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[(Brett, White House reporter for The Hill, covering the Biden administration as well as the Trump campaign.) “White House knocks Trump proposal for 10 percent tax on products entering US”, The Hill, August 23rd 2023, https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/4167729-white-house-knocks-trump-proposal-for-10-percent-tax-on-products-entering-us/]//LR

The White House on Wednesday took a shot at a proposal from former President Trump to impose a 10 percent tariff on foreign imports into the United States, warning it would lead to higher prices. “President Biden strongly opposes plans to hurt hardworking families with higher prices and higher inflation — as even economists who served in the Trump White House warn such an agenda would,” deputy press secretary Andrew Bates said in a statement. “Combining a sweeping tariff tax on the middle class with more trickle-down tax welfare for rich special interests would stifle economic growth and fuel inflation,” Bates added. The White House’s statement came roughly a week after Trump sat for an interview with Fox Business Network host and former Trump White House official Larry Kudlow, who asked him about potential economic policies for a would-be second term. “Number one, I think we should have a ring around the collar, as they say,” Trump said. “I think, when companies come in and they dump their products in the United States, they should pay automatically, let’s say, a 10 percent tax.” Trump argued that the 10 percent tariff on imports would not stop business, but “would really make a lot of money.” He leaned heavily on tariffs during his first term in the White House, which at times led to escalatory trade wars with countries like China. Beijing’s tariffs on U.S. products hit American farmers particularly hard, forcing the government to provide aid to many farmers. The White House on Wednesday sought to contrast Trump’s proposal with President Biden’s record, pointing to steadily declining inflation over the past year. Polls, however, have shown a majority of Americans still do not trust Biden’s handling of the economy.

[(James, contributing writer for The Atlantic and the author of The Wisdom of Crowds.) “The Trouble With Trump’s Tariffs”, The Atlantic, August 30th 2023, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/08/trump-tariff-foreign-imports-trade-policy/675169/]//LR

Last week, before taking the mug shot seen around the world, Donald Trump made news in a different way, suggesting in an interview with Fox Business that if he’s elected president, he’ll impose a 10 percent across-the-board tariff on foreign imports. “When companies come in and they dump their products in the United States, they should pay automatically, let’s say, a 10 percent tax,” Trump said. “I do like the 10 percent for everybody.” This proposal provoked a predictable storm of criticism from pundits and economists, who correctly pointed out that a universal tariff would raise prices for consumers, hurt American businesses that rely on imported goods, and lead inevitably to a trade war that would do serious damage to American exporters. (It would also almost certainly violate World Trade Organization rules, not that Trump cares.) Less remarked on but perhaps more striking about Trump’s tariff plan was something else: its blithe confidence that the president can, if he wants, unilaterally raise prices for American consumers and businesses. Though the fact is easy to forget, the Constitution does not give the president the power to impose tariffs or make trade policy more generally. Instead, it explicitly assigns responsibility over trade to Congress alone, awarding it the authority to set “duties” and “imposts” (taxes on foreign goods) and to “regulate Commerce with foreign Nations.” Yet when Trump talks about imposing a 10 percent tariff on imports, he’s not talking about getting Congress to do it—as we know from his record of issuing such orders, he means to do so himself. How? Well, as with several other aspects of government, Congress has effectively outsourced its trade-policy power to the White House in a series of laws over the past 60 years, while putting in place few guardrails or limits on the president’s authority. Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, for instance, lets the president impose tariffs as high as he wants on specific industries, as long as the Department of Commerce determines that imports in those industries pose a threat to “national security” (a term the law does not define). Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 lets the president, through the U.S. trade representative, take action against any “act, policy, or practice” of a foreign country that’s “unreasonable or discriminatory” (whatever that means). And the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 invests the president with the power to impose tariffs during a “national emergency” (which the president can declare at will). The vague, ill-defined language in these laws gives the president enormous latitude to do pretty much what he wants, particularly because the courts tend to be deferential to presidential judgments about what constitutes a national-security threat or whether a foreign country’s policy is “unreasonable.” For the most part, past presidents have nonetheless been cautious about exercising unilateral trade authority under these laws. Prior to Trump, the “national security” exception had been invoked only to embargo oil imports from Iran and Libya. And although Section 301 has been cited more, since the mid-1990s it has typically been used to initiate or implement WTO settlements. Trump, as was his wont, ignored these norms and took full advantage of the loopholes Congress left for him. According to the Peterson Institute for International Economics, he issued 41 executive orders on trade, compared with an average of 19 during the Clinton, Bush, and Obama presidencies. In 2018, Trump imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum on the grounds that the imports threatened national security, even though the Department of Defense has noted that only about 3 percent of U.S. steel production goes toward national defense, and even though the countries Trump put tariffs on included close allies such as Canada and the European Union. A year later, he announced a plan to impose a new 5 percent tariff on all imports from Mexico unless the country “substantially” stopped the flow of undocumented migrants into the U.S.; he withdrew the threat only after Mexico agreed to send more troops to its border with Guatemala. Most dramatically, of course, Trump used Section 301—the unfair-trade-practices clause—to unilaterally impose 25 percent tariffs on roughly $250 billion in Chinese goods, and when China retaliated, he imposed a second round of tariffs that hit another $120 billion or so in Chinese imports. Trump’s tariffs were at best loosely connected to the unfair trade practices they were supposed to remedy—which included, most notably, China’s violation of intellectual-property rules—but the language in Section 301 is, again, vague enough that this didn’t matter. Aside from whether Trump’s tariffs accomplished any of his supposed goals, evidence that they were good for the U.S. economy is hard to come by. No meaningful revival in manufacturing jobs occurred during his presidency. And the cost of his tariffs was borne, a 2020 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found, almost entirely by American businesses and consumers. According to an analysis by the research and consulting firm Trade Partnership Worldwide, after three years of his administration, the total cost of Trump’s tariffs to U.S. enterprise was $45 billion. Even as Trump’s various trade wars raised prices for consumers, they were especially hard on American producers and workers, particularly in parts of the country that supported him. That’s because, as a 2020 study found, China targeted its retaliatory tariffs against pro-Trump areas. Farmers were hit by those, which by the end of Trump’s term covered 98 percent of U.S. agricultural exports. And American businesses reliant on equipment and other imports from China saw their costs rise and profit margins fall, while exporters in a wide range of industries saw sales fall, thanks to retaliatory moves by the EU and China. The real problem with the tariffs, though, was not their macroeconomic impact. It’s the fact that they were imposed, in effect, at Trump’s whim. The rise of the “imperial presidency,” together with seemingly permanent deadlock in Congress, may have inured us to the unilateral exercise of presidential power, as more and more policy gets done by executive order rather than legislation. As a result, we’ve come to accept that a president can fight a war without Congress ever bothering to declare it, and can exercise near free rein over immigration policy without congressional authorization. Arguably, such cases might call for a national-security exception. Yet no plausible justification exists for handing unilateral power over trade policy to the president. The imposition of tariffs is not something that demands immediate action—it can, and should, be done through the legislative process. And unlike the waging of war, in which case the Constitution does make the president the commander in chief of the military, tariffs are entirely Congress’s responsibility. It has simply abdicated that responsibility. Typically, when you talk about policy problems in Washington, identifying what’s wrong is easy; what’s harder is finding a way to make it right. Where trade is concerned, however, the solution is easy: Congress can amend existing statutes and pass a new law to take away, or severely curtail, the president’s ability to impose tariffs. The simplest way to do this would be to set a time limit on any tariffs imposed by the president, a “sunset clause” that would require congressional approval for them to continue. In fact, Senator Mike Lee, a Republican representing Utah, offered a bill on the very first day of Trump’s presidency that would do precisely this.

The stakes for Democrats in their extraordinary public schism over whether President Joe Biden should withdraw from the 2024 presidential race extend far beyond the White House. A decisive loss at the top of the ticket could cost Democrats control of the US Senate for the remainder of this decade and cement Republican dominance of the Supreme Court for a generation. So far, Democratic anxiety about the presidential race’s impact on the Senate has been muted because public polling has almost invariably shown their candidates still leading in the key states where Biden has fallen behind former President Donald Trump. But recent history raises deep questions about whether Democratic Senate candidates can continue to levitate as far above the presidential ticket as polls now show. Throughout this century, but especially over roughly the past decade, it has grown increasingly difficult for Senate candidates in either party to win in states that usually vote for the other side in presidential contests. During the 2016 and 2020 election years, Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine was the only candidate, out of 69 total Senate races, who won in a state that voted the other way at the presidential level. This year, Democrats are defending an unusually large concentration of Senate seats in states that now appear at risk for them in the presidential contest. If Democrats lose a substantial number of those seats this year, it could be very difficult for them to recapture a Senate majority before these same seats come up again in 2030. The reason is that very few of the other Senate seats Republicans now hold are in states where Democrats have a realistic chance of winning, absent a dramatic change in their political balance. In turn, extended GOP control of the Senate, coupled with a return of Trump to the White House, would give the party ample time to nominate and confirm much younger replacements for Samuel Alito (74) and Clarence Thomas (76), the two oldest and most conservative Supreme Court Justices, and possibly also Sonia Sotomayor (70), the oldest Democratic-appointed justice.

“Because of the big sorting out of the states … Democrats have a narrower path to a Senate majority than Republicans do, which means this year is crucial,” said former Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana. “The margin of error [for Democrats] is not high, and the consequences will be with us for another six years.” If the presidential and Senate elections go badly for Democrats, Bayh added, Republicans “could change the judicial branch of government for a generation.” Vulnerable Democratic Senate seats this year fall into three broad buckets. The first includes three states that Trump carried in 2016 and 2020 and that he is virtually certain to win again — likely by a substantial margin. In that group, both sides concede the GOP will win the West Virginia seat being vacated by retiring Sen. Joe Manchin, who’s now an independent but still caucuses with Democrats; veteran Democratic Sens. Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Jon Tester of Montana, who have survived difficult reelections even as their states have moved right, are facing substantial challenges this year. If Republicans win just two of those three states, they would still seize control of the Senate (absent offsetting Democratic wins in any GOP-held seats, which are unlikely). But if Democrats only lost some combination of the three 2020 Trump states, they would remain close enough to the GOP in the chamber to retain realistic hopes of recapturing the Senate in 2026 or 2028. The real risk to Democrats is that their losses could extend beyond that inner circle of strongly red-leaning states — particularly if the presidential race goes badly. Democrats are defending five more Senate seats this year in presidential swing states where most polls now show Biden trailing, or at best running even. That list includes Democratic Sens. Bob Casey in Pennsylvania, Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin and Jacky Rosen in Nevada, as well as Reps. Elissa Slotkin and Ruben Gallego, who are seeking open Senate seats now held by Democrats in Michigan and Arizona respectively. (Retiring Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona still caucuses with Democrats after becoming an independent.) Biden’s 2020 margin of victory was three points or less in all of those states.

As president, Donald Trump’s sweeping attempts to roll back federal environmental regulations were often stymied — by the courts, by a lack of experience, even by internal resistance from government employees.

But if he retakes the White House in November, Mr. Trump would be in a far better position to dismantle environmental and climate rules, aided by more sympathetic judges and conservative allies who are already mapping out ways to bend federal agencies to the president’s will.

A Democratic White House would block tariffs, while Senate Republicans could blunt tax increases

Polls indicate that the U.S. general election in November will be close, with Democrats and Republicans both in a position to win full control of both the White House and Congress.

Many Republicans legislators still reject the science of climate change, a position , but . Their positions have not kept up with their constituents, or even some business groups with which they are typically aligned. After the API made its announcement, Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, the ranking Republican on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, issued a statement saying, “.” In April, Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania  at a hearing of a subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee that he planned to introduce a bill to withdraw the United States from the United Nations Framework Commission on Climate Change. He introduced his , which has no chance of passing, on Earth Day.

How did we get here? A total unwillingness to cooperate with Democrats is part of the problem. The polarized atmosphere in Washington is such that it is difficult for a Republican to support anything proposed by the Biden administration, lest they be demonized by right-wing media and the party’s activist base. A lack of honesty exacerbates this problem. Just in the last few days there was a flareup on the political right that President Joe Biden’s climate plan intended . His plan said no such thing, but as the saying goes, a lie can travel around the world while the truth is lacing up its boots.

President Joe Biden’s crowning legislative achievement was enacting the Inflation Reduction Act, easily the nation’s largest investment into addressing the rising dangers of climate change.

Yet Donald Trump’s advisors and associates have clearly indicated that dismantling the landmark law would sit at the top of the Republican front-runner’s to-do list should he win the presidential election. If he succeeds, it could stall the nation’s shift to cleaner industries and stunt efforts to cut the greenhouse-gas pollution warming the planet.

The United States is experiencing scorching new levels of heat fueled by climate change this summer, with dozens of people dying in the West, millions sweating under heat advisories and nearly three-quarters of Americans global warming. But as the Republican Party opens its national convention in Milwaukee with a prime-time focus on energy on Monday night, the party has no plan to address climate change. While some Republicans no longer deny the overwhelming scientific consensus that the planet is warming because of human activity, party leaders do not see it as a problem that needs to be addressed. “I don’t know that there is a Republican approach to climate change as an organizing issue,” said Thomas J. Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance, a conservative research group focused on energy. “I don’t think President Trump sees reducing greenhouse gases, using the government to do so, as an imperative.” When former President Donald J. Trump mentions climate change at all, it is mockingly. “Can you imagine, this guy says global warming is the greatest threat to our country?” Mr. Trump said, referring to President Biden as he addressed a rally in Chesapeake, Va., last month, the across the globe. “Global warming is fine. In fact, I heard it was going to be very warm today. It’s fine.” He went on to dismiss the scientific evidence that melting ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland are causing seas to rise, threatening coastal communities around the world. “The ocean will rise, maybe, and it may go down, also,” Mr. Trump said. “But it may rise one eighth of an inch in the next 497 years, they say, one eighth, which gives you a little bit more waterfront property if you’re lucky enough to own.” In fact, sea levels are estimated to rise as much as 33 inches by the end of the century, according to top scientists. And if the Antarctic ice sheet collapses, experts said global sea levels could rise by more than 10 feet. At the televised debate with Mr. Biden in June, Mr. Trump was asked if he would take any action as president to slow the climate crisis. “I want absolutely immaculate clean water and I want absolutely clean air, and we had it,” Mr. Trump responded, without answering the question. Mr. Trump’s spokeswoman, Karoline Leavitt, later declined to clarify the former president’s position or discuss any actions he would take regarding climate change, saying only that he wants “energy dominance.” A clear majority of Americans, 65 percent, wants the country to focus on increasing solar, wind and other renewable energy and not fossil fuels, according to a May survey by the Pew Research Center. But just 38 percent of Republicans surveyed said renewable energy should be prioritized, while 61 percent said the country should focus on developing more oil, gas and coal. “Their No. 1 agenda is to continue producing fossil fuels,” said Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences and the director of the Texas Center for Climate Studies at Texas A&M University. “Once you understand their main goal is to entrench fossil fuels regardless of anything else, everything makes sense.” The party platform, issued last week, makes no mention of climate change. Instead, it encourages more production of oil, gas and coal, the burning of which is dangerously driving up global temperatures. “We will DRILL, BABY, DRILL,” it says, referring to oil as “liquid gold.” By contrast, Mr. Biden has taken the most aggressive action of any president to cut emissions from coal, oil and gas and encourage a transition to wind, solar and other carbon-free energy. He has directed every federal agency from the Agriculture Department to the Pentagon to consider how climate change is affecting their core missions. If Mr. Biden has taken an all-of-government approach to fighting climate change, Mr. Trump and his allies would adopt the opposite: scrubbing “climate” from all federal functions and promoting fossil fuels. Mr. Trump and his allies want to end federal subsidies for electric vehicles, battery development and the wind and solar industries, preferring instead to open up the Alaskan wilderness to oil drilling, encourage more offshore drilling and expand gas export terminals.

Defunding or dismantling federal agencies focused on the environment. Slashing regulations aimed at combating climate change and cutting deadly air pollution. Boosting the use of fossil fuels that have helped drive the U.S. economy but also contribute to the heat waves afflicting millions of Americans this summer.

These are just some of the ways Republicans could shift U.S. climate policy if they win the White House, flip the Senate and maintain their House majority in the November election. While such a scenario seemed less likely a few weeks ago, it appears more probable in light of President Biden’s disastrous debate performance, an increasingly brutal Senate map for Democrats, and an attempted assassination of former president Donald Trump that has invigorated his base.

The long decline of the Republican Party’s internationalist wing may have reached a tipping point. Since Donald Trump emerged as the GOP’s dominant figure in 2016, he has championed an isolationist and nationalist agenda that is dubious of international alliances, scornful of free trade, and hostile to not only illegal but also legal immigration. His four years in the White House marked a shift in the party’s internal balance of power away from the internationalist perspective that had dominated every Republican presidency from Dwight Eisenhower through George W. Bush. But even so, during Trump’s four years in office, a substantial remnant of traditionally internationalist Republicans in Congress and in the key national-security positions of his own administration resisted his efforts to unravel America’s traditional alliances. Now though, evidence is rapidly accumulating on multiple fronts that the internal GOP resistance is crumbling to Trump’s determination to steer America away from its traditional role as a global leader. In Congress, that shift was evident in last week’s widespread Senate and House Republican opposition to continued aid for Ukraine. The same movement is occurring among Republican voters, as a new Chicago Council on Global Affairs study demonstrates. The study used the council’s annual national surveys of American attitudes about foreign affairs to examine the evolution of thinking within the GOP on key international issues. It divided Republicans into two roughly equal groups: those who said they held a very favorable view of Trump and the slightly larger group that viewed him either only somewhat favorably or unfavorably.

The analysis found that skepticism of international engagement—and in particular resistance to supporting Ukraine in its grueling war against Russia—is growing across the GOP. But it also found that the Republicans most sympathetic to Trump have moved most sharply away from support for an engaged American role. Now a clear majority of those Trump-favorable Republicans reject an active American role in world affairs, the study found. “Trumpism is the dominant tendency in Republican foreign policy and it’s isolationist, it’s unilateralist, it’s amoral,” Richard Haass, a former president of the Council on Foreign Relations and the director of policy planning at the State Department under George W. Bush, told me a few months ago. That dynamic has big implications for a second Trump term. The growing tendency of Republican voters and elected officials alike to embrace Trump’s nationalist vision means that a reelected Trump would face much less internal opposition than he did in his first term if he moves to actually extract America from NATO, reduce the presence of U.S. troops in Europe and Asia, coddle Russian President Vladimir Putin, or impose sweeping tariffs on imports. During Trump’s first term, “the party was not yet prepared to abandon internationalism and therefore opposed him,” Ivo Daalder, the chief executive officer of the Chicago Council, told me. “On Russia sanctions, on NATO, on other issues, he had people in the government who undermined him consistently. That won’t happen in a second term. In a second term, his views are clear: He will only appoint people who agree with them, and he has cowed the entire Republican Party.”

Biden dropped out as polls indicated a Trump victory, and the possibility of a Republican sweep. BCA Research, commenting before the weekend developments, said with Republicans favored to win, some countries may be enticed to act before the next president takes office.

BCA said Iran and Israel, for instance, may feel less reason for restraint, and inflame an already unstable Middle East.

When I dipped into the 195-page section on “The Common Defense” in Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership, my first question was how even the most hawkish of hawks could be disappointed with a Pentagon budget that is now soaring toward $1 trillion a year—hundreds of billions of dollars more than at the height of the Vietnam War or the peak year of the Cold War. I was particularly intrigued because the author of its chapter on the Pentagon is Christopher Miller, who, after a brief stint as acting secretary of defense under Donald Trump, wrote a memoir in which he asserted that our military is “bloated and wasteful” and argued that we could “cut our defense budget in half and it would still be nearly twice as big as China’s.

Unfortunately, Miller the budget cutter is nowhere to be found here. Instead, Miller calls for expanding the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Space Force and increasing the funding for nuclear weapons, missile defense, and offensive weapons in space. Perhaps that’s because, according to a number of veteran Pentagon watchers, he is the current favorite to serve as secretary of defense in the unfortunate event of a second Trump administration.

[(J. Miles, associate editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, the University of Virginia Center for Politics’ authoritative, nonpartisan newsletter on American campaigns and elections.) “How Current Presidential Polling May Impact House Races”, Center For Politics, July 11th 2024, https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/how-current-presidential-polling-may-impact-house-races/]//LR

The second scenario is where the playing field would really start tilting against Democrats. As of Monday, RealClearPolitics’s national aggregator gave Trump a 47.5%-44.1% lead over Biden, while the president trailed Trump by a slightly lesser 42.1%-39.7% in FiveThirtyEight’s average. In splitting the difference between the two outlets, we came up with a 3.3-point two-party margin for Trump. The far-right column on Table 1 reflects a uniform swing from the actual 2020 result to a 3.3% Trump popular vote advantage in the two-party vote. All told, Democrats would hold 15 of these 24 potential Biden-to-Trump seats. The aforementioned Rep. Angie Craig would actually hold the most marginal Trump-won seat in the House under this scenario. Importantly, over the past few cycles, Craig’s district has tracked well with Minnesota overall (meaning, in this case, one would expect the state’s electoral votes to be in the GOP column for the first time since 1972, albeit very narrowly so). While we won’t namecheck every seat that flips to Trump in this category, arguably the most important district here is NE-2. While GOP Rep. Don Bacon has been a frequent Democratic target since he was elected in 2016, his Omaha-district is also critical at the presidential level. In a situation where Biden holds the “Blue Wall” trio of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin but loses the Sun Belt states of Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada, NE-2 could provide Biden’s 270th electoral vote. In fact, we would go a little bit further and say that this configuration would represent Biden’s likeliest path to 270 (Crystal Ball Managing Editor Kyle Kondik discussed this scenario when we moved some Electoral College ratings last month). With the Nebraska legislature returning to Lincoln for a special session later this month, Gov. Jim Pillen (R) is renewing his push to change the state’s Electoral Vote allocation format to winner-take-all, although legislators turned back a similar effort earlier this year. Some of the Democratic incumbents in seats that Trump carries in this scenario might still be favored: in South Texas for instance, Rep. Henry Cuellar (D, TX-28) routinely outruns the top of the ticket—Cuellar, who is also under indictment on bribery charges, caught a break last month when it was announced that his trial would not take place before the election. Going farther west, Democrats’ Nevada gerrymander, which served them well in 2022, would begin to buckle, as Rep. Susie Lee (D, NV-3) would have a Trump +1 seat. Still, though Biden’s position has been wanting in Nevada for months by this point, national Republicans have not seemed to take much of an interest in House races there (although that could obviously change). Aside from the seats listed on Table 1, a uniform swing to Trump would have implications in other hotly-contested races. All three co-chairs of the Blue Dog Coalition—Golden, Gluesenkamp Perez, and Alaska’s Mary Peltola—would be defending double-digit Trump seats in the more extreme scenario (though to be fair to Peltola, Alaska has been a double-digit Republican-won state in presidential contests since 1996). This may explain why Golden and Gluesenkamp Perez have taken a “who cares, he’s going to lose anyway” stance on Biden: if Trump is perceived to be on an easy path back to the White House, red-district voters who may otherwise feel threatened by Democratic control of Washington could be more likely to split their tickets. Marcy Kaptur (D, OH-9), who is running for a historic 22nd term, would have a similar Trump +11 seat. Meanwhile, Democratic offensive opportunities could get less promising. On Long Island, the bluest district that is currently held by a Republican is Rep. Anthony D’Esposito’s NY-4 (we rate the race as Leans Democratic). D’Esposito could still be an underdog, but if Trump’s deficit in the district were cut to 7 points instead of 15, his odds would look less daunting.

Previous work has demonstrated presidents have a powerful influence on their party's popularity, reputation for competence, perceived ideological leanings, and attractiveness as an object of personal identification. This article extends the analysis by examining (1) how presidents shape popular opinions of congressional parties and leaders, (2) bow evaluations of the president's handling of specific policy areas affecs his party's reputation for effectiveness in handing these domains, (3) bow presidents affect perceptions of sheir party's sympathy for ordinary people, (4) bow presidents influence generic preferences for House candidates and party control of Congress as measured in surveys between elections, and (5) how presidents affect the partisan leanings of the generation thas comes of political age during their administrations. The evidence confirms thas popular reactions to presidents have both immediate and longer-term consequences for how his party and, to a lesser extent, the rival party are regarded by the American people.

The president is his party's dominant public face. His words and actions articulate and define his party's current principles and objectives. Judgments about his competence in managing domestic and foreign affairs inform assessments of his party's competence in such matters. The components of a president's supporting coalition, and the interests he favors while governing, help to define the party's constituent social base and thus appeal as an object of individual identification. People's affective reactions to the president, whatever their source, inevitably color their feelings about the other politicians in his coalition. Every president thus shapes public attitudes toward his party as well as beliefs about who and what it stands for and how well it governs when in office, insofar as the party label represents a brand name, the president bears prime responsibility for the brand's current image and status. Jacobson 2012, 684)

WASHINGTON — Seventy-two senators and 302 members of the House of Representatives cashed a check from the pharmaceutical industry ahead of the 2020 election — representing more than two-thirds of Congress, according to a new STAT analysis of records for the full election cycle.

Pfizer’s political action committee alone contributed to 228 lawmakers. Amgen’s PAC donated to 218, meaning that each company helped to fund the campaigns of nearly half the lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Overall, the sector donated $14 million.

To quote the great political philosopher Cyndi Lauper, “Money changes everything.” 1 And nowhere is that proverb more taken to heart than in a federal election, where billions of dollars are raised and spent on the understanding that money is a crucial determinant of whether or not a candidate will win.

This year, the money has been coming in and out of political campaigns at a particularly furious pace. Collectively, U.S. House candidates raised more money by Aug. 27 than House candidates raised during the entire 2014 midterm election cycle, and Senate candidates weren’t far behind. Ad volumes are up 86 percent compared to that previous midterm. Dark money — flowing to political action committees from undisclosed donors — is up 26 percent.

Television ads, logos, stickers, staplers and staffers. They are all needed to run political campaigns. And they all cost money.

Fundraising is one of the key components of political campaigns. Candidates spend a significant period of time talking to donors and mobilizing grassroots donations in order to keep their campaigns alive.

UC Davis psychology professor Alison Ledgerwood studies framing effects, or how people process information based on how it’s presented to them. Say a candidate proposes a new jobs policy — Jobs Policy A. You don’t know much about it. But one of the first things you hear is that it will save 60 percent of manufacturing jobs. Your friend, meanwhile, is told that 40 percent of jobs will be lost. It’s the same policy, with the same results, so all else being equal, you and your friend should have a similar outlook on it, right? What research actually finds is that you are more likely to respond favorably, because the information about it has been framed in terms of success. Whereas your friend, who has been thinking of the policy in terms of failure, is not a fan.

The power of a negative frame Ledgerwood and her colleagues have also found that a negative frame is much more persistent, or “stickier,” than a positive one. If you come at an issue negatively, but are later reminded of the policy's positive aspects, you will still think it's a bust. And if you start out thinking favorably about the policy, but are reminded of its downsides, your positive perception will be swept away and a negative one will take its place. Once we think the proverbial glass is half empty, it’s hard to remember that it’s also half full. In other words, our brains are hard-wired to seek out and remember negative information. That fact isn’t lost on politicians and political parties. A few examples from over the years: “Tricky Dick,” a nickname associated with Richard Nixon that emerged during his 1950 campaign for Senate, dogged his entire political career, from his presidential faceoff with John Kennedy to Watergate. The phrase “death panels” almost ground the Affordable Care Act to a halt. An attempt to undermine John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign by impugning his record in Vietnam was so effective — and deceptive — that the term “swiftboating” now refers to any untrue negative political attack. And the current president has cultivated his own negative campaigning style, relentlessly portraying his opponents with repetitive negative nicknames: Crooked Hillary. Low Energy Jeb. Lyin’ Ted. Fake News. The beauty of negative attacks — from a campaign standpoint — is that they influence everyone. Even a candidate’s supporters will be affected by negative attacks, Ledgerwood and her collaborators have found. Once a negative idea has been planted, it’s very hard to shake.

The influence of law on the framing processes of A2K activists illustrates what I call the “gravitational” force that law can exert on framing processes. Law is, of course, only one among many resources for framing.245 Nonetheless, there is good reason to believe that law has a particularly powerful influence on the meaning-making efforts of movement actors. This follows directly from law’s status as a dual resource (to use Pedriana’s term) and from the fact that “[l]egal practices carry with them their own inherent constraints on what is accepted as legally sensible or compelling.”246 The term “gravitational” is thus intended to designate something more than the role of law as a “master frame.” 247 It points also to the special form of constraint that legal frames exert upon those who use them. From the discursive perspective, of course, all frames are freighted with preexisting meanings and affordances, and cannot be wielded simply to suit the aims of an actor. But legal frames are more constrained—more weighty, if you like—than many because they are imbued with doctrine and history, and tethered to institutions that are authorized to define and implement the law. If law attracts movement actors because it is “semantically permeable,” in Siegel’s words, 248 it also directs their arguments because it is semantically constrained. The term “gravitational” marks this directionality. It is not, however, intended to figure law as the center of the social universe. Everything with mass exerts a gravitational pull; the more massive an object, the greater the force. A crucial caveat is in order. To say that law exerts a gravitational pull on the framing processes of groups is not the same thing as saying that engagement with law tends to coopt or deradicalize groups.249 An exploration of that question is beyond the scope of this Article. Importantly, though, the gravitational and integrative effects that are here discussed are meaningful even if they do not lead to cooptation in the classic sense because they influence the path that a movement/countermovement conflict takes. The gravitational pull that law has exerted on the framing processes of the A2K mobilization has, as I describe below, affected the group’s architecture, discourse, and strategies. It has also brought it into alignment with its opponents, creating zones of agreement between A2K groups and their opponents, but also zones of common disagreement. This Part concludes by theorizing three possible implications of law’s gravitational pull. If law integrates groups with their opponents, movement/countermovement conflict can strengthen law even as it unsettles it, as Siegel has noted. To the extent that movement actors become aware of these effects, they may be better able to predict and control them, with strategies also drawn from the frame-analytic perspective. Perhaps most intriguing, however, are the implications of law’s integrative effect in the international domain. If publics and polities are defined as communities of disagreement, then the case study offered here suggests that law may have a significant role to play in creating such communities beyond the nation-state. Analyzing the A2K mobilization, that is, may help us not only understand the new politics of IP, but also may help us theorize how new forms of international and transnational law may facilitate the emergence of global polities and publics

America’s opioid epidemic has rocked communities across the country. New evidence suggests that it has had an outsize role in shaping today’s political landscape, too. Drug-related deaths over the past two decades appear to have pushed the electorate to the right and helped Republican candidates in several elections.

Establishing that relationship is tricky. Some factors, such as worsening economic conditions, have been found to increase votes for conservatives and, separately, increase drug use. To try to isolate the role of the epidemic on voting, Carolina Arteaga and Victoria Barone, respectively economists at the University of Toronto and the University of Notre Dame, started by looking at areas where opioids had been heavily prescribed when they first hit the market in the 1990s. Purdue Pharma, the company that precipitated America’s opioid crisis, initially marketed OxyContin, its potent and addictive painkiller, to areas with high cancer mortality rates. In the decades that followed these towns, which were varied in terms of geography and socio-economic conditions, suffered from lethal drug overdoses more than other parts of the country.