‘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.
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
Fox Won’t Stop Anti-Vaccine Scare Campaign Even as Delta Variant Spreads
"Weird science: How a 'shoddy' Bannon-backed paper on coronavirus origins made its way to an audience of millions [...] (CNN) -- It was a blockbuster story. A respected Chinese virologist appeared on Tucker Carlson's show .. https://www.foxnews.com/media/chinese-virologist-government-intentionally-coronavirus .. on Fox News in mid-September to share the results of her just-completed report. The conclusion: The novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19 was likely engineered in a Chinese lab. On Carlson's show, she claimed it was intentionally released into the world. P - Then, its validity began to unravel. The publication of the paper .. https://zenodo.org/record/4028830#.X4zTmi2z3kK .. by lead author Li-Meng Yan..."
Conservative commentators, including those who have been vaccinated themselves, appear willing to endanger their audience for ratings.
By Charlotte Klein
July 11, 2021
Brian Kilmeade at Fox News Channel Studios on September 10, 2019. by Noam Galai/Getty Images
As the threat of the Delta variant grows, public health experts are urging Americans to get vaccinated for the coronavirus and “try and save their own lives,” as Dr. Anthony Fauci put it Sunday. Right-wing media, however, appears to only be increasing its anti-vaccine messaging, with conservative commentators politicizing .. https://twitter.com/LisPower1/status/1413116850108502016?s=20 .. the vaccine and potentially endangering their audience.
“They’re going to be knocking on your doors, I guess with a cotton ball and a needle, and they’re going to look to put a needle into your deltoid—stop asking questions,” Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade said last week, inaccurately conflating President Joe Biden’s door-to-door initiative to get people vaccinated with a sinister infringement .. https://twitter.com/RealCandaceO/status/1412882282491305999?s=20 .. on personal freedom. CNN’s Brian Stelter pointed out Friday that local governments have already been doing such outreach.
Brian Stelter @brianstelter · Jul 11 For some of these right-wing media stars, resisting the Covid vaccines is a badge of honor, a way to "stick it to the blue states." They claim to respect their audience, but are actually putting them at risk. VIDEO Link to tweet
Nonetheless, Fox News contributor Marc Thiessen called Biden’s plan “Orwellian” and in a recent monologue, Fox News host Laura Ingraham connected Biden’s “creepy” initiative to the conspiracy theory of “great global resetters, who love seeing us shut in and shut up.” She commended Americans who “are wising up to this charade” by refusing to get vaccinated, per Media Matters.
“These radio stars, these TV stars: they are trusted individuals in Republican communities,” Stelter noted. “But they are abusing that trust by pushing anti-vaccination propaganda, and it’s something that ultimately affects every American.”
Matthew Gertz @MattGertz· Jul 9, 2021 Replying to @MattGertz And now huge swaths of Republicans say they are not and will not be vaccinated. It's a culture war issue rather than a health one because that's the lens through which Fox presents the world to its viewers. Matthew Gertz @MattGertz We're headed for a scenario in which Democrats are vaccinated and Republicans aren't, and a lot of Fox viewers end up dead because they listened to the network instead of getting shots. 10:05 PM · Jul 9, 2021 Twitter
“It's not just an anti-vax thing which is somewhat passive in some ways,” Carusone told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes on Friday. “They're building something that is actively anti-public health.”
More Great Stories From Vanity Fair [links inside]
— Inside Jeffrey Epstein’s Decades-Long Relationship With Leslie Wexner — Trump’s Deranged Replacement Theory Might’ve Lost Him the Election — Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk Want to Burn Their Cash in Space — Three Texans Bust Myths About the Alamo’s Famous “Last Stand” — The Guy Who Could Send Trump to Prison May Soon Cooperate With the Feds — Bill and Melinda Gates’s Epic Divorce Saga Enters Its Next Phase — Juneteenth, Critical Race Theory, and the Winding Road Toward Reckoning — Trump Is Now Urging People Not to Vaccinate Their Kids Against COVID — From the Archive: Microsoft’s Odd Couple, in the Words of Paul Allen
Charlotte Klein is a staff writer at Vanity Fair’s Hive.
The Pandemic’s Wrongest Man In a crowded field of wrongness, one person stands out: Alex Berenson. [...] Berenson has a big megaphone. He has more than 200,000 followers on Twitter and millions of viewers for his frequent appearances on Fox News’ most-watched shows. On Laura Ingraham’s show, he downplayed the vaccines, suggesting that Israel’s experience proved they were considerably less effective than initially claimed. On Tucker Carlson Tonight, he predicted that the vaccines would cause an uptick in cases of COVID-related illness and death in the U.S. P - The vaccines have inspired his most troubling comments. For the past few weeks on Twitter, Berenson has mischaracterized just about every detail regarding the vaccines to make the dubious case that most people would be better off avoiding them. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=164846661
GOP AND FOX NEWS RUSH TO TURN VACCINE DOOR-KNOCKERS INTO TERRIFYING STRAW MEN [...] Republican members of Congress and conservative talkers have wrongly pitched the effort as forced vaccination — even repeatedly invoking the Nazis — and lodged baseless suggestions that it would be done using illegally obtained medical information. Others have suggested it’s something akin to government coercion or even a precursor to gun confiscation.
We know relatively little about the nascent effort thus far, but what we do know bears little to no resemblance to these allegations. P - Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) got the ball rolling Tuesday by comparing the effort to “medical brown shirts showing up at their door ordering vaccinations.” Not to be outdone, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) took to Twitter the next day to offer her own Nazi comparison, labeling the door-knockers “needle Nazis.” P - If anyone should know the folly of such metaphors, it would seem to be Greene, who just three weeks prior conceded in an apology after another wayward Nazi/coronavirus comment that “there is no comparison to the Holocaust.” And it’s worth emphasizing that there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to believe door-knockers would compel vaccinations, which would be illegal, in the way Nazis and the Sturmabteilung, also known as the brownshirts, used violence to enforce their political will. P - But while these might be the most extreme examples, they’re hardly alone. P - Fox News host Tucker Cnarlson also wrongly pitched this effort as being about forcing vaccinations. “The idea that you would force people to take medicine they don’t want or need — is there a precedent for that in our lifetimes?” he said Tuesday. Again, that’s not at all what is proposed here. But it didn’t stop Carlson on his show, where nuance often goes to die, from saying, “I honestly think it’s the greatest scandal in my lifetime, by far. I thought the Iraq War was; it seems much bigger than that.” P - (Fox News political analyst Brit Hume, to his credit, responded to Carlson’s comments by gently noting his summary was incorrect and that maybe there should be a little more benefit of the doubt.) https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=164828713
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