Welcome back to El Surge, Slate’s weekly boletín política about the most important figures of the moment in the fiasco grande of our government. I’m Ben Mathis-Lilley, filling in for Jim Newell, who has taken leave to participate in a touring hip-hop version of the Nutcracker called Dr. Crackenstein’s Funky Christmas.
This week, we’ve got a bluegrass miracle, the usual Joe Manchin intrigue, and more discussion of battleships than you, or anyone else, probably expected. First up, though: another Never Trump dream goes poof.
By Ben Mathis-Lilley
This week saw a handful of state-level elections in the perverted places that hold their elections in “off-cycle” odd-numbered years. The most scrutinized such races were in Virginia—and not just because it’s the state closest to the two population centers on the East Coast where political reporters and editors tend to live. “The VA,” rather, was on watch because it was holding elections that would determine control of both chambers of its state Legislature—and because it’s generally become so blue (i.e., Democratic-voting) recently that a Republican sweep would have suggested very rough seas ahead for the Dems in 2024. A GOP win would also have strengthened the profile of Republican Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a former hedge fund executive who won an upset victory in 2021 as a kind of pre-MAGA conservative and has been touted by Republican donors who are sick of Donald Trump as a potential last-minute “white knight” entrant into the Republican primary field. But on Tuesday, Republicans not only failed to take Virginia’s state Senate; they lost control of the state House of Delegates. It was a big loss for Youngkin, and for the allegedly compromise-ish 15-week abortion ban policy he’d said he’d sign if the GOP took control. Somehow, it’s back to the drawing board for all the Republicans who keep saying, with a huge preponderance of evidence behind them, that Trump is a drag on their party and in some ways the worst possible person they could nominate in 2024!
One governor from America’s thick, juicy midsection who did have a nice time Tuesday was Kentucky’s Andy Beshear. The brown-haired, extremely regular-looking scion of a Bluegrass State political family is the only Democrat who’s gotten elected statewide in “the KY” since roughly 1582, and this week he won his second term in office by a margin of 5 percentage points. What’s his secret? In Slate, David Faris writes that Beshear seems to have benefited from partisan voters’ willingness to give credit to local politicians of the other major party, but not a president from that party, when the economy is doing well. (There are a handful of popular Republican governors in blue states too.) He also hasn’t been involved in many confrontations over controversial cultural issues, in part because on those subjects the state’s GOP-dominated Legislature can basically do whatever it wants. Which is to say that while Beshear may be a smart politician who understands where to pick his spots, it doesn’t necessarily mean he would be a successful national candidate or effective campaigner in, let’s say, the 2028 Democratic presidential race. Needless to say, neither the Surge nor any other member of the national political press will let that stop us from spending the next four years hyping him up.
For the past three years, centrist Democratic West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin has been both the biggest thorn in the Biden administration’s side and, like, the guy who takes the thorn out, puts a homespun treatment on the wound, and says, “You’ll be up and at ’em in no time!” In 2021 he torched Democrats’ legislative agenda by refusing to support the Build Back Better Act, which would have expanded the social safety net and funded green energy … but then, in 2022, he revived the Democrats’ legislative agenda by supporting the Inflation Reduction Act, which expanded the social safety net in a slightly different way and funded green energy. This was all tolerated by the party because Manchin represents a red state in an evenly split Senate; holding West Virginia in 2024 is critical to Democrats’ hopes of keeping the chamber, and Manchin couldn’t think to win that race without showing his independence from a Democratic president. Makes sense, right? Well, the 76-year-old Manchin just announced that he is not running for reelection … and that he’s going to be “traveling the country and speaking out to see if there is an interest in creating a movement to mobilize the middle and bring Americans together,” i.e., possibly running for president on a third-party No Labels ticket, which would likely drain support from Biden. Or maybe he’s just going to take some time to enjoy a little travel on No Labels’ tab while he decides which K Street lobbying firm to sign on with. The world is Joe Manchin’s oyster! And the Democrats are probably going to lose the Senate even if they do well in the rest of the country.
Results in Kentucky and Virginia weren’t the only good ones for Dems this week. They also backed proposals in red Ohio to legalize recreational marijuana and enshrine the right to an abortion in the state constitution; both passed by double-digit margins. It all suggests that, at the least, the Republican Party as a whole is not surging in popularity. Another person who isn’t surging in popularity, though, and is in fact un-surging in anti-popularity, is the Democratic president, Joe Biden, who according to a New York Times/Siena College poll currently trails Donald Trump in five key swing states. According to the paper, he’s got problems with “younger, nonwhite, and less engaged voters,” and there’s a general perception that he’s too old and not mentally sharp enough to be president. While there’s nothing he can do about the latter issues short of finding a reverse aging serum in the hollow of a magical tree stump at the center of an enchanted glen, all is probably not lost. Donald Trump will be on trial for most of the next year, which will be great for reminding voters what they don’t like about him (i.e. the law-breaking stuff). That’s also a year in which voters who are still unimpressed with the state of the economy will have a chance to get used to higher prices and possibly see their incomes rise. Dems in several swing states are also hoping to hold 2024 referendums on abortion that could help them turn out voters. So things could be worse. But objectively speaking, purely as a matter of dispassionate numerical analysis? Folks, they could also be a lot better.
Conservative Louisiana Rep. Mike Johnson surged (ha-ha) to the House speakership late last month on the strength of his amiable reputation and other Republicans’ exhaustion with the infighting that had consumed the caucus during the three weeks it had spent without a leader. His first job: Figure out how to pass a government funding bill without alienating either the party’s vulnerable swing-state centrists or its far-right hard-liners. That’s the task that had led directly to the ousting of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and Johnson’s plan, apparently, is something called a “laddered continuing resolution” in which separate funding bills for different parts of the government would be staggered such that there is always one coming due. One problem with this idea would seem to be that it would turn a periodic crisis for House leaders into a continuous one. Another is that other House Republicans say they don’t understand how it would work. And a third is that it’s, well, not working: The chamber’s efforts to pass a bill funding judiciary and treasury operations failed Thursday when far-right and centrist factions couldn’t resolve their differences. Politico called it a sign that Johnson’s “legislative mojo” is waning, which is a very generous read on whether he ever had any legislative mojo to begin with. Anyhoo, the government will shut down if they can’t get this all figured out by the end of next week.
On the subject of Donald Trump’s alleged crimes, CNN published a report on Friday, headlined “Exclusive: What the woodworker saw,” regarding the possibility, attributed to “multiple people familiar with the investigation,” that Mar-a-Lago employees and contractors, including “a plumber, a maid, a chauffeur and a woodworker,” could be called to testify against the former president when he’s tried for mishandling classified documents. Are we in for an Agatha Christie situation here? What did the woodworker, who apparently installed crown molding in Trump’s bedroom in February 2022, see? According to the article, it was, uh, a “stack of papers” that “may have been classified.” Hmm. The other service professionals, CNN says, “may not have even noticed boxes or papers around the property,” but may be called simply to establish the premise that security in and around Trump’s possessions at Mar-a-Lago was generally lax. Well, that’s not as fun as someone witnessing a murder in the cloakroom.
The non-Trump Republican presidential candidates had a debate this week in Miami, and our main takeaway from it at Slate HQ was that none of them are coming anywhere near making a convincing case to their party’s voters that they should be the nominee. On the other hand, there was an extremely long exchange about boats, instigated by radio host Hugh Hewitt. Hewitt is an old-fashioned Cold War Republican who is perpetually concerned about strategic military capabilities, and on Wednesday night he absolutely grilled the five candidates onstage about how many ships they think there should be in the U.S. Navy. Said Hewitt to Vivek Ramaswamy: “What would you build? Where would you build it? When would they be in the water? How big would the fleet get?” At long last, sir, When would the ships go splash in the ocean? In any case, to mollify Hewitt, all the candidates agreed that America should have more boats, possibly way more boats. Ron DeSantis said there should be 600, more than twice as many as there are currently. Long story short, it’s probably time for every American to start boning up on this stuff just in case they find themselves in a conversation with Hugh Hewitt.
Another Never Trump Dream Just Went Poof
7
1
11.11.2023
Welcome back to El Surge, Slate’s weekly boletín política about the most important figures of the moment in the fiasco grande of our government. I’m Ben Mathis-Lilley, filling in for Jim Newell, who has taken leave to participate in a touring hip-hop version of the Nutcracker called Dr. Crackenstein’s Funky Christmas.
This week, we’ve got a bluegrass miracle, the usual Joe Manchin intrigue, and more discussion of battleships than you, or anyone else, probably expected. First up, though: another Never Trump dream goes poof.
By Ben Mathis-Lilley
This week saw a handful of state-level elections in the perverted places that hold their elections in “off-cycle” odd-numbered years. The most scrutinized such races were in Virginia—and not just because it’s the state closest to the two population centers on the East Coast where political reporters and editors tend to live. “The VA,” rather, was on watch because it was holding elections that would determine control of both chambers of its state Legislature—and because it’s generally become so blue (i.e., Democratic-voting) recently that a Republican sweep would have suggested very rough seas ahead for the Dems in 2024. A GOP win would also have strengthened the profile of Republican Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a former hedge fund executive who won an upset victory in 2021 as a kind of pre-MAGA conservative and has been touted by Republican donors who are sick of Donald Trump as a potential last-minute “white knight” entrant into the Republican primary field. But on Tuesday, Republicans not only failed to take Virginia’s state Senate; they lost control of the state House of Delegates. It was a big loss for Youngkin, and for the allegedly compromise-ish 15-week abortion ban policy he’d said he’d sign if the GOP took control. Somehow, it’s back to the drawing board for all the Republicans who keep saying, with a huge preponderance of evidence behind them, that Trump is a drag on their party and in some ways the worst possible person they could nominate in 2024!
One governor from America’s thick, juicy midsection who did have a nice time Tuesday was Kentucky’s Andy Beshear. The brown-haired, extremely regular-looking scion of a Bluegrass State political family is the only Democrat who’s gotten elected statewide in “the KY” since roughly 1582, and this week he won his second term in office by a margin of 5 percentage points. What’s his secret? In Slate, David Faris writes that Beshear seems to have benefited from partisan........
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