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Josh Shapiro, the Democratic nominee in Pennsylvanias gubernatorial race, received backing from eight GOP figures this week in his race against State Senator Doug Mastriano, a far-right Republican backed by Donald Trump who has touched off tensions within the GOP around where the party should be headed without Trump in office. This weeks endorsements came just less than two months after an additional nine current and former Pennsylvania Republican officials threw their support behind Shapiro, the states attorney general.

James Schultz, a former associate White House counsel under Trump, explained his support for Shapiro in a Monday op-ed for Philadelphia magazine, noting that Mastriano led a baseless campaign to overturn Pennsylvanias 2020 election results. Because some in our state GOP leadership have put self-preservation over principled conservatism, were stuck with a conspiracy theorist candidate, wrote Schultz. But by no means must we stick by Doug Mastriano. Im a proud Republican. Im backing Josh Shapiro. In a statement, Shapiro promised to continue bringing Republicans and Democrats together if elected, adding that he was proud to receive the endorsement of these Republican leaders who are putting our commonwealth ahead of partisan politics in order to come together and move Pennsylvania forward.

Other names on Shapiros new roster of Republican supporters include Michael Chertoff, the former secretary of homeland security during George W. Bushs second term; David Heckler, a former district attorney; Mario Civera, the former Delaware County Council chairman; and four former state lawmakers. Like Schultz, Chertoff singled out Mastrianos voter-fraud conspiracy theories in his endorsement of Shapiro. Although I am a long-standing Republican, I am deeply troubled by Doug Mastrianos embrace of dangerous extremism, Chertoff told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, urging Americans to support candidates who will defend our democracy, no matter which party they claim. Josh Shapiro, on the other hand, is a staunch defender of our democratic institutions and will lead Pennsylvania with honor and integrity, Chertoff added. I am proud to support his campaign for governor.

Mastrianos controversial views go beyond just the 2020 election. The winner of a 2019 special election for State Senate, Mastriano has called legal abortion a barbaric holocaust and argued that the separation of church and state, as outlined in the US Constitution, is a myth. Reuters also recently reported that Mastriano donned a Confederate uniform in a 2014 faculty photo at the Army War College.

Mastriano, a retired military officer, was put on the MAGA map in March 2020 while live streaming Facebook diatribes against COVID-19 lockdowns, according to The New York Times. A video he took in April of that year ended up amassing more than 850,000 views. Several months later, Mastriano propelled himself into Trumps orbit after attending aStop the Steal rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and he eventually partook in an alternate-elector plot designed to subvert Joe Bidens win in the 2020 election.

After Republicans in the State Senate rebuked the scheme, Mastriano warned them of his influence amongst their voting bloc. I have more followers on Facebook alone than all 49 other senators combined, he said during an appearance on a local conservative podcast, per the Times. That any colleague or fellow Republican would think that it would be a good idea to throw me under the bus with that kind of reachI mean, theyre just not very smart people. Since launching his gubernatorial campaign, Mastriano has by and large shunned mainstream outlets, relying almost exclusively on social media platformsincluding Gab, a far-right site that he recently distanced himself fromand friendly media figures to promote his candidacy.

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More Republicans Are Running Away From Mastriano as He Digs In on Election-Fraud Lies - Vanity Fair

FiveThirtyEights Senate and House forecasts are based on myriad factors, with changes in one race often influencing odds in another. To see just how much individual races can change the forecast, first try picking different winners in key Senate races (or feel free to skip ahead to key races in the House!).class='footnote-text'> But beware, the choices you make in the Senate affect the House, and vice versa.

Based on FiveThirtyEights current forecast

Based on FiveThirtyEights current forecast

Based on FiveThirtyEights current forecast

Based on FiveThirtyEights current forecast

Based on FiveThirtyEights current forecast

Based on FiveThirtyEights current forecast

Republicans win both chambers

Republicans win both chambers

Republicans win the SenateDemocrats win the House

Republicans win SenateDemocrats win House

Democrats win the SenateRepublicans win the House

Democrats win SenateRepublicans win House

Democrats win both chambers

Democrats win both chambers

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Explore The Ways Republicans Or Democrats Could Win The Midterms - FiveThirtyEight

Yesterday, the John Locke Foundations Carolina Journal wrote a piece bemoaning the lack of Republican professors at UNC-Chapel Hill. Of course, the implication is that conservatives dont have voices on college campuses. The other implication is that universities should hire more conservatives. And I thought they opposed affirmative action.

The study, conducted by a conservative web site called The College Fix, says that professors at Carolina are 16 times more likely to be registered as Democrats than as Republicans. According to their report, in the departments they examined, the school has 204 Democrats, 13 Republicans, and 67 unaffiliated professors. They couldnt identify the party registration of another 121 faculty members.

First, nothing is more common these days than conservatives whining that theyve been slighted. The GOP has morphed from Reagans Party of Ideas into Trumps party of resentment. If Republicans were a sitcom figure they would be Ralph Kramden or Archie Bunker. Everybody is out to get them and they yearn for the good old days that exist only when looking backwards through rose-colored glasses.

Second, of course most academics and intellectuals are more liberal. Conservatives have spent the last three decades denying science and empirical knowledge. They are just now coming around to believing in the reality of climate change, though many are still in denial. Even George H. W. Bush said the supply-side nonsense that holds tax cuts pay for themselves is little more than voodoo economics. They have embraced their anti-intellectual bent and wear ignorance on their sleeves, bragging about their lack of education and denigrating the value of liberal arts degrees.

To put it another way, about 50% of Republican primary voters still support Donald Trump. Enough said.

Third, conservatives and Republicans with college degrees tend to be more interested in making money than research or teaching. They are perfectly happy to take the benefits of a higher education degree and put it to work for themselves, but they are less interested in putting that degree to work helping other people. Of course in their minds, making money is helping other people through the all-powerful free market. Its the Randian rationalization that their self-interest is in the best interest of society as a whole. So why would they accept less money in academia when they could make far more in the world of business?

Finally, conservatives are, by nature, averse to change and much, if not most, of the research in universities and academia is about uncovering new ideas and introducing them to the world. William F. Buckley famously described a conservative as someone who stands athwart history yelling Stop! That philosophy stands in stark contrast to the people in academia who are exclaiming Eureka! Those people are searching for innovative concepts that can improve the world or, at least, our understanding of it.

Nothing illustrates conservatives antithesis to academic change more than the debate over history right now. Republicans, the political wing of the conservative movement, desperately want to hang onto the narrative weve told ourselves about the country for the past 250 years. Progressives want a more honest telling of our national story, especially where race is concerned.

Conservatives prefer a tidy image of benevolent, brilliant men who came together to construct a virtually infallible constitution and founded a country based on virtues and universal truths. While they are correct that the men who wrote the Constitution and started the fledgling republic on a continent largely unexplored by Europeans had high ideals, the reality is much more messy and many of those same men failed to live up to the standards they expressed. The conservative story really doesnt hold up very well under the scrutiny of scholarship.

Republicans like to crow that Democrats were the party of segregation and Jim Crow. To a point they are correct, but, back then, Democrats, especially in the South, were the conservative party. In the 1890s, they opposed Fusion politics, a coalition of Republicans and progressives that included African Americans and small farmers who demanded more corporate regulation, higher taxes, investments in public education, and better access to the polls, among other things. When Fusion won the state in the mid-1890s, a Democratic backlash led to the disenfranchisement of Black voters and the beginning of the one-party South.

But thats not where history ended. And its not where politics ended, either. Politics were much more nuanced than the polarized parties of today. National parties had far less influence than state ones in the first half of the 20th century and even into the latter half, with liberal Republicans up north and conservative Democrats down South.

With the introduction of the New Deal under Franklin Roosevelt and the integration of the armed forces under Harry Truman, conservative Democrats in the South began leaving the Democratic Party, first as Dixiecrats and then, at the urging of Goldwater and Nixon, as Republicans. By 1968, the GOP in the South became the party for disgruntled White voters who resented Lyndon Johnson for signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965. Combined, the two laws ended segregation and made African Americans a voting force in the South for the first time in the 20th century. It also began the resentment and victimization that defines the Republican Party today and led to the nomination of Donald Trump as GOP standard bearer.

But for Republicans, history stopped when Democrats were the party of White supremacy and Republicans were the party of voting rights. Thats why, I shit you not, the John Locke Foundation is making a movie about the Wilmington Massacre thats a captivating, fast-paced love story. The fiction they put on screen is the same fiction they believe today.

That Republicans make up a small percentage of intellectuals and academics is really not surprising at all. They dont want change or progress. They are vested in their desire to turn back the clock despite all of the evidence that the advances weve seen since the New Deal and Great Society have made our country more fair and equitable. They are an anti-intellectual party while academia is an intellectual institution.

Thomas Mills is the founder and publisher of PoliticsNC.com. Before beginning PoliticsNC, Mills spent 20 years as a political and public affairs consultant. Republished from PoliticsNC.com.

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OPINION: Affirmative action for Republicans - The Richmond Observer

As the GOP lurches toward authoritarianism, one of its key tactics is to suppress free thinking. What better place to start that effort than in the schools (and by extension school libraries)? Its no surprise that schools have emerged as one of the key battlegrounds in the culture war.

But whats less noticed is that in branding itself the education party, the GOP is actually the ignorance party. Republicans constant attacks on bogus controversies like critical race theory are just an excuse to dumb down the school curriculum. Thats because Republicans believe that schools are where children should be taught how to become Republicans if they are taught anything at all.

Two things are happening as Republicans go after schools. One is to focus on public schools and make sure that students learn a right-wing version of history. That involves eliminating groups that the right doesnt like, like LGBTQ people. Floridas Dont Say Gay bill is an obvious example of erasing the visibility of non-approved groups from schools.

Then there are the bills that protect the tender emotions of white students. These so-called divisive concepts laws prohibit any discussion of race in the classroom that could cause students to feel anguish, guilt or any other form of discomfort or stress. In short, the bills are meant to denature history so that the ongoing quest for civil rights in the U.S. effectively ends with the Civil War.

Not content to remove current events and history from schools, Republicans have gone after other subjects as well. Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) called for the removal of 54 math books because he claimed that they somehow slipped critical race theory into the multiplication tables.

Absent from any of this discussion is anything about academic standards or, you know, actually making students smarter. Theres a good reason for that. What Republicans are interested in isnt making students smarter, its making them more Republican. Apparently, the way to do that is to keep them as ignorant as possible.

Thats where the second part of the plan comes in. Republicans have been pushing hard for school choice, which would use taxpayer money to fund private schools. This effort got a big boost fromyou guessed itthe Supreme Court, which ruled in its last session that two anti-LGBTQ Christian schools in Maine were entitled to receive state funding.

As those schools proved, the curricula are not designed to educate but to indoctrinate. School choice options, like religious schools and, worse still, home schools, can be as political as they want. Indeed, a leading figure on the rightCharlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USAhas started a chain of anti-woke academies based on bedrock principles that sound a lot like Trumpism.

Kirk has the perfect credentials for the job. He never went to college.

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Republicans think keeping kids as ignorant as possible is the key to academic excellence - LGBTQ Nation

Sen. Lindsey Graham is facing quite a bit of criticism over his riots in the streets rhetoric, and for good reason: The South Carolina Republicans on-air comments about Donald Trumps followers turning to violence in the event of a possible indictment were indefensible.

There was, however, a key detail that shouldnt go overlooked. Graham didnt just seem to justify prospective violence, the longtime GOP lawmaker also went into some detail about the basis for the perceived injustice. If they try to prosecute President Trump for mishandling classified information after Hillary Clinton set up a server in her basement, the senator told Fox News, there literally will be riots in the street.

Yesterday morning, Republican Sen. John Cornyn wasnt nearly as reckless, though the Texan published a tweet touting the underlying partisan principle:

Democrats and the FBI created the Hillary Clinton standard for non-prosecution of mishandling classified information. Will Donald Trump be held to a different standard?

Cornyn was referencing a Wall Street Journal editorial, published yesterday, pushing the idea.

For those who dont care about factual details, this framing may very well have superficial appeal: Clinton was accused of mishandling sensitive materials; Trump was accused of mishandling sensitive materials. She wasnt indicted, so therefore, he shouldnt be indicted. If the two are held to different standards, at least according to Graham, the Republicans most radical followers will feel justified in lashing out with literal societal violence.

The problem emerges when grown-ups bother to look beyond the surface and notice that the allegations surrounding Clinton and Trump arent especially similar.

Clintons email protocols were, of course, the subject of a lengthy criminal probe. Federal investigators appeared eager to find evidence of wrongdoing: then-FBI Director James Comey privately marveled at the visceral hatred some senior FBI officials in New York had for the former secretary of state.

But federal law enforcement nevertheless didnt charge the Democrat with any crimes because they couldnt find evidence of criminal wrongdoing. Comey took the extraordinary step of publicly criticizing Clinton anyway, but he grudgingly conceded that the FBI, following an exhaustive investigation, couldnt indict her.

Trumps State Department similarly conceded late on a Friday afternoon that there was no systemic or deliberate mishandling of classified information from Clinton. The inspector generals office in Trumps Justice Department also concluded that the FBI had no reason to charge Clinton.

Trumps scandal bears little resemblance to his former rivals. Clinton didnt take physical documents. She didnt ignore pleas for cooperation. She didnt store highly sensitive secrets at a private club that had an unfortunate habit of letting foreign spies walk around.

To be sure, its possible that federal investigators will examine Trumps alleged misconduct and come to a similar conclusion. Maybe the former president will be exonerated. Maybe it only appears that he committed a variety of felonies by bringing classified secrets to his glorified country club and refusing to give them back.

But, on the other hand, if prosecutors conclude that the Republican deserves to be indicted, it wont be because of a double standard. It will be because the evidence proved that he broke the law.

Chances are, Graham, Cornyn, and the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal understand this. Its what makes their faux confusion that much more ridiculous.

Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MSNBC political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "The Impostors: How Republicans Quit Governing and Seized American Politics."

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What Republicans refuse to grasp about the Clinton standard - MSNBC