California Primary Offers No Evidence of Blue Wave + Sy Hersh "The Unabomber was Right!"

The wrap up on yesterday's primary in California is provided by FiveThirtyEight's Nathaniel Rakich:

The world appears safe from top-two mischief in California. Although it’s still possible for two Republicans to finish in the top two in California’s 10th and 48th congressional districts, the smart money is on the Democratic candidates gaining votes from here on out. And while it looks like Dianne Feinstein will face fellow Democrat Kevin de León in the U.S. Senate race, the races the 39th District and the 49th District are going to be regular Democrat-on-Republican contests, as will the race for governor, where Democrat Gavin Newsom and Republican John Cox advance to the runoff. The presence of a Republican in the governor’s runoff avoids the worst-case scenario for the GOP: getting shut out of both top-of-the-ticket races in California, which could depress Republican turnout in competitive House races statewide.

But if you look at the vote totals in the seven Republican-held congressional districts that Democrats hope to flip in a Blue Wave there's not much fuel there for Democratic sanguinity. There is maybe one race, the 49th CD, that's looking bad for the GOP. Every other district looks like a Republican majority. Republicans got their standard bearer at the top of the ticket, Trump coattailer John Cox. So Dems can't be pinning their hopes on depressed turnout come November.

I waffle back and forth between viewing Democrats as irretrievably lost down the Trump rabbit hole of century 21 McCarthyism and seeing the suburbs as going blue dog (Conor Lamb) out of exhaustion with Trump tomfoolery.

In regards to the former, there was a wonderful quote from Seymour Hersh hidden away on the bottom of Monday's business page (see Michael Grynbaum's "I, Sy: Seymour Hersh’s Memoir of a Life Making the Mighty Sweat"):

I was expecting Mr. Hersh to have a lot to say about the Trump presidency, but he often changed the subject. He eventually allowed that the narrative of Russian meddling struck him as incomplete. “Do you have any evidence that these 13 guys really were trolls and changed the election?” he asked, referring to the 13 Russians indicted by the Justice Department in February on charges they tried to subvert the election and support Mr. Trump.

“There have been social science studies of the impact of any particular thing on Facebook, and it’s, like, zippo!” Mr. Hersh went on. “We have a divided America, a really bitterly divided America. Do we really need the Russians to tell us we’re a troubled country?”

Continued Democratic allegiance to the Trump-Russia "stab in the back" appears to be a vulnerability.

But the Hersh interview gets even more interesting from there:

He called the president an unserious man surrounded by “terrible people.” But he has reported on unscrupulous leaders before. “We will survive Trump,” he said. “America will go on.”

These days, his main concern is the 24-hour, Twitter-driven news cycle, which he denounces in his memoir as “sodden with fake news, hyped-up and incomplete information.” In his office, he brought up unprompted the manifesto of Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber.

“I hate to say it — if he hadn’t killed people, if he hadn’t been a psychotic who thought it was O.K. to mail bombs to people, if you went and reread it, he’s talking about machines taking over our life,” Mr. Hersh said. “We’re all going to be beholden to machines, and here we are, you know: Facebook and Instagram. I mean — it’s happened!”