What if Hillary had won?

 Acouple of recent conversations made me wonder how things might be different if 80,000 people had voted differently in 2016 and Hillary Clinton had edged out Donald Trump in the Electoral College. One school of thought holds that the second President Clinton would have represented the end of America as we know it, but is that really what would have happened?

If other election results were significantly unchanged, Clinton would have been faced with Republican majorities in both the House and Senate. As with Barack Obama, the same Republicans in Congress that enabled Donald Trump would have acted as a brake on Hillary’s progressive agenda.

One of the first places where history would have diverged would have been the appointment of a replacement for Antonin Scalia. While I agree that any Hillary or Obama appointment would have been a step down from Scalia, Hillary would not have been able to appoint a fire-breathing liberal to the Court.

Why? Because a Republican Senate would not have to confirm a far-left justice. We would not have Neal Gorsuch or Brett Kavanaugh, but moderately liberal Clinton appointments might not have significantly shifted the balance of the Court.

Still, judicial appointments are an area where Trump has hands-down performed better than Hillary would have. Trump’s appointments are a clear conservative victory… Except that if Joe Biden wins and Democrats take control of the Senate and pack the Court, those gains might quickly prove ephemeral.

Another area of difference is with trade. Hillary waffled on the Trans Pacific Pact, but I am skeptical that she would have abandoned the treaty. She definitely would not have launched the tariff war that Donald Trump began.

While many Trump apologists view this as a weakness for Hillary, as an economic conservative, I disagree. Trump is actually to the left of Hillary and Obama on trade as he himself acknowledged when he compared his trade policy to that of Bernie Sanders.

Far from being a winning strategy, Trump’s trade policy has been disastrous. His taxes on trade have offset the benefits of tax reform for most Americans and devastated American manufacturing and farm exports. Trump’s farm base was pacified with billions of dollars in bailouts but the US manufacturing sector was in a recession for all of 2019. The rest of the country followed in February 2020, a month before the pandemic hit the US in earnest and after negative economic growth began in the fourth quarter of 2019 following the escalation of the trade war with China.

How do you get Republicans to cheer for tax increases? Have President Trump call them tariffs. But tariffs are taxes and come with all the negative economic consequences of any other tax increase.

But what about the stock market? The Dow has been on a tear throughout the Trump era. Wouldn’t the stock market have crashed under a Hillary Administration?

It’s true the stock market has done well under Trump, even recovering most of its losses from the pandemic spring, but many of the stock market graphs touting Trump’s success with the market end in 2017. If we zoom out and look at a longer time scale, we see that the market has been on a steady climb since the recovery from the Great Recession began in 2009. The market has been tumultuous since the onset of the trade war in 2018.

It’s also true that tax reform would have never happened under Hillary Clinton. I favored tax reform, but the new tax laws also have a downside. Federal revenues flattened after the tax cuts while spending increased sharply under Trump. As a result, both the federal budget deficit and the national debt ballooned even before the pandemic.

If Hillary had been president with a Republican Congress, federal spending would have been more restrained. In fact, when Barack Obama was president, the much-maligned John Boehner led the House to reduce federal spending in consecutive years for the first time since the Eisenhower Administration in 2012 and 2013. Ironically, most Republicans that I talk to refuse to believe that this victory occurred.

But wouldn’t Hillary have eviscerated the Second Amendment and instituted abortion on demand? Remember that Republican control of Congress would have limited her actions on those issues to tinkering around the edges with Executive Orders as Obama did. Barack Obama was president for eight years and Republicans in Congress stonewalled gun control for the entire time. In fact, President Trump has been more successful at enacting gun control than Obama, having instructed his bureaucrats to ban bump stocks without going through Congress.

As for abortion, the practice has been in long-term decline for decades regardless of which party occupied the White House. Abortion declined throughout the Obama years and is now at a lower level than prior to Roe v. Wade when it was totally illegal in many states. This milestone occurred before President Trump took office.

What else might have been different if Hillary Clinton had become president? There are both good and bad possibilities. Our allies would not have been alienated by our erratic foreign policy and attempts to retreat from the world stage. The US would not have recognized Jerusalem as the Israeli capital. On the other hand, the US would likely still be party to the Iran deal and the Paris Accords. Deregulation, another big accomplishment of the Trump Administration, would never have happened. Republicans would have likely prevented abuses of executive power by Hillary that they ignored under Donald Trump.

Some things would not have been different. With the Iranian threat to moderate Arab nations growing, the Middle East treaties might still have happened. In a Hillary presidency, Obamacare would still have not been repealed and there would still have been no border wall. Hillary Clinton would still not be locked up.

One of the other big differences would be the outlook for the current election. Rather than being on the brink of electoral disaster, Republicans would be poised to expand their hold on Congress and to elect a conservative president. Conservative America would be united against Hillary and the suburbs, seniors, and minorities would not be fleeing the Republican Party.

Hillary would also have probably responded better to the pandemic. Clinton would have been more likely to heed expert medical advice and follow the pandemic plan established by the National Security Council rather than winging it. The pandemic response might not have been politicized. Tens of thousands of lives might have been saved.

Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump represented mixed bags for America. In some areas, Hillary would have been worse, but in others, Trump has been the worse of the two.

There are two lessons here. One is that a Democratic president, even with control of Congress, won’t necessarily mean the end of America or an economic implosion. America is resilient and has been strong enough to withstand both Barack Obama and Donald Trump. We can also survive Joe Biden and/or Kamala Harris.

The second is that control of Congress is ultimately at least as important as controlling the White House, if not more so. Especially if President Trump loses the election, it is important for Republicans to maintain control of the Senate. Doing so will minimize the ability of a Democratic administration to enact radical progressive change.

Divided government would also encourage the parties to work together as the Founders intended. A government in which the two parties are at a standoff should be the goal of conservatives who truly believe in limited government since both parties have shown that they cannot be trusted with unchecked power.

Originally published on The First TV

Bernie Sanders has been surging in the polls in recent weeks. The Vermont senator’s newfound success is apparently enough that it attracted a high-profile attack from the previous failed Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton.

A new CNN poll out this morning shows a big jump for Sanders over the previous Real Clear Politics average. The new poll gives Sanders a 27 percent share of the Democratic primary vote, which puts him three points ahead of Joe Biden at 24. Sanders has been trending upward since mid-December, but the new poll is a sharp jump from his polling average of 21 percent.

Large, sudden movements in polling often represent inaccurate outliers. Further polling is necessary to determine whether Sanders’ newfound lead is real or illusory.

Regardless, Sanders’ rise in the polls has led other Democrats to focus their attacks on him. The Vermonter traded sharp barbs with Massachusetts senator and fellow candidate Elizabeth Warren last month. The Warren campaign accused Bernie of saying that a woman couldn’t win the election, an accusation that Bernie denied, and the two had an awkward moment after last month’s debate in which each accused the other of lying while they were still wearing hot mics.

Now Hillary Clinton is entering the fray with a statement in a documentary film. Per The Hollywood Reporter, Clinton says in the film, “He was in Congress for years. He had one senator support him. Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done, He was a career politician. It’s all just baloney and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it.”

“It’s not only him, it’s the culture around him,” Clinton continued. “It’s his leadership team. It’s his prominent supporters. It’s his online Bernie Bros and their relentless attacks on lots of his competitors, particularly the women.”

Clinton’s attack aims squarely at Bernie’s perceived strength of being an outsider with revolutionary ideas. The #MeToo-style accusation that Sanders is hostile to women would be lethal to most candidates in the progressive party as well.

The problem with Hillary’s plan of attack is that the New Yorker is one of the most unpopular people in politics. Her unpopularity within the Democratic Party almost allowed Sanders to seize the nomination in 2016 and spurred thousands of Bernie Bros to cross the aisles and vote for Trump or stay home on Election Day. In 2020, it’s entirely possible that Hillary’s condemnation of Bernie will galvanize his support.

It’s also possible that Bernie is merely the newest flavor-of-the-month in the Democratic Party. Democratic voters have already considered and then rejected a number of non-Biden candidates, including Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Pete Buttigieg. Sanders may simply be the next alternative to be examined and then tossed aside.

If this is the case, the Democratic consideration of Bernie comes at an opportune time for Sanders. With the Iowa caucuses on February 3, less than two weeks away, Bernie’s support may be cresting at exactly the right time.

Current polling averages in Iowa show Biden in the lead with 21 percent, but three other candidates, Sanders, Buttigieg, and Warren, also meet the 15 percent threshold to win delegates. In a caucus state, Bernie’s devoted supporters may give him an advantage that could propel him to a surprise victory, although recent polls have shown him slipping there.

Sanders also has a slim lead in the polling average for New Hampshire’s primary. where he currently holds an advantage of about one point over Joe Biden. Hailing from neighboring Vermont, Sanders is the favorite son in the New Hampshire race and needs to do well there to remain viable. The New Hampshire primary is scheduled for February 11.

Sanders has enjoyed a brief surge in the polls. We will find out soon whether it is a real increase or whether Bernie’s popularity will be a flash in the pan. If the senator doesn’t perform well in Iowa and New Hampshire, it is difficult to see a path to the nomination even though he has money to stay in the race to the end.

Originally published on the Resurgent

Play The Reverse Card

One of the many frustrating problems of modern politics is the partisan nature of almost every aspect of every issue. As many of us have pointed out, the parties seem to flip their positions based on who is in office at the time. This is no way to run a country, especially one that values the rule of law.

As an exercise, I find it useful to look at events with the roles reversed. For me personally, if I would oppose an action by a Democrat, I also oppose it when Donald Trump does it and vice versa. The mental exercise helps me to keep my principles straight rather than bending to partisan biases. It helps to keep me objective.

Along those lines, let’s play a game. Let’s imagine that American politics have rules similar to a giant game of Uno. In our game, let’s throw the reverse card down and see what happens.

In our reversed, bizarro world, Hillary Clinton won the election. Now three years into her Administration, witnesses come forward to allege that she demanded a quid pro quo from a foreign leader, let’s call him the president of Scandalstan, in exchange for access and foreign aid, which has already been approved by Congress. Further, the witnesses claim that Hillary ordered her trusted personal fixer, Sidney Blumenthal, to bypass the State Department’s chain of command and go to the Scandalstan himself to do campaign research.

At some point, Hillary gets the idea that there is a massive scandal against her presumptive Republican opponent, Donald Trump, brewing in Scandalstan. Preferring to face a weaker opponent, she pressures the president of Scandalstan to announce a public investigation that names Trump personally. She ties this announcement to a White House meeting with the new president of Scandalstan and then places a hold on military aid, which Scandalstan needs to defend itself against an incursion by its arch-enemy, Evilonia.

However, Scandalstan doesn’t seem to be taking the hints. Months go by and they haven’t announced the investigation. The Scandalstanians say that they don’t want to get involved in American politics.

So, Hillary agrees to a phone call with the Scandalstanians. In the call, they exchange pleasantries and President Clinton (I shudder to type those words) notes that America does a lot for Scandalstan but that the US does not get much out of the relationship. The president of Scandalstan then says that he needs more American missiles to defend his country against the Evilonian tanks.

“I would like you to do us a favor though,” are the next words out of Hillary’s mouth. She wants Scandalstan to “find out what happened” with people running a website that claims that Hillary is a secret serial killer. The president agrees to look into the people running the fake news site. He stresses that his aids have already spoken with Blumenthal on the matter and that he will do whatever he can to stay in Hillary’s good graces.

Then Hillary asks the president for another favor. She wants him to help Blumenthal look into Ivanka Trump’s business dealings in Scandalstan, which Hillary believes are corrupt. There is no firm evidence of corruption. Hillary doesn’t have enough information to instruct the DOJ to get a warrant or go to a grand jury for an indictment, but she knows that the whiff of Ivanka’s corruption could hobble Trump’s campaign enough for someone like John Kasich or Ted Cruz to become the nominee.

The call, along with other associated meetings on the subject of the investigations, sets off alarm bells in the heads of many staffers. Several White House employees who were privy to the call go to in-house lawyers with their concerns and others file whistleblower reports. Through it all, the vital military aid to Scandalstan is still locked up tight with the end of the fiscal year rapidly approaching. If the aid isn’t released by the end of September, Congress will have to appropriate the money again and Scandalstan’s soldiers will be hard-pressed to fight off the Evilonian tanks.

But then a whistleblower report is leaked. Coincidentally, Hillary releases the aid to Scandalstan the next day. This allows her a fig leaf in her claim that there was no quid pro quo because Scandalstan got its aid without announcing the investigation.

Republicans are apoplectic at Hillary’s behavior. Not only did she try to sell access to the Oval Office for a political investigation, the evidence is strong that she tried to use aid appropriated by taxpayers to benefit her reelection campaign and smear her likely opponent. When Republicans ask the Clinton Administration for documents relating to the delay in the Scandalstan aid, they face a stone wall.

However, the debate over quid pro quos and whistleblowers and the original intent of impeachment obscures one of the most important facts of the entire Ukraine scandal. For a president to use his office to leverage a foreign government to conduct (or announce) a sham investigation of a political opponent is wrong on its face. The favors requested in the president’s own call summary represent a flagrant abuse of power. 

Although no analogy is perfect, this is an accurate representation of the case against Donald Trump. It merely changes the names. If Republicans are honest with themselves, I’m sure that they would be extremely angry at Hillary’s abuse of power in using her position to further her own political career. In fact, the allegations that Hillary used her position as Secretary of State to enrich herself and that she acted as though she was above the law were two of the many very good reasons that Republicans gave back in 2016 when they argued that Hillary was unsuited for the presidency.

Let’s look further as well. Assume that Hillary had been the president who was the subject of the Mueller report’s claims that there were 10 separate episodes of obstructive behavior. Even though Mueller did not ask for an indictment of the president, based on his understanding of the DOJ policy that a sitting president cannot be indicted, Republicans would not hesitate to call Hillary’s behavior disqualifying and impeachable.

Finally, consider the use of a national emergency as a legislative tool. It isn’t difficult to picture Hillary Clinton using the pretext of a national emergency to do what Congress has decided not to do. Maybe Hillary would use a state of emergency after a spate of mass shootings or a terror attack to declare a ban on the private use of “assault rifles.” Maybe she would declare the current health care system a public health crisis and use a national emergency to implement a public option. Again, Republicans would rightly consider such actions to be an impeachable subversion of congressional authority.

To be fair, there is also a weakness in Democratic handling of the impeachment process, however. The Constitution is silent on how the House conducts the impeachment process, an inquiry is not even a constitutional requirement, so the Democrats have much leeway in the nuts and bolts of the process. It also isn’t necessarily a disqualifying factor that Democrats did not allow Republicans to call irrelevant witnesses or unmask the whistleblower. Even though the statute does not protect the whistleblower’s identity from disclosure by anyone other than the inspector general, there are legitimate public policy reasons for protecting the anonymity of whistleblowers.

The best reasons for slowing the impeachment process come from Jonathan Turley and David French. In his French Press column, French argued that the Trump Administration’s stonewalling of Congress is not improper based upon precedent that the president and his immediate advisors cannot be compelled to testify before Congress. This position is based upon a Nixon-era interpretation and was also supported by the Clinton and Obama Administrations. The argument is based upon the president’s need for independence from Congress as the head of a co-equal branch of government.

Second, Prof. Turley argued in his testimony, not that Donald Trump was not guilty of the charges before him, but that the investigation was not complete. Turley told congressional investigators, “A quid pro quo to force the investigation of a political rival in exchange for military aid can be impeachable, if proven. Yet moving forward primarily or exclusively with the Ukraine controversy on this record would be as precarious as it would premature.”

“In the current matter, much remains unknown in terms of key witnesses and underlying documents,” Turley said later. “There is no explanation why the matter must be completed by December.”

As both French and Turley point out, House Democrats have not exhausted all means of obtaining more evidence against Donald Trump. Rather than submitting requests, Congress could issue subpoenas for testimony and documents and ask the courts to enforce the subpoenas on an expedited basis. While Republicans often point out that President Obama rejected congressional subpoenas from the Republican House, it is also true that the Obama Administration turned over the subpoenaed documents when confronted with a court order.

Likewise, lawsuits against Donald Trump’s abuse of national emergency statutes are also winding their way through the legal system. A resolution to these cases could impact the articles of impeachment. If the president loses the case and refuses to back down, it would be another clear example of an abuse of power.

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I believe that Donald Trump’s actions justify impeachment, but that does not mean that I support a willy-nilly rush to impeach before a self-imposed deadline. Polling shows that a plurality of Americans supports impeachment but further investigation and revelations of corruption by the Trump Administration would help to build public support for his impeachment and removal. If there is to be any chance of removing Donald Trump, then overwhelming public support is required. With the current slim edge favoring removal, that strong public pressure on Republicans is simply not there… yet.

I’ll close with more words of wisdom from Jonathan Turley. As you read his quote, don’t forget that Turley was actually called to testify by House Republicans in Trump’s defense.

“The House should not assume that the Republican control of the Senate makes any serious effort at impeachment impractical or naïve,” Turley said. “All four impeachment inquiries have occurred during rabid political periods. However, politicians can on occasion rise to the moment and chose principle over politics.”

Originally published on The Resurgent

Nate Silver: Clinton Campaign Strategists Were 'Huge Dumbasses'

There are many myths about the 2016 election. On the left it is an article of faith that Donald Trump could not have won without illicit coordination with the Russians. On the right, there is the pervasive notion that because Trump beat the odds to win the presidency, all polling is wrong and should be disregarded. Yesterday Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight managed to blow up both of these theories in a single tweet.

The exchange began with a tweet from Ben Collins of NBC News that asked, “What did the Kremlin's cutouts know about targeting MI and WI? How did they know it? And is there data to show they took action on it?”

https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/1082750493842173953

Silver, the head of the FiveThirtyEight polling analysis site, responded quickly with a tweet that slammed the door on that particular aspect of Russian collusion. “The 538 model, which was based on publicly-available polling data, said the campaigns should target WI and MI,” Silver wrote. “You didn't have to have any proprietary info to know they were important states. You just had to look at the data and not be huge dumbasses like the HRC campaign was.”

https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1082777389460004864

Silver followed up with a link to a FiveThirtyEight article from February 2017, “Donald Trump Had A Superior Electoral College Strategy.” The thrust of the article, subtitled “How Hillary Clinton and the media missed the boat,” was that Hillary made two key errors in the campaign. First, she focused on states where the race was close rather than states that had the potential to tip the race. In particular, the article points out that Clinton did not set foot in Wisconsin after the Democratic primary. Second, she was overconfident and limited her focus to a narrow range of states. Hillary’s main focus was on Florida, North Carolina, and Ohio.

Silver didn’t explicitly address the idea that because the forecasts were wrong in 2016 that all polling is wrong, but it is implicit in his statement that the Clinton campaign was made of “huge dumbasses” who ignored polling data that showed that Hillary was in trouble. Many Republicans claim that the media gave Hillary a 99 percent chance of becoming president on election night, but FiveThirtyEight’s forecast, which is still posted, gave Donald Trump a 29 percent chance of winning. Under those circumstances, Trump was an underdog, but not prohibitively.

With respect to the two states in question, FiveThirtyEight gave Trump a 21 percent chance in Michigan and a 17 percent chance in Wisconsin. Many polls were within the margin of error in Michigan, but Wisconsin polling was further off, showing a consistent albeit single-digit lead for Hillary.

As I pointed out a few months ago, polls are snapshots rather than predictive. One good technique for examining polls is to look for trends in the big picture. The big picture of the polling average from 2016 is still available on Real Clear Politics in convenient graph form. If we look at the trend, we can see Trump plunging in the polls about Oct. 10 then starting a slow rise on Oct. 20. There is a sharp increase between Oct. 28 and Nov. 2 that brought Trump to within two points of Hillary, well within the margin of error of most polls. Going into Election Day, the national polling average had the two candidates about three points apart, a close race by any standard.

If we look at key events that occurred in the campaign, we can see exactly what caused these movements in the polling. Keeping in mind that polls are lagging indicators, we see that Trump’s decline in early October followed the release of the Access Hollywood tape on Oct. 7. The final presidential debate was on Oct. 19 and Trump’s performance seems to have helped him in the polls, but not enough to close the deal. The event that sealed the race in Trump’s favor occurred on Oct. 28, the release of FBI Director James Comey’s memo to Congress that detailed the discovery of thousands of emails that related to the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private email server. In a May 2017 article, Silver also made the case that Comey’s memo cost Hillary the election.

There are lessons for both parties in Silver’s tweets and articles. For the Democrats, candidates should not take the Rust Belt states for granted. Traditional party loyalties may not be enough to carry a state, especially in an election where everything seems to be going wrong for your candidate. There is no substitute for getting into the field and making appearances. Charisma, broad appeal outside the party, and the stamina to campaign should be factors in nominating a candidate.

For Republicans, the lesson is also that the Rust Belt states should not be taken for granted. Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin were all decided by about one percent of the vote after being all but ignored by the Democrat candidate. Just because they voted for Donald Trump once does not mean that they will do so again. The Clinton campaign made mistakes that will probably not be repeated by the next Democratic candidate. Even with these mistakes, however, Trump still lost the popular vote and would most likely have lost the electoral vote had it not been for James Comey. Donald Trump has the stamina to campaign, but he lacks charisma and popularity outside the GOP.

Despite claims from both sides, the 2020 election is far from a sure thing for either party. The outcome will be determined by which side better learns the lessons of the 2016 election and adapts their strategy to a changing electoral environment.

Originally published on The Resurgent

Hillary In 2020? Fuhgeddaboutit

Hillary Clinton won’t go away. The Democratic loser from 2016 hinted over the weekend at the possibility that she would run again in 2020 saying that she would think about it after the midterms.

In an interview on Friday, Kate Swisher of Recode.net asked Clinton whether she wanted to run for president again.

“No,” Clinton answered. “I’d like to be president.”

After discussing her qualifications, Clinton added, “I’m not even going to think about, until we get through this Nov. 6 election, about what comes after that.”

Let me take a moment to interject that Hillary should think about running again. She should think about it right now and she should decide against it. If she was a viable candidate for 2020, she would be being interviewed by the New York Times, Wall Street Journal or Washington Post, not a tech website.

Mrs. Clinton has the distinction of being the worst major party candidate in modern American political history. She won that distinction by losing to the second-worst candidate. Her utter lack of charisma, charm, and endurance paired with her checkered history and polarizing political past to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Her lackluster campaign relied on Donald Trump’s unpopularity and ultimately handed the Republican an Electoral College victory when she lost several reliably blue states.

Has anyone forgotten how Hillary failed to campaign in the Rust Belt states and instead focused on swing states that she did not need to win? Do potential supporters recall that she went more than nine months in the middle of the campaign without a press conference? Do you recall how her health was an issue after she fainted at a September 11 event? Who doesn’t remember how, by embracing a candidate with a shady past and history of judgment so bad that it could be illegal and negligent, Democrats set themselves up for an October surprise from James Comey that ultimately tilted the election in Donald Trump’s favor? If Democrats remember any of this, why would they ever consider re-nominating Hillary Clinton?

The evidence says that most Democrats wouldn’t. Over the summer, Rasmussen found that 73 percent of Democrats want a fresh face in 2020. Far from the #ReadyForHillary masses in 2014, Hillary didn’t even place in a CNN poll of Democrat choices for their 2020 standard bearer. Mrs. Clinton’s supporters, if there are any, are found among the two percent of Democrats who prefer “someone else.”

Hillary had her shot and she blew it with a choke of historic proportions. If Democrats want to win in 2020, they would be well advised to find a candidate who has something more to offer than female genitalia and the belief that she is destined to be president for no other apparent reason than that she wants to be. In the Trump era, many Democrats may have gone crazy, but I’ll wager that they aren’t stupid enough to roll the dice on Hillary Part Two.

Originally published on The Resurgent

Heidi Heitkamp On Civility

As the Democratic Party appears to be devolving into a pitchfork-wielding mob, at least one Democrat official is willing to stand against the rising tide of incivility and violent rhetoric. North Dakota Senator Heidi Heitkamp yesterday rebuked Hillary Clinton’s statement that Democrats could not be civil with Republicans as “ridiculous.”

Earlier this week, failed presidential nominee Hillary Clinton said on CNN, “You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about. That's why I believe if we are fortunate enough to win back the House and or the Senate, that's when civility can start again.”

The embattled North Dakota senator responded to Clinton’s comments on Anderson Cooper’s show, also on CNN, saying, “That's ridiculous.  I mean I can't imagine how you get anything done if you don't bring civility back into politics, and that goes for both sides.”

Heitkamp’s newfound ability to speak out against heated Democrat rhetoric may be related to a bevy of bad polls in her reelection campaign. Heitkamp was trailing her Republican challenger even before she announced her opposition to Brett Kavanaugh. Since September, she has trailed by double-digits. Heitkamp’s seat represents one of the best chances for Republicans to flip a Senate seat this November.

To be fair, however, Heitkamp, a red state Democrat, is not a typical liberal. In 2016, Donald Trump reportedly considered her for a cabinet position as Secretary of Agriculture. Since then, she has voted with Trump about half the time and her support for a bill reforming Dodd-Frank earned her a public thank you from the Koch brothers. A GovTrack ranking of senators puts her almost squarely in the middle of the Senate and more conservative than Susan Collins (R-Maine).

Sen. Heitkamp’s call for civility may not be enough to save her seat, but it is nonetheless refreshing to hear. If the North Dakota voters choose to bring her home, the real loser will be the Democratic Party, where moderate voices are becoming increasingly difficult to find.

Originally published on The Resurgent

How To Skeptically Look At Polls

It’s election season. The time when a political junkie’s fancy turns to polls, polls, and more polls. With so many polls being released, many of the polls will show results that are contradictory from each other, which one do you believe? Should you believe any of them?

Conservatives have long been leery of polls, but that skepticism reached its height after Donald Trump’s surprise victory in 2016. Much of this skepticism lies in a misunderstanding of how to look at polls and what they represent. Some of this misunderstanding is fed by media outlets and politicians that misuse polls.

When considering polls, keep a few simple rules of thumb in mind:

Polls are historical, not predictive. They provide a snapshot of public opinion when they were taken. By themselves, they do not forecast the outcome of elections. Polls are lagging indicators that measure public opinion as it was on a given date.

Look at the trend of all the polls. To see which way public opinion is moving, don’t just look at one poll. Look at similar polls taken over a period of time and compare the results. For example, one poll on Donald Trump’s approval rating isn’t very useful, but if you look at the trend of all polls showing the presidential approval rating you can see whether it has improved or declined.

Real Clear Politics is a useful site that acts as a clearinghouse of polls. You can look up individual poll types such as President Trump’s approval, individual races such as Ted Cruz v. Beto O’Rourke, or generic ballots.

RCP shows all the polls of each particular type, which makes it easy to see trends. For instance, the page of Cruz-O’Rourke polls shows 10 polls going back to April. The trend shows a surge by O’Rourke in which Cruz moved from a double-digit lead to a statistical tie.

Discard the outliers. Politicians and the media often trumpet shocking poll results such as the recent Rasmussen poll that showed President Trump’s support among black voters at 36 percent. Polls that differ wildly from other polls are outliers and should be treated with suspicion.

One way of reducing the effect of outliers is to take an average of polls. Both Real Clear Politics and FiveThirtyEight have pages that show the average of polls asking about President Trump’s approval rating that go all the way back to his inauguration. These are useful tools for getting the big picture of the longterm trends in presidential approval.

Look at the nuts and bolts of the poll. Not all polls are created equal. You can get an idea of how reliable a poll is by looking at who it surveyed. The most accurate polls talk to likely voters. Polls of registered voters are less accurate while those that survey adults are the least accurate.

Pollsters also must make assumptions about who will show up to vote. These assumptions are used to weight the data from the poll, but there is no way to test their validity until Election Day when we find out who comes out to vote. Many polls give information about the weighting and the mix of Democrat and Republican respondents if you read the fine print.

Consider the margin of error. No poll is exact because they all represent only a sample of the population. The accuracy of the poll can be calculated and is usually disclosed as the “margin of error.” A large sample size is more accurate and reduces the poll’s margin of error.

The thing to remember is that the closer a poll is, the less it can be used to predict a specific outcome. For example, the most recent Cruz-O’Rourke poll that showed a one-point race had a 4.4-point margin of error. This is known as a statistical tie. The one-point difference is well within the margin of error so the key takeaway from the poll is that the race is currently too close to call, not that Ted Cruz would win the election by one point.

If a poll shows a large difference discrepancy between two viewpoints, you can be reasonably confident that the general breakdown is correct, even if the specific percentages are not. For example, when 72 percent opposed the Trump Administration policy of separating immigrant children from their parent and only 27 percent were in favor in a June CBS News poll, there was little doubt that Americans strongly opposed the policy.

Consider polling difficulties. The smaller the race, the tougher it is to get good polling. National polls are the most accurate, but state and district polls are more questionable. There might be no public polling at all in some House and Senate races.

The root cause of much of the 2016 polling problem was polling at the state level in a few Rust Belt states. By Election Day, national polls were showing a close race between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. The RCP average gave Hillary Clinton a 3.1 point edge, within the margin of error of most polls. In the final tally, Clinton won the popular vote by 2.1 points which was very close to what the polls showed.

Of course, the popular vote does not decide presidential elections and the predicted outcome of elections in key states turned the Electoral College results. An after-action report by the American Association for Public Opinion Research noted that “eight states with more than a third of the electoral votes needed to win the presidency had polls showing a lead of three points or less” and that “polls on average indicated that Trump was one state away from winning the election.”

The outcome in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin was the surprise for forecasters that turned the election to Trump, yet the polling in both Michigan and Pennsylvania showed a close race. In both states, the last poll before the election favored Donald Trump. The polls were only substantially off in Wisconsin where the last poll favored Hillary by eight points, but Trump won by less than one point.

In the end, most polls did not capture a late surge by Donald Trump in the wake of FBI Director James Comey’s memo to Congress. The lagging indicators were too far behind to include the rapidly changing landscape but did reflect a very close race in most cases. The AAPOR after-action report also faults an overrepresentation of college graduates in many polls that would have favored Clinton.

Polling is not an exact science. Poll results shouldn’t be considered to be gospel, but neither should they be ignored. By looking beyond the headline, you can determine whether a poll is reliable and how it fits into the big picture of the election.

Originally published on The Resurgent

IG Report Says Comey Was Wrong, But Not Politically Biased

The report by the Department of Justice's inspector general is out and Republicans are not going to be happy with the findings. The report faults former FBI Director James Comey for his handling of the Clinton email investigation, but did not attribute his actions to political bias.

Per Bloomberg, the report, which will be made public later today, says that Comey did not follow FBI protocol when he held a press conference to announce the FBI findings in July 2016 and then reopened the investigation with a memo to Congress in October. Comey was also criticized for not keeping DOJ superiors, including then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch, informed about the investigation.

"While we did not find that these decisions were the result of political bias on Comey’s part, we nevertheless concluded that by departing so clearly and dramatically from FBI and department norms, the decisions negatively impacted the perception of the FBI and the department as fair administrators of justice,” Inspector General Michael Horowitz said in the report’s conclusions.

The Washington Post reports that the report will also contain previously unseen text messages between FBI Agent Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page.

“[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!” Page wrote to Strzok.

“No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it,” Strzok responded.

The inspector general condemned the texts, but said that there was no evidence that they affected the FBI's work.

“We did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that improper considerations, including political bias, directly affected the specific investigative actions we reviewed,” Horowitz said in the report . “The conduct by these employees cast a cloud over the entire FBI investigation.”

The full report will be released to the public on Thursday afternoon.

Originally published on The Resurgent

Democrats Reach Out To Clintons

Sometimes people sabotage themselves. They try so hard to succeed, but are unable to see that their best efforts are undermining their own efforts. Lately, it is the Democrats who are showing many signs of self-defeating behavior.

The latest example of Democrat self-sabotage is the party’s welcome to Bill and Hillary Clinton to get involved in the 2018 elections. The Clintons, of course, are the Democrat power couple whose incompetence at running the last election led to what can surely be called the most unexpected and humiliating defeat in the history of the Democratic Party.

When asked whether the party would welcome support from Ms. Clinton and former President Obama, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, answered, “We welcome support from everybody who wants to help, including Secretary Clinton and President Obama.”

When pressed as to whether Democrats would welcome former President Bill Clinton, Van Hollen answered, “Yes. As the head of the DSCC, we welcome those individuals and everybody that wants to help.”

Van Hollen added that the final decision on assistance from the Clintons and Obama would be up to the individual candidates. “Those are not decisions the DSCC gets involved in,” he said. “Those are decisions that are left to every campaign and they can talk to anybody who wants to help and decide who should come to the state and when.”

Republicans should hope that Democratic campaigns embrace the Clintons. Even though Donald Trump’s approval rating is underwater with an average of 41 percent approval according to the FiveThirtyEight index, Hillary Clinton’s popularity is worse. A Gallup poll showed Ms. Clinton at 36 percent approval in December 2017. A Wall Street Journal poll from April 2018 found that she had sunk even lower to 27 percent.

Bill Clinton, who was always more popular and better campaigner than his wife, is a liability in the #MeToo era. Even the left has finally started criticizing his treatment of women, albeit 20 years too late. The former president found himself in hot water again this week after trying to claim victim status because he left the White House with $16 million in legal fees after fighting impeachment.

Think about what the Democrats would be getting if they embrace the Clintons again. As with Hillary in 2016, the party would get a couple under investigation. The FBI launched an investigation into corruption at the Clinton Foundation in January 2018. After the 2016 debacle, it should be evident that people being investigated by the FBI should be held at arms length.

Democrats would get a couple that was so arrogant and incompetent that they flouted the law with a private email server instead of using secure government email systems. The only logical explanation for this decision was to shield illicit emails from preservation in the national archives. It was this decision that led to Hillary’s downfall as it contributed directly to James Comey’s October 2016 memo that swung the election in Donald Trump’s favor.

The Democrats would be welcoming back the people who undermined their own primary system. Donna Brazile, the former head of the Democratic National Committee, admitted that the Hillary campaign had stacked the DNC with its own people even before the 2016 primary. Brazile also admitted to leaking debate questions to Hillary’s campaign to give her an unfair advantage.

The Clinton infestation of the DNC eventually led to the election of Donald Trump. Without Hillary’s stacked deck, it is possible that Bernie Sanders would have been the eventual nominee. No one knows for sure what would have happened in a Sanders-Trump matchup, but Sanders consistently polled better than both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. It is possible, even likely, that America would have a socialist president, something that would thrill most Democrats, were it not for the Clinton’s underhanded dealings with the DNC.

Finally, what Democrats get if they decide to welcome Hillary back into their camp is the one candidate in the country who was so bad that she could not defeat the most unpopular major party candidate in history. The vaunted Clinton machine fell to a man in his first political campaign ever. Hillary was just an awful, uninspiring candidate who was toxic on the campaign trail.

On the other hand, President Obama would be a better surrogate. The 44^th president has so far not been inclined to re-enter the political arena, but Gallup found in February 2018 that 63 percent approve of the way that Obama handled his job as president. Considering that President Trump has spent much of his time erasing Obama’s legacy of executive actions, the former president could be a powerful voice for Democratic candidates.

In the wake of the 2016 election, Democrats seemed poised to put the Clinton era behind them for good. Two years later, the Clintons are trying to creep back in, but they really have nothing to offer Democratic candidates. If Democrats are smart, they will quash the Clinton resurgence now in order to avoid a repeat of 2016.

Originally published on The Resurgent

Comey Book Makes All Sides Look Bad

Most of the focus on former FBI Director James Comey has been on his comment in an ABC News interview that Donald Trump is “morally unfit” to hold the office of president. Trump is not the only president that Comey took aim at recently, however. In his new book, Comey accuses President Obama and Attorney General Loretta Lynch of interfering in the investigation of Hillary Clinton's emails in much the same way that Trump interfered in the investigation of Michael Flynn.

In his book, “A Higher Loyalty,” which is due out on Tuesday, Comey described the problem of political statements that had “jeopardized” the credibility of the Clinton investigation. He specifically cited statements made by President Obama that seemed to absolve Clinton of criminal wrongdoing.

“Contributing to this problem, regrettably, was President Obama. He had jeopardized the Department of Justice’s credibility in the investigation by saying in a 60 Minutes interview on Oct. 11, 2015, that Clinton’s email use was 'a mistake' that had not endangered national security,” Comey wrote in a passage cited by the Washington Examiner. “Then on Fox News on April 10, 2016, he said that Clinton may have been careless but did not do anything to intentionally harm national security, suggesting that the case involved overclassification of material in the government.”

Comey continued:

“President Obama is a very smart man who understands the law very well. To this day, I don’t know why he spoke about the case publicly and seemed to absolve her before a final determination was made. If the president had already decided the matter, an outside observer could reasonably wonder, how on earth could his Department of Justice do anything other than follow his lead.

“The truth was that the president — as far as I knew, anyway — he had only as much information as anyone following it in the media. He had not been briefed on our work at all. And if he was following the media, he knew nothing, because there had been no leaks at all up until that point. But, his comments still set all of us up for corrosive attacks if the case were completed with no charges brought.”

Comey also described a 2015 meeting with Lynch in which the attorney general allegedly asked him to describe the Clinton investigation as a “matter,” rather than an investigation. When he asked what the basis for the request was, Lynch answered, “Just do it,” a response that Comey says indicated that there was “no legal or procedural justification for her request, at least not one grounded in our practices or traditions.”

Comey said that he and others in the FBI saw Lynch's request as political, but that he did not see it as interfering in the investigation... or matter. “Though I had been concerned about her direction to me at that point, I saw no indication afterward that she had any contact with the investigators or prosecutors on the case,” Comey wrote.

Comey also denied that FBI agents had shown any personal prejudice in the investigation. “I never heard anyone on our team — not one — take a position that seemed driven by their personal political motivations. And more than that: I never heard an argument or observation I thought came from a political bias. Never,” Comey wrote. “Instead we debated, argued, listened, reflected, agonized, played devil’s advocate, and even found opportunities to laugh as we hashed out major decisions.”

Loretta Lynch fired back at Comey's accusation in a written statement obtained by the Daily Wire. Lynch insists that she followed Justice Department policy in “neither confirming nor denying the fact of an ongoing investigation.” Further, Lynch states, “At no time did I ever discuss any aspect of the investigation with anyone from the Clinton campaign or the DNC.”

“I have known James Comey almost 30 years,” Lynch's statement concludes. “Throughout his time as Director we spoke regularly about some of the most sensitive issues in law enforcement and national security. If he had any concerns regarding the email investigation, classified or not, he had ample opportunities to raise them with me both privately and in meetings. He never did.”

Looking at the big picture, a pattern begins to emerge. Barack Obama and Loretta Lynch appear to have subtly attempted to manipulate the FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton without overtly interfering. Obama's statements seem to be very similar to what Comey claims President Trump did when he overtly said, “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go.” Lynch's request to use the word “matter” seems very much like President Trump's request that Comey announce that he was not under investigation.

Comey never spoke out against any of the pressure applied to get him to influence investigations until after he was fired by President Trump. While Comey did refer to the Hillary matter as an investigation in both his July 5 press conference and his October 28 letter to Congress, he was unable to explain his actions except to write, “It is entirely possible my concern about making her an illegitimate president by concealing the restarted investigation bore greater weight than it would have if the election appeared closer or if Donald Trump were ahead in all polls. But I don’t know.”

The more that emerges from the Trump-Comey feud, the worse all sides look. Both the Obama Administration and President Trump seem to have engaged in similar “swampy” tactics to steer investigations away from political allies while Mr. Comey seems to be pliant and incompetent. Rather than conspiring with one side or the other, Comey seems to have tried to please everyone and ended up pleasing no one.

Originally published on The Resurgent

Russian Trolls Posted Fake Hillary Sex Video

As if launching cyberattacks against state election agencies was not bad enough, Russian trolls have now outdone themselves. The Russians are now confirmed to have posted a video so heinous that it could be considered a WMD, a weapon of mass distraction. Yes, it's true. The Russians were responsible for a Hillary Clinton sex tape.

A joke went around the internet in 2016 that warned, “If you get an email that says it's a Hillary Clinton sex tape, don't click the link!” The punch line added, “It's really a sex tape of Hillary Clinton.”

In this case, the video is not authentic. NBC News reports that the video was traced back to a Reddit account known to be a Russian front. The account, Rubinjer, has already been shut down, but was one of Russia's most popular known accounts with more than 100,000 up-votes.

The sex tape was posted to two popular porn sites, which we won't name here, before the 2016 election. (If you want to see it for some reason, you'll have to find it for yourself.)

To their credit, internet users were skeptical of the claim that the video featured Hillary. “If it’s her I think we'd see her face at least once,” once user commented.

A whistleblower from Russia's Internet Research Agency, a notorious troll farm, told Russia's TV Rain last year that the video was produced by the group. “We did the most ridiculous things we could think of,” Alan Baskaev said, adding that he feared retaliation for speaking out.

It's doubtful that the sex video had any effect on the election, but it does show the lengths to which the Russians went to stir up public opinion in the United States during the election. The video was clearly an illicit attempt to influence the outcome of the election.

It also is a warning sign for future elections. The video of Hillary Clinton was not believable, but as technology gets better and the Russians get more adept at understanding American politics, future attempts might not be so transparent. Would a video that purported to feature Donald Trump be so laughable? What about Ted Cruz or Mike Pence?

In an era of high stakes and closely fought elections, it is more and more likely that Russian trolls can influence enough voters to sway an election. Given that the aim of Russia is to destabilize and weaken the United States there is no guarantee which candidate will be given their backing next time.

So carefully consider what you watch and read on the internet. If it sounds too stupid to be true, it probably is (although in this day and age it is difficult to be sure). If it seems far-fetched, then you should at least check with other reliable sources before believing and spreading it.

And, by the way, if you see a link for a Hillary Clinton sex tape, don't click on it.

Originally published to the Resurgent