Looking Back, And Forward

This has been one weird year. I’m not even going to try writing any kind of comprehensive year-end roundup, mainly because I would hardly know where to begin. The election of Donald Trump as the 45^th President obviously sticks in everyone’s mind, both because it is still so fresh and because it is perhaps the event that will most directly affect us personally over the next few years. But there were others: Republicans holding the Senate, against all odds; Brexit; the reemergence of Anthony Weiner and the role he played in sinking the Clinton campaign…

And we don’t even have to get into politics to find the craziness of the year. The Cavs’ NBA victory in the spring; the Cubs’ first World Series title in over a century; the robberies, green pools, and smashed records that were the Rio Olympics…

And there were many notable deaths this year, seemingly even more than in recent years. Two that stood out for me, from two very different worlds, were Associate Justice Antonin Scalia and Carrie Fisher. RIP.

This is perhaps the first year that can also be used as an adjective. As in, “that’s so crazy” can now be written as simply, “that’s so 2016.”

This was also, obviously, a big year for The Conservatory. We launched in June as a political site without any name recognition or outside support—but fortunately at a time when demand for outside political analysis and opinion was near an all-time high. Now, six months later, the site is growing, slowly but surely. Thank you to everyone who takes just a few minutes out of their day to read an article or click on a link.

The new year promises to be a big one in terms of politics, and by extension a big one for The Conservatory. I hope to continue offering the same kind of quality articles and opinion pieces on political news of all sorts, as well as potentially increasing the number of culture-related columns. But the site will remain, first and foremost, a home for conservative thought and divergent opinions. I hope you’ll continue on that journey with us.

Happy New Year.

Changes Since 1992: California

Following Donald Trump’s victory, the dominant media narrative on the two major parties has quickly gone from “Republicans are nearing extinction” to “Democrats are no longer a national party,” and understandably so. Just about the only thing we heard in all election coverage of the past four years, from the end of the 2012 campaign until last month, was how Republicans were facing demographic ruin. The minority, Democratic coalition was ascendant. The GOP must embrace identity politics or be washed away by ever-growing numbers of liberal Hispanic voters.

Now, of course, the demographic focus is all on how the Democrats have abandoned the white working class. But just as those voters were wrongly ignored during the Obama years, it would be a mistake to think that just because Republicans won this election, changing demographics are no longer an issue for them and vital swing states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin will ultimately trend in their direction. Many states are trending red, as I’ve written about over the past month, but states are also trending blue, far more dramatically than Virginia.

Many people forget that California, the home of both Nancy Pelosi and Ronald Reagan, was once a Republican stronghold. And many of those who remember this fact, don’t realize that the state was still widely competitive for Republicans, even conservative ones, as recently as 2000. The transformation of California from conservative stronghold to battleground state to liberal bastion should be a warning that, just as Democrats ignored the white working class at their peril, Republicans ignore Hispanics and other minorities at theirs.

Although California has voted for the Democratic presidential nominee in every election since 1992, it is an interesting fact that before 2008, the nominee consistently won by less than thirteen points—and that margin was falling:

1992	1996	2000	2004	2008	2012	2016
Clinton +13.4	Clinton +12.9	Gore +11.6	Kerry +10.0	Obama +24.0	Obama +21.0	Clinton +28.8

These were all still convincing victories, to be sure. But the trend in favor of Republicans, post-Obama, is intriguing. And for comparison’s sake, Kerry’s ten-point margin in 2004 is almost identical to Bush’s concurrent 9.8% margin in… Arkansas.

Statewide races paint an even more interesting picture. Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein have served as California’s two U.S. Senators since 1992 (Feinstein won in a special election that year, and won her first full term in 1994). Both have been would I would term fairly generic liberal Democrats, so one would expect them to regularly win California by fairly wide margins. And indeed, they have generally won reelection handily, but there have also been interesting exceptions.

In 1992, Feinstein won her Senate seat by more than sixteen points, but Boxer won by less than five points. Two years later, when Feinstein was up for election to her first full term, she won by less than two points. And in 1998, Boxer won by ten points.

That year marked the last time either faced a truly competitive reelection fight until 2010, when Boxer won another term (against Republican nominee Carly Fiorina) by just 9.6 points. This year, Boxer retired, and under California’s new “top-two”, all-party primary voting system, two Democrats advanced to the general election—Rep. Loretta Sanchez and state Attorney General Kamala Harris, who won by a twenty-five point margin.

But no electoral analysis of California would be complete without looking at attorney general and gubernatorial elections, and that’s where things really start getting interesting. Several times since 1992, California has seen competitive, high-profile races in which a Republican has either won or come close to winning—most recently in 2010, when Kamala Harris was elected Attorney General by just two-tenths of a point.

California Gubernatorial Elections, 1994-2014:
1994	1998	2002	2006	2010	2014
Wilson +14.9	Davis +19.6	Davis +5.0	Schwarzenegger +16.9	Brown +11.4	Brown +18.8

California Attorney General Elections, 1994-2014:
1994	1998	2002	2006	2010	2014
Lungren +14.4	Lockyer +9.1	Lockyer +11.0	Brown +18.2	Harris +0.2	Harris +13

Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger also won a special election for governor in 2003, by a margin of 17.1%.

This is where Democratic dominion of California begins to look much less permanent. Schwarzenegger’s candidacy was obviously a special case; there were many voters who would presumably have voted for a generic Democrat over a Republican, but the possibility of having the Terminator as governor was just too good to resist. But some of the other recent Democratic margins are shockingly low (looking at you, Kamala Harris), and every single Democratic victory over the last twenty years has significantly underperformed the margin we’ve come to expect from Democrat presidential candidates in the state. Obviously, a governor who enters office with a five-point margin of victory is just as powerful as one who enters in a landslide. But only one will be looking over his shoulder as reelection looms, and seek to reach out to independents and Republicans accordingly, at the risk of upsetting his own party.

Overall, however, and particularly at the presidential level, California is a warning that in politics, nothing is eternal—and today, Democrats in Arkansas and Republicans in California find themselves in almost identical positions. Neither state is permanently out of reach for the minority party, but they will have to fight for every inch of what they once took for granted. New coalitions will have to be formed, new outreach efforts aggressively pursued, and new strategies tested, because just as the current electoral map began to take shape in 1992, so to could the winner of the 2032 presidential election be decided by actions taken by the California Republican Party in 2017.

Movie Review: Rogue One

Spoilers ahead

Yesterday I was finally able to see the latest Star Wars movie, Rogue One. I’ll go into more detail below, but it would be dishonest to start with anything other than this advice: If you haven’t seen it, go now. You’re missing out.

The movie is the first standalone in the Star Wars universe, not connected with the core, episodic storyline or the Skywalker story, and there are a number of differences that make it feel unlike any other movie in the franchise. There is no opening crawl. The music was not composed by John Williams, and therefore was oddly forgettable for a franchise that has some of the most iconic music in cinema history. And, most importantly, this was the first movie in which a Skywalker was not among the main characters (though more than one make appearances over the course of the movie).

The movie is, in a sense, one about the forgotten men and women of the Star Wars universe, ironic coming so close coming after an election season that was all about the “forgotten man” in the end. The Jedi and the Force are mentioned often, but this movie is about the soldiers, the ordinary people who struggle against the Empire.

It is also darker and more gritty than the average Star Wars movie, and more adult oriented (though not a gore-fest by any means). Death is constant, even more than in regular Star Wars movies—if you’ve seen it already, you know what I mean. And even seemingly clear-cut sides—the good Rebels versus the evil Empire—become less fairy-tale, more real life. A good example comes early in the movie. In the scene which first introduces one of the main Rebel characters, we see him shoot a Rebel informant in the back, in order to allow the main character to more easily escape pursuing stormtroopers. With seemingly no remorse. The action serves to make the character’s later evolution more compelling, but again, this is supposed to be one of the good guys.

As far as the plot, I largely agreed with many of the other reviews around the Internet. The movie starts out slowly but begins to hit its stride about midway through, and the last twenty minutes…wow. There’s plenty for casual viewers and Star Wars fans alike to enjoy, and for all of the cameos sprinkled throughout the film, it rarely feels forced. This is the bridge between the prequels and the original trilogy that has been desperately needed.

Overall, the tone and theme are welcome additions to a universe that might often seem narrow and familiar, making it richer and more layered. If Disney is going to stick to their plan of making one Star Wars movie a year, it will have to try different things. And if Rogue One—and The Force Awakens before it—are signs of things to come, then the future of Star Wars has never looked brighter.

Trump's Cabinet: The Christmas Gift That Keeps On Giving

Trump’s Cabinet is almost complete, with only the nominations for Secretaries of Agriculture and Veteran’s Affairs, as of this writing, left to announce. And what a Cabinet it’s shaping up to be.

My original intention was to write something every time Trump announced a new Cabinet nomination, discussing the good and the bad, but this quickly became unrealistic for one primary reason—there are just so many good choices that people would quickly get tired of me repeating lines about how great they all were. And I would get tired of repeating them. But now, near the end of the process, seems an opportune time to say: This is one great Cabinet.

Jeff Sessions at the Justice Department. Rick Perry at Energy. Mike Pompeo at the CIA. Nikki Haley at the U.N., and Betsy DeVos at Education. Mick Mulvaney as OMB head. This is the sort of Cabinet I would have expected from a Cruz or Rubio administration, but I never dared hope for even one of these picks from Donald Trump, the man who says Planned Parenthood does “wonderful things” and that “[he] alone can fix” America’s problems. (Well, Jeff Sessions was likely to get his choice of top jobs after his hearty support in the primary. But certainly not Perry, he who said Trump was a “cancer on conservatism”, or Haley, who implicitly criticized Trump in her State of the Union response and endorsed two of his primary opponents.)

To be sure, most of these appointments are going to be a double-edged sword for conservatives. With the exception of DeVos and Perry, many of Trump’s appointees will be leaving current elected offices, so while the Justice Department gains a leader dedicated to proper enforcement of the law, the Senate will lose a powerful voice for oversight and against the expansion of government. The U.S. will gain a strong, unapologetic voice on the world stage, but South Carolina will lose a talented, reforming governor. And the OMB will gain a dedicated fiscal hawk, but the U.S. House will lose one of the fiercest defenders of fiscal sanity and crusaders against wasteful spending. Not every new vacancy will be filled by someone as dedicated to conservative, constitutional ideals as their predecessor.

And not every Trump pick is equally good. Wilbur Ross as Commerce Secretary is troubling, and while Rex Tillerson may be a good man at heart, he should be opposed to lead the State Department. I haven’t failed to notice that the announcements of many of Trump’s worse picks have been paired with, or closely followed by, better ones (Tillerson for State and Perry for Energy were announced at about the same time, for example). It remains to be seen which members of the Cabinet Trump will value and listen to the most.

But overall, the incoming Cabinet will be much stronger in constitutional principle than anything I dared dream during the campaign, or on November 8^th. Well done, Mr. President-elect. And a very Merry Christmas to the Constitution.

Merry Christmas

Sunday marks another year since the birth of Jesus Christ. It is a remarkable story, one that transcends political affiliation and race and national origin and, yes, religion. Even the most avowed atheist must admit, if he’s being honest, that it is remarkable how the birth and life of one man, a carpenter’s son in an oppressed, far-flung corner of the Roman Empire, could so dramatically shape the course of human history.

Like Thanksgiving, Easter, and the Fourth of July, Sunday is a day to spend with friends and family. To come together, give thanks for the year that was, and look forward to the blessings that the new year will bring. And to forgive and heal after a campaign season that drove rifts into even the most apolitical of families.

But above all, don’t forget why we celebrate Christmas, why it is a time for gift-giving and hot chocolate and fat elves in red suits. Because more than two thousand years ago, in the cold and loneliness of the outskirts of Bethlehem, three magi came to honor the newborn King, with gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

It may be a cliché, but that doesn’t make it any less true: Don’t forget the reason for the season.

Come 2019, Republicans Could Be Looking at a Filibuster-Proof Majority

After the way my 2016 predictions went, I’m in no hurry to begin making predictions about 2018. But that being said, Senate Republicans could be looking at a majority of upwards of sixty seats—a number never-before achieved by the GOP in the chamber, rarely achieved by the Democrats, and one which would allow Republican bills and nominees alike to pass easily against unified Democratic opposition.

Five Democrats will be up for reelection in states Donald Trump won by double digits. Another is in a state (Ohio) Trump won by a solid single-digit margin. And another seven are in states Trump either won narrowly (such as Florida and Pennsylvania) or lost narrowly (Virginia).

By comparison, only two Republican senators are in states even remotely competitive—Dean Heller in Nevada and Jeff Flake in Arizona. Both, as of right now, are reasonably popular in their states. Trump won Arizona narrowly, and lost Nevada by only a couple of points.

None of this is to say that Republicans will definitely gain the eight seats necessary to have a filibuster-proof majority when the 116^th Congress convenes. Republicans typically do better in midterm elections, but the incumbent President’s party also usually suffers—as we saw in 2010 and 2014. It is also far to know which Senators, from both parties, are running for reelection. Defending an open seat is usually much harder than defending an incumbent with high name recognition and legislative accomplishments. And, circumstances could change dramatically over the next two years, making Republican seats in Tennessee, Texas, or Utah unexpectedly come into play. In 2012, Republicans were certain of picking up seats in Missouri and North Dakota, and both stayed blue in the end.

But, given what we know now, GOP gains of some sort are likely, with two or three seats being the conservative estimate. That much I feel confident predicting (though not which two or three seats will flip.) And if the next two years are successful, and Trump voters feel validated, then the Senate could become a bastion of one-party rule seen only rarely in its history.

Whether that’s a good thing, regardless of the party in charge, is a discussion for another day.

The Final Results of the 2016 Presidential Election Are In

The results are in: Donald Trump has officially been elected as the 45^th President of the United States.

On Election Day, according to state laws governing the awarding of electoral votes based on the results of the popular vote, Trump won 306 votes, and Hillary Clinton won 232. The margin was virtually unchanged yesterday; Trump took 304, and Clinton, 227. Two pledged Trump electors from Texas went rogue, one voting for John Kasich and the other for Ron Paul. (So the Libertarian Party will still end up with an electoral vote, despite Gary Johnson's failure to make a splash.) Meanwhile, five Clinton electors across the country voted for several other people, including Bernie Sanders, Colin Powell, and Faith Spotted Eagle (an American Indian activist involved in the Dakota Access pipeline fight).

Amusingly, for all the talk of Republican electors voting for someone other than Trump, Clinton actually lost more votes to faithless electors. And it could have been even worse for her—another three pledged Clinton electors in Minnesota, Maine, and Colorado attempted to vote for someone else (Sanders in Maine and Minnesota, and Kasich in Colorado) but had their votes invalidated due to state laws binding electors to the results of the statewide popular vote.

Some unexpected names also received electoral votes for Vice President: Carly Fiorina, Susan Collins, Maria Cantwell, and Winona LaDuke (the Green Party’s 2000 VP nominee).

Seven rogue electors may be well short of the thirty-seven that would have been needed to actually change the results of the election, but it’s still hard to count the ways in which this was historic:

·         Most number of faithless electors in a single election, beating the previous record of six, set in 1808.

·         Most people to receive at least one electoral vote for president in a single election.

·         First time the Green Party has received an electoral vote for President or Vice President (Winona LaDuke).

·         First time faithless electors voted for a candidate from the other major party (the three Democrats in Washington State who voted for Colin Powell).

·         And Faith Spotted Eagle now has a place in history, going from completely unknown activist to one of only two women (along with Hillary Clinton) to have won Electoral College votes for President.

Odd footnotes to a crazy year.

And presumably, now that Trump has officially been elected President, liberals will forget their brief infatuation with the power of the Electoral College and “Hamilton electors” and go back to decrying it as a relic of slavery.