What happens when years of propaganda cause pro-democratic norms to collapse

The New York Times writes:

Yet when the House Republican leader, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, was shown to have lied about his response to the deadliest assault on the Capitol in centuries and President Donald J. Trump’s culpability for it, there was little expectation that the consequences would be swift or severe — or that there would be any at all.

Dissembling is not a crime, but doing so to conceal a wholesale reversal on a matter as serious as an attack on the citadel of democracy and the possible resignation of a president would once have been considered career-ending for a politician, particularly one who aspires to the highest position in the House.

Not so for a Republican in the age of Trump, when Mr. McCarthy’s brand of lie was nothing particularly new; maybe it was just a Thursday. On Friday, another House member, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, said under oath at an administrative law hearing in Atlanta that she could “not recall” having advocated Mr. Trump imposing martial law to stop the transfer of power to Joseph R. Biden Jr., a position that would seem difficult to forget.

“It’s a tragic indictment of the political process these days — and the Republican Party of late — that truth doesn’t matter, words don’t matter, everybody can be elastic in areas that were once viewed as concrete,” said Mark Sanford, a former Republican governor of South Carolina who lied to the public about his whereabouts when he was pursuing an extramarital affair in South America and was censured by the State House of Representatives. “You cross lines now, and there are no longer consequences.”

Mr. Sanford’s political comeback as a Republican member of the House ended when he crossed the one line that does still matter in his party: He condemned Mr. Trump as intolerant and untrustworthy. Mr. Trump called him “nothing but trouble,” and Mr. Sanford was defeated in a primary in 2018.

It was Mr. Trump himself who showed just how few consequences there could be for transgressions that once seemed beyond the pale for the nation’s leaders in 2016, when he survived the release of leaked audio in which he boasted of sexually assaulting women — then went on to win the presidency. In the years afterward, he survived two impeachment trials, on charges of pressuring Ukraine for his own political gain and of inciting the Capitol riot, and he continues to spread the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him. (emphasis added)

That speaks for itself. What is happening right now is the rise of neo-fascism in the Republican Party, the poisoning of society with distrust in democracy and fellow citizens, belief in falsehoods, moral rot, etc. This is just a brief consideration of some of the evidence.

How a morally rotted Republican in congress answers questions under oath

Fourteenth Amendment 

• Section 3

  No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

A lawsuit has been filed to prevent Marjorie Taylor Greene from running for re-election to the House. The lawsuit accuses Greene of supporting the 1/6 coup attempt and is thus constitutionally barred from running for re-election. She is asked questions under oath and her responses frequently are:

• I don't recall
• I don't remember
• I did not support the insurrection
• I didn't plan 1/6

In other words, Greene relies on standard Republican deceit tactics of lying, denying and keeping her mouth shut in the face of questions she does not want to answer.

That she claims no recollection of asking the president to impose martial law is for me in my opinion ample evidence that she is a shameless, bald faced liar and a traitor. Anyone speaking to a sitting president would remember whether they asked for martial law. To the extent there is such a thing as common sense (maybe there isn't because it is an essentially contested concept), common sense tells us that Greene is a liar. 

Obviously, that is not a holding in a court of law. But it is a defensible opinion in the court of public opinion. If the rule of law meant anything any more, Greene would be prosecuted for treason and sentenced to death if convicted. Sadly, the rule of law has mostly rotted away for the rich and powerful. She will be found to have not supported 1/6 and allowed to run for re-election. Then, the fine people of the state of GA will re-elect her. 

As we all know, the fine people of GA simply cannot vote for an evil socialist, communist, fascist, atheist, pedophilic Democratic tyrant. As all good Republicans know, all Democrats are hell bent on (1) making Christianity illegal, (2) putting Christians in re-education camps to turn them into Godless atheist pedophiles, (3) taking away all guns and Bibles, and (4) doing some other horrible, terrible, awful things, like trying to do something about climate change.

That is how morally degenerate, reality-detached and neo-fascist the Republican Party cult has become.

Question:  In situations where there is room for doubt, are members of the American public justified and doing the right thing to not give the benefit of any doubt to a Republican in congress when they talk about much of anything, especially when they say nothing or are defending themselves against allegations of bad behavior?

Question to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene: "In fact, you think that Speaker Pelosi is a traitor to the country, right?"

Greene: "I'm not answering that question...I haven't said that."

Q: "Put up plaintiff's exhibit 5."

Greene: "Oh, no. Wait. Hold on now..." pic.twitter.com/hBHPAkUOaA

— CSPAN (@cspan) April 22, 2022

See why Republicans rely so heavily on the keep your mouth shut tactic when faced with inconvenient questions? It is so easy to get caught in a lie, like Greene did here.
 

The moral rot in the Republican Party leadership

Lie of omission: (legal definition) an intentional failure to tell the truth in a situation requiring disclosure; (lay definition) also known as a continuing misrepresentation or quote mining (quoting out of context), occurs when an important fact is left out in order to foster a misconception. Lying by omission includes the failure to correct pre-existing misconceptions

The New York Times writes:

In the days after the attack, Representative Kevin McCarthy planned to tell Mr. Trump to resign. Senator Mitch McConnell told allies impeachment was warranted. But their fury faded fast. 

In the days after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol building, the two top Republicans in Congress, Representative Kevin McCarthy and Senator Mitch McConnell, told associates they believed President Trump was responsible for inciting the deadly riot and vowed to drive him from politics.

Mr. McCarthy went so far as to say he would push Mr. Trump to resign immediately: “I’ve had it with this guy,” he told a group of Republican leaders, according to an audio recording of the conversation obtained by The New York Times.

But within weeks both men backed off an all-out fight with Mr. Trump because they feared retribution from him and his political movement. Their drive to act faded fast as it became clear it would mean difficult votes that would put them at odds with most of their colleagues.

“I didn’t get to be leader by voting with five people in the conference,” Mr. McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, told a friend.  

Mr. McConnell’s office declined to comment. In a statement on Twitter early Thursday, Mr. McCarthy called the reporting “totally false and wrong.” His spokesman, Mark Bednar, denied that the Republican leader told colleagues he would urge Mr. Trump to leave office. “McCarthy never said he’d call Trump to say he should resign,” Mr. Bednar said.

But the recording tells a different story.

Screenshot of the recorded McCarthy phone call

Mr. McCarthy did not immediately respond to a request for comment after The Times published the audio clip on Thursday night.  

Mr. McCarthy said he would tell Mr. Trump of the impeachment resolution: “I think this will pass, and it would be my recommendation you should resign,” he said, according to the recording of the call, which runs just over an hour. The Times has reviewed the full recording of the conversation.

He acknowledged it was unlikely Mr. Trump would follow that suggestion.

“What he did is unacceptable. Nobody can defend that and nobody should defend it,” he told the group.   

But in a brief window after the storming of the Capitol, Mr. McCarthy contemplated a total break with Mr. Trump and his most extreme supporters.

During the same Jan. 10 conversation when he said he would call on Mr. Trump to resign, Mr. McCarthy told other G.O.P. leaders he wished the big tech companies would strip some Republican lawmakers of their social media accounts, as Twitter and Facebook had done with Mr. Trump. Members such as Lauren Boebert of Colorado had done so much to stoke paranoia about the 2020 election and made offensive comments online about the Capitol attack.

“We can’t put up with that,” Mr. McCarthy said, adding, “Can’t they take their Twitter accounts away, too?” (emphasis added)

Neo-fascist Republican power rests on a foundation of lies, deceit and treason

The recording mentioned in the article is a 1:35 phone call that the NYT obtained and inserted in the article. In accord with the now standard Republican KYMS propaganda tactic in the face of bad news, neither McConnell nor McCarthy would comment. No surprise there. 

KYMS = keep your mouth shut; in politics, usually a form of a lie(s) of omission 

when in the face of political bad news or politically inconvenient fact or truth

The McConnell comment, “I didn’t get to be leader by voting with five people in the conference” shows that he is more interested in personal power than defending either truth or democracy. That is pure moral rot in the Republican Party political leadership.

McCarthy denial that he discussed asking the ex-president to resign is a lie. He did discuss it and the recorded phone is proof. McCarthy also shows that he is more interested in personal power than defending either truth or democracy. That is more moral rot in the Republican Party political leadership. 

Hence, the American people get an insulting, arrogant KYMS response from both morally rotted GOP congressional leaders. The entire GOP leadership is solidly neo-fascist, not pro-democracy. 

Anonymous Kremlin Insiders Express Grave Concerns About Putin's War To Bloomberg News

On Wednesday, Bloomberg News published the following story  If those who spoke to Bloomberg did so sincerely  (i.e. not as part of a disinformation strategy), and if their knowledge is as complete and accurate as it appears in the article, then it offers important new insights into the war. Its architects appear to be an even smaller group than previously thought, and they no longer treat alternative views within the Kremlin as valid. This comes at a time when  we are  beginning to hear calls for NATO to take the fight directly to the Russians in Ukraine from within the Senate, and a few military and political figures here and in Europe.

Significantly, majority member of the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Chris Coons, made the case for possibly deploying troops in a  media appearance, and in two extended policy discussions with Secretary of State Antony Blinken (one on 4/14  and the other on 4/18) held by The Ford School.  He also discussed this on CBS' Sunday morning show, Face The Nation, on 4/17. As the Washington Post points out, this is significant because of his close ties with the administration as well as his influential position in the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. He is one of the 10 majority members of that influential committee, and one of Biden's close friends. Though the White House respectfully pushed back against Coons, and Coons subsequently tweeted that he is not explicitly calling for troop deployments right now (which is accurate), the fact that he is urging the Biden administration to consider such an action in the near future reveals the extent to which the possibility of WW3 (NATO vs. Russia) looms on the horizon. 

One may expect that as information like that in the Bloomberg article emerges,  there will be more emphataic calls for NATO intervention. Already, Anders Aslund, economist and author of Putin's Crony Capitalism, responded to the article by tweeting the following: "Russia has declared war on NATO and what are we doing? Nothing. My Humble advice...3) Bomb relevant Russian cities preventively to make sure Putin does not use chemical weapons or nukes. Wake up! We are at this stage."   https://twitter.com/anders_aslund/status/1516970288679948291   As Mark Galeotti, the well known British security affairs analyst and historian of Russia  tweeted in response, "Good grief it's not only that #3 is insane--starting a war to prevent escalation-- it's also that this kind of lunatic talk gets picked up by the ultra-hawks in Russia as 'proof' that NATO is  a hostile, aggressive force such that Russia likewise ought to strike first." https://twitter.com/MarkGaleotti/status/1517064912362778626 I share that concern. Responses to articles like the following will be just as important as the information (however reliable) contained within it.

Bloomberg News/ 4/20/22 

Almost eight weeks after Vladimir Putin sent troops into Ukraine, with military losses mounting and Russia facing unprecedented international isolation, a small but growing number of senior Kremlin insiders are quietly questioning his decision to go to war. 

The ranks of the critics at the pinnacle of power remain limited, spread across high-level posts in government and state-run business. They believe the invasion was a catastrophic mistake that will set the country back for years, according to ten people with direct knowledge of the situation. All spoke on condition of anonymity, too fearful of retribution to comment publicly. 

 So far, these people see no chance the Russian president will change course and no prospect of any challenge to him at home. More and more reliant on a narrowing circle of hardline advisers, Putin has dismissed attempts by other officials to warn him of the crippling economic and political cost, they said.

Some said they increasingly share the fear voiced by U.S. intelligence officials that Putin could turn to a limited use of nuclear weapons if faced with failure in a campaign he views as his historic mission. 

To be sure, support for Putin’s war remains deep across much of Russia’s elite, with many insiders embracing in public and in private the Kremlin’s narrative that conflict with the West is inevitable and that the economy will adapt to the sweeping sanctions imposed by the U.S. and its allies. And public backing remains strong as the initial shock and disruption from sanctions has given way to a kind of surreal stability in Russia.

Still, more and more top insiders have come to believe that Putin’s commitment to continue the invasion will doom Russia to years of isolation and heightened tension that will leave its economy crippled, its security compromised and its global influence gutted. A few business tycoons have made veiled statements questioning the Kremlin’s strategy, but many powerful players are too fearful of the widening crackdown on dissent to voice their concerns in public.

The skeptics were surprised by the speed and breadth of the response by the U.S. and its allies, with sanctions freezing half of the central bank’s $640 billion in reserves and foreign companies ditching decades of investment to shut down operations almost overnight, as well as the steadily expanding military support for Kyiv that’s helping its forces to blunt the Russian advance.

Senior officials have tried to explain to the president that the economic impact of the sanctions will be devastating, erasing the two decades of growth and higher living standards that Putin had delivered during his rule, according to people familiar with the situation.

Putin brushed off the warnings, saying that while Russia would pay a huge cost, the West had left him no alternative but to wage war, the people said. Publicly, Putin says the “economic Blitzkrieg” has failed and the economy will adapt.

The president remains confident that the public is behind him, with Russians ready to endure years of sacrifice for his vision of national greatness, they said. With the help of tough capital controls, the ruble has recovered most of its initial losses and while inflation has spiked, economic disruption remains relatively limited so far.

Putin is determined to push on with the fight, even if the Kremlin has had to reduce its ambitions from a quick, sweeping takeover of much of the country to a grueling battle for the Donbas region in the east. Settling for less would leave Russia hopelessly vulnerable and weak in the face of the threat seen from the U.S. and its allies, according to this view.

In the weeks since the invasion started, Putin’s circle of advisers and contacts has narrowed even further from the limited group of hardliners he’d regularly consulted before, according to two people. The decision to invade was made by Putin and just a handful of hawks including Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, General Staff chief Valery Gerasimov, and Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of Russia’s Security Council, these people said.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment for this article. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov didn’t give a direct answer to repeated questions about whether Russia might use nuclear weapons in Ukraine in an interview released Tuesday.

The critics see no sign that Putin is yet ready to consider cutting short the invasion given the losses or making the serious concessions needed to reach a cease-fire. Given his total domination of the political system, alternative views take root only in private. 

Limited information contributed to the Kremlin’s miscalculation in the early days of the offensive, betting on broader support among Ukrainian troops and officials, as well as quicker military progress, the people with knowledge of the matter said. The Russian leader also underestimated his Ukrainian counterpart, initially perceiving him as weak.

Roman Abramovich, the billionaire who has helped broker the so-far-unsuccessful peace talks, had to disabuse Putin of his conviction that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, a former comedy actor, would flee the country once the invasion began, according to people familiar with the conversations. 

Inside the main successor to the KGB, the Federal Security Service, frustration with the failure of the invasion so far is growing, according to Andrei Soldatov, an expert on the Russian security services. Others there had expected the fighting would last no more than a few weeks, according to people familiar with the situation. 

Broke Oligarch Says Sanctioned Billionaires Have No Sway Over Putin

Only one senior official has so far broken publicly with the Kremlin over the invasion: Anatoly Chubais, the unpopular architect of the 1990s privatizations and the Kremlin’s climate envoy. He left the country and Putin removed him from his post. 

Others who sought to quit — including central bank chief Elvira Nabiullina — were told they had to stay on to help manage the economic fallout, according to people familiar with the situation. Some lower-profile officials asked to be transferred to jobs not related to policy making, the people said.

Senior officials have denounced those who left the country as “traitors.”

Among business tycoons, many of whom saw yachts, properties and other holdings seized under sanctions imposed by the U.S. and its allies, a few have been critical of the war — though without mentioning Putin.

Metals tycoon Oleg Deripaska called the war “insanity” in late March, saying it could have ended “three weeks ago through reasonable negotiation.” He warned fighting could continue for “several more years.” 

Some in the elite have pushed for an even harder line. After Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov defended a prominent TV host who had left the country in the days after the invasion, Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov — whose troops are fighting in Ukraine — blasted him for insufficient patriotism. 

“Putin has built his regime mainly on stoking public support, which has given him the means to control the elite,” said Tatiana Stanovaya of political consultant R.Politik. “There’s no room for disagreement or discussion, everyone must just get on with it and implement the president’s orders and as long as Putin keeps the situation under control, people will follow him.”

Republican attacks on democracy continue to advance the cause of neo-fascism

A couple of recent items drive home the intensity and power of what is now a clearly, continuous anti-democratic Republican Party neo-fascism assault on democracy, inconvenient truth, the rule of law and civil liberties. These are just more evidence to add to the what has been accumulating ever since the ex-president announced his candidacy for president on June 16, 2015. The neo-fascist rot in the Republican Party started decades before that, but accelerated enormously with the rise of the ex-president.

The Republican attack on democracy and good faith governance

The first is an 8 minute segment that MSNBC aired a couple of days ago on the Rachael Maddow program. This segment deals with how Republican Party elites generate and distribute lies and slanders about Democrats. Although the financing is hidden behind laws that shield donors, a key lies and slanders organization called the American Accountability Foundation (AAF) appears to be significantly funded by a political action group controlled by our neo-fascist ex-president. 

The bottom line is this: Using donor money, the non-profit AAF group looks for dirt on all Biden nominees and then makes up lies and slanders about them to slow or block their confirmation in the Senate. All nominees are tarred as much as possible, which helps the broader GOP attack on Democrats as crooks, liars, communists, pedophiles, etc. That misinformation is then fed to Republican senators who use it as disinformation to attack and slander Biden's nominees. What AFF and the Republican Party elites are doing is conducting all-out political war on Democrats using all means they can get away with. Those means include slanders, smears and open contempt for inconvenient facts, truths and reasoning. There is nothing democratic about these tactics. This is the face of American fascism that the Republican Party and the ex-president are fully engaged in.

Research for this segment came from Jane Mayer, who wrote an article about the AAF, The Slime Machine Targeting Dozens of Biden Nominees, in the New Yorker magazine.

AAF runs a website called BidenNoms.com and it shows who it is targeting as shown in the screen shot below.

 

Biden's nominee (Sarah Blum Raskin, former United States Deputy Secretary of the Treasury) for a Federal Reserve position was successfully blocked by AAF by smearing her with the lie that she is a crook. The real reason she was targeted is that she had spoken publicly about climate change being a risk for the economy. One can assume that oil, gas and coal interests helped fund that sleaze campaign, by funding AAF, Republican Senators or both. The Republican Party is in all-out opposition to dealing with climate change. 

The AAF also engineered the lie that Biden's Supreme Court nominee Katenji Brown Jackson was soft on pedophiles, presumably to implant the false belief that she is a pedophile herself. Some Republican senators relied on that AAF lie to oppose that nomination too.

Republican politicians no longer participate in democratic compromise. They want a single party system and the Democratic Party eliminated as a significant source of opposition.

The Republican attack on elections

A key GOP goal is to lay the foundation for an all-out attack on the 2024 presidential election if a Democrat wins. That foundation building continues every day. The New York Times writes:

Trump Allies Continue Legal Drive to Erase His Loss, Stoking Election Doubts

Fifteen months after they tried and failed to overturn the 2020 election, the same group of lawyers and associates is continuing efforts to “decertify” the vote, feeding a false narrative.

In statehouses and courtrooms across the country, as well as on right-wing news outlets, allies of Mr. Trump — including the lawyer John Eastman — are pressing for states to pass resolutions rescinding Electoral College votes for President Biden and to bring lawsuits that seek to prove baseless claims of large-scale voter fraud. Some of those allies are casting their work as a precursor to reinstating the former president.

The efforts have failed to change any statewide outcomes or uncover mass election fraud. Legal experts dismiss them as preposterous, noting that there is no plausible scenario under the Constitution for returning Mr. Trump to office.

The efforts have fed a cottage industry of podcasts and television appearances centered around not only false claims of widespread election fraud in 2020, but the notion that the results can still be altered after the fact — and Mr. Trump returned to power, an idea that he continues to push privately as he looks toward a probable re-election run in 2024.

“At the moment, there is no other way to say it: This is the clearest and most present danger to our democracy,” said J. Michael Luttig, a leading conservative lawyer and former appeals court judge, for whom Mr. Eastman clerked and whom President George W. Bush considered as a nominee to be the chief justice of the United States. “Trump and his supporters in Congress and in the states are preparing now to lay the groundwork to overturn the election in 2024 were Trump, or his designee, to lose the vote for the presidency.”

Where does a serious threat, if any, come from?

At this point, most people will have made up their minds about a threat to democracy and where it comes from. Most Democrats and liberals probably see some reason for some degree of concern about threats to democracy from conservatives and Republicans. Most conservatives and Republicans probably see some reason for serious concern about threats socialist, communist and/or pedophile from tyrannical Democrats and liberals. Some see no significant threat from either side. 

To me, it looks like there is a major, urgent threat neo-fascist from the conservative and Republican side.

The Most Popular Politicians are Moderates

 

A really obvious point that will probably make some people mad

by Simon Bazelon

https://outoftheordinary.substack.com/p/the-most-popular-politicians-are?s=w

Here are two basic facts about politics:

1. Figuring out how to win elections and be popular once in office is very important. 

2. Doing the political science research necessary to demonstrate the best way to do that is really hard. 

There are a few reasons for this second point. First, data quality in politics is often bad. Polling is hard (and getting harder) so figuring out what voters actually want is tricky. Second, you can’t really run randomized control trials of different political strategies. Parties want to win, and they’re not inclined to assign each of their 435 congressional candidates a slightly different strategy to produce the kind of data that would make it past peer review. Third, the effect size of any given political maneuver is generally pretty small. So without randomization and large sample sizes, it’s hard to know whether a politician's victory should be attributed to their policy ideas, the national environment, or local events. 

In this situation, I think it’s useful to zoom out for a second, and to look to the states to try to find some broad patterns of what seems to work for politicians and what doesn’t. 

The most popular governors and senators

Morning Consult regularly publishes approval ratings for every American governor and senator. But the numbers in themselves aren’t that useful. The most popular governor in the country right now is Mark Gordon of Wyoming, who boasts a 69% approval rating. But is Gordon popular because his policies and messaging are great, or because he’s a generic Republican in a state that loves Republicans?

It’s much more instructive to look at popularity relative to the partisan lean of a state. In 2019, FiveThiryEight’s Nathaniel Rakich put together a ranking of the most popular governors and senators “above replacement.”1 Here’s what the top 15 look like for governors:

And here’s the top 15 for senators:

Looking at these lists cuts through a lot of the noise surrounding debates on ideological positioning and political success. The story they tell is clear. Overwhelmingly, the most popular governors tend to be moderates – and specifically, moderates who act as a counterbalance to their state’s more extreme legislatures. As for senators, look at the names at the top of the list. Manchin. Klobuchar. Jones. Tester. Collins. Warner. Again, they tend to be moderates by brand, who avoid taking radical stances on policy, and cultivate a reputation for independence by bucking their party at times.2

Looking at popularity above replacement doesn’t “prove” anything about political strategy. There could be confounding variables – maybe the popularity of moderates is just a coincidence, and has nothing to do with their ideological posturing. Correlation isn’t causation, etc etc. 

But in the words of XKCD’s Randall Munroe, “Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there.'” The simplest, Occam’s razor style explanation is that there is a real connection here – one we should take seriously.

I think that the clear over-representation of moderates at the top of these two lists should strongly influence how we think about political strategy. At the very least, it should convey a sense of what works and what doesn’t in electoral politics. That’s not at all to say politicians should embrace centrism at every turn. But I think you should probably have a pretty strong prior that, all else equal, having a reputation for moderation will help you win elections, especially if you’re seen as independent of your party. 

Writing it out like that, it almost seems so banal and obvious as to be not worth saying. But much of the progressive wing of the Democratic party has decided to ignore what was in previous eras a cornerstone of political conventional wisdom, so I think it’s useful to say anyway. 

1

It’s not ideal that this data is three years old, but Morning Consult stopped updating their governor and senator approval rating tracking, and I didn’t have time this week to recreate FiveThirtyEight’s graphic myself. Overall, I don’t think much has changed since 2019. Joe Manchin still tops the senators list, with a 59% (!) approval rating in a state Biden got 30% of the vote in. I think Larry Hogan now tops the governors list, with a +52 approval rating in a state Biden won by 33%.

2

 There’s one notable senator, who despite being far from a Manchin-esque moderate, nevertheless manages to be far more popular than his state’s partisanship would seem to dictate: Sherrod Brown. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that he’s also one of the senators who most emphasizes kitchen table economic issues, and tends to avoid making progressive social stances a major part of his brand.