Wednesday, December 9, 2020

The Lincoln Project and the state of the Republican Party

The Lincoln Project's Steve Schmidt in this interview of 12/08/2020 with Michelle Martin on . Christiane Amanpour about their position in the election and now. Lincoln Project’s Steve Schmidt: American Democracy Was Deliberately Poisoned (transcript here):


It seems obvious that they have some kind of business plan going forward. They are advertising themselves as a media company and aren't necessarily looking to only political consulting for work.

I certainly enjoyed a number of their anti-Trump ads this year. My understanding is that a lot of their television ads buys were concentrated in the D.C. media market, specifically to get Trump's attention to them. And Schmidt in this interview talks about their marketing strategies for getting under Trump's very thin skin and to try to exacerbate factional divisions in the Republican Party.

What's that you say? Those factional divisions in the Republican Party don't seem to be too evident these days with the party talking and acting like a death cult that is sunk into bizarre conspiracy theories and is massively denying the validity of the democratic Presidential election and with the President and other party officials inciting their rabid fans to armed violence against Democrats?




Josh Kelety has more in 'Die for Something:' Arizona GOP Incites Violence Over Election Fraud Fantasy Phoenix New Times 10/08/2020

No, those factional divisions don't seem so clear, do they? Although, to be fair, the cult is also turning on some Republicans who decline to break the law to give the election to Trump by overriding their own state's votes in the Presidential election. (More on that below.)

But the Lincoln Project did go after some down-ballot Republicans including the odious Mitch McConnell. So their play doesn't seem to be to solely related to internal Republican Party politics. Schmidt himself formally resigned from the party, as Martin discusses in her first question, showing a tweet of his from January 2018 saying, "Today I renounce my membership in the Republican Party."

Is the Republican Party really a membership organization? The Democratic Party does have an official Democrats Abroad organization that is a membership organization, that to be an official part of it, Democrats Abroad does have to approve you based on your affirmation that you are an American citizen and are living outside the US. But "resigning" from the party for someone who is not a public official or holds some formal party office such as delegate to the national convention is basically just theater.

Schmidt says just after 3:50 that for the Lincoln Project, "This election was about Trump. The second issue in this election was Trump. And the next 300 issues after that: Trump. And that was before COVID." 

That was also the basic message of the Biden-Harris campaign: Biden Is Not Trump. And that most likely did contribute to the down-ballot problems. The main Democratic campaign, the Presidential one, was all about not being Trump. They did not put any particular emphasis on defining the Republican Party as an essential part of the Trump problem.

But this raises a real concern. One of the striking results of the 2020 election was that Biden clearly won, but the down-ballot candidates didn't do so well. The Democrats lost one Senate seat and several House seats. The two remaining Georgia Senate elections are next month.

And despite their tangential criticism of other Republicans, the thrust of the Lincoln Project's message was the same: Trump Is The Problem, 300 times over. They reinforced what for the Democratic Party was a problematically narrow focus on Trump alone.

Evaluating exit poll findings involves the extra complication in 2020 that the turnout of eligible voters was the highest the US has seen since 1908. But the exit polls indicated that nationally among voters who identify as Republicans, a higher percentage of them voted for Trump than in 2016. That may be a reflection of the fact that an election that generally brings out more voters would also bring out more with specific partisan affiliation, not just independents. But the results don't show any clear indication that Biden pulled any significant numbers of Republicans switched their preference to Biden.

Schmidt in the interview claims that their efforts were decisive in making the Confederate flags and monuments a more significant issue. Which on its face sound dubious to me. I haven't seen any specific evaluation of the effect that their presence online, in particular their YouTube videos, may have had. The fact that they presumably delighted Democrats and annoyed Republicans doesn't tell us a lot in itself.

After 11:00 in the video, Schmidt is careful to say of how they saw their role in 2020 on the political spectrum, "this is not the Obama coalition. This is not a progressive coalition that elected Joe Biden. It's a different coalition. If it falls apart - and you look at the structural advantage that Republicans have in Presidential elections through the Electoral College - it means that you could wind up with President Tucker Carlson in 2024. Nobody should want to see that."

In other words, Schmidt is talking the familiar line of Third Way and the onetime Democratic Leadership Council: the Democrats need to try to be more like Republicans and reject progressive approaches.

Martin after 11:30 does then press him in the interview about the process that preceded Trump's 2016 victory in the primaries, the road that the Republican Party took that wound up with it becoming the Trump Party. "What part of this do you own?"

Schmidt basically ducks the question by claiming that he has always considered himself a "Jacobin Republican" who tried to get the party to reach out to minorities. This is a Republican media consultant's 2020 version of, "Some of my best friends are black people."

But he does give an actually sensible response when he says that the Republican Party took on the identity of an entertainment show. I didn't hear anything in his response that could be said to "own" any responsibility for that development. But one of the milestones in that path was the Vice Presidential candidacy of the clown Sarah Palin. She was the pick of Steve Schmidt's Presidential candidate John McCain in 2008 (he was a senior adviser), a role to which he alludes with his some-of-my-best-friends pitch, but without mentioning Palin. And, among other things, Schmidt made the accusation in 2008 about Barack Obama that he ... acted too much like a celebrity. (Liz Halloran, Republicans Press Celebrity Attack on Obama US News 08/01/2008) Essentially the same charge that he's now making against the Trumpified Republican Party. A reminder how much of what the Republicans typically say about Democrats alleged shortcomings and faults is based heavily on projection.

But even an ex-Republican like Steve Schmidt can't pass up an opportunity to attack those he calls "my progressive friends." So he advises in a sneering tone (remember: projection!), "To think carefully about the condescension, about the elitism, about the indifference that a lot of people hear in this country from those messages," i.e., messages he takes to be from his "progressive friends," presumably any message he deems to be "progressive," since he doesn't actually say what messages he means. Like any good Republican might, he disses the New Deal as economically unimportant (!) but good messaging for the Democrats back then.

Some of his analysis in this interview about what constitutes Trumpism is good. But we also do need to keep asking what the Lincoln Project's larger aim may be. Because his presentation here gives us no reason to think that it involves supporting policy agendas even slightly to the left of the Third Way/DLC neoliberal playbook.

About those standout Republicans who go so far as to insist they won't break election law for Trump ...

Here's Chuck Todd's Meet the Press 12/06/2020 interview with Gabriel Sterling, Georgia's Republican Voting System Implementation Manager, who gained wide respect with his emphatic scolding of Republicans who were complicit in supporting Trump's false and destructive claims in support of trying to overturn the election results: Full Gabriel Sterling Interview: Trump has a 'higher' responsibility. (Transcript here.)
CHUCK TODD:

Well, I'm just curious what was it that sparked your decision to come out as, you know, to come out as direct as you came out earlier this week? Was there a specific incidence or incidents that have been happening to you or others?

GABRIEL STERLING:

It wasn’t happening -- obviously, I have a police car outside my house right now. I could see it out the right side of my peripheral vision. There has been police protection for the secretary, his wife received sexualized, violent threats on her personal cell phone. But what, for lack of a better word, set me off on Tuesday was about an hour before, hour and a half before a producer-scheduled news conference, I got a call from the project manager from Dominion Voting Systems out of Colorado who was telling me in a very audibly shaken voice that one of their contractors had received some threats in Gwinnett County. And this is just a young tech. He took a job a few weeks ago. He's one of their better ones. And when I was going through the Twitter feed on it and I saw, it basically had the young man's name, it's a very unique name. So they tracked down his family and started harassing them. And it said his name, "You have committed treason. May God have mercy on your soul," with a slowly swinging noose. And at that point I just said, "I'm done." [my emphasis]
But check this out. Even Sterling still pledges his allegiance to the Party. Just prior to the part just quoted:
CHUCK TODD:

Mr. Sterling, you had made an impassioned plea there that we just played that this has to stop. It doesn't look like he chose to stop. Is there-- could you please debunk or, what he said there when it comes to your role in the Georgia elections?

GABRIEL STERLING:

At this point, it’s a game of whack-a-mole as we’ve been saying. The president's statements are false. They're disinformation. They are stoking anger and fear among his supporters. And hell, I voted for him. The situation’s getting much worse and it’s an environment that’s been built out over years, and it's not just -- you know, Republicans and this side this time. But even in polling up to 2019, up to 50% of Democrats think Russians flipped votes on machines. So this is going both ways. It undermines democracy. We've got to get to a point where responsible people act responsibly. [my emphasis]
Both Sides Do It! He's singing Chuck's favorite song!

Is there is any senior Democrat claiming that "Russians flipped votes on machines"? Sterling didn't cite the poll and (surprise!) Chuck Todd didn't fact-check him in real time or question the claims, which Sterling also references again later in the interview. The Senate Intelligence Committee did issue a report in 2019 that found that Russian cyber-probing of American election systems in 2016 was more widespread than previously generally believed. But as the New York Times reported, the Committee "concluded that while there was no evidence that any votes were changed in actual voting machines, 'Russian cyberactors were in a position to delete or change voter data' in the Illinois voter database. The committee found no evidence that they did so." (David Sanger and Catie Edmondson, Russia Targeted Election Systems in All 50 States, Report Finds 07/26/2019)

A redacted verions of the report is available online from the Senate's website.

But Sterling goes on to express disappointment that the two Georgia Senate Republican candidates weren't talking a straightforward position against Republican efforts to nullify the Georgia elections in November. But he is careful to say that he still supports them: "I'm a Republican. We need to hold on to the Senate. So I'm still going to vote for them. But I'm not happy with how they conducted themselves in this particular situation." (my emphasis)

I think it would be too generous to call this a mixed message. He's saying he's still going to support senior Republicans who won't defend democracy. The best I could say about it is that it's just sad.

And while we should give people credit for doing the right thing, Gabriel Sterling has a public position of responsibility and trust. He is obligated to follow the law in doing so. The fact that he stands out in pushing back on pressure from his own party to do otherwise is a very damning commentary on the Republican Party of 2020. Public officials obeying the law should be entirely ordinary.

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