You're Fired: The Perfect Guide to Beating Donald Trump

by Paul Begala

Latinos ranked the following five issues as most important to them: jobs and the economy, health care, immigration, education, and gun violence.

The common ground between blacks and Hispanics jobs, education, health care.

In 2012, Barack Obama lost married women by 7 percent. He won unmarried women by 36 percent—a

Hillary won married women by 2 percent and unmarried women by 29 percent.

In the midterm election of 2018, Republicans lost married women by 10 points and unmarried women by 35 percent. The marriage gap had narrowed from 43 points under Obama to 25 under Pelosi.

James Barnes, coauthor of The Almanac of American Politics, has hypothesized that this is programmatic: single women are more concerned about a safety net.

“For an elderly single person who lacks a pension or savings, Social Security and Medicare are truly vital.”

attribute the difference in the way married and unmarried women vote to gender-linked fate. Unmarried women, they argue, see their own fate more closely and clearly linked to the fate of other women than do married women. “Marriage alters women’s perceptions of self-interest,” they argue, “by institutionalizing their partnerships with men and consequently leading women to feel less connected to other women.”

The idea that you’re liberal when you’re young and conservative when you’re old is baloney. Voters who came of age under FDR remained more progressive throughout their lives, just as those who came of age under Reagan are still conservative today

How progressive are young people today? They are by far the most progressive generation in memory. In a 2018 Pew Research Center survey, 57 percent of millennials described themselves as “consistently or mostly liberal.” Just 12 percent of millennials are conservative—that’s

By contrast, just 28 percent of voters over sixty-five are liberal, while 29 p...

In that same Pew survey, nearly eight in ten millennials say immigrants strengthen the country; less than half of seniors say that.

The majority of young voters say racial discrimination is the main reason many black people can’t get ahead these days. Three-fourths of senior citizens disagree.

This is reflected in the protests and riots. So many younger people were energized to protest, and many older people seemed to be deeply unsettled by the anger and violence shown by those tired of massive oppression.

Younger voters don’t remember the Cold War; they remember the Great Recession, when hundreds of thousands of jobs were lost, lives were upended, communities crushed. No wonder they have a more favorable view of socialism than do their elders, while less than half view capitalism favorably.

With poverty increasing, or at least an increase in job stability, this explains increasing dissatisfaction with capitalism as well among many younger people, such as AOC.

They have lived most of their lives under the specter of George W. Bush’s forever wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. I have spoken with enlisted personnel and even some officers who have little or no memory of a time when their nation wasn’t at war.

Nearly twice as many Americans under age thirty say other countries are better than the USA as say America is the greatest country on earth.

The majority of millennials say the federal government is doing too little to reduce the effects of climate change, while less than a third of older voters feel that way.

Of course older people feel less concern about climate change — they represent the many who let it get to the bad condition it is in today.

Nearly all millennials (78 percent, to be exact) want our country to prioritize renewable energy sources over fossil fuels.

They may be losing faith in capitalism and religion (which we’ll get to in a moment), but young American...

According to the nonpartisan group States of Change, millennials will comprise 34.2 percent of the eligible voting population in 2020.

Their numbers could far exceed the combination of baby boomers (28.4 percent) and those older than boomers, often called the Silent Generation (9.4 percent).

Younger voters have always voted in smaller numbers than their elders.

whereas 10 percent of the voters in 2016 were age twenty-five and younger, 16 percent were sixty-five and older—and seniors solidly preferred Trump.

The fastest-growing religious denomination is not evangelicals or Catholics or Muslims or Hindus or Jews. It is Nones: people who say they have no religious affiliation.

Those who claim no particular religion were just 16 percent of the country at the end of the George W. Bush presidency. Today they account for more than one in four Americans,

Sixty-eight million adults in America are Nones.

Nones tend to be more Democratic. Those who express no particular religion, according to the Pew Research Center, lean Democratic by a 23-point margin, and atheists prefer the Democrats by a 54 percent margin,

Whereas only one in three evangelical Protestants says homosexuality should be accepted by society, 83 percent of Nones do.

Donald Trump’s constant racist rants, his misogynistic comments, his right-wing judges, and his cozying up to white supremacists—those moves do not warm the heart of the Rising American Electorate.

voters are not drawn to a party that calls them idiots.

Republicans have driven themselves into a box canyon. By doubling and, heck, quadrupling down on older male white working-class voters, they are missing the demographic bus. The smart ones know this and have urged the GOP to modernize and moderate. But Donald Trump has killed that effort.

The key for Democrats is to build coalitions, and coalitions require web issues, not a hodgepodge of separate issues for different communities. Democrats should take literally that old Baptist hymn “Blessed Be the Ties That Bind.” They need to stitch together communities of color with white people; younger voters with seniors; LGBTQ+ Americans with straight allies; religious progressives with atheists. To do that they need issues with broad, diverse appeal. This is no time for boutique, artisanal, bespoke messaging.

John Ashcroft, set out to hunt down the fraudulent voters. (Ashcroft has the distinction of being the only senator in history to lose his Senate seat to a dead man—true story. How do you give that concession speech? “We tried our best, friends, but the other side just outworked us. My congratulations to the late Mel Carnahan.”)

Haha

Attorney General Ashcroft’s investigators looked into hundreds of campaigns, in which a total of 197 million votes had been cast. They convicted precisely twenty-six people of voter fraud. For those of you keeping score at home, as the writer/producer/actor/activist/podcaster Bob Cesca noted in Salon, “that’s a voter fraud rate of 0.00000013 percent.”

The Washington Post reported on a study of fourteen years of elections, in which 1 billion votes were cast. It found thirty-one cases of fraud.

After the 2016 election—the one that Trump claimed was rife with millions of illegal voters from sea to shining sea—Philip Bump of the Washington Post (no wonder Trump hates that paper so much) searched Nexis for any published report of voter fraud. He found four—out of more than 135 million votes cast. Well, Bump found a couple more cases that were under investigation but not yet proved.

my favorite case was from Iowa. A woman in Des Moines tried to vote twice but was caught. She was trying to vote twice for—oh, you just know it—Donald Trump. She was asked why she did it. “The polls are rigged,” she said, echoing her hero.

If you get caught, you go to federal prison, which I’ve never been to but I’m sure Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort will tell us all about when he’s eligible for parole. So that’s a big downside risk. And the reward? Well, your favored candidate gets one more vote. Just one. You need more than 60 million votes to win the presidency, so the potential fraudster is risking prison for nothing.

Voting is as fundamental a right as there is in a democracy. It cannot be a “use it or lose it” deal. Your right to vote is not like your right bicep, where if you don’t exercise it, it withers. If you miss church for a few weeks—or a few years—do you lose your freedom of religion?

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution concluded that closing precincts and requiring voters to drive farther to vote—ten miles, in some cases—prevented 54,000 to 85,000 Georgians from voting in the Abrams-Kemp election. Abrams lost by about 55,000 votes.

In 2016, Brian Kemp, when he was secretary of state, was the only state election official in America who declined federal help once the Department of Homeland Security identified the threat from Russia to our voting systems. The only one.

“The question remains,” he said at the time, “whether the federal government will subvert the Constitution to achieve the goal of federalizing elections under the guise of security.” What a bunch of hooey. This guy wants you to believe that the government of the United States of America—you know, the people who have the Navy SEALS and those cool jets ...

But 300,000 Wisconsinites who are old enough to vote don’t have one of those forms of photo ID.

You shouldn’t lose your right to vote just because you don’t drive or fly on airplanes.

one political party has won the popular vote in six out of seven presidential elections.

But from Bill Clinton’s 1992 victory to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, Democrats have been the choice of the American people every time, except for George W. Bush’s narrow reelection in 2004.

National Popular Vote Interstate Compact

If you live in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, Minnesota, Arizona, North Carolina, or Georgia, expect to see a lot of rallies and a ton of ads. Voters in the other forty-two states, well, thank you for playing. Presidential elections should not be a spectator sport.

As far back as August 2017, just eight months into his presidency, he had so undermined his supporters’ faith in elections that polls showed a shocking result: Poll: 52 percent of Republicans would support postponing the 2020 election if Trump proposed it.

Trump’s madness. His endless undermining of democratic institutions puts him in a win-win position: if he does win the election he can say, as he did in 2016, that he won in spite of the rigged system. But if loses, he will have laid the groundwork for an all-out war against democracy itself.

Responding to Trump’s War on Democracy