He is the biggest winner of the U.S. election? Washington’s most cunning politician is not pretending anymore, Trump is furious From Bing Ru Watch America 00:00 13:08
Trump tweeted this morning to warn Senate Republican boss McConnell and others: get tough! Or you will lose the Republican Party. We won big in the presidential election! We’re going to fight and not let the Democrats steal the election.
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The implication is that Trump is encouraging Republican bigwigs not to acknowledge the results of Biden’s victory and to fight for Trump and overturn the election results.
But after this week’s Electoral College vote, McConnell said publicly Tuesday, “I want to congratulate President-elect Biden, and while many of us wish the presidential election had gone the other way, our system of government operates to determine who is sworn in on Jan. 20. The Electoral College has already indicated the outcome.” Soon after, Biden said he had a friendly 10-minute call with McConnell.
Fourteen hours later, Trump began a Twitter rant against McConnell: Old Mac, 75 million votes (all caps), the highest for a sitting U.S. president! Don’t give up too soon. Republicans must finally learn to fight. People are angry!
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And McConnell did something even more infuriating to Trump, telling other senators in private not to get involved in Trump’s fight to try to overturn the Electoral College vote, and not to make a scene when Congress certifies the Electoral College vote on Jan. 6.
And McConnell as the Senate Republican leader, his speech is pivotal, and can even be said to mark a watershed in the Republican Party’s attitude toward the election results shift. The original support for Trump’s challenge to the election results of several big brothers, this time are refusing to stand, such as South Carolina’s Graham (Lindsey Graham) is not willing to criticize McConnell abandon Trump; originally to help Trump in the Supreme Court lawsuit Texas Senator Ted Cruz (Ted Cruz) said: they are big boys, they can solve their own problems.
The public confrontation between Trump and McConnell is the first rift between Trump and the top of the Republican Party since the U.S. election. It also underscores that the interests represented by both sides are beginning to diverge.
Hate each other, and need each other
McConnell, 78, has been a senator for 36 years and is known as the most cunning politician in Washington. In the past four years, without McConnell’s support, the advancement of Trump’s political platform would have been inching forward. And as a senior Republican establishment, four years ago McConnell and Trump, a real estate mogul from New York, aura is very incompatible.
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Plastic brotherhood
A former U.S. government official described it this way: Compared with Trump, who tweets everything he thinks, McConnell thinks more, says less and is as shy as gold. Trump is always thinking about winning today! This hour to win! McConnell is fighting a constant battle, he is very sensitive to political reality, and his only goal is to be the majority leader. And McConnell is a man who is extremely patient, cunning, and good at covering his tracks. If Trump is a populist, anti-elite, anti-establishment; then McConnell is one of the biggest establishment figures Trump is against.
And McConnell’s relationship with Trump reflects today’s deeply divided Republican Party: global corporate elite vs. lower-class white conservatives. In their new book, “Let Them Eat Tweets,” political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson describe “expediency” as the heart of today’s Republican Party. The 2017 Republican push for tax reform, for example, is a prime example. It rewarded the Republican Party’s largest donors by lowering corporate taxes. The legislation was unpopular with both Democratic and Republican middle voters, but in order to win the election, the two factions of the Republican Party formed an alliance much like Trump’s relationship with McConnell: they hate each other, but need each other.
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McConnell has defended Trump all the way through the past four years. Especially when Trump was being investigated for impeachment, and before the case even reached the Senate, McConnell said the Senate would fire off a dismissal and there was no need to call additional witnesses.
If in public, McConnell and Trump support each other, how is McConnell in private? The New Yorker wrote in a story that McConnell’s inner circle revealed that in private McConnell called Trump a “nut” (nuts)! And that he was much smarter than Trump, and that he couldn’t stand Trump. (Of course, McConnell’s spokesman denied the content of this report.
Politically McConnell’s loyalty to Trump has also cost him. McConnell has lost the respect of some longtime supporters. For example, David Jones, a big money backer who has supported McConnell since 1984, once gave McConnell donations totaling $4.6 million. John David Dyche, a Louisville attorney who wrote McConnell’s biography, said McConnell knew Trump was an ugly man and totally incompetent to be president, and that McConnell’s support for Trump showed he had no ideology he adhered to, only his own political rights.
And in addition to losing political allies, McConnell also lost the support of his three daughters. McConnell’s youngest daughter, Porter, is a radical activist and was the director of advocacy for Take On Wall Street, a coalition of unions and nonprofits. After McConnell helped Trump appoint Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh, Porter publicly criticized the nomination. In addition, McConnell’s second daughter, Claire, has also criticized the appointment.
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And McConnell’s eldest daughter, Eleanor, is a registered Democrat. (As I write this, I not only lament how Republican bigwigs are netting out bear children in their homes? Trump’s personal lawyer Giuliani’s daughter, Trump’s former adviser Conway’s daughter, none of them are worrying Refer to the history article ?【Breaking】Trump’s most senior adviser resigned, how the bear children have beaten the president of the United States?
Al Cross, a journalism professor at the University of Kentucky, described McConnell’s partnership with Trump as the most important political relationship in the United States. Cross had hoped to see McConnell criticize Trump on the big issues, after all, from denouncing McCarthy to Nixon, Republicans have defended the country’s democratic institutions across party lines. But McConnell is clear that if his relationship with Trump breaks down, it will be a disaster for Republican control of the Senate. So for the past four years, McConnell and Trump have had a common goal: win!
McConnell’s big game
The moment McConnell congratulated Biden on his election, it meant that his and Trump’s political interests began to diverge. Trump is seeking his own re-election; McConnell is seeking to remain in control of the Senate. And now the Senate will depend on Georgia’s Senate election on January 5 next year. This is the reason why most Republicans are united with Trump after the election, and Trump represents 74 million voters.
But in 2020, not only the U.S. presidential election, but also the state and local level elections, and the Republican Party has a very good performance this year, not only did not lose any of the seats in the House of Representatives, but also took back nine seats from the Democrats. Now the Democrats have 222 seats in the House of Representatives and the Republicans 211 seats. According to this trend, the U.S. polling analysis website 538 expects that in 2022, the Republican Party will regain the dominant power in the House of Representatives. Since World War II, the party to which the U.S. president belongs has lost an average of 28 seats in the House of Representatives in midterm elections.
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In addition to Congress, the Democrats have lost badly in state-level congressional races. All 50 U.S. states have state-level Senates and Houses of Representatives, and of the nation’s 100 legislatures, Republicans control 59, Democrats 39, and Alaska is a shared-rights state. And 86 legislatures held elections in 2020, with Republicans expanding their advantage to win the New Hampshire House and Senate. This means that when the decennial census begins in 2021, Republican-controlled state legislatures will be in control of redistricting in most areas.
Back in 2010, Republicans fought a good fight with their “red map” plan. At the time, Republicans won a record 700 state legislative seats, with 20 legislatures flipping from blue to red. The Republicans took control of the House and Senate in 25 states, establishing a decade-long advantage at once.
Another 10 years of firm Republican control
There is a term in American politics called Gerrymander, which refers to the way in which districts are gerrymandered by the electoral interests of one party. The point of gerrymandering is that the state legislators who hold the power can choose their own constituents. The term was originally derived from the name of Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry and the combination of the noun sala-mander, which is what a gerrymandered district map looks like.
There are two main ways to expand party strength through the Gerry salamander: Packing and Cracking.
Concentration of votes: Concentration of votes for the opposing camp supporters as far as possible to concentrate into their own iron vote area, in order to consume reduce the force of these votes in other areas. Let’s say a state with 1 million voters and 10 electoral districts has 550,000 Democrats and 450,000 Republicans. If the Republicans have the right to gerrymander, the Republicans can use two districts to divide away 200,000 Democratic voters, and in the remaining 8 districts, the Democrats lose the state 2:8 with 35,000 vs. 45,000 Republicans in each district.
Spreading the vote: Spreading the vote means dividing the opposing party’s iron vote districts into as few votes as possible, thus doing the job of diluting the vote. For example, if there are still 1 million voters and 10 districts in the state, this time the Democrats account for 450,000 voters and the Republicans account for 550,000, if the Republicans still divide the districts, they only need to divide them equally, so that each district is 45,000 Democrats VS 55,000 Republicans, then the Republicans will win 10:0 and sweep the state.
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If anything, in those traditionally red or blue states, redistricting with population makes little sense. But in some key states, it will have far-reaching effects. In North Carolina, for example, the 2018 midterm elections were a two-party race for 13 seats, with a 50-50 split of Democratic and Republican voters voting, and the end result was that Democrats took only three seats and Republicans took 10, thanks to the Republicans’ use of the Jelly Salamander.
After the 2011 census, North Carolina redrew its electoral districts and the lines were disjointed ?
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One of the oddest shapes is this narrow House District 12 ?
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The reason this district was drawn in such a strange shape was because the Republicans divided three black cities into one district, thus pooling the Democratic vote into “invalid votes.
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The darker the color, the more the Democrats are gathered
However, this scheme was eventually ruled to violate the U.S. Constitution because of “racial discrimination”, so the Republicans came up with a new idea, to divide the districts according to party affiliation, in order to dilute the Democratic voters ?
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Dilute a concentration of Democratic voters into a Republican district
In the 2020 state elections, Republicans continue to hold control in the state House and Senate, which also means that Republicans will have the power to dominate the gerrymandering in 2021. North Carolina’s gerrymandering could be replicated in every state held by the Republican Party, and while unjust gerrymandering has been repeatedly challenged legally, the impact of the Jelly Salamander remains far-reaching.
While Trump’s first presidential term is almost over, the next decade is just beginning for the Republican Party under McConnell.
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