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Sunday, July 11, 2021 5:49:12 AM
‘As Long as the Party Embraces Trump, It’s Going to Have Trouble’
"Weird science: How a 'shoddy' Bannon-backed paper on coronavirus origins made its way to an audience of millions
"They once peddled misinformation for Guo Wengui and Steve Bannon. Now they're speaking out
"...How a fake persona laid the groundwork for a Hunter Biden conspiracy deluge""
[...]
Anna Mapp, an associate dean and research professor at the University of Michigan, agreed. "I was really disturbed to see such a shoddy piece of work that I would not accept if turned in to me by one of my own students receiving such attention and being treated as a valid scientific paper," she told CNN. (It was Mapp's graduate student, Amanda Peiffer -- who's working toward a PhD in chemical biology -- who first alerted CNN to issues with the citations at the end of Yan's paper.)"
The Republican collapse in Michigan’s Oakland County, once a stronghold, was a long time coming. Is losing these suburbs a warning light for Trumpism?
Photos by Erin Kirkland for POLITICO Magazine
By ZACK STANTON
06/18/2021 07:00 AM EDT
Zack Stanton is deputy editor of Playbook.
In the aftermath of the 2020 election, the Republican National Committee opted not to order an autopsy into what exactly led to the party’s decline in suburban communities that were, until recently, considered deep red.
But if RNC Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel wanted to understand what happened, she could do worse than to look back at the place she was raised: Oakland County, Michigan.
“Oakland County was kind of the quintessential suburban Republican stronghold over the postwar period,” says Jeff Timmer, a longtime GOP strategist who was executive director of the state party from 2005-2009. It was (and is) a huge source of campaign donations for the party and its candidates. It had massive influence in Lansing, and an influential bipartisan delegation in Washington. It was a must-visit locale for every aspiring Republican presidential candidate.
“When I ran the Michigan Republican Party, we always pointed to Oakland: ‘These guys have got their shit together,’” says Timmer.
To put it bluntly, the shit is no longer together.
Ten years ago, Republicans held two of the four GOP-drawn U.S. House seats in Oakland (the other two were safe Democratic); now, all four are in Democratic hands. Democratic women now represent the Romney family’s hometown in the state House, state Senate and U.S. House (Rep. Haley Stevens). Ten years ago, Brooks Patterson, the silver-tongued sun-God around whom all local politics orbited, was county executive, and Republicans held four of the six countywide elected posts; Democrats now hold five of them, including the executive. After GOP-controlled redistricting in 2012, Republicans had a 14-7 majority on the Oakland County Board of Commissioners; now, Democrats have an 11-10 edge and will control the county-level redistricting process for the first time in a half-century.
The change is happening in lush, sylvan communities like Birmingham and Bloomfield—a place at least three generations of Romneys, McDaniel included, have called home. Here, generations of families with auto-baron surnames set roots. Here, they enrolled their kids at affluent public schools or even-more-affluent private schools with idyllic names like Country Day and Cranbrook. Here, they donated to and elected Republicans. At least, that is, until recently.
“That’s how I describe it to literally anyone from out of state,” laughs Mari Manoogian, a Democratic state Representative whose district encompasses much of the community. “They’re like, ‘Wait, you’re the state representative for Mitt Romney’s hometown?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah!’”
Carl Milles’ Orpheus Fountain outside the Cranbrook Museum of Art and Academy of Art Library in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. As a teenager, now-Sen. Mitt Romney attended Cranbrook, an affluent private school attached to the museum. | Erin Kirkland for POLITICO Magazine
This was “‘Romney Republican’ territory, but the Republican Party has gone so far away from that,” says Mallory McMorrow, the Democrat who represents the area in the state Senate. “Even looking at the types of things Mitt Romney is proposing on the federal level right now, I think if he were still at home, he’d be a Democrat. The party has shifted so much.”
To the casual observer, this change happened overnight. But the change is less the flip of a switch than a stovetop dial cranked on high—it took a while to heat up but the pot is boiling now.
Between Barack Obama’s campaign in 2012 and Joe Biden’s in 2020, the margin of victory for Democratic presidential candidates in Oakland grew by roughly 55,000 votes. Few have noticed it, but Oakland’s share of the statewide Democratic vote now exceeds that of the city of Detroit. Oakland now accounts for roughly 1 in every 7 votes statewide. And those votes are being cast for Democrats at much higher rates than they used to be.
That’s a problem for Republicans in a state that has played a pivotal role in the last two presidential elections. But Oakland is also a national warning light for the Republicans at the highest levels of the party.
Scenes from Cranbrook’s idyllic campus. Top: Sculptor Mark di Suvero’s “For Mother Teresa.” Bottom: A jogger runs through the quad. | Erin Kirkland for POLITICO Magazine
Oakland County “represents the dominant trend in the country because it combines the most affluent and college graduates in increasingly diverse suburbs becoming increasingly and emphatically Democratic,” says Stanley Greenberg, the Democratic pollster whose study of neighboring Macomb County in the mid-1980s put it on the map and elevated “Reagan Democrats” to the forefront of American politics. But that era no longer really describes the central battlefield of America’s suburban politics. Macomb can have its “Reagan Democrats”; Oakland has the “Biden Republicans.”
And there are Oakland Counties all around the nation—affluent, longtime Republican suburbs that have been trending Democratic for a long time, but where the Trump years marked a tipping point. “Look at why the Republicans are so obsessed with reversing Maricopa [County, Arizona]—but also Gwinnett [County, Georgia]—both key to Biden and Democrats winning the states and Senate,” says Greenberg.
These key suburban populations are mostly white but increasingly diverse, highly educated and relatively affluent. They aren’t scared by immigration; they support it in their own communities—especially with highly skilled immigrants, attracted to work at businesses lured to these suburbs, in many cases, by business-minded Republican politicians. They are repelled by white-grievance politics and culture-war clashes, and concerned about the rise of violent right-wing anti-government plots, like the Jan. 6 insurrection and the thwarted plan to kidnap and execute Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. They used to think of themselves as Republicans, but nowadays the GOP seems disconnected from the things they care about; it talks less about affordable child care or student debt than banning transgender student athletes or making it harder to vote. It’s the inverse of what President Ronald Reagan said in Macomb County all those years ago: They didn’t leave the Republican Party; the Republican Party left them.
In an email to POLITICO, a spokesperson for the RNC pushed back on the idea that the Republicans are having difficulties in the suburbs, pointing to GOP gains in the 2020 House elections in California, Florida and New York. The spokesperson noted surges in Republican support in, among other places, North Carolina and the Florida panhandle, and said that a plurality of registered voters in suburban Michigan “feel the socialist agenda Democrats are pushing will bankrupt the country.”
Just as the Reagan Democrats didn’t suddenly materialize with the 1980 election, the Biden Republicans didn’t spontaneously sprout up in 2020; their emergence is part of a longer story—or, more precisely, several interlocking stories.
It’s the story of how demographic trends are changing America’s suburbs, not simply in making them more diverse, but in making them more highly educated at the same time educational attainment has become a defining predictor of how Americans vote. It’s the story of how the GOP playbook—which often defaults to the tactic of demonizing cities as bastions of out-of-touch liberal elites—has missed an important shift: Suburbs aren’t at war with their cities any longer, and claiming they are has alienated potential Republican voters.
Left: The sun sets near downtown Birmingham, Mich. on June 8. Center: Roses grow in Cranbrook’s campus in Bloomfield Hills. Right: In downtown Birmingham, diners eat at a trendy pizzeria. | Erin Kirkland for POLITICO Magazine
It’s the story of the Democrats who’ve remade Oakland County politics, chief among them boy wonder politician-turned-elder statesman Dave Woodward, the longtime party chair who focused on building local power cycle after cycle. And it’s the story of Democratic women, like McMorrow and Manoogian, who’ve built on that foundation with major victories in traditionally Republican areas.
It’s the story of a Republican Party in something of an identity crisis; of downballot Republicans who have found success while embracing diversity and are utterly flummoxed why the rest of the party is moving in the other direction; of the once-in-a-generation talent named L. Brooks Patterson, who made Oakland County into a Republican political behemoth first by perfecting the art of culture war, and later by trading away grievance-based politics for business-oriented conservatism only to see that traditional approach banished from the Trump-era GOP.
And, critically, it’s a warning of what happens when a political party is associated with one charismatic figurehead and doesn’t invest in candidates with their own identities; and of the strategic blunder of responding to a tidal shift of demographic change by rewriting voting rules instead of fixing a tone-deaf message.
This is the story of how Oakland County went blue—and what that tells us about the Republican Party’s continuing collapse in America’s suburbs.
Much more. It's a long read - https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/06/18/biden-republican-voters-oakland-county-michigan-suburbs-494983
See also:
HEAR HEAR! Finally, someone steps forward!
READ: Rep. Paul Mitchell's letter quitting the GOP, fearing 'long-term harm to our democracy' with its support for Trump's actions
Michigan Republican Rep. Paul Mitchell told CNN that his disgust and disappointment with President Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the results of the election have led him to request that the clerk of the House change his party affiliation to "independent." Read his letter to Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel and House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy below:
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=160176683
"Weird science: How a 'shoddy' Bannon-backed paper on coronavirus origins made its way to an audience of millions
"They once peddled misinformation for Guo Wengui and Steve Bannon. Now they're speaking out
"...How a fake persona laid the groundwork for a Hunter Biden conspiracy deluge""
[...]
Anna Mapp, an associate dean and research professor at the University of Michigan, agreed. "I was really disturbed to see such a shoddy piece of work that I would not accept if turned in to me by one of my own students receiving such attention and being treated as a valid scientific paper," she told CNN. (It was Mapp's graduate student, Amanda Peiffer -- who's working toward a PhD in chemical biology -- who first alerted CNN to issues with the citations at the end of Yan's paper.)"
The Republican collapse in Michigan’s Oakland County, once a stronghold, was a long time coming. Is losing these suburbs a warning light for Trumpism?
Photos by Erin Kirkland for POLITICO Magazine
By ZACK STANTON
06/18/2021 07:00 AM EDT
Zack Stanton is deputy editor of Playbook.
In the aftermath of the 2020 election, the Republican National Committee opted not to order an autopsy into what exactly led to the party’s decline in suburban communities that were, until recently, considered deep red.
But if RNC Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel wanted to understand what happened, she could do worse than to look back at the place she was raised: Oakland County, Michigan.
“Oakland County was kind of the quintessential suburban Republican stronghold over the postwar period,” says Jeff Timmer, a longtime GOP strategist who was executive director of the state party from 2005-2009. It was (and is) a huge source of campaign donations for the party and its candidates. It had massive influence in Lansing, and an influential bipartisan delegation in Washington. It was a must-visit locale for every aspiring Republican presidential candidate.
“When I ran the Michigan Republican Party, we always pointed to Oakland: ‘These guys have got their shit together,’” says Timmer.
To put it bluntly, the shit is no longer together.
Ten years ago, Republicans held two of the four GOP-drawn U.S. House seats in Oakland (the other two were safe Democratic); now, all four are in Democratic hands. Democratic women now represent the Romney family’s hometown in the state House, state Senate and U.S. House (Rep. Haley Stevens). Ten years ago, Brooks Patterson, the silver-tongued sun-God around whom all local politics orbited, was county executive, and Republicans held four of the six countywide elected posts; Democrats now hold five of them, including the executive. After GOP-controlled redistricting in 2012, Republicans had a 14-7 majority on the Oakland County Board of Commissioners; now, Democrats have an 11-10 edge and will control the county-level redistricting process for the first time in a half-century.
The change is happening in lush, sylvan communities like Birmingham and Bloomfield—a place at least three generations of Romneys, McDaniel included, have called home. Here, generations of families with auto-baron surnames set roots. Here, they enrolled their kids at affluent public schools or even-more-affluent private schools with idyllic names like Country Day and Cranbrook. Here, they donated to and elected Republicans. At least, that is, until recently.
“That’s how I describe it to literally anyone from out of state,” laughs Mari Manoogian, a Democratic state Representative whose district encompasses much of the community. “They’re like, ‘Wait, you’re the state representative for Mitt Romney’s hometown?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah!’”
Carl Milles’ Orpheus Fountain outside the Cranbrook Museum of Art and Academy of Art Library in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. As a teenager, now-Sen. Mitt Romney attended Cranbrook, an affluent private school attached to the museum. | Erin Kirkland for POLITICO Magazine
This was “‘Romney Republican’ territory, but the Republican Party has gone so far away from that,” says Mallory McMorrow, the Democrat who represents the area in the state Senate. “Even looking at the types of things Mitt Romney is proposing on the federal level right now, I think if he were still at home, he’d be a Democrat. The party has shifted so much.”
To the casual observer, this change happened overnight. But the change is less the flip of a switch than a stovetop dial cranked on high—it took a while to heat up but the pot is boiling now.
Between Barack Obama’s campaign in 2012 and Joe Biden’s in 2020, the margin of victory for Democratic presidential candidates in Oakland grew by roughly 55,000 votes. Few have noticed it, but Oakland’s share of the statewide Democratic vote now exceeds that of the city of Detroit. Oakland now accounts for roughly 1 in every 7 votes statewide. And those votes are being cast for Democrats at much higher rates than they used to be.
That’s a problem for Republicans in a state that has played a pivotal role in the last two presidential elections. But Oakland is also a national warning light for the Republicans at the highest levels of the party.
Scenes from Cranbrook’s idyllic campus. Top: Sculptor Mark di Suvero’s “For Mother Teresa.” Bottom: A jogger runs through the quad. | Erin Kirkland for POLITICO Magazine
Oakland County “represents the dominant trend in the country because it combines the most affluent and college graduates in increasingly diverse suburbs becoming increasingly and emphatically Democratic,” says Stanley Greenberg, the Democratic pollster whose study of neighboring Macomb County in the mid-1980s put it on the map and elevated “Reagan Democrats” to the forefront of American politics. But that era no longer really describes the central battlefield of America’s suburban politics. Macomb can have its “Reagan Democrats”; Oakland has the “Biden Republicans.”
And there are Oakland Counties all around the nation—affluent, longtime Republican suburbs that have been trending Democratic for a long time, but where the Trump years marked a tipping point. “Look at why the Republicans are so obsessed with reversing Maricopa [County, Arizona]—but also Gwinnett [County, Georgia]—both key to Biden and Democrats winning the states and Senate,” says Greenberg.
These key suburban populations are mostly white but increasingly diverse, highly educated and relatively affluent. They aren’t scared by immigration; they support it in their own communities—especially with highly skilled immigrants, attracted to work at businesses lured to these suburbs, in many cases, by business-minded Republican politicians. They are repelled by white-grievance politics and culture-war clashes, and concerned about the rise of violent right-wing anti-government plots, like the Jan. 6 insurrection and the thwarted plan to kidnap and execute Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. They used to think of themselves as Republicans, but nowadays the GOP seems disconnected from the things they care about; it talks less about affordable child care or student debt than banning transgender student athletes or making it harder to vote. It’s the inverse of what President Ronald Reagan said in Macomb County all those years ago: They didn’t leave the Republican Party; the Republican Party left them.
In an email to POLITICO, a spokesperson for the RNC pushed back on the idea that the Republicans are having difficulties in the suburbs, pointing to GOP gains in the 2020 House elections in California, Florida and New York. The spokesperson noted surges in Republican support in, among other places, North Carolina and the Florida panhandle, and said that a plurality of registered voters in suburban Michigan “feel the socialist agenda Democrats are pushing will bankrupt the country.”
Just as the Reagan Democrats didn’t suddenly materialize with the 1980 election, the Biden Republicans didn’t spontaneously sprout up in 2020; their emergence is part of a longer story—or, more precisely, several interlocking stories.
It’s the story of how demographic trends are changing America’s suburbs, not simply in making them more diverse, but in making them more highly educated at the same time educational attainment has become a defining predictor of how Americans vote. It’s the story of how the GOP playbook—which often defaults to the tactic of demonizing cities as bastions of out-of-touch liberal elites—has missed an important shift: Suburbs aren’t at war with their cities any longer, and claiming they are has alienated potential Republican voters.
Left: The sun sets near downtown Birmingham, Mich. on June 8. Center: Roses grow in Cranbrook’s campus in Bloomfield Hills. Right: In downtown Birmingham, diners eat at a trendy pizzeria. | Erin Kirkland for POLITICO Magazine
It’s the story of the Democrats who’ve remade Oakland County politics, chief among them boy wonder politician-turned-elder statesman Dave Woodward, the longtime party chair who focused on building local power cycle after cycle. And it’s the story of Democratic women, like McMorrow and Manoogian, who’ve built on that foundation with major victories in traditionally Republican areas.
It’s the story of a Republican Party in something of an identity crisis; of downballot Republicans who have found success while embracing diversity and are utterly flummoxed why the rest of the party is moving in the other direction; of the once-in-a-generation talent named L. Brooks Patterson, who made Oakland County into a Republican political behemoth first by perfecting the art of culture war, and later by trading away grievance-based politics for business-oriented conservatism only to see that traditional approach banished from the Trump-era GOP.
And, critically, it’s a warning of what happens when a political party is associated with one charismatic figurehead and doesn’t invest in candidates with their own identities; and of the strategic blunder of responding to a tidal shift of demographic change by rewriting voting rules instead of fixing a tone-deaf message.
This is the story of how Oakland County went blue—and what that tells us about the Republican Party’s continuing collapse in America’s suburbs.
Much more. It's a long read - https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/06/18/biden-republican-voters-oakland-county-michigan-suburbs-494983
See also:
HEAR HEAR! Finally, someone steps forward!
READ: Rep. Paul Mitchell's letter quitting the GOP, fearing 'long-term harm to our democracy' with its support for Trump's actions
Michigan Republican Rep. Paul Mitchell told CNN that his disgust and disappointment with President Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the results of the election have led him to request that the clerk of the House change his party affiliation to "independent." Read his letter to Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel and House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy below:
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=160176683
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