Archive for the ‘Republicans’ Category
Why Republicans are gaining with less than a week to go – CNN
- Why Republicans are gaining with less than a week to go CNN
- Republicans hold edge over Democrats in congressional races among definite voters: poll Fox News
- Coming: Totally predictable, utterly normal Republican midterm sweep The Hill
- Midterm elections 2022: The tide is turning for Republicans Axios
- White Suburban Women Swing Toward Backing Republicans for Congress - WSJ The Wall Street Journal
- View Full Coverage on Google News
More:
Why Republicans are gaining with less than a week to go - CNN
Kyiv Is Hoping the Republican Party’s Better Angels Prevail in the U.S. Midterms – Foreign Policy
Politics stops at the waters edge, or it may have in 1947, when then-Sen. Arthur Vandenberg, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, first made the remark. But as partisan politics increasingly have bled into U.S. foreign policy in recent years, next months midterm elections have raised concerns about how the election could impact U.S. support for Ukraine as the war against Russia grinds into the winter.
Republicans have been widely predicted to retake control of the House of Representatives, and the future of the Senate remains up in the air. Although there has been strong bipartisan support for Kyiv since the war began among mainstream Republicans, former U.S. President Donald Trump-aligned members as well as influential commentators on Fox News and other parts of the right-wing echo chamber have begun to question the degree of military aid provided by Washington.
The decision to further arm Ukraine maps onto a deepening rift within the Republican Party between hawkish establishment conservatives, not shy of overseas intervention, and a growing chorus of isolationists who gained prominence during the Trump administration.
Politics stops at the waters edge, or it may have in 1947, when then-Sen. Arthur Vandenberg, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, first made the remark. But as partisan politics increasingly have bled into U.S. foreign policy in recent years, next months midterm elections have raised concerns about how the election could impact U.S. support for Ukraine as the war against Russia grinds into the winter.
Republicans have been widely predicted to retake control of the House of Representatives, and the future of the Senate remains up in the air. Although there has been strong bipartisan support for Kyiv since the war began among mainstream Republicans, former U.S. President Donald Trump-aligned members as well as influential commentators on Fox News and other parts of the right-wing echo chamber have begun to question the degree of military aid provided by Washington.
The decision to further arm Ukraine maps onto a deepening rift within the Republican Party between hawkish establishment conservatives, not shy of overseas intervention, and a growing chorus of isolationists who gained prominence during the Trump administration.
There are a lot of Republicans who are strongly behind Ukraine, who want the administration to do more, said Democratic Rep. Adam Smith, chair of the House Armed Services Committee.
There is, however, a creeping anxiety among Republicans, Democrats, and Ukrainians as to whether they could be overwhelmed by the vocal minority. In May, 57 Republican members of the House and 11 Republican senators voted against a $40 billion aid package for Ukraine while several members of the House Freedom Caucus, which represents some of the most extreme right-wing members, have spoken out explicitly against sending further aid to Ukraine. In August, members of the caucus co-sponsored a bill that called for no more federal funds to be sent to Ukraine until a wall is erected along the U.S. border with Mexico.
These voices that believe in America First isolationism dominate all of the major right-wing media, said Melinda Haring, deputy director of the Atlantic Councils Eurasia Center. Theyre the noisiest and the loudest, and they get the most attention.
Since the day Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, highly influential Fox News anchorssuch as Tucker Carlsonhave portrayed the war as a failing of the Biden administration, an effort to avenge Russias interference in the 2016 presidential election. At times, Carlson has echoed Russian talking points about the war.
Other conservative commentators dismissed the impact that Carlson and others had on the broader Republican Party. Anytime youre citing [Rep.] Matt Gaetz and Tucker Carlson, it sounds like there is an agenda behind it, said Danielle Pletka, a senior foreign-policy and defense fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Pletka noted that senior Republicans across the House and Senate have all encouraged the administration to provide more aid to Ukraine.
I think a lot is overblown in terms of the effect of Fox News commentators, said a Republican congressional aide who requested anonymity to discuss the matter. The aide noted that Republican concerns about military aid have largely centered on bureaucratic fights over appropriations and the urge to get heavy weaponry into the hands of the Ukrainian military faster. In a speech on the Senate floor in late September, minority leader Sen. Mitch McConnell urged the Biden administration to move faster in delivering weapons to Ukraine.
The other hesitancy about providing money to Ukraine is not as much to do with Ukraine itself but the Biden administration not doing the proper oversight and accountability of very large sums of money being given to a foreign partner, the aide added.
Others found little substance to the GOPs critiques of the way the Biden administration has handled military aid to Ukraine. Republican critiques of the Biden administration are nonsense on Ukraine. And I say that as a lifelong Republican and an Ukraine expert, Haring said.
But views from the fringes of the party have proven capable of moving into the mainstream in recent years, as evidenced by the partys coalescence around claims that the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent. A majority of GOP candidates running for office in November have questioned or rejected the outcome of the vote.
That small group has certainly shown that they have a disproportionate influence on the direction that [House Minority Leader Rep.] Kevin McCarthy chooses, Smith said.
Opinion polls already show creeping fatigue among Republican voters for U.S. support for Ukraine, which could come to weigh on members. A Morning Consult poll released on Monday found only 32 percent of Republicans believe that the United States has a responsibility to protect and defend Ukraine from Russia, compared to 58 percent of Democrats. I think its incumbent on mainstream Republicans to get out of Washington and New York and start talking to Americans, Haring said. We need to do better, and we need to explain why support for Ukraine is in the U.S. national interest.
Between January and October, Washington pledged $26.8 billion in military aid, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economys Ukraine Support Tracker, several times that of the second-biggest donor, the United Kingdom.
Any cutbacks to U.S. military aid to Kyiv could deal an existential blow to Ukraine.
People in Ukraine do believe that support for Ukraine is a bipartisan issue, said Olena Tregub, secretary-general of NAKO, an independent defense anti-corruption commission in Ukraine.
Yet, of course, here in Ukraine, there is a strong reaction [to] some statements of Donald Trump or Tucker Carlson. These are really shocking statements for Ukrainians, and they are confused as to how Russian propaganda has penetrated the American Republican Party to such an extent, she added.
Here is the original post:
Kyiv Is Hoping the Republican Party's Better Angels Prevail in the U.S. Midterms - Foreign Policy
Top Republicans Are Aiming at Brookings. Will It Backfire? – POLITICO
Congress, the executive branch, and the American people deserve to know whos influencing research and public policy in our country, is how Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, a co-sponsor of the most stringent recent proposal, put it.
Yet while the proximate controversy, and the subject of Grassleys bill, involve money from foreign sources, the logic of the criticism is that think tanks have an outsize effect on public policy and the public is therefore entitled to know whos calling the shots. Its a logic that doesnt necessarily stop at the waters edge.
Consider the highest-profile left-wing critic of Brookings, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, whose broadsides against nefarious foreign funders often elide into broadsides against nefarious domestic donors: Special interest money slithers through Washington like a snake, and for years Ive been sounding the alarm about corporations and foreign governments secretly using think tanks to lobby, Warren said in a statement. Her own bill, which predates the Allen tumult, would require think tanks to disclose donors not just foreign ones that pay for lobbying materials, among other things.
For all the joy that conservative pols have taken at Brookings latest turn in the barrel, conversations with people around the industry reveal an irony: Any potential new wave of government-mandated disclosure rules, especially those that go beyond foreign money, would actually represent a bigger cultural change at right-wing organizations, some of which historically have tended to see donations as a form of free speech. Establishmentarian center-left outfits like Brookings already share significant pieces of that information thanks in part, it should be noted, to previous funding imbroglios, and their reliance on corporate dollars. (The Heritage Foundation, by contrast, says less than two percent of its income comes from corporate sources.)
The last spate of transparency efforts, which followed a blockbuster set of New York Times reports in 2014 and 2016 about donor influence at think tanks, was embraced way more on the left than the right, one longtime conservative think tank figure tells me. (To be clear, this veteran of fundraising told me, thats because it was centrist and liberal outfits that had been caught out.) While a visitor to Brookings website can today peruse annual reports that identify top donors, the American Enterprise Institute says it doesnt provide that information as a matter of course.
Its going to be a harder, bigger disruptor for center-right think tanks, even though more of them say they dont take foreign government money, says Enrique Mendizabal, who leads On Think Tanks, a research outfit that researches the think tank business.
Its also notable that none of the proposals that have been publicized since the tumult at Brookings would have done much about Allen, whose allegedly fishy work for Qatar was done before he took over Brookings and would theoretically be covered by the Foreign Agent Registration Act. (Hes denied improper behavior and hasnt been charged with any wrongdoing.)
What the scrutiny of Allen did do, though, was re-focus attention on the organizations broader history with the emirate. In June, I reported on a 2007 contract with the Qatari government establishing a Brookings outpost in Doha while handing its autocratic regime an unusual and unattractive degree of contractual prerogatives over an independent organization. The previously unreported contract has been cited by members of Congress supporting new disclosure rules and demanding federal investigations. (In a final irony, it was during Allens tenure that Brookings actually disaffiliated from its Doha center and began eschewing funding from non-democratic governments.)
That Qatar deal wound up in angry public letters by Warren as well as a quartet of GOP senators, and in the most stringent of the bills introduced following Allens departure, the Think Tank Transparency Act, sponsored by Grassley and Michigan GOP Rep. Jack Bergman.
Not only does their measure require the quick disclosure of all funding from foreign sources, including private citizens, it also orders think tanks to share the contracts so that the public would know, as in the case of Brookings Doha center, whether management had agreed to submit a budget and program agenda to a government ministry. And it says any briefings for Congress or the executive branch funded by the foreign donation be labeled as such. The prospect of having to announce the support of the government of Qatar or Norway on every paper prepared for a federal policymaker is something that fills a lot of think-tankers with dread.
Under the bill, the rules apply to nonprofits that spent at least 20 percent of resources influencing public policy, which is how it avoids looping in art museums or cancer-research facilities or other nonprofits. Technically, theres no legal definition of think tank.
Another measure, the Fighting Foreign Influence Act, with bipartisan sponsorship that includes Democratic Reps. Jared Golden (Maine) and Katie Porter (Calif.) as well as the far-right Republican Rep. Paul Gosar (Ariz.), would require think tanks to declare any funding from foreign governments and political parties, which would then be published by the Treasury Department.
None of this would have happened if not for John Allen, says Ben Freeman, a research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and a longstanding critic of think tanks as a place where foreign entities can skirt FARA rules and have a real impact on American policy and public opinion. Freeman says the attention generated by the fall of Allen even if a large portion of it was just partisan pile-on by folks who dont like Brookings politics did more to galvanize the issue than any number of the papers he and colleague Eli Clifton have produced as theyve built a cottage industry as think-tank watchdogs.
I call it an enormous dark-money operation, Freeman says. Lets be honest here, these think tanks are going to play a vital role in advising policymakers and members of government about what would be good policies, presumably, in the national interest. The lack of mandatory disclosure, the fact its all voluntary, the fact that theres no enforcement, even of the accuracy of these voluntary disclosures, it all kinds of builds towards what is potentially an enormous national security problem.
Under the status quo, there are few rules about who a think tank may accept money from and who it has to tell. And there are probably as many internal policies as there are think tanks: The Heritage Foundation doesnt take any money from governments of any sort, foreign or domestic. Brookings does take money from governments, but only democratic ones. The Center for American Progress also takes foreign money, but not for any specific project. It also discloses donors, unless those donors choose to remain anonymous, something deep-pocketed types occasionally do to avoid being hit up by others. AEI doesnt disclose donors, but does release a graph about where the money comes from. And those are just the biggest outfits, the ones that can support sizable accounting staffs.
Freeman and Clifton say most of the larger places could abide foreign-donation transparency rules, despite the paperwork hassle. Many are already partly there. But the less august realms of the think tank sphere may prove trickier. I think where this matters a lot is at places that dont disclose any of this stuff and where, for the first time, were going to get a look under the hood there and see just how swampy it might be, Freeman says.
Like a lot of observers, the pair are skeptical about whether the measures can actually become law in a quickly-expiring Congress. But its likely that they presage future rough times for research outfits facing scrutiny from genuine reformers as well as ideological foes who just want to discredit the policy industry. That aspect of the national mood concerns even some folks who favor more transparency.
We should be wary of anything that undermines the use of expertise in policymaking, says David Solimini of the Stimson Center, an international-relations focused think tank. Stimson, he says, currently discloses its overseas and domestic donors, though it allows individual donors to opt for anonymity.
For folks whove made their lives in think tanks the heart of the matter is something more fundamental and unmentioned in any of the legislation and agitation: Just what are think tanks, anyway?
A quintessentially Washington industry whose research shapes public policy, whose jobs incubate future administrations, and whose role in Congressional testimony and media influences American public opinion, leaders of the institutions have often cast their world as a universe of dispassionate scholarship.
In the current climate of criticism, though, theyre being cast as something much earthier a part of the advocacy game, more like lobbyists with PhDs than like college professors who study Tennyson or Mayan civilization. And if lobbyists and foreign agents should have to declare who pays them, the logic goes, shouldnt it be the same for think tanks, which after all are subsidized by the government via their tax-exempt status?
Its an uncomfortable question for the self-esteem of think-tank employees, many of whom dont want to think of themselves as grubby influence-peddlers. But its also a problematic one for the folks who need to raise money for the outfits, which unlike colleges cant charge tuition.
People in the think tank world are worried, says Ken Weinstein, the former head of the conservative-oriented Hudson Foundation. They want to keep the focus on the scholars. They dont want to talk about the funders. The motives of the funders are not always the motives of the think tanks.
Mendizabal, who studies think tanks around the world, tells me hes in favor of broad transparency but wary of government regulations that could give aid and comfort to authoritarian regimes elsewhere that have cracked down on independent research organizations. Allegations of foreign meddling have been part of the playbook in countries like Russia that seek to quash any research or opinions that lack an official stamp.
As for the bigger question of what this new climate means for think tanks identities, he says he thinks part of the problem is that top organizations have become victims of their own hype. Though they like to describe themselves as rigorously research-based, they also solicit donations by talking up how much influence they have the kind of talk that, in a country already suffering from high levels of distrust, can cause political troubles.
The bill states that they have huge influence, he says of the Grassley-Bergman measure. Wheres the evidence of that? These think tanks are creating problems for themselves by claiming to be so influential. Its as if Congress has no agency theyre saying we need to be protected from these influential organizations that were powerless against and that use foreign money.
Continue reading here:
Top Republicans Are Aiming at Brookings. Will It Backfire? - POLITICO
OCTOBER HARVARD-CAPS HARRIS POLL: REPUBLICANS ARE INCHING CLOSER TOWARDS A WAVE AS THEY WIN OVER VOTERS ON INFLATION, CRIME, AND IMMIGRATION – PR…
REPUBLICANS ARE WINNING THE GENERIC CONGRESSIONAL BALLOT 53% TO 47% AMONG LIKELY VOTERS
55% OF AMERICANS BLAME BIDEN FOR INFLATION, INCLUDING 42% OF DEMOCRATS
BIDEN'S DEBT RELIEF AND MARIJUANA PARDONS ARE POPULAR BUT DON'T MOVE THE NEEDLE ELECTORALLY FOR DEMOCRATS
NEW YORK and CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Oct. 14, 2022 /PRNewswire/ --Stagwell (NASDAQ: STGW) today released the results of the October Harvard-CAPS Harris Poll, a monthly collaboration between the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard (CAPS) and the Harris Poll and HarrisX.
Republicans are connecting with voters on their key issues of inflation, crime, and immigration, while Americans see Democrats as mostly focused on January 6, women's rights, and the environment. Biden continues to struggle on the economy, which is the key issue: 84% of Americans think the US is in a recession now or will be by next year, and 58% are not confident in Biden's ability to hold inflation at bay.
Other topics surveyed in this month's poll include voter views on Biden's marijuana pardon and student debt plans, and US foreign policy around oil and Ukraine. Download key results here.
"Republicans are inching back towards a wave election after a summer when abortion seemed to turn the tides," said Mark Penn, Co-Director of the Harvard-CAPS Harris Poll and Stagwell Chairman and CEO. "People are more motivated to vote when they are upset, and the Republicans are capturing voter dissatisfaction on inflation, crime, and immigration. Americans are suffering incredible economic anxiety on top of normal buyer's remorse for the president and his party in a midterm."
REPUBLICANS ARE CONNECTING ON INFLATION, CRIME, AND IMMIGRATION
AMERICANS BLAME BIDEN AND THE FED FOR INFLATION
BIDEN'S DEBT RELIEF AND MARIJUANA PARDON POLICIES ARE POPULAR BUT DON'T MOVE THE NEEDLE ELECTORALLY
AMERICANS LEAN TOWARDS HAWKISH FOREIGN POLICY ON OIL AND RUSSIA
The October Harvard-CAPS Harris Poll survey was conducted online within the United States from October 12-13, 2022, among 2,010 registered voters by The Harris Poll and HarrisX. Follow the Harvard CAPS Harris Poll podcast athttps://www.markpennpolls.com/or on iHeart Radio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other podcast platforms.
About The Harris Poll
The Harris Poll is a global consulting and market research firm that strives to reveal the authentic values of modern society to inspire leaders to create a better tomorrow. It works with clients in three primary areas: building twenty-first-century corporate reputation, crafting brand strategy and performance tracking, and earning organic media through public relations research. One of the longest-running surveys in the U.S., The Harris Poll has tracked public opinion, motivations, and social sentiment since 1963, and is now part of Stagwell, the challenger holding company built to transform marketing.
About the Harvard Center for American Political Studies The Center for American Political Studies (CAPS) is committed to and fosters the interdisciplinary study of U.S. politics.Governed by a group of political scientists, sociologists, historians, and economists within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, CAPS drives discussion, research, public outreach, and pedagogy about all aspects of U.S. politics. CAPS encourages cutting-edge research using a variety of methodologies, including historical analysis, social surveys, and formal mathematical modeling, and it often cooperates with other Harvard centers to support research training and encourage cross-national research about the United States in comparative and global contexts. More information at https://caps.gov.harvard.edu/.
SOURCE Stagwell Inc.
Read the rest here:
OCTOBER HARVARD-CAPS HARRIS POLL: REPUBLICANS ARE INCHING CLOSER TOWARDS A WAVE AS THEY WIN OVER VOTERS ON INFLATION, CRIME, AND IMMIGRATION - PR...