The Cook Political Report notes the scope of the GOP’s congressional victories: Only 15 of the 241 House Republicans won their races by less than a 10-point margin, even though nearly two dozen of them represented districts that Hillary Clinton carried.
Overall, House Republicans won 51% of the national vote, and will be representing 55% of the seats in the lower chamber.
Nate Silver: “At the risk of engaging in a hit-and-run argument, I wanted to go on record to say that I think this is a bad idea. My reasons are best encapsulated in this tweetstorm by the political scientist Matt Glassman, who notes that there is a strong precedent toward electors abiding by the vote in their states. Other than a few one-off cases like Leach, the historical norm has been that electors stick with the voters’ choice unless the candidate died, as in the case of Greeley or the losing vice presidential candidate James S. Sherman in 1912.”
“Furthermore, as Glassman notes, it’s not at all clear what the upside for Democrats would be. This year, narrowly denying Trump a majority in the Electoral College would still probably result in Trump’s election via the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, producing the same president but with a Constitutional crisis along the way. And in the long run, encouraging electors to deviate from the outcomes in their states would result in the House more often deciding presidential elections, which is probably not in Democrats’ interests given how their voters are clustered — and gerrymandered — into urban congressional districts.”
NBC News: “The American political landscape has changed a lot over the past 25 years but there is no more dramatic shift than the one that has pushed this state from deep blue to ruby red. In the 1992 presidential election, Democrat Bill Clinton won West Virginia by a solid 13 percentage points. In November, Republican President-elect Donald Trump captured the state in a walk — winning it by more than 40 percentage points. The forces behind that turnaround are complex. The decline of the coal industry and the changing demographics of the political parties explain part of it. But underneath that are the peaks and valleys of the Appalachian Mountains that make West Virginia what it is: picturesque, resource-rich and remote.”
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Filmmaker Michael Moore says he will pay the fines of any Republican electors punished for voting against Donald Trump, ABC News reports.
Said Moore on Facebook: “I obviously can’t and won’t give you money to vote tomorrow, but if you do vote your conscience and you are punished for it, I will personally step up pay your fine, which is my legal right to do.”
President Obama told NPR that Democrats suffered stinging electoral losses in last month’s vote because they failed to campaign in hard-hit rural areas.
Said Obama: “You’ve got a situation where they’re not only entire states but also big chunks of states where, if we’re not showing up, if we’re not in there making an argument, then we’re going to lose. And we can lose badly, and that’s what happened in this election.”
He added: “There are clearly failures on our part to give people in rural areas or in exurban areas a sense day-to-day that we’re fighting for them or connected to them. Part of the reason it’s important to show up…is because it then builds trust and it gives you a better sense of how should you talk about issues in a way that feel salient and feel meaningful to people.”
“President-elect Donald Trump has continued employing a private security and intelligence team at his victory rallies, and he is expected to keep at least some members of the team after he becomes president,” Politico reports.
“The arrangement represents a major break from tradition. All modern presidents and presidents-elect have entrusted their personal security entirely to the Secret Service, and their event security mostly to local law enforcement, according to presidential security experts and Secret Service sources.”
New York Times: “After all the allegations of rampant voter fraud and claims that millions had voted illegally, the people who supervised the general election last month in states around the nation have been adding up how many credible reports of fraud they actually received. The overwhelming consensus: next to none.”
Bloomberg has a good Q&A on voter fraud with Rick Hasen.
“Donald Trump’s improbable-then-unstoppable run for the presidency takes its last, formal step Monday as the Electoral College meets to officially name him the winner,” the Washington Post reports.
“The usually overlooked, constitutionally obligated gathering of 538 electors in 50 states and the District of Columbia has earned special scrutiny and intense lobbying this year by Trump’s opponents, including last-minute weekend protests that stretched from Austin to Denver and Los Angeles.”
New York Times: Here’s what to expect.
A new Politico/Morning Consult poll shows there’s little support for a long-shot effort to free this year’s electors to choose a candidate other than Trump.
“Donald Trump’s top advisers are jousting over control of the new political group they are forming to help press the president-elect’s agenda, as rival camps have formed with repercussions for who ends up as senior staff at the White House,” Politico reports.
“The issue came to a head last Wednesday, in a glass-walled conference room on the 14th floor of Trump Tower, where about a dozen members of Trump’s inner circle gathered to plot the future of the still-unformed nonprofit.”
President-elect Donald Trump “doesn’t know much,” former President Bill Clinton told a local newspaper earlier this month, but “one thing he does know is how to get angry, white men to vote for him,” Politico reports.
Clinton also scoffed at the regular claim from Trump and his team that the president-elect’s Election Day win represented a “landslide” victory, despite the fact that he lost the popular vote.
Said Clinton: “Landslide? I got something like 370 electoral votes. That was a landslide.”
Wall Street Journal: “Fresh signs emerged Sunday that President-elect Donald Trump could embrace the intelligence community’s view that the Russians were behind a computer-hacking operation aimed at influencing the November election. A senior Trump aide said Mr. Trump could accept Russia’s involvement if there is a unified presentation of evidence from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies. This followed weeks of skepticism from the president-elect and his supporters that there is sufficient evidence that Russia was responsible for cyberattacks against the Democratic National Committee or leak of stolen emails.”
Washington Post: “The White House may be the nation’s time-honored symbol of power, but Trump is establishing his 58-story colossus at 725 Fifth Avenue as a stage for his new role, potentially nipping at Washington’s reputation as the center of American authority and the stature of its most famous address, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”
“On most days, crowds of tourists, rank-and-file New Yorkers and candidates seeking jobs with the new administration endure a maze of checkpoints, barricades and police command posts on the traffic-choked streets that bound Trump Tower.”
Peter Weber: “Democrats in the House will have very little power, but Senate Democrats will have a chance to block Trump’s more outrageous proposals — at least as long as the filibuster stands — and a handful of Republicans skeptical of various aspects of the Trump agenda (see: Russia) will wield a lot of clout. More to the point, these senators will have every right to block Trump, if they see fit. After all, America has elected its senators by popular vote since the 17th Amendment took effect in 1913 — unlike Trump, all 100 of these Senate members won more votes than their opponents.”
“Republicans did not assent in 2009 after Obama won 365 electoral votes, 52.9 percent of the popular vote, and nearly 10 million more votes than his Republican opponent. If Democrats, and even a few Republicans, don’t buy this 46 percenter’s claim to a mandate, that seems more like common sense than fighting dirty.”
Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) “was so eager to celebrate Hillary Clinton’s presidential inauguration, he booked 200 hotel rooms in DC for family, friends and supporters of his possible future bid for the presidency,” the New York Post reports.
Leaked documents show that Rex Tillerson, the businessman nominated by Donald Trump to be the next secretary of state, is the long-time director of a US-Russian oil firm based in the tax haven of the Bahamas, The Guardian reports.
“The leaked 2001 document comes from the corporate registry in the Bahamas. It was one of 1.3m files given to the Germany newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung by an anonymous source. The registry is public but details of individual directors are typically incomplete or missing entirely.”
“I do regret sitting down and having a conversation with him, because it did give people concern.”
— Attorney General Loretta Lynch, in an interview on CNN, about her airport tarmac meeting with Bill Clinton during the election.
Washington Post: “Pressure on members of the electoral college to select someone other than Donald Trump has grown dramatically — and noisily — in recent weeks, causing some to waver but yielding little evidence that Trump will fall short when electors convene in most state capitals Monday to cast their votes. Carole Joyce of Arizona expected her role as a GOP elector to be pretty simple… But then came the mail and the emails and the phone calls — first hundreds, then thousands of voters worrying that Trump’s impulsive nature would lead the country into another war.”
Politico: Electors under siege.
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
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