"Donald Trump Outperformed Mitt Romney's 2012 Campaign on Minority Vote Share"

"A big part of the story is that Hillary Clinton did much worse among minorities than Obama did. Not only was her share of the minority vote worse than Obama's, but minorities turned out less for her than they had for him.
"For example, in Michigan, Hillary Clinton received 50,000 fewer votes in Detroit's Wayne County than President Obama had in 2012. Trump's margin of victory in Michigan over Clinton was about 11,000."

In a 2016 Forbes article, Avik Roy looks at changes in the American electorate.

And Omri Ben-Shahar argues that "Trump Won Because Of Lower Democratic Turnout."

Two Tall Mountains

"Converse enrolled her brother and Jean, his new wife, as members of her own private Song-of-the-Month Club. Beginning with a 1950 composition called 'Down This Road,' her first entirely original song, and ending with 1955's 'Empty Pocket Waltz,' she mailed them roughly three dozen 'guitar songs,' all self-recorded in her tiny Greenwich Village studio at 23 Grove Street.

"The recordings reveal the result of her meticulous study and assimilation of virtually all American vernacular music to that point; either that or—like some sort of literary, New England parallel to Robert Johnson—she had made a deal with the devil. Somehow, Converse had become a master of the acoustic guitar, created a complicated and unique fingerpicking style, developed a keen understanding of harmony and complex chord voicings, and become conversant (bordering on virtuosic) in the stylistic hallmarks of rural blues, country, gospel, folk, pop, jazz, hillbilly, parlor songs, and early jazz."

At The New Yorker, Howard Fishman tells the story of Connie Converse.

"Perhaps It's Time Someone Asked Them"

"In short, the story of a white working-class revolt in the Rust Belt just doesn't hold up, according to the numbers. In the Rust Belt, Democrats lost 1.35 million voters. Trump picked up less than half, at 590,000. The rest stayed home or voted for someone other than the major party candidates.

"This data suggests that if the Democratic Party wants to win the Rust Belt, it should not go chasing after the white working-class men who voted for Trump. The party should spend its energy figuring out why Democrats lost millions of voters to some other candidate or to abstention. Exit polls do not collect information about why voters stay home."

Konstantin Kilibarda and Daria Roithmayr at Slate argue that turnout, or lack thereof, was key to the 2016 presidential election.

Eric Levitz follows up at New York.

Return to Romney

"This meant that states had rights enshrined in the Constitution, but they also, like citizens, had grave responsibilities. The Michigan governor would not endorse conservative Senator Barry Goldwater in 1964, because of his appeals to Democratic segregationists. And when Romney was in Richard Nixon's cabinet, he drove the president to distraction with his highly public efforts to integrate housing in all-white suburbs.
"As president of the American Motors Company, briefly among Detroit's most innovative car makers, Romney believed corporations had multiple stakeholders, as described by Rick Perlstein. If they are people, corporations also constitute a community of individuals who depend on each other. 'Each owes a debt to the other,' a biographer quoted Romney as saying. Hoover's rugged individualism, Romney thought, was 'nothing but a political banner to cover up greed.'"

John Stoehr in The American Conservative pines for George Romney's "liberal Republicanism, an all but extinct school of political thought that could once again help the GOP find its way."

Nixon Hates Iran-Contra Stooges

The New York Times runs obits for drummer Scott Asheton, ex-I.R.S. head Randolph Thrower, homophobic preacher Fred Phelps, prosecutor Lawrence E. Walsh, and Republican Party strategist Howard H. Callaway.

"Rust Belt Stories"

"The author is fully present in these scenes, though the tales are predominantly those of others: Steelworkers laid off in their 50s, never to work again; autoworkers in their 40s moving into service jobs at a fraction of their former pay; chronically poor urban scavengers; young men who will never have a shot at a factory job rolling drugs in urban underground economies. Or economies in which nothing is produced."

Scott Martelle in the Los Angeles Times reviews Edward McClelland's Nothin' but Blues Skies: The Heyday, Hard Times, and Hopes of America's Industrial Heartland.

"The Dynasty’s Forgotten Kick-Starter"

"With little money and needing work (and lacking a college degree), Romney saw an ad for a stenography job with the address of the Senate Office Building. He managed to score an interview with Walsh and land the position. But there was a problem: He wasn’t a stenographer.
"It took Walsh all of two days to discover his new aide couldn’t take dictation. But rather than dismiss Romney, Walsh allowed him to swap roles with another man in the office."

John R. Bohrer in New York discusses Sen. David I. Walsh, who gave George Romney a big break in 1929.

And in an article at Buzzfeed, Bohrer portrays George Romney's political career in the 1960s.

Michael Barbaro in The New York Times reports on criticism of Mitt Romney by a longtime George Romney associate.

"The Most Eloquent Manifesto in the History of the American Left"

"But by invoking the spirit of John Dewey, Albert Camus, C. Wright Mills, Michael Harrington and Pope John XXIII, by at once championing and chiding organized labor as a victim of its own success (the S.D.S. began as the student arm of the League for Industrial Democracy), by elevating the university to the apex of activism and by validating liberalism and the two-party system, Tom Hayden and his colleagues forged a manifesto that still reverberates."

Sam Roberts in The New York Times marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Port Huron Statement.

Not His Father's Party

"As the newly elected governor of Michigan, George Romney marched with the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963. Throughout the turbulent 1960s, George Romney argued, at considerable political cost to himself, on behalf of a Republican Party that would welcome newly enfranchised African-American voters and reject the coded language of Southern strategists and repurposed segregationists. In 1964, as one of the nation’s most prominent Republican elected officials, he refused to endorse Barry Goldwater’s presidential candidacy. He complained that Goldwater, who had voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and was gearing his campaign toward disaffected Democrats in Southern states such as Alabama and Mississippi, had broken faith with party members who valued 'basic American and Republican principles.'
"While some Republicans responded to the outbreak of rioting in American cities by blaming Democratic President Lyndon Johnson’s anti-poverty initiatives, Geoffrey Kabaservice recounts in his brilliant new analysis of the decay of the Republican Party, Rule and Ruin (Oxford, 2012), how Romney argued that government was not doing enough."

John Nichols at The Nation contrasts George and Mitt Romney.

As does Rick Perlstein in Rolling Stone.

"Timeless, Joy-Giving, Life-Giving Free Spaces to Fulfill Ideally Man's Needs"

"The world may be catching up to the iconoclastic vision of the man who, when asked what he thought of the metropolis that he made his home, said he wanted to roll a giant boulder down Mulholland Drive. If only Lautner had been given the chance to sculpt the cityscape, instead of merely erect rare gems. The man who designed the Googie Coffee Shop — the origin of the name for a whole style of design—could even make roadside vernacular sing."

Evelyn McDonnell in the LA Weekly marks the centennial of architect John Lautner's birth.

Of Our Elaborate Plans, the End

"At least one person in the crowd thought differently, however—a U-M dropout named Jim Osterberg, who had recently started his own rock band. Like most others, Osterberg watched in astonishment as Morrison stumbled around the stage, making strange noises, swearing, and generally antagonizing the audience. Except instead of being annoyed by the singer's behavior, Osterberg thought it was cool."

Alan Glenn at Michigan Today recounts the Doors' concert at the 1967 University of Michigan homecoming dance.

"Civility in This Age Also Requires Something More Than Just Asking If We Can’t Just All Get Along"

"Today’s 24/7 echo-chamber amplifies the most inflammatory soundbites louder and faster than ever before. And it’s also, however, given us unprecedented choice. Whereas most Americans used to get their news from the same three networks over dinner, or a few influential papers on Sunday morning, we now have the option to get our information from any number of blogs or websites or cable news shows. And this can have both a good and bad development for democracy. For if we choose only to expose ourselves to opinions and viewpoints that are in line with our own, studies suggest that we become more polarized, more set in our ways. That will only reinforce and even deepen the political divides in this country.
"But if we choose to actively seek out information that challenges our assumptions and our beliefs, perhaps we can begin to understand where the people who disagree with us are coming from."

The Detroit Free Press prints President Obama's remarks at the University of Michigan's commencement.