Opponents of Jeff Session don’t appeal to Republicans

When the most high-profile opposition to him comes from the incoherent shouting of Code Pink and the camera-hugging grand-standing of Cory Booker, how do you think most Senate Republicans are going to vote?

There was a small window of opportunity for Sessions foes, but that would have required Senate Democrats to make an argument against the Alabama senator that appealed to the worldview of Senate Republicans. Sessions is a big fan of civil forfeiture, a process that allows law enforcement to take private property that more than a few conservatives contend is widely abused and has become “a cash cow for state and local police and prosecutors.” His support for drug prohibition isn’t by itself a glaring problem, but quite a few Republicans aren’t sure the War on Drugs is working out the way it was supposed to, and Sessions doesn’t appear to have doubted its effectiveness one bit. A lot of conservatives are taking a long look at sentencing reform, wondering if our prisons and jails are just taking the bad and making them worse. Sessions is wary at best about these efforts, fearing they will release violent offenders back on the streets, and he blocked legislative efforts last year.

Had the argument against Sessions focused primarily on those areas, maybe you could have shaken loose a few Republican senators. But hey, Code Pink wants to shout, so… go ahead, guys. Have at it.

Morning Jolt: Fry Dylann Roof

This is because a lot of self-identified death penalty opponents aren’t really full-spectrum death penalty opponents.

.. John Ekdahl set off an amusing storm on Twitter by noting that the three best-selling vehicles in the United States are pick-up trucks and asking journalists the seemingly anodyne question of whether they personally know anybody who owns one.

The responses were predictable: The sort of smug progressives who are proud of their smugness scoffed that pick-ups, pollution-belching penis-supplements for toothless red-state Bubbas, are found mainly in the sort of communities where they’d never deign to set foot

.. We’ve established that the world is immensely dangerous to Americans at the close of Obama’s presidency.

So now the Trump administration wants to… shrink the intelligence community?

.. Hey, it’s not like something bad happened when we cut the intelligence budget in the 1990s under Bill Clinton, right?

This is the sort of move that doesn’t just inspire cheering at the headquarters of the Russian intelligence apparatus, or ISIS’s headquarters in Raqqa. This will have those guys doing the wave.

Jim Geraghty: Election Polls not that far off

My last message to you, the Wednesday morning after the election, asked how the polls could be so wrong. After further review, one of the ironies of this shocking election was that the polls weren’t really wildly off at all.

The final RealClearPolitics average of national polls showed Hillary Clinton ahead by 3.3 points. She led by 4 points in the surveys commissioned by The Economist, ABC News/Washington Post, Gravis, NBC News/Wall Street Journal, and CBS News. Hillary’s currently ahead by… 1.3 percent in the national popular vote. When all is said and done, and those last absentees in California get added up, it could be close to 2 percent. Not that far off!

.. The final RCP average in Florida was Trump ahead by two-tenths of a percentage point. He won by 1.2 percent!

.. The final RCP average in Ohio was Trump ahead by 3.5 percentage points. He won by 8.5 percent—a bigger margin, but almost all of the final polls had Trump ahead here.

.. Michigan was one of the biggest surprises. The final RCP average in Michigan was Clinton ahead by 3.5 percentage points—but that was the smallest margin in the average for the entirety of the general election. The polls didn’t project Trump’s two-tenths of a percentage point margin of victory, but they did tell the story of late Trump momentum.

Libertarians Blew their best chance in decades

This was the year that the Democrats nominated a corrupt, longtime-insider, big-government, scandal-ridden statist, and the Republicans nominated a guy who wants government to get bigger – more infrastructure spending, mandated maternity leave, opposes entitlement reform, cheers eminent domain, and a new 35 percent tax on companies that fire workers.

Trump’s focus was never freedom or liberty. It was about empowering government, run by him, to address grievances of working-class whites and return America to a golden past, un-doing decades of changes to the country and the world.

This year was the golden opportunity libertarians – capital L and little L – had dreamed of for decades… and they fumbled it away.