Too much winning? The coal industry is back? Nope: "Coal mines are closing faster than ever... A bleak outline tonight on the coal industry. A brand new report from CNN suggests more more coal plants have closed during the first two years of the Trump administration than the first four years of the Obama administration. It's not because of regulations but because of competition with cleaner, cheaper forms of energy. Another 20 plants are expected to close this year."Tangent/reminder: In 2016 Trump slaughtered Clinton-- 68.7% to 26.5%; he beat her in every single county. And in the primaries, Bernie also beat her badly-- 51.4% to 35.8%. He also beat her in every single county-- the urban counties, the suburban counties, the rural counties. No news there and not much to learn other than that theDemocratic Party should not let party apparatchiks pick slick, establishment corporate hacks to run for president. But that's not the point either. Even in the coal-mining counties where Trump did so well against Clinton, Bernie on primary day Bernie didn't just beat Hillary. In many counties he also outdrew Trump! People saw his authentic populist message of hope as more appealing than the dark, negative fascist picture Trump drew for them. Here's a cross section of West Virginia counties, where people were eager to hear a message that would lift their families’ lives. They heard it most convincingly not from Clinton and not even from Trump, but from Bernie. Monongalia, for example, whose county seat is Morgantown, is the third biggest county in the state. Bernie killed Trump there. Mingo is smack up against Kentucky in the southwest corner of the state-- "the bloodiest county in America," where Obama only got 8% of the primary vote in 2008. This is coal country, as are Logan and McDowell, both right next door. And all 3 gave far more votes to Bernie on primary day than to Señor Trumpanzee. They wanted change… but most of them wanted good change, not bad change.
• Boone: Bernie- 2,410; Trumpanzee- 1,388• Braxton: Bernie- 1,321; Trumpanzee- 861• Calhoun: Bernie- 803; Trumpanzee- 480• Clay: Bernie- 754; Trumpanzee- 568• Fayette: Bernie- 3,585; Trumpanzee- 2,683• Gilmer: Bernie- 643; Trumpanzee- 433• Lincoln: Bernie- 1,510; Trumpanzee- 1,193• Logan: Bernie- 3,201; Trumpanzee- 1,665• Marion: Bernie- 5,324; Trumpanzee- 4,035• McDowell: Bernie- 1,473; Trumpanzee- 760• Mingo: Bernie-2,425; Trumpanzee- 1,161• Monongalia: Bernie- 8,096; Trumpanzee- 5,971• Randolph: Bernie- 2,492; Trumpanzee- 2,206• Wayne: Bernie- 2,898; Trumpanzee- 2,662• Webster: Bernie- 837; Trumpanzee- 423• Wetzel: Bernie- 1,744; Trumpanzee- 1,096
Since the Trump/McConnell government shutdown, Trump's approval rating has ticked downward, as you can see in the brand new Gallup Poll chart. It doesn't matter that over the last month 2% more Democrats disapprove of him and it barely matters that in that period 1% more Republican voters disapprove of him. What does matter, though, is that his approve rating among independent voters has gone from 39% in mid-December to 31% now-- a drop of 8%. That's how elections are lost.Trump's approval rating is back down to 37%Yesterday Politico reported that Trump thinks he's going to turn his and his party's government shutdown "into a political issue in next year's presidential election, labeling 'Radical Democrats' as a 'party of open borders and crime.' How will he use this clip in his ad campaign?The Senate voted 100% against shutting down the government-- every Republican joining every Democrat to avoid Trump's shut down. They sent the bill to the House-- then controlled by Ryan and McCarthy-- and Ryan and McCarthy refused to allow it to come to a vote. OK, new year comes and Pelosi takes over the House, puts the Senate's bill up for a vote and it passes. So Trump tells McConnell not to have a Senate revote and... we now have the longest government shut-down in history and a petulant game-playing president laughing as the economy starts circling the drain. "But even as the government remained mired in the longest shutdown in the nation's history, the president signaled that he will look to make political hay out of Democrats' unwillingness to meet his demands for $5.7 billion in funding for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border."
Trump's signal that he will make the shutdown a 2020 issue came as the field of Democratic challengers has only begun to form. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) announced Tuesday that she would run for president, joining Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julián Castro, West Virginia state lawmaker Richard Ojeda and Reps. John Delaney (D-MD) and Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) in the Democratic field.None of the announced Democratic candidates have supported Trump's demands for a wall. Many have instead argued that that a border wall would be an inefficient use of funds that could be better spent on other priorities at the border like erecting fencing, hiring more immigration judges and Border Patrol agents and investing in monitoring technology.
It is expected that next week best-selling author and former Bernie surrogate, Marianne Williamson, is going to announce her candidacy. I asked her how she feels about the wall, about Trump's immigration agenda, about how to end this shutdown crisis and about how she'll debate these issues with Trump if she's the Democratic nominee in 2020.Unlike other candidates, Williamson is running a campaign based on her hope that every one of us-- all Americans regardless of partisanship-- have to do what we can to shore up our democracy now. She's been telling audiences that too many of us being disengaged from politics was the problem, not the answer. She's telling audiences larger than most of the presidential hopefuls are getting that "this [Trumpism] couldn’t have happened if more of us HAD been more engaged. We need to see that each of us being part of the solution-- on every level from local to federal-- is the only force large enough to create a unified field of democratic intent. When that field is stronger, the opponents of democracy don’t have such an easy time getting in." Yesterday she told me that "Neither his immigration policies nor the wall nor the shut down are anything but symptoms of the same disease. Of course we need to fight the symptoms, but until we address their underlying cause they will continue to morph into new iterations. Trumpism is an opportunistic infection that couldn’t have gotten hold of us if we hadn’t had such a weakened immune system. Boosting our immune system-- the intellectual, political and moral awakening of every citizen-- is the only force powerful enough to flush out the larger attack on our democracy that so much of his presidency represents."