Net Neutrality- Tess van Hulsen Presentation

What does it all mean???

Michael Cohen to Take Fifth Amendment in Stormy Daniels Lawsuit

Trump would "prefer" the popular vote?

Regarding campaign/election reform: https://www.politico.com/story/2018/04/26/trump-electoral-college-popular-vote-555148 

Appraisals II

Lee (203): "Bipartisanship is particularly problematic for a party seeking to win a larger share of institutional power"

Schier (137):  "The American founders did not design a system to encourage and enhance an ideological politics"

Schier (136): "...the decline in the vital function of intermediation."A paradox: are more democratic parties bad for democracy?

 From CBO:

Budget: compare opinion on cuts with the composition of federal spending.


Examples of multiparty systems:  Canada, Britain, Israel

Causes of the two-party system:

• Duverger's "Law"
• Electoral college
• Ballot access:
• Third parties  (article at Reason)
• Independent candidates

Types of Third-Party Movements

• Ongoing issue-based or ideological parties
• Short-lived movements
• Wallace 1968
• Anderson 1980
• Perot 1992

Reasons for Third Party Bursts

• Major party deterioration and issue responsiveness
• Economic decline
• Unacceptable major party candidates

Julie's Oral Presentation

The Impossible Presidency

Henry Kravis will be at the State Dinner tonight

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/24/us/politics/trump-macron-state-dinner-guest-list.html

For those searching for alternative reasons driving Trump's election

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/05/reinventing-america/556856/

The article presents some interesting findings about the contradictory views Americans hold about the country and their immediate communities. Fallows explores an improving culture and increasing social capital at the local level.

Theres has been a lot of talk (Trump voice)...

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/existential-anxiety-not-poverty-motivates-trump-support/558674/

Appraisals I

A few more items about 2016

• Union density in the Rustbelt
• Decline of split-ticket voting
• Looking ahead to 2020

Responsible Party Government

A few years after the Contract, Newt reflected:

We had not only failed to take into account the ability of the Senate to delay us and obstruct us, but we had much too cavalierly underrated the power of the President, even a President who had lost his legislative majority and was in a certain amount of trouble for other reasons. I am speaking of the power of the veto. Even if you pass something through both the House and the Senate, there is that presidential pen. How could we have forgotten that?

Issue ambivalence:

Abortion:  survey trends and interviews
Budget:  compare opinion on cuts with the composition of federal spending. From CBO:

Paradox:  are more democratic parties bad for democracy?

Sarah Tocher Presentation

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1r--mR-JW89G353csNxgpzpCNowOT9e7LNGj5LGg28MQ/edit?usp=sharing

As the South Diversifies, Immigration Policy Becomes Personal

In a recent New Yorker article, author Jonathan Blitzer interviews dozens of white residents in Morristown, SC after the largest ICE roundup in a decade. The responses raise concerns about evangelicals unilateral committing to Trump's hardline immigration stances.

The Politics of Climate Change

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1qrMJCWkCkS-e4HUs7qHeZbSRbc1xICCeOoFvySp-f2Q/edit?usp=sharing

The General Elections of 2016

The General Election

IT WAS NOT THE DEBATES  (Clinton won the debates)

IT WAS NOT THE ADS

IT MIGHT NOT HAVE BEEN COMEY, EITHER (SEE P. 123)

MODELS PREDICTED A NARROW DEMOCRATIC POPULAR VOTE VICTORY, WHICH IS WHAT HAPPENED.

Look at state and local data:

• Economic inequality
• Education
• Public Health and death rates
• Union density

Click the map to create your own at 270toWin.com

CONGRESSIONAL RACES: DECLINE OF SPLIT-TICKET VOTING

Cognitive Dissonance Update

A sketch years later about a nonexistent man. A total con job, playing the Fake News Media for Fools (but they know it)! https://t.co/9Is7mHBFda

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 18, 2018

From the Public Religion Research Institute:


 

GOP Nomination, General Election

Review:

Table 1.1: Mapping American Politics, 2016 (P. 10)

	Left	Center	Right
Outside	Bernie Sanders	Donald Trump	Ted Cruz     Rand Paul     Ben Carson     Mike Huckabee     Tea Party
Middle (Inside-Outside)		Jim Webb         Chris Christie	Marco Rubio
Inside	Nancy Pelosi	Mitch McConnell      John Kasich         Jeb Bush	Paul Ryan

                                                            Hillary Clinton

Henry Olsen and the Four Faces

Cruz and the insider taint

Trump actually drew from evangelicals and somewhat conservatives.





Key is aversive partisanship:  Trump and Nixon

The General Election

IT WAS NOT THE DEBATES

IT WAS NOT THE ADS

Conservative Politics and Doomsday Prep

This article is about a year old, but I recently read it for another class and found it super interesting. Essentially, there is a large community of doomsday preppers who are super wealthy (generally new money) and one section of this article focuses on the fact that there seems to be a correlation between conservative politics and doomsday prep.

Early Voting

I apologize if we covered this earlier in the semester and I forgot, but..
On page 172 of Defying the Odds, there is a discussion about early voting in the 2016 election. An estimated 40% of voters cast their ballots before election day, before major turning points in the race occurred. How early are people allowed to start voting this way? Can the date that people are allowed to start early voting be changed, so that people cannot vote until maybe just a week or two before?

Brendan Busch's Presentation

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1h8cBJjmQsrngsDmC3FG9Q-rJ9gTsTyPXJNXA9Dc_gac/edit?usp=sharing

Last Assignment, Spring 2018

Pick one:

• The authors had to write Defying the Odds very quickly and finish by January 2017.  The public now has more information about many aspects of the 2016 campaign (e.g., campaign finance, Russian meddling).  Pick one of these aspects and develop it.  What do we know now that we did not know 15 months ago?  How would this additional information affect the book's interpretation of the campaign?
• For responsible party government to happen, writes Hershey (p. 350), "all the elected branches of government would have to be controlled by the same party at a particular time." [Emphasis in the original.]  This situation has existed since January 2017.  So do we have responsible party government?  Explain with reference to class readings, discussions, and outside research.
• Schier and Lee finished their books before the 2016 election.  Write an update either to Lee, ch. 9 or Schier, ch. 7.  Explain how subsequent events either confirm the chapter's argument or raise new questions that the author does not address.

The specifications:

• Essays should be typed (12-point), double-spaced, and no more than four pages long. I will not read past the fourth page. Please submit papers as Word documents, not pdfs.
• Cite your sources. Please use endnotes in Turabian format. Endnotes do not count against the page limit. Please do not use footnotes, which take up too much page space. 
• Watch your spelling, grammar, diction, and punctuation. Errors will count against you. Return essays to the Sakai dropbox for this class by 11:59 PM, Tuesday, May 1. Papers will drop one gradepoint for one day’s lateness, a full letter grade after that.

Implications of Paul Ryan's Departure

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/04/house-speaker-paul-ryan-departure-trump-world/

What does the departure of establishment and moderate Republicans from office mean for the future of the party ideologically? Who are the conservative casualties of the Trump presidency?

Blaise's Presentation

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1UdWsfiQQmbBXAnwySTlJKcsVwh3UqWf0eFAvfo1cQOs/edit#slide=id.p

US-led Syria Strikes: A Distraction from Trump's Troubles?

When Bill Clinton launched Operation Desert Fox,in Dec.1998 against Iraq, he was facing 3 articles of impeachment in the House. President #Trump launched the Attack on #Syria’s CW infrastructure at a time when he is facing a tsunami of legal and Political challenges. Just sayin’.

— Hisham Melhem (@hisham_melhem) April 14, 2018

 More info here from Aljazeera

The 2016 Election: The Nominations

See page 18 of the book.  Joan C. Williams at The Harvard Business Review:

Michèle Lamont, in The Dignity of Working Men, also found resentment of professionals — but not of the rich. “[I] can’t knock anyone for succeeding,” a laborer told her. “There’s a lot of people out there who are wealthy and I’m sure they worked darned hard for every cent they have,” chimed in a receiving clerk. Why the difference? For one thing, most blue-collar workers have little direct contact with the rich outside of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. But professionals order them around every day. The dream is not to become upper-middle-class, with its different food, family, and friendship patterns; the dream is to live in your own class milieu, where you feel comfortable — just with more money. “The main thing is to be independent and give your own orders and not have to take them from anybody else,” a machine operator told Lamont. Owning one’s own business — that’s the goal. That’s another part of Trump’s appeal.

Hillary Clinton, by contrast, epitomizes the dorky arrogance and smugness of the professional elite. The dorkiness: the pantsuits. The arrogance: the email server. The smugness: the basket of deplorables. Worse, her mere presence rubs it in that even women from her class can treat working-class men with disrespect. Look at how she condescends to Trump as unfit to hold the office of the presidency and dismisses his supporters as racist, sexist, homophobic, or xenophobic.

Trump’s blunt talk taps into another blue-collar value: straight talk. “Directness is a working-class norm,” notes Lubrano. As one blue-collar guy told him, “If you have a problem with me, come talk to me. If you have a way you want something done, come talk to me. I don’t like people who play these two-faced games.” Straight talk is seen as requiring manly courage, not being “a total wuss and a wimp,” an electronics technician told Lamont. Of course Trump appeals. Clinton’s clunky admission that she talks one way in public and another in private? Further proof she’s a two-faced phony.

Silo Country:  News media sources 

The Democratic Party, 1992 (p. 34):





The party coalitions change (p. 40 of the book)




The Gallup "Would Not Vote For" Question




Democratic nomination polls

Republican nomination polls


If you look up the word cringeworthy....

Lincoln - Oral Presentation

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1os6Ajf8QnRFCmOtV-2S3zBmrvYfhLNm3_9BFh8OL5CY/edit?usp=sharing

McKenzie - Oral Presenation

The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics 
Mark Lilla, Professor of Humanities at Columbia 

   “We must understand that there is a difference between being a party that cares about labor and being a labor party. There is a difference between being a party that cares about women and being the women’s party. And we can and we must be a party that cares about minorities without becoming a minority party. We are citizens first.”

Senator Edward M. Kennedy (1985)

                Part 1 - Anti-Politics: Reagan Dispensation

                Part 2 - Pseudo-Politics: New Left’s Identity Politics = Evangelism

                 Part 3 - Politics: Reset!

“This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially radically politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression.”

“The Combahee River Collective Statement” (1977)

From We to Me //The Personal is Political

“The line between self-analysis and political action is now blurred” (p. 85)

“The more obsessed with personal identity campus liberals become, the less willing they become to engage in reasoned political debate” (p. 90)

Lilla calls for an end to Identity Liberalism: “In recent years American liberalism has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing.” (NY Times Op-Ed)

-       Clinton’s calling out explicitly to African-American, Latino, LGBT and women voters = strategic mistake: “If you’re going to mention groups in American, you had better mention all of them.” - Lilla

Congressman Boehner once said he was “unalterably opposed” to legalization. Now we have this:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-11/ex-speaker-john-boehner-joins-marijuana-firm-s-advisory-board

Jeff Sessions Responsibilities

Check out this article from 2016 detailing Sessions' potential responsibilities if elected

The 2016 Election: A First Cut

The Big Picture: 2016

Insider-Outsider/Left-Right

Table 1.1: Mapping American Politics, 2016 (P. 10)

	Left	Center	Right
Outside	Bernie Sanders	Donald Trump	Ted Cruz     Rand Paul     Ben Carson     Mike Huckabee     Tea Party
Middle (Inside-Outside)		Jim Webb         Chris Christie	Marco Rubio
Inside	Nancy Pelosi	Mitch McConnell      John Kasich         Jeb Bush	Paul Ryan

                                                            Hillary Clinton

Well we're living here in Allentown
And they're closing all the factories down
Out in Bethlehem they're killing time
Filling out forms
Standing in line

-- Billy Joel

 


Declining Mobility



Education and Incarceration:



Life expectancy and support for Trump

Coming Apart:




Education




At the other end of the spectrum:  the dream hoarders

Geography and inequality