique of the Reagan era or support for social democracy. 

I think that the questions that actually motivate voters on a real level are fundamentally different from the ones that motivate activists, and the ones that motivate people like me growing up—we’re very invested in these economic ideologies. Trump really kind of pulled that back and said this isn’t really at a fundamental gut level what’s moving people, even though they do have. I write this in the book that it’s not like Republicans should just become a party that supports social programs, and that’s how you win working-class voters. They do have this gut-level identification with capitalist or free enterprise, or business and hard work as a way of working your way up. But they’re just not quite as invested in reading Milton Friedman as maybe that younger version of me was thinking.

Gillespie: If the Republican Party no longer seems to be courting libertarians in a way that they were at the end of the aughts to the beginning of the 2000 teens, it doesn’t mean that libertarian voters have disappeared. Emily Ekins and David Boaz at the Cato Institute, using various measures that are alternative to some of the ones that you and Lee Trotman use, hypothesize that 10 percent to 20 percent of voters pretty reliably vote socially liberal and fiscally conservative. 

Where do those voters go, assuming they’re not completely just making that up? In an election like the one that we’re going to have now, in an election like in 2022 or 2016, where are those libertarian voters and who do you think they would be going for in something like this?

Ruffini: You’re right that even if a group is smaller in the electorate, it turns out they matter quite a lot. And I think Joe Biden doesn’t win in 2020 without all the third party voters from 2016 who primarily backed him. But when you talk about how we define that socially, more moderate, or liberal and fiscally conservative voter, I think we are used to viewing that libertarian vote as adjacent to the Republican vote. As something that belongs to Republicans. What we’ll be actually seeing more and more is more of a crossover between libertarians and Democrats recently. Because those cultural issues seem to be the tie-breaker. They seem to matter more. 

Number one, Trump isn’t fiscally conservative. He’s not really standing up for that side of the argument. But you also just see social issues and cultural issues kind of matter more. I’m not talking about the hardcore Libertarian Party voter, I am talking about that sort of voter in the northeast corridor, that likes to say they’re socially more moderate and fiscally conservative. What you’ve seen more recently, in a more recent election cycle is that those voters go more Democratic. Whereas that moderate voter again, that’s the Obama-Trump voter. That’s the voter in Michigan. That’s the old autoworker. That’s pro-life. They see a role for the government in the economy. Those voters have been moving in completely the opposite directions.

Gillespie: What are the signs to look for going into the election, and then after that will there be a long-lived realignment of the parties?

Ruffini: We don’t necessarily know after 2024 if this new coalition survives. Certainly, there’s a case for the shifts that we’ve seen, particularly as it relates to non-white voters continuing, you’re seeing that in the polls right now. There’s also a case to be made that this is more of a long-term process. In the book, I write about looking ahead. Let’s actually conduct a thought experiment that if this actually happens, what does 2036 look like? What would the election of 2036 look like? 

Overwhelmingly, because we have a pretty good idea of what the demographics are going to be in that year. We know the country is just getting more non-white. What would the breakdown need to look like? It would need to look something like this: Republicans draw pretty even among Hispanics, they’re winning about maybe 40 percent of Asian voters, and they’re winning almost a quarter of the African-American vote. What’s interesting is there’s polls out there that show that’s happening in 2024. It could be that I’m way too conservative. But I think you really have to view this over a long-term trajectory and not election to election, which is very noisy. I think that subject to all sorts of factors that are specific to the cycle. 

Right now we have this tendency to view Ronald Reagan as this golden era of Republican normalcy, as somebody who is moderate on immigration and for free trade and for internationalism and global leadership. Certainly, that’s true, but I think it understates the extent to which Reagan himself was a disruptive figure in the Republican Party in the ’70s and ’80s, where he was fundamentally—in the same way Trump is disrupting the existing Republican order—disrupting challenger Gerald Ford from the right. As a result, the party moves, the party shifts, and it becomes a really unambiguously conservative party after Reagan. 

In some way, I think the party will become an unambiguously more populist party. Now, whether or not we have somebody who is quite as much of an avatar of that as Donald Trump in the future, I’m not sure. I think he is somewhat sui generis. I think you will, by default, have somebody more “normal” in the future, particularly someone who can get elected president. But, I think that just the baseline has shifted. It shifted with Reagan and I think it’s now shifted with Trump. 

Gillespie: Where do you think the Democratic Party is shifting to? Are they undergoing a similar process, if they are now appealing to educated cosmopolitan voters? 

Ruffini: It’s a coalition that is shifted in terms of the voters it’s appealed to significantly. It’s really openly making the case on cultural issues, openly making the case for a more open society, really talking up these sort of more abstract concepts of democracy as opposed to the kind of campaign we saw as recently as 2012 when Obama was railing against Mitt Romney as the scion of private equity. You didn’t care about people like you. You just don’t seem to see that kind of rhetoric anymore, even though that remains part of the party’s policy commitment. I don’t necessarily think they’re going to go conservative on economic issues.

Gillespie: Medicare and Social Security appear to be completely inviolate at this point. It is beyond the third rail of American politics now. To even invoke it, other than to say you are going to keep it forever and maybe make it shinier, is complete political death. Is there any way that that’s going to change? 

Ruffini: What’s going to change, if nothing else, are the actuarial realities of these programs that are going to impose upon everybody’s tidy the political notions and ideas. What you would say now is that it is absolute political death for anybody to touch that entitlement reform. Particularly when you frame the question as cuts to entitlement programs. I think you’re absolutely passing that rubicon of we’re no longer able to pay out benefits at the state level. It’s going to fundamentally be another major disruption, akin to but somewhat I think much greater than what we saw in the last three years with 20 percent inflation. I think that that is going to be in and of itself going to upend a lot of our politics. 

But, Trump intuited, not incorrectly, that this was not a political winner for Republicans and he was actually willing to—and I think probably others had intuited that beforehand—make the argument, which have made it overall very much more difficult for any political party that is calling out for some kind of solution.

Gillespie: Are there new ways to talk about entitlement spending that casts it in a more populist sensibility, because it’s clear that Social Security and Medicare both take money from relatively young people and relatively poor people and give it to relatively old and relatively rich people. Former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan failed because he didn’t make the commercial throwing grandma off a cliff. He should have owned that and said,
we need to do this, and she wants that for us anyway.”

Ruffini: It’s fundamentally different for a lot of people. You’ll have Hispanic voters really voicing the sentiment around, “We don’t want welfare cheats.” And frankly, that’s a real, palpable sentiment. They completely exclude Social Security and Medicare from that calculation.

 Whereas for a lot of people, when people take offense to the idea that these are quote-unquote entitlements—aka welfare programs—when the technical definition of an entitlement is you’re entitled to it because you theoretically paid into it. Fundamentally, this is actually the political consensus in the working class, is anti-welfare and pro-Social Security. They’re making the distinction based on the fact that they believe they paid into these programs, and they’re just getting out what they have already paid in. Which is not reality, but that’s a very strongly held belief.

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.

• Video Editor: Adam Czarnecki
• Audio Production: Ian Keyser

Cllr Joseph Baum a councillor on Buckinghamshire Council and the Deputy Chairman (Political) of the Chesham and Amersham Conservative Association.

Two weeks ago was New Homes Week 2024, a key awareness date for the industry to praise the benefits of building news homes. Although less celebratory, it’s also an opportunity to reflect on the broader and more divisive conversation about housing.

Before you read on, let me be clear – I am not in favour of building homes everywhere. As a Councillor, I have experienced the impact that inappropriate development has on communities. But, as a Conservative, we do need to confront an issue that risks holding our country back – socially, economically, environmentally, and politically too. As Paul Goodman wrote in a recent piece, it’s time we talked about housing.

According to John Burn-Murdoch’s analysis, the most common situation for 18–34-year-old Brits used to be living and coping as a couple with children. Today, most of that age bracket are living with their parents. Some, which includes many of my own friends, have simply given up on ever being able to own a home of their own.

The Conservative Party, which has historically been on the side of these people, faces a precarious opportunity to reset this imbalance and reassert its commitment to housebuilding. Not addressing the issue is itself a choice and one which runs the risk of creating a generation imbued with the idea that hard work no longer leads to a better life, with graphs and surveys showing a cliff-edge collapse in ownership among young people.

The impact of this means that young people in Britain are bucking a global trend and deserting conservatism. After all why, some would some begin to wonder, should people vote for capitalist party if they themselves are without capital?

The benefits of expanding the choice and quality of homes across our country extend across economic, environmental, social, and political spheres, and align closely with our core Conservative values. Values of aspiration, opportunity, family and fundamentally getting on in life.

Economic growth and prosperity

The UK’s construction sector, an essential pillar of our economy, is currently restrained. By championing housebuilding, we enable not just the construction industry but also the broader ecosystem of small builders, contractors, engineers, and entrepreneurs to thrive. This effort in turn supports skilling our workforce domestically, helping to address our acute skills shortages and reducing our reliance on unsustainable levels of immigration to fill that gap.

Furthermore, increased housing leads to higher council tax receipts and business rates, a key income stream for Local Authorities already struggling with rising costs. This shift could also usher in a regeneration of our town centres, reviving high streets and signalling that our local economy is open for business.

New homes don’t just lead to income generation, however. They can deliver savings too. Despite the recent changes to the NPPF, Local Authorities that struggle to demonstrate a sufficient housing land supply will continue pay a heavy price when rejecting planning applications which are inevitably overturned at Appeal. Imagine how much taxpayers’ money could be saved if we took back control of the planning process and decided where the new homes were built, rather than having an Inspector decide it for us through the appeals process.

Environmental stewardship

The Conservative commitment to the environment extends beyond preserving the green belt, important though that is. New developments offer a chance to enhance biodiversity, improve energy efficiency, and make land accessible to the public – the very issues that are so often raised by those care about the environmental agenda, not to mention the millions of voters who expect us to respond with clear action.

By empowering the private sector, we can provide innovate solutions to address the climate emergency. Restrict their ability to deliver, however, and we will continue to experience a nation with low-quality and low-energy efficient homes.

Even if you don’t accept that new development has the power to improve the local environment,  the decision not to take proactive steps to address our housing crisis also has negative consequences for our existing green spaces. Local Authorities that don’t have an up-to-date Local Plan are often those that have the highest level of speculative development.

Far from protecting our green spaces, therefore, the failure of the current planning process has often failed to protect truly valuable green spaces. This makes it imperative for Councils to take control and responsibly allocate development sites, protecting our environment while accommodating growth.

Social responsibility

Our duty to support the most vulnerable in society is compromised by a failure to deliver new homes. With over 1.2 million households on Local Authority waiting lists and many living in substandard conditions, the need for quality housing is hard to deny.

New developments not only offer better-quality homes, with an adherence to more modern standards and additional features such as electric vehicle charging points, but also provide significant open spaces, improved living conditions, and community well-being. As Conservatives, we must champion the dream of homeownership, extending opportunities for secure, quality living to everyone. If we do that, as Mrs Thatcher did when she gave millions the right to buy, then future generations will thank us for it.

Political imperative

The correlation between property ownership and Conservative support is well-documented. Yet, as younger generations grow increasingly disillusioned with the prospect of homeownership, the party faces the challenge of appealing to those people. By fostering an environment where more people can own property, we not only secure our political future but also uphold the principles of capitalism and individual prosperity.

In conclusion, as we navigate the complexities of today’s housing debate, the Conservative Party needs to lead with a vision that is pro-growth, pro-business, and pro-community. That doesn’t mean that we build homes everywhere (the Local Plan process enables us to protect spaces as well as invest in them), but it does mean that we take the bold and long-term decision to build somewhere.

Our party has a history of empowering individuals and communities, and by championing housebuilding, we can continue this legacy, ensuring a prosperous, sustainable, and inclusive future for all.

Let us reaffirm our commitment to not just building more of the right homes, but rekindling the Conservative spirit of innovation, spreading opportunity, and, above all, believing in our people and in their dreams.

The House of Representatives voted on Wednesday to pass bipartisan legislation on the Chinese-owed app TikTok.

Reps. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., and Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., introduced the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act on March 5. Gallagher and Krishnamoorthi are the chairman and ranking member, respectively, of the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party.

The legislation passed in a 352-65 vote, with the help of 197 Republicans and 155 Democrats. Fifteen Republicans and 50 Democrats voted against the legislation. One lawmaker voted “present.”

“Communist China is America’s largest geopolitical foe and is using technology to actively undermine America’s economy and security,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said in an X post. “Apps like TikTok allow the Chinese Communist Party to push harmful content to our youth and engage in malign activities, such as harvesting the location, purchasing habits, contacts, and sensitive data of Americans.”

“Today’s bipartisan vote to pass The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act demonstrates Congress’ opposition to Communist China’s attempts to spy on and manipulate Americans and signals our resolve to deter our enemies,” Johnson said. “I urge the Senate to pass this bill and send it to the President so he can sign the bill into law.”

Chairman @RepGallagher floor speech in support of the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act.

“I also want to set the record straight on a few misconceptions about this bill: ??

It DOES NOT apply to American companies. It ONLY applies to… pic.twitter.com/urbFpD9VeN

— Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party (@committeeonccp) March 13, 2024

“The platform should not be in jeopardy. This should be an easy choice for TikTok, which is a subsidiary of ByteDance, which is closely linked and controlled by the Chinese Communist Party,” Rep. August Pfluger, R-Texas, said on “The Daily Signal Podcast” ahead of Wednesday’s vote.

“And you can see right there that the dangers that lay with a company that is beholden to a government that is demonstrating on a daily basis their willingness to undermine American interest both at home and abroad, not just with the data, not just with this particular platform, but in many different areas,” Pfluger said, adding:

So, the choice is pretty clear for TikTok that they either divest from their parent company, ByteDance, which is controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, or they won’t be allowed in the United States.

TikTok is a threat to our national security because it is owned by ByteDance, which does the bidding of the Chinese Communist Party.

We know this because ByteDance leadership says so, and because Chinese law requires it. ?

— Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party (@committeeonccp) March 13, 2024

Sens. Mark Warner, D-Va., and Marco Rubio, R-Fla., issued a joint statement about the House passing the bill. Warner and Rubio are the chairman and vice chairman, respectively, of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

“We are united in our concern about the national security threat posed by TikTok – a platform with enormous power to influence and divide Americans whose parent company ByteDance remains legally required to do the bidding of the Chinese Communist Party,” the senators said in a statement shared on X. “We were encouraged by today’s strong bipartisan vote in the House of Representatives, and look forward to working together to get this bill passed through the Senate and signed into law.”

According to a news release from the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, “The bill prevents app store availability or web-hosting services in the U.S. for ByteDance-controlled applications, including TikTok, unless the application severs ties to entities like ByteDance that are subject to the control of a foreign adversary, as defined by Congress in Title 10.” 

“In addition, the bill creates a process for the president to designate certain, specifically defined social media applications that are subject to the control of a foreign adversary—per Title 10—and pose a national security risk,” the news release explained.

Ryan Walker, executive vice president of Heritage Action for America, the grassroots advocacy arm of The Heritage Foundation, weighed in about the House successfully passing the legislation. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)

“The House sent a message today that adversarial foreign regimes do not have the right to surveil and steal from Americans while using the popularity of social media as a shield from scrutiny,” Walker said in a statement. “This bill does not ban TikTok or any app—it ends limitless influence and control given to foreign governments with proven contempt for the United States.”

“If social media companies can’t sever ties with communist dictators, they don’t get to access American consumers,” Walker said. “The Senate has a duty to quickly take up this important national security bill that the House is sending over with overwhelming support.”

The legislation “gives ByteDance and TikTok a clear choice: cut ties with the Chinese Communist Party and continue to operate in the United States or immediately cease all business in our country,” Kara Frederick, director of The Heritage Foundation’s Tech Policy Center, said in a statement prior to the vote.

“It should be an easy and simple decision for the company, but its executives are panicking because this bill calls their bluff,” Frederick said.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee advanced the legislation in a 50-0 vote last Thursday. 

President Joe Biden expressed his support for the legislation, telling reporters on Friday, “If they pass it, I’ll sign it.” Biden’s presidential campaign, however, is on TikTok and shared its first video there on Feb. 11, ABC News reported.

Former President Donald Trump, who sought to ban the app in 2020, said in a March 7 post on Truth Social that “If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business.”

“I don’t want Facebook, who cheated in the last Election, doing better,” Trump said. “They are a true Enemy of the People!”

“There’s a lot of good and a lot of bad with TikTok. But the thing I don’t like is, without TikTok you can make Facebook bigger,” says @realDonaldTrump. “And I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people.” pic.twitter.com/nmw8CCzHDX

— Squawk Box (@SquawkCNBC) March 11, 2024

During an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Monday, the former president was asked if he believes the app is a national security threat.

“I do believe that. I do believe it and we have to very much go into privacy and make sure that we are protecting the American people’s privacy and data rights,” Trump said. “And I agree, but you know, we also have that problem with other—you have that problem with Facebook and lots of other companies too.”

“I mean, they get the information. They get plenty of information and they deal with China, and they’ll do whatever China wants,” the former president said.

While the bill garnered overwhelming bipartisan support in the House, its future is uncertain in the Senate, where Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has expressed opposition to banning the app.

“Reactionaries who want to ban TikTok claim the data can’t be secured because the ‘algorithm’ is in China. Not true,” Paul said in a two-part thread posted to X on Wednesday morning ahead of the House vote. “The truth is the Algorithm runs in the U.S. in oracle cloud with their review of the code. (NOT in China). Maybe we should examine the facts before committing violations of the 1st and 5th amendments.”

“They want to ban TikTok because it’s ‘owned by China,’” Paul said. “Not true.”

The Kentucky Republican added:

60% of the company is owned by US and international investors. 20% is owned by the company founders. 20% is owned by company employees, including over 7,000 Americans. The CEO of TikTok is from Singapore, not China. So ask yourself why they keep repeating this lie to scare you?

The Daily Signal reached out to TikTok for a comment about the House passing the legislation.

“This process was secret and the bill was jammed through for one reason: it’s a ban,” TikTok Policy said in an X post following the vote. “We are hopeful that the Senate will consider the facts, listen to their constituents, and realize the impact on the economy, 7 million small businesses, and the 170 million Americans who use our service.”

This is a breaking story and may be updated.

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