Open Thread Jan. 1: Keeping Up With the Jones Campaign

Didja notice that during the weeks leading up to Alabama’s special Senate election you heard and read almost nothing about Doug Jones and the kind of race he was running? That was no accident. The team behind Jones included Joe Trippi, the strategist who ran DL patron saint Howard Dean’s presidential campaign. Trippi sat for an interview with Vox’s Ezra Klein about the approach they took with Jones: Don’t nationalize the race because that motivates Trump voters. The story is full of information: Jones’ internal polls had Moore up by 1 point the day the WaPo creeper story ran and Jones up by 2 the day before the election; Jones won by 1.8. Those numbers swung 3-4 points toward Moore every time Trump tweeted about the race but dissipated after two or three days, leading Trippi to observe that if Trump had held his Florida rally two days later Moore might have won. He also shared an interesting insight into Trump voters in the deep-red state: They are fine with the amount of chaos Trump produced, but they don’t want more of it.

This piece is full of Third Way hand-wringing but still sums up the folly that is Trump’s “foreign policy,” which has vastly accelerated the timeline for China’s assumption of world leadership from a crumbling USA.

The folly of Republican economic policy is obvious to everyone except Republicans, whom we should really rename Stepford Citizens. Josh Marshall argues that even Trump, in his incoherent way, recognizes he has sold America a shit sandwich. All the GOP electeds know it, actually; 237 wea

In addition to being horrible in design, the tax bill is even worse in execution, a logical result of being hatched in secret and passed without review or debate. Its provisions harming blue states at the expense of red ones are so nakedly unfair that blue states, led by New York, are considering lawsuits, which Delaware, being a low-tax state, probably won’t join.