By David Wright, CNN

Republicans are leveraging voter frustration with high prices to hammer Democrats in midterms campaign ads.

GOP groups and campaigns up and down the ballot have produced 93 distinct TV ads mentioning inflation, spending $13 million on more than 30,000 airings from the start of 2021 through Thursday. By comparison, their Democratic counterparts have produced just two ads mentioning inflation, spending about $600,000 on 1,700 airings, according to a CNN analysis of AdImpact data.

In their ads, Republicans blame policies from President Joe Biden and Democrats in Washington for inflation, which is at its highest level since 1982.

One Nation, a GOP group, is targeting Democratic senators in key states such as Arizona, Nevada and New Hampshire with an ad filled with newsclips about inflation, saying, “Inflation is killing us. Stop the reckless spending.”

Another GOP group, Building America’s Future, is running ads across a range of competitive House and Senate races, warning that “inflation is rising out of control, prices surging from cars to gasoline, to groceries and utilities.” And American Action Network, a conservative group, is running ads in multiple races about “record inflation,” calling it a “hidden tax on the working class.”

Republican candidates for US Senate in key races across the country have also made inflation a point of emphasis.

In Arizona, Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly faces a competitive reelection campaign, and Republican challenger Jim Lamon accuses the senator in one of his ads of causing “rampant inflation” by supporting the Biden agenda. Lamon first faces a crowded GOP primary that includes state Attorney General Mark Brnovich, venture capitalist Blake Masters and retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Mick McGuire.

In the race to replace retiring Ohio GOP Sen. Rob Portman, Republican Mike Gibbons — a self-funding candidate pouring millions into his bid — has an ad that says, “It’s roaring into our lives, Biden’s raging inflation. We’re paying the high price, and politicians are completely to blame.” The competitive GOP primary there also features former state party chair Jane Timken, state senator and Cleveland Guardians part-owner Matt Dolan, author J.D. Vance and former state Treasurer Josh Mandel.

In another key open-seat Senate race, Pennsylvania Republican Mehmet Oz is spending millions on his ads saying “Biden’s reckless spending caused inflation.” GOP Sen. Pat Toomey’s retirement in the battleground state has drawn a long list of contenders for his seat, including former hedge fund manager David McCormick and Trump-era Ambassador Carla Sands on the GOP side, and state Lt. Gov. John Fetterman and US Rep. Conor Lamb on the Democratic side.

And in Missouri, US Rep. Billy Long — a former auctioneer running in the contested Republican primary for retiring GOP Sen. Roy Blunt’s seat that also includes ex-Gov. Eric Greitens and US Rep. Vicky Hartzler — remarks on inflation in one of his campaign spots. “Now we have Biden and the far left crazies letting inflation rise faster than an auctioneer rattling off numbers,” he says.

Wisconsin GOP Sen. Ron Johnson, who is up for reelection this fall in a state that Biden carried in 2020, warns in an ad that “from open borders, increasing crime and rising inflation, Democratic policies are weakening America.”

Democrats — currently with control of the White House and both chambers of Congress — have referenced inflation far less often in their midterms advertising. Alex Lasry, a potential challenger to Johnson in Wisconsin, confronts the issue in one of his ads: “Supply chain backlogs. Inflation agitation. Here’s an idea. If we make things here in America, supply chain issues won’t be a thing anymore.”

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The political landscape in the United States is always evolving as administrations change and the White House looks forward to a new crop of faces. One notable trend in that ever-evolving landscape has been the emergence of women running for office in the last decade: women who are ready to make a change and have their voices heard. The 2018 midterm elections established an exciting incoming freshman crop of leaders that included Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the Democratic Party, and more and more noteworthy women in U.S. politics have been making their mark every year since.

Related story

A Look Back at Presidential Families Through the Decades

The uptick of women in elected office isn’t exclusive to the Democratic party. The Republican Party also has rising female stars — along with some veterans that are important to what’s happening in our country right now. Understanding conservative Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s views is important as Roe v. Wade heads back to court for a heated battle, and South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem hopes to take her state position and bring it to the national stage in 2024. So, no matter where you fall on the political spectrum, it’s important to know the names and faces that are currently shaking up Washington, D.C. as well as their home states.

And in the spirit of Women’s History Month, it was the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg who wisely reminded us all, “Women belong in all places where decisions are being made.” So, get to know the women in politics who are making headlines (and decisions) as representatives of our states and our country.

 

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WASHINGTON — Key senators working on an overhaul of the little-known law that former President Donald J. Trump and his allies tried to use to overturn the 2020 election pledged on Sunday that their legislation would pass the Senate, saying that recent revelations about the plot made their work even more important.

In a joint interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Senators Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, and Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, said their efforts to rewrite the Electoral Count Act of 1887 were gaining broader support in the Senate, with as many as 20 senators taking part in the discussions.

“Absolutely, it will pass,” Mr. Manchin said of an overhaul of the law, which dictates how Congress formalizes elections.

He said efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies to exploit “ambiguity” in the law were “what caused the insurrection” — the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. That misreading of the statute led to a plan by Mr. Trump and his allies to amass a crowd outside the Capitol to try to pressure Congress and Vice President Mike Pence, who presided over Congress’s official count of electoral votes, to overturn the results of the election.

Ms. Murkowski said the rewrite could be expanded to include other protections for democracy, such as a crackdown on threats and harassment against election workers.

“We want to make sure that if you are going to be an election worker,” Ms. Murkowski said, “you don’t feel intimidated or threatened or harassed.”

A bipartisan group of at least 15 senators — which includes Mr. Manchin and Ms. Murkowski and is led by Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine — recently began discussions with another group that features top Democrats who have studied the issue for months. That group includes Senator Angus King, independent of Maine; Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota; and Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois.

Mr. King’s group last week released draft legislative text for a rewrite of the Electoral Count Act that would address deficiencies exposed by Mr. Trump’s plan. The bill would clarify that the vice president has no power to reject a state’s electors and ensure that state legislatures cannot appoint electors after Election Day in an effort to overturn their state’s election results.

It would also give states additional time to complete legitimate recounts and litigation; provide limited judicial review to ensure that the electors appointed by a state reflect the popular vote results in the state; enumerate specific and narrow grounds for objections to electors or electoral votes; raise the thresholds for Congress to consider objections; and make it harder to sustain objections without broad support by both chambers of Congress.

In an interview with The New York Times, Mr. King called his group’s draft “very nonpartisan” and said it included the input of conservative and liberal legal scholars.

“Hopefully we can join forces and get a good bill,” Mr. King said of Ms. Collins’s group.

The latest push to clarify the law follows a series of revelations about a campaign by Mr. Trump and his allies to try to overturn the 2020 election, including the surfacing of memos that show the roots of the attempts to use so-called alternate electors to keep Mr. Trump in power and the former president’s exploration of proposals to seize voting machines.

On Friday, Mr. Pence offered his most forceful rebuke of Mr. Trump’s plan, saying the former president was “wrong” to insist that Mr. Pence had the legal authority to overturn the results of the election. Those comments came on the same day the Republican National Committee voted to censure two members of the party, Representatives Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, in a resolution that described the events of Jan. 6 as “legitimate political discourse.”

Ms. Cheney and Mr. Kinzinger are the only Republican members of the special House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, which left more than 150 police officers injured and resulted in several deaths.

The resolution drew criticism from some congressional Republicans on Sunday.

Representative Michael McCaul, Republican of Texas, said on ABC’s “This Week” that he did “not agree with that statement — if it’s applying to those who committed criminal offenses and violence to overtake our shrine of democracy.”

In an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Marc Short, Mr. Pence’s former chief of staff, said that “from my front-row seat, I did not see a lot of legitimate political discourse.”

Mr. Short blamed Mr. Trump’s push to overturn the election on “many bad advisers who were basically snake-oil salesmen, giving him really random and novel ideas as to what the vice president could do.”

He described being taken to a secure room in the Capitol with Mr. Pence on Jan. 6 as rioters stormed the building, some chanting, “Hang Mike Pence.” He said Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence did not talk that day.

Mr. Short and another top Pence aide, Greg Jacob, recently testified before the committee, a step Mr. Pence’s advisers have hoped would stop the committee from issuing a subpoena for Mr. Pence. Representatives of Mr. Pence have been negotiating with the committee’s lawyers for months.

“That would be a pretty unprecedented step for the committee to take,” Mr. Short said of a subpoena for the former vice president, adding that it would be “very difficult for me to see that scenario unfolding.”

Emily Cochrane and Chris Cameron contributed reporting.

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CNN

By Kara Scannell and Sonia Moghe, CNN

The New York attorney general’s office has subpoenaed two of former President Donald Trump‘s children for testimony as part of its civil investigation into whether the Trump Organization manipulated the values of its properties.

The disclosure was made public Monday in a court filing where the judge set a briefing schedule to handle a dispute that has arisen over the subpoenas for Trump’s testimony as well as Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr.

The attorney general’s office previously subpoenaed Trump for testimony and set a deadline of January 7. Trump’s lawyers have said they would move to quash the subpoena.

A lawyer for Ivanka Trump and Trump Jr. did not respond to a request for comment.

Eric Trump, an executive vice president at the company, was previously subpoenaed and provided his testimony in late 2020.

The subpoenas for the testimony of Trump’s children comes amid an ongoing criminal investigation into the Trump Organization and its executives and whether they inflated the value of some of its assets. Prosecutors with the Manhattan district attorney’s office have interviewed additional witnesses in that case in recent weeks. The New York attorney general’s office joined with the district attorney as part of the criminal investigation earlier this year.

Representatives for the Trump Organization could not immediately be reached for comment.

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The Baltimore Tree Trust today called on Mayor Brandon Scott and the Board of Estimates to reinstate its low bid for planting 3,000 trees on city streets.

As as result of a minor irregularity, the nonprofit said, its bid was tossed out, allowing the contract to go to “a well-connected, for-profit vendor from Baltimore County” whose bid is 69% higher.

“What is scheduled to happen at the Board of Estimates meeting on Wednesday is an outrage,” declared Bryant Smith, executive director of the Tree Trust at a press conference in Druid Hill Park.

“In a city that’s trying to encourage nonprofits and NGO’s to get contracts to do work in the community, employ local people and train youths, why would they turn us down for minor technicalities,” he asked.

According to the Minority and Women’s Business Opportunity Office (MWBOO), one of the nonprofit’s two WBE subcontractors did not file a corporate renewal application and was “not in good standing” with the city when the bid was submitted.

The subcontractor would have provided supplies worth 2.25% of the full contract, an amount that could easily be absorbed by the other WBE, Smith said.

He said the error originated from MWBOO’s own database, which incorrectly listed the WBE as in good standing.

City regulations allow the board to give a winning bidder 10 days to place a WBE in good standing or make arrangements with another subcontractor to fulfill hiring goals.

Only One Bid

With Tree Trust disqualified, only one bidder is now before the board – Lorenz Inc., whose $1.6 million planting proposal is $651,000 higher than Tree Trust’s bid of $946,490.

In recent years, the Pikesville-based company has gained a near monopoly on grass mowing and landscaping contracts in Baltimore City.

It has won more than $33 million in city contracts, favored by former Mayor Catherine Pugh (who received a $1,000 campaign contribution by company founder Joe Lorenz in 2017) and, more recently, by the Brandon Scott administration.

Between those periods, Lorenz was publicly called out by Mayor Bernard C. “Jack” Young, who accused the company of doing shoddy work and not employing more city youth at a BOE meeting in April 2020.

Young halted approval of $4.7 million of contract renewals to Lorenz at the meeting, only to approve the very same renewals two weeks later with a warning that “I’m looking at all these contracts for duplicity [sic] to see if we need those contracts.”

In April 2021, Lorenz won its most lucrative contract to date – $13 million to mow grass in medians and right of ways maintained by the city Department of Transportation through the spring of 2024.

The contract was approved without discussion by Scott, City Council President Nick Mosby, Comptroller Bill Henry, City Solicitor James L. Shea and Acting DPW Director Matthew Garbark.

Disqualification of the Tree Trust will cost taxpayers $650,000, says former mayoral aspirant Thiru Vignarajah. (Fern Shen)

Planter of 13,000 Trees

Thiru Vignarajah, former state deputy attorney general and 2020 mayoral candidate, joined Smith and COO Justin Bowers to denounce the process that led to the nonprofit’s disqualification.

“This is a circumstance that reveals how broken our procurement system is, how broken City Hall can be,” he said.

The Tree Trust “has been doing this work for years. It has a Black director who has consistently employed residents of Baltimore, many of whom are at-risk youth, many of whom are returning citizens, and gives them skills and a constructive path forward.”

The trust was established in 2008 by Baltimore author Jill Jonnes and arborist Amanda Cunningham.

First chaired by Barbara Shea, wife of the current city solicitor, James L. Shea, early efforts were concentrated on planting trees east of Johns Hopkins Hospital around McElderry Park. They have since expanded to include the entire city.

The organization has now planted 13,000 trees, but says that Baltimore’s tree canopy has only increased about 1% because so many trees have been chopped down or have died through inadequate care.

Louis Middleton, a neighborhood forester employed by the trust, today expressed pride in the group’s impact on poor communities.

“I’m seeing neighborhoods that are degraded, but we’re making them better,” he said.

“I’ve got people asking me, ‘Can you plant a tree on my street?’ I’ve got a job where my kids say, ‘Hey, my dad planted that tree!’”

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Details of how police attempted to criminalise British families whose children were trafficked to Islamic State (IS) in Syria are revealed in a series of testimonies that show how grieving relatives were initially treated as suspects and then abandoned by the authorities.

One described being “treated like a criminal” and later realising that police were only interested in acquiring intelligence on IS instead of trying to help find their loved one. Another told how their home had been raided after they approached police for help to track down a missing relative.

Their experiences were revealed in a parliamentary session last week that was closed to the media at the request of the families, due to concern they would be misrepresented and harassed. However, four of the families that gave evidence have agreed to share their experiences with the Observer anonymously to shed light on their treatment by the authorities and how their daughters have been left stranded in Syrian refugee camps.

One woman revealed how she had cooperated with police when her sister went missing only to learn officers had had no intention of tracking her down. “We thought the police were there to help us. Over time, we could see the police and the authorities weren’t talking to us to help us, but only to get information. Once they had their information, they washed their hands of us.”

She added: “We were never offered any support. I felt I had to prove I was anti-extremist to them; I felt I was always under suspicion.”

A member of another family said: “I was interrogated as if I was a suspect, and once they had decided I wasn’t, they didn’t really want anything to do with me. It became really difficult to get in touch with them.”

Their testimonies follow a report from legal charity Reprieve that found two-thirds of British women detained in north-east Syria were coerced or trafficked to the region, often lured there after being groomed on dating sites, before being sexually exploited.

The report found that many girls were under 18 when they travelled to IS territory and have since suffered exploitation, forced marriage, rape and domestic servitude. They include a British girl who was trafficked to Syria aged 12, then raped and impregnated by an IS fighter. One of the most high-profile British cases of children joining IS involves three London schoolgirls, Kadiza Sultana, 16, and Amira Abase and Shamima Begum, both 15. The latter’s lawyer says there is “overwhelming evidence” Begum was trafficked.

The family testimony was given to the all-party parliamentary group on trafficked Britons in Syria, which will release a report in the new year.

Only about 20 British families are currently stranded in north-eastern Syria, yet the Home Office refuses to consider repatriating women and children. It has even removed the citizenship of most, including Begum.

Amira Abase, 15, Kadiza Sultana, 16, and Shamima Begum, 15, from Bethnal Green in London, at Gatwick airport in 2015. Photograph: Metropolitan Police/PA

The UK government’s stance is at odds with that of other European states, and the US has called on western countries to take responsibility for their citizens and bring them home.

Andrew Mitchell, former international development secretary and chair of the all-party parliamentary group, said: “If the government would only listen to these families, it would surely realise the inhumanity and sheer wrongheadedness of abandoning British citizens in desert detention camps.

“This terrible policy is affecting ordinary law-abiding families and fraying the fabric of our multicultural society. Whether from a security perspective or a moral one, the case for repatriation could not be more clear.”

Former Foreign Office minister Baroness Warsi said: “Many of us in parliament are very concerned by what is happening here, particularly in relation to the precedent that it sets.”

All of the families who gave testimony expressed anger over how the UK government had ditched the principle of innocent until proven guilty in relation to their children, a decision they said compromised the UK’s international standing.

One said: “Normally, it is western governments that talk about human rights and trafficking. However, when it is my family who have been abused and trafficked, they have decided not even to investigate their cases. They are considered guilty just for being in Syria.”

They added: “Women and children are being punished without a trial. I don’t know why Britain has decided to abandon its principles in my family’s case.”

Another family member said: “I felt really betrayed and [she] felt confused as to why her country had abandoned her. I’ve now lost faith in the people who are supposed to help and protect us. We don’t have our rights any longer.”

Reprieve’s data indicates that British families in north-eastern Syria include around 19 women and 38 children; more than half of the children are five years old or younger. The UK government has stripped citizenship from at least 20 of the adults, including Begum. That stance appears peculiar, say experts, when viewed against the fact that only 40 or so of the 400 Britons who have returned to the UK after travelling to Syria or Iraq to join terrorist organisations have been prosecuted.

Maya Foa, the director of Reprieve, said the families in the camps had “been stripped of all rights, presumed guilty without a trial, subjected to violence, and abandoned by the government”. She said that the government “appeared to be seeking to inflict maximum harm on this group – which is mostly British children – to make some kind of political point”, adding that this was “dangerous for our security as well as the interests of justice”.

Reprieve’s research into the British trafficking victims is based on extensive work in the Syrian camps, while the Home Office has made no apparent attempt to visit the camps or evaluate if the women were exploited.

The UK government has defended its position, saying it views the British families as a potential national security threat.

One of the families said it was laughable that their loved one could be considered a threat. “[She] is so frail and has been abused. She is not a threat. She is really scared and vulnerable,” they said.

Another added that their sister was effectively incarcerated the moment she arrived in Syria, saying: “She was imprisoned in every way; it was a cage from the moment she was there.”

The families’ evidence has sharpened the focus on how the UK authorities failed to protect at-risk women and girls from being trafficked to Syria in the first place.

In particular, their testimony raises questions over the police’s heavy-handed approach of opting to view vulnerable young women and children as terrorists rather than as a safeguarding issue.

“All I want to ask the government is: you had every opportunity to protect her and failed, how can you now wash your hands of her?” said one.

After listening to their testimony, Warsi told participants in the session that the stripping of citizenship is of particular concern to her. “It is important for me to be involved in this, because it could be me, it could be a descendant of my family.”

She added: “I served as the first Muslim in the cabinet in this country, and this country is the only place that my family before and after me would consider home. This is a point of principle that goes beyond you and your families, but your families are cases which illustrate this principle.”

Conditions in the Kurdish-controlled refugee camps are dire – described by the World Health Organization as “deplorable and unbearable”. According to Save the Children, during the first eight months of 2021, 163 people died in Camp al-Hol, including 62 children. There have been at least 81 murders this year. In August last year, eight children under five years old died in a single week.

One family member told the parliamentary inquiry: “The children are growing up surrounded by threats of violence and danger from things like frequent tent fires.”

Another added that her grandchildren were “suffering” in the camps: “The children are still young. I don’t want them to be brought up in unsafe camps, with no access to medical facilities or education.”

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Tuesday 09 November 2021 4:08 pm

The publisher of one of Europe’s highest-selling tabloids forces employees to disclose their relationships in the newsroom, after its editor, Julian Reichelt, was ousted for a string of affairs with his interns. 

Axel Springer plans to introduce a new code of conduct for its 16,000 staff that will force them to quit if they behave inappropriately in the workplace. 

Whilst the new rule doesn’t outwardly ban workplace relationships, it does look to build a stricter office environment 

This new policy sits in a wider context of Axel’s chief executive Mathias Döpfner’s quest to make the publisher one of the world’s biggest online media companies.

He started with buying Politico, the U.S. political news outlet, earlier this year for a reported $1bn (£730m). 

The new work policy now suggests he is hoping to integrate this American dream into workplace culture.

In the USA, it is common for employees to enter a “love contract”, with the likes of BlackRock banning romances altogether, and Airbnb offering guidelines for dating. 

This trend was only buffered by the Me Too movement, which made many companies even stricter. 

A general trend is that European companies are becoming more willing to regulate employee private lives.

In the UK, employees could claim unfair dismissal if they were sacked for breaking a “love contract”, and rules are normally much more subtle in the City about whether employees can get together.

Rhona Darbyshire, Partner and Head of Employment at law firm Cripps Pemberton Greenish said: 

“It is by no means unusual for businesses in the UK to require staff to disclose details of romantic relationships in the workplace. Legally they will be on solid ground if they can show such a policy is in place to protect legitimate business interests. This could include avoiding disclosure of confidential information or conflicts of interests – for example, a relationship between a manager and a direct report. 

“Under the Human Rights Act, employees do have a right to a private and family life, and this includes their personal relationships. It is therefore important for a business to demonstrate they have got the balance right between these conflicting interests.

“In reality, implementing a policy of requiring staff to disclose workplace relationships is likely to be the easy part. Enforcing the policy is another matter entirely and not a decision to be taken lightly.”

Read more

German publisher Axel Springer to buy US news site Politico

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With all of that in mind, let’s briefly look at this political-desk offering from The Washington Post: “Black and Latino voters often pick Democrats. But Republicans of color just won 2 big ‘firsts’ in Virginia.” Here is the overture:

Virginia’s political landscape saw a historic shift this week when a Black, Jamaican-born woman won the race for lieutenant governor and the son of a Cuban refugee became the state’s next attorney general.

The fact that Winsome E. Sears and Del. Jason S. Miyares (Virginia Beach) are both Republicans reflects the inroads the GOP is making in the African American and Latino communities that have long favored Democrats, political analysts say.

By reaching those historic milestones first with a ticket led by Glenn Youngkin, the governor-elect, that was more diverse than the Democrats’, which featured two White men, Republicans now hold a symbolic advantage over Democrats, said L. Douglas Wilder, who as a Democrat during the 1980s and ’90s became Virginia’s first Black lieutenant governor and governor.

Did any religious content make it into the story?

Well, it does mention Youngkin’s strong support for additional state funding for historically Black colleges and universities (HBUs) and, in a Southern state, that is highly likely to include campuses linked to churches and Black denominations. Then there was this:

… Sears is an advocate for government-funded school vouchers, which she has said could help Black students in communities with low-performing public schools get a better education.

The primary daily function of the lieutenant governor is to preside over the state Senate, where Democrats hold a slim 21-to-19 majority, and serve as a tiebreaking vote. With Republicans on their way to a 52-to-48 majority in the House of Delegates, it’s probable that some bills reaching the Senate will attract support from one or two more conservative Democrats in that chamber, making a tie and a need for Sears’s vote more likely, Holsworth said.

That is particularly so with respect to abortion restrictions, which Sears, a devout Christian, has said she supports. On that issue, Sen. Joseph D. Morrissey (D-Richmond), an antiabortion Catholic, has in the past sided with Republicans.

O.K., I’ll ask. Are there other “conservative Democrats” in Virginia whose beliefs on religious, moral and cultural issues — maybe think “woke” trends in public schools — are linked to religious convictions and ties to specific pews and doctrines? Are any of those “conservative Democrats” Latino or Black evangelicals, Catholics or Pentecostal believers?

Later in the story, the Post did — to its credit — feature some addition faith-linked content, turning to input from Quentin Kidd of Christopher Newport University.

… [A]reas that are also mostly Black and Democratic — Portsmouth, Hampton and Newport News — also saw a shift toward Republicans, albeit not as large, Kidd said. That indicates that Sears, who made direct appeals to Black voters who share her conservative views on abortion and gun rights, had impact, he said.

Traditional Democratic voters are so liberal on those issues that the voices of more socially conservative Black voters — especially Black women — are often not heard, Kidd said.

Sears “may be able to highlight that conservative viewpoint more and make it acceptable for it to be more of a part of the political identity of the Black voter in a way it isn’t so much now,” he said.

Could be. If so, add that trend to the growing clout of Latino evangelicals, Catholics and Pentecostal believers and, you know, that might be an important story.

Yes, your GetReligionistas have been saying that for years. So there.

Enjoy the podcast and, please, pass it along to others.

FIRST IMAGE: From the Twitter feed of the Salem Republican office.

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I think many journalists would assume — if they thought about religion angles in the Virginia race — that the members of the victorious GOP team probably came from White megachurches. But that’s not what veteran editor Tony Carnes found when he looked for the ties that bind, in this case. Here is his overture:

Most of the media attention in the Virginia elections has been on Trump and his influence. The Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe tried unsuccessfully to tag his opponent Glenn Youngkin as a Trumper.

However, under the surface of politics, there was a deeper spiritual culture and social network that connected the top three candidates in Virginia. This characteristic made the GOP effort in Virginia more winsome (indeed, that is the first name of Winsome Sears, the next Lieutenant Governor.)

When one looks at the facts, wrote Carnes, it’s possible to see “why Youngkin appears to have done a lot better among Latinos, African Americans, and women.” The question is whether any of these religion and culture connects will be seen in future contests across the nation.

Here is the information that I found so fascinating and, Carnes is suggesting, these facts are quite different from those connected to Trump the man, a former liberal Mainline Protestant who grew up to become an intensely secular candidate, in terms of his own style and lack of commitment to a worshipping community.

Youngkin goes to an evangelical Episcopal church Holy Trinity Church and provides a retreat center for FOCUS (Fellowship of Christians in Universities & Schools), an evangelical outreach to prep school students. In UK Youngkin served on the executive committee of Holy Trinity Brompton (the home church of the Alpha course).

The “Alpha course” — a program promoting personal evangelism — is a global phenomenon among traditional Anglicans worldwide, in Africa and Asia as well as England and America. It’s hard-core, face-to-face Christian basics.

Reading on:

The GOP Lt Governor-elect Winsome Sears is an African American who headed a homeless ministry for the Salvation Army (as well as being vice president of the Board of Education for Virginia, an elected official, and a Marine).

Attorney General-elect Jason Miyares is a Latino Christian, a member of Galilee Episcopal Church, an evangelical leaning Episcopal church.

Carnes asked a logical question: While the press focused on Trump, Critical Race Theory, Democrat Terry McAuliffe’s foot-in-mouth moments and other obvious topics:

… Underneath, I wonder. did the deep connections to the people in the pews and the balance and gentleness of the Spirit play a role?

Or as Youngkin put it with a bit of hyperbole and spiritualized metaphor in his speech last night: “A campaign that came from nowhere. But we were joined by neighbors and friends of all races, of all religions, of all ages, of all political ideologies, and it turned into a movement. This stopped being a campaign long ago. This is the spirit of Virginia coming together like never before.”

That’s a pretty big jump, methinks, but I think the facts points to connections in this trio, in terms of style and faith commitments.

Here’s one other strange bit of news from last night, care of USA Today. Sometimes, it’s hard to see stories that should be right in front of your editor’s eyes.

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Thank God for Germany. That is not a sentiment that you heard much during the 20th century. As the second world war drew to a close, Hans Morgenthau, the US Treasury secretary, argued that the only answer to the German question was the destruction of the country’s industrial capacity. François Mauriac, the French writer, welcomed the division of the country, joking “I love Germany so much, I’m glad there are two of them”.

When reunification loomed in 1990, a meeting of chiefly British intellectuals, convened by Margaret Thatcher, discussed the German national character. Her chief foreign policy adviser wrote minutes suggesting these were “in alphabetical order, angst, aggressiveness, assertiveness, bullying, egotism, inferiority complex, sentimentality”.

Thirty years on and these stereotypes about national character have been completely reversed. It is the US and the UK where politics seem increasingly prone to “angst, aggressiveness” and all those other unattractive, supposedly Teutonic, qualities. These days, it is German public life that is characterised by the virtues the British often attribute to themselves — calm, restraint, rationality and compromise.

The recent German election and its aftermath underline the point. It was a close contest, but the losers accepted the results gracefully. Nobody tried to claim that the voting was rigged or that their opponents were “scum” — or represented a mortal danger to the country.

The Social Democrats now look set to lead a German government for the first time since 2005. But a transition of power will not bring about an abrupt rupture in policies or an attempt by the political opposition to paralyse the government, as is happening in the US.

The SPD’s Olaf Scholz, who may become chancellor, ran as a continuity candidate. As my FT colleagues reported, voters saw Scholz “with his quiet demeanour, long experience in government and pragmatic politics, as Merkel’s natural successor”. How very different from the leadership profiles of Donald Trump or Boris Johnson.

This reversal of roles is not simply one of the ironies of history. It is the product of history. Unlike any other country that I know of, Germany has placed a memorial to its greatest national disgrace right at the heart of its capital. The Holocaust memorial in Berlin stands near the Brandenburg Gate, the traditional centre of the city. It is a symbol of modern Germany’s determination to acknowledge the horrors of Nazism — and to learn the lessons.

Because they know where demagoguery can lead, mainstream German politicians are allergic to the cult of the leader. No candidate for chancellor would ever boast, as Trump did, that “I alone can fix it”, or encourage chants of “lock her up” about his opponent. In the recent election debates, the party leaders treated each other with an underlying respect and restraint. They know that politics is a serious business. Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Germany’s president, is said to be particularly contemptuous of Johnson because he thinks that the British prime minister treats politics as a game.

Modern Germany is not immune to the dangers of political extremism. In 2020, a crowd of anti-vaxxers and assorted extremists attempted, unsuccessfully, to storm the Reichstag. In the wake of the refugee crisis of 2015, when Merkel allowed over 1m migrants and refugees into the country, many observers, myself included, predicted a surge in political extremism in Germany. The atmosphere in the 2017 election was often ugly. The extreme-right Alternative for Germany party won a large bloc of seats in parliament.

But in the most recent election, the political extremes of right and left both lost votes. The centre has not only held in Germany, it has strengthened. The AfD is still strong in eastern Germany, but it is further away than ever from national power.

One difference between Germany and other large western nations is that high levels of immigration have not radicalised the mainstream right. Trump came to power on the back of a promise to build the wall. Johnson won the Brexit referendum on a pledge to “take back control” of Britain’s borders and laws — particularly borders. In France, Michel Barnier, who is campaigning for the centre-right’s nomination for the French presidency, has called for a moratorium on all immigration from outside the EU. Éric Zemmour, the rising star of the far right, threatens to throw 2m people out of the country.

The German government, by contrast, continues to make the case for immigration. In August, the head of Germany’s federal labour agency said that the ageing of the country’s workforce means that Germany needs to let in 400,000 new immigrants every year — arguing that without this level of migration, “there will be a shortage of skilled workers everywhere”. Only the AfD condemned the idea outright.

The strength of the centre ground in Germany does not mean the extinction of debate. It could take months to form a governing coalition. It will be hard to narrow policy differences between the Greens, the Free Democrats and the SPD. But the very need to build a coalition militates against the political polarisation — and demonisation of the opposition — that has become standard in the Anglosphere.

In the 21st century, German politics is once again exceptional. But this time for a good reason.

gideon.rachman@ft.com

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