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Where are the January 6th Anti-Democracy Legislators Now?

They voted against certification. How long will it take for the voters to clean up their mess?

I’ve seen a few stories about Repubs who voted to impeach Donald John Trump, but haven’t seen any kind of overview of those who voted to overturn the 2020 election. So I looked around. It’s kind of tricky since this is a redistricting year, and it’s still early so some states are still holding primaries. But here’s an overview.

There were 147 Repub members of Congress (eight in the Senate, 139 in the House) who voted to overturn the election results in either Arizona (2), in Pennsylvania (20), or in both.

Only one of the eight senators is up for reelection this year (Kennedy of Louisiana). But 130 in the House are up for reelection in 2022. Two have already lost primaries from the right. Only 15 are unopposed by Democrats (though several still have primaries or primary runoffs, and some will face third-party opponents in the general election).

Five House Repubs opted to run for the Senate. Odds have it that maybe two of them (Mullin in Oklahoma and Budd in North Carolina) will win their races and move to the cooling saucer. One has already lost in a primary runoff (Brooks in Alabama), and the other two probably won’t win their primaries.

One ran for the state’s attorney general (Gohmert in Texas, who lost the primary), one for secretary of state (Hice in Georgia, who lost the primary), and one for governor (Zeldin in New York, whose primary is on 28 June, and who has a decent chance to be nominated, but low prospects in November against the incumbent Democrat).

Two died, and four quit (including one, Jacobs in New York, due to NRA backlash over suggesting we should adopt reasonable gun regulation).

But the vast majority will be reelected. There are a handful in competitive districts, and depending on how the races break (with expectations this will be a bad year for Democrats), chances are that at least 119 will be back in the House next year. Chances are that they will form a majority of the Repub majority. That doesn’t mean they will be there in January 2025 for the next counting of electoral votes; that will depend on the November 2024 elections and all the happenings between now and then.


From the Senate:

StateName
AlabamaTuberville
FloridaScott
KansasMarshall
LouisianaKennedy
MississippiHyde-Smith
MissouriHawley
TexasCruz
WyomingLummis

And from the House, and likely returning, as follows:

StateNumberReturn
Alabama65
Arizona43–4
Arkansas11
California74–6
Colorado22
Florida1212
Georgia65
Idaho11
Illinois21–2
Indiana44
Kansas33
Kentucky11
Louisiana44
Maryland11
Michigan32–3
Minnesota21
Mississippi31–3
Missouri53
Montana11
Nebraska11
New Jersey10–1
New Mexico10–1
New York42
North Carolina75
Ohio53–4
Oklahoma54
Oregon11
Pennsylvania87
South Carolina54
Tennessee77
Texas1612–14
Utah22
Virginia43–4
West Virginia22
Wisconsin22

More Thoughts on Doug Jones’ 2020 Election Loss.

Things that might have made a difference: House races, a primary fight, and no Donald John Trump.

House Races.

In 2020 only four of the seven House seats in Alabama had a contest; the other three were unopposed (including the lone Democratic seat). Doug Jones would have done at least marginally better had the other two seats had Democratic candidates.

The math is simple: even if you only draw a few more Democrats out by having a House candidate to vote for, that’s still a few more people who can vote for you for Senate. This is especially true because of hardcore gerrymandering of Alabama House seats: the single Democratic seat was already going to turn out for Doug Jones, but in the suburbs and exurbs where they’re separated into these other districts? It’s marginal, but having someone on the ballot matters.

There’s also the experimental and experiential aspects; running some candidate who won’t win gives you a chance to maintain some idea of how the district actually performs. You can throw a few ideas at a district, see what happens. Have a candidate that only reads fortune cookies, something. Who knows what’ll happen.

Which is the other piece. The running candidate could have a major scandal, could die, whatever. Having someone running against them gives some chance to have a sudden shift net a seat.

Finally, having a candidate with at least minimal funding would have given Jones a surrogate in the area to be accessible to media. One more voice cheering for the team couldn’t hurt, could it?

Lack of a Primary.

Jones ran unopposed for the nomination. Had there been a primary, there’s some small risk he would have lost it, and even if he didn’t, there’d be some resources spent. But having him butt heads with a fellow Democrat could actually have been a positive. Depending on challengers, it would have given a chance to define himself and how he differed from other Alabama Democrats.

That last part is key: if state Democratic voters picked Jones over a more liberal candidate, it could be taken as a signal to moderates that Jones isn’t some pinko and should be given a better look. Brains like contrasts, and party primaries are one way to add some shading to who candidates are and aren’t.

Going back to ways to experiment and gain experience, it would have offered some ways to test messaging and strategy before moving into the general election. The fuss over the Republicans picking a candidate generated some energy on their side. Alabama voters love competition and drama, one supposes.

In general, Democrats in the House and Senate should welcome primaries. None of this blacklist-firms-who-help-primary. They are great chances to develop talent, check the engine’s running right, and increase interest in the elections. There are risks, spending too much on them, having the race get away from you by having someone that doesn’t fit the general electorate. But done right, they are useful, and there’s always the fact that it’s the right fucking thing to do. It’s the democratic thing.

Donald John Trump on the Ballot and the Map.

It was always going to be tough to pull off, with so many Alabamians itching to fill an oval for their favorite president. Hell, in 2017 Senator Jones only barely pulled it off, some 20 000 votes. Even without the top of the ticket, it might still have been a crush out of the embarrassment Alabama Republicans felt at letting one slip away from them. But if you compare the 2020 map and the 2017 map, it tells the tale.

First, the Black Belt. It spread north and south in 2017, and it contracted in 2020. Alabama Democrats gotta know that there’s a lot of opportunity in that area. That’s half their future, right there. Build on it. Fund it.

Second, Mobile and Huntsville (and to a lesser extent the college towns). Their counties, Mobile County and Madison County, they gotta be blue. Same reason as the Black Belt: there’s enough Democratic voters there, that you can make a push to spread that notion in those areas.

The how of spreading is harder. Senator Richard Shelby is trying to build a second FBI in Huntsville, which is earning him support.


Every election reveals more to us about who our fellow voters are and aren’t. But extrapolating the choices they make to who they are, deep down, is often a mistake. Walk through a company’s staff parking, see the cars the people drive, you can learn something about them. But you can’t touch their souls. There’s no Sherlock-Holmes-method to extrapolate too deep from limited data. Still, we do learn something.

The inauguration of President-elect Biden and Vice-president-elect Harris is in eight weeks.

The 2020 Senatorial Race in Alabama.

As you may know, Senator Jones lost his reelection bid in Alabama to some football guy. Some thoughts about WTF? to a football guy?!

Alabama did not want a serious senator who would bring good things to the state and the nation. That’s the solid conclusion of the 2020 senatorial race in Alabama. But let’s talk about why.

Stature.

Donald John Trump would never have been nominated in 2016, much less elected, without finding a way to improve his stature, to make him seem like a real candidate. His first trick was to be a big asshole in announcing his run. That got enough attention to get his polls to a place he could get in the early debates. Then, standing next to prominent Republican senators, he bullied them, which further inflated his stature to the point he polled better and could start winning primaries. The media kept its eyes trained on him like he was a rabid unicorn, which kept him nice and plump all the way to the nomination, and once nominated his stature was fully established as a Republican-approved candidate to be the actual president.

Jones entered the special election with strong stature of his own, as did Roy Moore. But Moore got badly damaged, not by being the arrogant tool of the devil that he acts like, but because of national reporting on decades-old creepy behavior. Between that and the Black vote, Jones won that election (or, perhaps, Moore lost it).

Normally, incumbency is a strong part of stature. But Alabama loves college football in a way that could only be called a fetish. Tuberville was never a serious candidate, but he had the fetishized stature to get the nomination in a runoff, and too few Alabamians care about reasonable government, so that stature alone was enough to make him the senator.

The main takeaway here is that if you’re running for an office, you have to find some way to gain sufficient stature. Debates are a great way to do that, but Alabama Republicans are well-known for ducking debates, because they don’t want to lose or give a Democrat any profile.

Messaging matters, not so much the message.

Tuberville has no real agenda, just like Donald John Trump. The message doesn’t matter. Most voters aren’t listening anyway.

Up in Maine, Senator Collins ran an add against Sarah Gideon with the basic message that Gideon had all these priorities. It got a broadened run as Democrats made fun of it for highlighting Gideon’s positively-polling positions. I think the message had nothing to do with a tangle of number-one-priorities, but it was all about saying: “Sarah Gideon wants to make all these fucking changes, Maine. Are you ready for all these fucking changes?” In other words, the gut-level of the ad wasn’t anything about any of the issues. It was a how-dare-she for having ideas, for having a platform.

There’s a squint-test in graphics design. You squint your eyes so you can’t really see the content, just the contrast of white-space to text or graphics. You want to see a nice balance there. The folks doing ads for the Democrats need to do their own squint-tests with their ads. Fuck the message, make sure the sound and shape of the thing appeals to the gut of the people you’re trying to reach.

Even something as simple as Jones’ ads ending with him indoors saying he approved the ad—he should have been in some kind of outdoor shot, maybe standing in the middle of a rural highway—missed the signal. (Likely done that way to seem relatable re: COVID-19 stay-at-home, too few Alabamians care about protecting their state from a novel and potentially-deadly virus, so it didn’t really hit as maybe it should have.) Dumb shit plays with a lot of people (and not just in the south). If Jones had done one of those stunt-ads (blow up a tree stump, slap handcuffs on someone in a non-sexual context, or even cook a steak on a grill), it would have boosted him with the folks who went with Tuberville. Most liberals would have shrugged or maybe laughed without it affecting their vote.

Republicans don’t care about policy. They care about the emotion of the message. “Democrats are gonna try to stop robocalls from bugging you all the time” is an effective Republican message, because it says the Democrats will deprive you of something, even something you hate.

Liberals mostly don’t care about that hokey bullshit. As long as the policy is there and thoughtful, you’ll get their votes.

If Democrats ran a message “Republicans are blocking changing the borders of Florida to make it look like an AR-15” the voters would eat it up down there. Boom, six more Democratic senators, three new states, and a reconfigured Florida that looks like a gun, plus three states that look like the mud that rifle was dropped in. (In all probability, envy would then spark several other southern states to split up so they could shape themselves into firearms, cannons, trebuchets, whatever. And in a generation we’d have to teach kids why the map looks like a homicidal six-year-old drew it.)

Upton Sinclair was right: hit them in the gut.

The policy obviously doesn’t matter, because Tuberville doesn’t have policy. Donald John Trump hasn’t policy. For a large group of people, the policy is not even secondary to the tone and package. It just doesn’t factor in for them. They’ll buy a dump in a box marked guaranteed over a quality product.


(Wherein I was going to throw a few bones about the future, but the present is still not officially called, so skipping to the end.

I will say of the presidential race, it was either the-economy-stupid, or it was nearly the-economy-stupid. While other factors like racism and deal-with-devil-Republicans (no gun laws, anti-abortion, anti-taxes, etc.) were certainly factors, I don’t think it’s as close as it is (was) without a strong recovery. The flip-side is that most incumbents would have taken this race handily.)


Started working on a new book. Hum.