[View Article at Source]Take the hint, Mr. President. The post A ‘Multiracial Coalition,’ If You Can Keep It appeared first on The American Conservative.

[View Article at Source]It is time for Congress to exercise its constitutional role to rein in the runaway war machine. The post War Powers, Anyone? appeared first on The American Conservative.

[View Article at Source]Despite a bad Tuesday, the numbers still show an upward trend for Garden State Republicans. The post New Jersey Is Still a Swing State in the Making appeared first on The American…

Scaling up cephalopod-style camouflage.

Politics A ‘Multiracial Coalition,’ If You Can Keep It Take the hint, Mr. President. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images) Consider the numbers. A very South Asian precinct in Edison, NJ has swung from Donald Trump +30 to Mikie Sherrill +76 in the span of a year. Working-class Hispanic Republicans in New Jersey, who turned the state red in 2024, have swung back to 64 percent for Sherrill, voting for her almost 2:1, compared to around half in 2024. Likewise, Palisades Park, America’s most heavily Korean-American town, flipped from a 52–46 Harris-Trump split in 2024 to 62–38 for Sherrill, an eighteen-point blue swing. Eighty-four percent of young women (18-29) voted for Zohran Mamdani in the New York mayoral election, around 80 percent for Sherrill in New Jersey, and around 78 percent for Abigail Spanberger in Virginia. Paterson’s Arab-American community swung heavily for Sherrill. The dust is still settling, but according to NBC News exit polling on young men (18-29) in Virginia, New Jersey, and New York City, in Virginia, Spanberger was +14. The numbers for Sherrill, and Mamdani were +10, and +40, respectively. In her speech Tuesday night, Spanberger said that the people voted for “the Commonwealth over chaos”—a pointed twist on the broken promise of the admin to pursue “commerce, not chaos.” Every single county of Virginia shifted blue. People really don’t like chaos, especially in a state where the top half are all government workers.  When I was touring New York in 2023 with my parents, who came to visit me, we were chauffeured by a Taiwanese taxi driver who was heavily pro–J.D. Vance. His borough of Queens saw significant rightward shifts in voting for Trump. I wonder how he is feeling today. The core political principle, at least in a democracy, if you must have a democracy, is that you don’t win because of the “base,” but often despite the base. Catering only to the base brings one down to their basest instincts. There’s a reason politics is a question of a coalition.  Consider that people liked the competence of the Trump administration in stopping the mass migration that was reshaping the country. But instead of competently going on about illegal migration—fining employers who hire them, putting a tax on outward remittance—the admin was cowed by its base into some of the worst optics of the century: a militia harassing children and their mothers at Costco and incessant online anonymous abuse to the smallest, most educated, English-speaking, and law-abiding subset of migrants, H1-B holders. Rumor in Washington is that even President Donald Trump’s foreign and trade policy is now being dictated by a handful who care about nothing other than immigration. There’s no other way to justify or explain the troop buildup in Latin America, the trade war with Japan and India, and the treatment of South Korean engineers in the U.S. by ICE agents.  One of this magazine’s core principles is free speech and constructive criticism of one’s own side when duty requires. The Trump-Mamdani voters are the swing voters who propelled Trump to victory: the working-class Latinos, Asians, and even Muslims, a significant chunk of whom voted for the Republicans and for Trump for the first time on the promise of competent foreign policy, a golden age of job growth, and conservative social and economic policies. Instead, they got the 12-Day War with Iran, a massive troop buildup in Latin America, trade war with the entire world, enormous grocery prices, and incessant social media abuse, about how they are unwanted in this country or among the right wing at large. They appear to have taken the hint.  Trump and J.D. Vance should take the hint, too, and should find the courage to cut the cancer out that infects their earlier unifying, positive message. The first four months of the administration was about competence and commerce, nothing more. The last six months have been a weird mix of George Bush and Ron DeSantis: overt evangelical foreign policy, threats of interventions in Venezuela, Iran, and Nigeria, and mindless cruelty towards those who are legal and assimilated. A simple lesson from the most part of the 20th century is that the side with the most optimistic and unifying message and policies wins in the grand struggles of our times. The side that turns it to a Hobbesian war of all against all are usually left alone when everyone else forms a balancing coalition against their hubris. Power, after all, eternally begs to be balanced.  The post A ‘Multiracial Coalition,’ If You Can Keep It appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs War Powers, Anyone? It is time for Congress to exercise its constitutional role to rein in the runaway war machine. (Photo by Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post via Getty Images) When our country’s Founders were creating the Constitution, they had just won a war against King George III of England. They deliberately and unambiguously invested the power to wage war in the Congress, judging it to be more reticent about entering war than a head of state, who would see a war as an opportunity to increase his power. Fast forward to today. America is embroiled in foreign wars that consume, with growing unease, our attention and resources. Yet the Senate on Thursday sunk legislation that would have required the White House to get congressional approval before attacking Venezuela. We should rely on the carefully designed constitutional structure our Founding Fathers provided to avoid further disasters and use those tools to extricate us from existing ones.  During the 2024 election campaign, we were all told the wars were a waste and would be ended swiftly if Donald Trump won. It looks like we were fooled again. Ukraine was supposed to be settled quickly. However, after the 10 months since President Trump’s inauguration, the current debate is whether to provide nuclear-capable Tomahawk missiles to reach deep into Russia, which has the largest nuclear arsenal in the world. Doesn’t our governing elite think shooting nuclear-capable missiles into Russia could be risky? Recently, and with fanfare, the Palestinians released their hostages to the Israelis, but Israel’s military, using U.S. supplied and funded weapons, has repeatedly and dramatically violated the ceasefire. It looks like all the lofty rhetoric about peace deals was just hot air. In less than a year in office, the Trump administration has directly engaged in the bombings or has supported the bombings of Gaza, Yemen, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Somalia, and possibly Qatar. It has also been financing political turbulence in countries across Asia, the Western Hemisphere, and who knows how many in Africa. Alarmingly, Trump recently has started arguing for military intervention in Nigeria. Over the past two months, the Trump administration has been illegally assassinating, without any due process, “suspected narco-terrorists” off the coasts of Latin America. The Washington elites are circulating stories sotto voce among themselves that there are Hezbollah terrorists in the Venezuelan jungles. Now, we are supposed to be really threatened. It won’t be long before they will be whispering about Hamas fighters training in Cuba to attack Key West, or even Miami! These fairy tales are the latest additions to the long list of old discredited war propaganda gems such as: the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor, the German soldiers bayoneting and decapitating babies during World War I in France, the domino theory, the faked attack in the Gulf of Tonkin in Vietnam, Iraqi soldiers ripping babies out of incubators in Kuwait, Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, poison gas attacks in Syria, the fake Libyan mass rape claims, or of course the completely debunked claim of the many beheaded babies in Israel. The U.S. is operating an empire spanning the globe with 800 military bases and overseeing numerous military actions in many countries. All these hostilities are acts of war without a constitutionally required declaration of war. The national debt stood at about 6 trillion dollars before the start of the Global War on Terror. It is now 38 trillion and counting while there seem to be more terrorists and wars than before. Much of this would stop if the money was stopped. What’s worse, none of these wars have even remotely turned out as promised. Often the results are the opposite of the propaganda.  There was a ceasefire in the Korean War in 1953, yet we still have troops stationed in Korea seven decades later. We were told we had to protect Vietnam from Communism. We even destroyed villages to save South Vietnam from the Vietcong. In the end, we fled Vietnam, the North Vietnamese won, and Hanoi normalized relations with Washington a couple decades later. Afghanistan, after 20 years of war, crumbled to the Taliban in 11 days. Don’t forget the Carter administration supported Sunni fighters in Afghanistan before the 1979 Soviet invasion. Under President Ronald Reagan they became the vaunted U.S.-supported Mujahideen, whose post-Soviet civil war helped lead to the rise of the Taliban. (Author Scott Horton recounts the genesis of that sordid history in his book “Fool’s Errand.”) We still have troops in Iraq and Syria. Libya is a continuing wreck and embroiled in a devastating civil war. It is a safe bet that this new regime change adventure in Venezuela will end badly. As will Yemen, Ukraine, and Gaza. During the Vietnam tragedy, Congress became increasingly alarmed about the excesses of presidential power amid the war’s horrifying human and economic costs, so they formulated and finally passed the 1973 War Powers Resolution. This Resolution was designed to limit the president’s power to wage war without the constitutionally required congressional approval. It is time for Congress to exercise its constitutional duties and stop shirking its responsibility to restrain these destructive actions. Some courageous members of Congress have taken the initiative to introduce a bill entitled: “H.Con.Res.51 – To direct the removal of United States Armed Forces from hostilities that have not been authorized by Congress.” Members of Congress who are concerned about America’s future should support this effort to constrain our illegal runaway militarism before we run out of borrowing power and credibility. It may be difficult for many members of Congress to resist the influence of the military industrial complex and various foreign interests, but those who can, must, before we become embroiled in more failed military fiascoes. How many Americans would die or be maimed in a war in South America? What if we wreck Venezuela—how many people would flee and exacerbate the worldwide refugee crisis? How would this adversely affect our relations with other countries in our hemisphere? How would war against a country with one of the largest proven oil reserves in the world affect the price of oil for consumers? The looming war against Venezuela is, like the others, clearly unlawful on many levels and should be stopped before things spin out of control with deadly and ruinous unanticipated consequences. It is time for Congress to ignore the propaganda, vote the interests of the American people, and follow our Constitution to end this reckless destruction. The post War Powers, Anyone? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics New Jersey Is Still a Swing State in the Making Despite a bad Tuesday, the numbers still show an upward trend for Garden State Republicans. (Photo by Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Getty Images) When you put together a campaign, part of your path to victory is guessing the electoral universe: how many votes it will take to win. This is barely an art and not at all a science, but you start by looking at past elections and political enthusiasm. Now there are many external factors behind what causes campaigns to win or lose that are beyond a campaign’s control, for instance a pandemic that shuts down the country and changes the way people cast ballots, an economic recession around the housing market, or the backlash against a party controlling Congress and/or the White House in Washington that pushes forward unpopular bills on issues like healthcare.  What separates good campaigns from bad campaigns in such environments is whether they can manage either to localize the race to such a degree that they can break national headwinds (see Nassau County circa 2025) or to hit their target numbers to save some down-ballot races. Jack Ciattarelli’s campaign for governor wasn’t perfect, but he assembled enough votes to win the governorship of New Jersey in any election since 1973—except for 2025. Unlike Winsome Sears, who received more than 200,000 fewer votes than Glenn Youngkin, Ciattarelli received the most votes of any New Jersey Republican running for governor in a half-century. Unfortunately for the GOP candidate, for 1.8 million Jersey residents, his name might as well not have been on the ballot. They were out to vote against Donald Trump. According to exit polls, 65 percent of respondents said that they were angry or dissatisfied with the direction of the country, 41 percent were voting to oppose Trump, and 55 percent said they disapproved of Trump.  To Ciattarelli’s credit, he won an overwhelming number of voters who said that this election wasn’t about Trump—by a near 2-to-1 margin—but it wasn’t enough for the army of former Harris voters who said that this election was a referendum on the president. Going into the election, four in 10  voters said they were coming out to vote against Trump, while only about one in 10 said they were casting a ballot to show they support him. The Democrat Mikie Sherrill received 81 percent of Harris’s vote, while Ciattarelli only won 70 percent of Trump’s raw vote total.  Ciattarelli had to deal with a tidal wave of enthusiastic Democrats who had just finished protesting the president at the “No Kings” rallies and believed they were saving democracy, swing voters who are angry over rising costs, and low-propensity conservatives, especially those registered as independents, who only come out during presidential years. It was too much for him. Election day was not kind to Republicans in New Jersey or almost anywhere in the country, but that doesn’t mean the trajectory of where voters are leaning in New Jersey isn’t clear. During Trump’s first full year in office, from January to election day in November, Democrats in New Jersey added 12,523 more new voters than Republicans in the Garden State. In the following year ahead of the midterms, they increased their voter registration advantage again by nearly 45,000 more new Democrats than Republicans. For those who are curious, independents shed 143,008 of their voters in 2017 and added 25,681 the following year. While voter registration is a lagging indicator, it does show voter enthusiasm for belonging to a party during the year of Women’s March and amid subtle calls to execute the president coming from prominent celebrities like Madonna and Kathy Griffin. But the year that just passed showed no such momentum for Democrats leading to the enormous victory. In fact, Democrats had a net loss of 8,626 members of their party during the last 10 months while Republicans gained 21,407 new enrollees. Independents once again lost an astounding 150,489 members.  Even in Latino-majority areas that swung to the left from 2024 to 2025, rolls show that Republicans’ raw vote growth in cities including Passaic, East Newark, and North Bergen is larger than Democrats’ since 2017. That’s about the same level of support the Republican gubernatorial nominee received compared to Trump’s raw vote total in those cities in 2017 and 2021. Democrats have always done a better job at turning out voters in those Hispanic-majority cities, but unlike in 2017 and 2021, when the Democratic gubernatorial candidate received slightly less than 50 percent of the previous presidential candidate’s totals, Sherrill was able to retain an astounding 93 percent of Harris’ support from 2024. Whether that is credited to anger over Trump’s ICE raids, anger spilled over from losing the White House, anxiety over the rising cost of living, or effective get-out-the-vote efforts on behalf of Mayor Brian Stack and the Democratic machine is up for anyone’s speculation.  Still, Democrats have yet to match their level of support that they received in these communities during the 2017 election, when Phil Murphy also received 56 percent of the statewide vote, and that’s in spite of Democrats turning out 90 percent of the Harris vote. A lot can change between the gubernatorial elections and the midterms next year, but the current trajectory is clear. Republicans are making inroads in New Jersey, and 2025 will be just like 2001 and 2017: the first year after a Republican won the White House, when Democrats were energized, had high voter turnout, and won 56 percent of the vote. The post New Jersey Is Still a Swing State in the Making appeared first on The American Conservative.

They Were All Deep Blue States. But…

Don't Call Mamdani a Commie or Jihadi