Month: September 2020

Joe Biden continues to lead the acting president in the polls. A Washington Post-ABC News poll out Saturday confirmed the others, that Biden leads the incumbent by 10 points nationally, both among registered and likely voters. The polling has remained remarkably stable for months. Yet, the pandemic and disastrous response from the White House may be shaping the race in ways pollsters might not see coming.

The Post observes:

A sizable gender gap continues to fuel Biden’s lead, with women making the difference in the current state of the race. Trump has a lead of 55 percent to 42 percent among male likely voters, but Biden has an even larger 65 percent to 34 percent advantage among female likely voters. Trump’s lead among men is about the same as his margin over Hillary Clinton in 2016, but Biden’s lead among women is more than twice as large as Clinton’s was then.

Battleground states tend to be closer, naturally, but this bit of news speaks to voter interest:

Interest in the election has climbed to near-record levels, with nearly 6 in 10 registered voters saying they are following the election “very closely,” higher than any in other presidential election at this time in the cycle dating back to 2000.

The number who say they are certain to vote also appears to be marginally higher than in previous elections. At present, 89 percent of registered voters say they are certain to vote between now and Election Day, Nov. 3, up from 83 percent at this point in 2016. A bare majority (52 percent) of registered voters say they will vote either by mail or early, with 45 percent saying they plan to vote on Election Day.

Even while enthusiasm for their candidate ranks higher for the incumbents boating and caravanning supporters, Biden’s supporters are intensely concerned about the election’s outcome.

Here is something I have not seen before (USA Today):

WASHINGTON — Like thousands of other teenagers, Abhinand Keshamouni’s introduction to working the polls came from watching “The Daily Show.”

Host Trevor Noah ends each episode with a pitch for Power the Polls, a national recruitment network working to ensure there are enough poll workers on Election Day. The message resonated with Keshamouni, a 17-year-old senior from Canton, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit.

He signed up first for the Michigan state primary in August. And he will be back at a polling site Nov. 3, when he will take off a day from his high school that’s conducting classes online. Keshamouni will be among more 1 million poll workers braving a pandemic to ensure people can vote – and he got four of his buddies to do the same.

Katherine Kortum, 36, and a District transportation engineer, plans to do take her 70-year-old father’s place at the polls, even if it is not at his home precinct in Pittsburgh:

Kortum is one of a record number of residents in their 20s and 30s who have signed up to fill jobs vacated by veteran poll workers, officials say, addressing an urgent need for the upcoming presidential election no one could have anticipated a year ago.

In the Washington region, like across the country, poll workers have typically been older residents who vote at higher numbers and tend to be more civically engaged than their younger peers. This year, however, the threat of the coronavirus caused thousands of these seasoned election judges to drop out. When officials scrambled for replacements, young volunteers came in droves.

Election officials in Milwaukee, Detroit, Philadelphia, Atlanta and Houston are not just confident they can staff polling places. Fueled by people in their 20s and 30s, some have thousands more applications than needed.

The Post continues:

An 18-year-old Black woman in Prince George’s County says she was inspired by the national reckoning on race. A 29-year-old former Marine in Fairfax County wants to ensure confidence in the election results. A 38-year-old Native American woman in D.C. wants voters to see more people of color at the polls than she did growing up in rural Wisconsin.

“They are willing to take on the risk, and it fits the pattern of young people getting more engaged,” said Michael Hanmer, a government and politics professor at the University of Maryland. “One of the things that has started to become more apparent to people at a young age is what is at stake.”

A friend near age in my precinct heard there might be a shortage and called the local Board of Elections to work on Election Day. Here too, the anticipated shortage has disappeared in a flood of civic-mindedness. Okay, maybe urgency.

“There absolutely is a risk. More exposure is bad — we know that,” said Nick Mariani, 24 and signed up for poll work in Montgomery County, Md. “But the election is also a non-question. It’s fundamental to keeping a democracy going.”

These voters are from an age cohort that typically under-performs their elders. When turnout ticked up from 20 percent in 2014 to 36 percent in 2018, it was hailed as significant, but only by comparison to past anemic voting habits. Older voters turn out at nearly twice that rate.

That may change for real this time (The Dispatch, one month ago):

The Knight Foundation just released a revealing new national survey of 4,000 full-time college students currently enrolled in four-year degree programs. The survey confirms that political engagement among Gen Z voters is pervasive and serious. No previous generation of new and recent voters has shown similar commitment to vote and make a political difference in other ways. Although Gen Z voters prefer Democrats to Republicans, they are not firmly and permanently committed to either party, and they reject many partisan orthodoxies. Young voters are eager to change our broken politics, and they are up for grabs. The candidates who attract their favor this November will gain a major advantage, especially in close races. 

Young voters are indeed fired up. The Knight data shows that 71 percent of Gen Z college students say they are “absolutely certain” they will vote in the upcoming election, with female students expressing greater certainty than their male counterparts by a margin of 10 points. Democratic identifiers are the most likely to be absolutely certain they will vote (81 percent), followed by Republicans (74 percent) and Independents (63 percent); so large majorities of all outlooks. 

Before you shake your head and point out that every election features stories about how the youth turnout could shape the election—and then it doesn’t—the figures today are far higher than what was reported in earlier surveys before previous presidential elections. In 2016, 49 percent of 18–29 year olds stated that they would “definitely” be casting a vote, and in 2012 the figure was 48 percent. The actual turnout? In 2016 it was 43 percent and 41 percent. Moreover, 79 percent of college students today believe that most or all of their close friends will be voting in November—this is greater than the national figure of 71 percent, which again shows that the youthquake is materializing. 

Younger voters manning the polls and telling their friends may portend just what these stories imply, and more engagement down the road. I worked the poll as a Democratic judge at 18.

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Pfft. Wow. That was a quick friggin’ summer.

As great poets have said…autumn is over the long leaves that love us, yesterday is dead (but not in my memory), and it’s late September and I really should be back at school (virtual or otherwise).

Well, not literally (I’m a little old for home room)…but my school days of yesteryear are not necessarily dead in my memory. I feel like I have to go to bed early now. Some habits die hard.

So here’s a back-to-school playlist that doesn’t include “The Wall” or “School’s Out” (don’t worry, you’ll get over it). Pencils down, pass your papers forward, and listen up…

“Alma Mater” – Alice Cooper

“At 17” – Janis Ian

“Cinnamon Street” – Roxette

“ELO Kiddies” – Cheap Trick

“Me & Julio Down by the Schoolyard” – Paul Simon

“My Old School” – Steely Dan

“Rock ‘n’ Roll High School” – The Ramones

“School” – Roger Hodgson

“School Days” – Chuck Berry

“Smokin’ in the Boy’s Room” – Brownsville Station

“Status Back Baby” – Frank Zappa & the Mothers of Invention

“Teacher Teacher” – Rockpile

“Thirteen” – Big Star

“To Sir, With Love” – Lulu

“Wind-up” – Jethro Tull

Previous posts with related themes:

From crayons to perfume: Top 10 School Flicks

More reviews at Den of Cinema

Every single hour in South Carolina, Lindsey Graham is being violently out-fundraised.

But you can help stop the suffering. pic.twitter.com/9rDS5naJ4V

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) September 25, 2020

I actually lol’d at this. I doubt it will persuade anyone but we deserve a few laughs at this pathetic hypocrite’s expense.

This review of John Yoo’s new book by Gene Healy says it all:

John Yoo and Donald J. Trump seemed like a perfect match from the jump. Yoo is the legal scholar who believes the president can order a recalcitrant prisoner’s fingernails pulled out and his child’s testicles crushed if that’s what it takes; Trump is the politician brash enough to insist that “torture works” and “you have to take out [terrorists’] families.” For a no-limits executive-power enthusiast such as Yoo, what’s not to like about Trump? And surely Trump could use a little scholarly heft for his authoritarian impulses.

Yet a funny thing happened during Trump’s rise to power: Yoo seemed to go wobbly over the prospect. The GOP nominee “reminds me a lot of early Mussolini,” Yoo told The Washington Post in October 2016—in a bad way, that is. Just two weeks after Trump’s inauguration, Yoo took to The New York Times to sound the alarm about “Executive Power Run Amok.” Later that year, Yoo all but called for Trump’s impeachment.

But we always knew, however tortuous the path, that Yoo would eventually find his way home. In the opening pages of Defender in Chief: Donald Trump’s Fight for Presidential Power, Yoo declares, Penthouse Forum–style, that he never thought this sort of thing would happen to him. “If friends had told me on January 21, 2017, that I would write a book on Donald Trump as a defender of the Constitution, I would have questioned their sanity, he wrote.” He found Trump’s personal behavior repellent and “saw him as a populist, even a demagogue, who had not prepared for the heavy responsibilities of the presidency.” But then our 45th president turned out to be a “stout defender of our original governing document” and the Framers’ glorious vision of “an independent, vigorous executive.”

Defender-in-Chief has already earned Yoo the coveted tweet-blurb from @realDonaldTrump, so it’s unlikely anything I write here will put much of a dent in its sales. But ye gods, this is a terrible book: a lazy, turgid, error-ridden mess, perched atop an appallingly silly thesis.

Yoo forgets history he learned in high school, announcing that the Mexican-American War kicked off with an “attack on Sam Houston’s forces along the Rio Grande.” (Zachary Taylor’s, actually; Houston was a U.S. senator at the time.) He forgets history he actually lived through, declaring that President Barack Obama “launched attacks on Syria for its use of chemical weapons.” (Er, he didn’t.) Through large stretches of the book, Yoo even forgets what he’s just written, as when he deploys the same damned passage from the Federalist three times in seven pages. You get the sense that with this book, unlike the Torture Memos, his heart really wasn’t in it.

As for that thesis: What makes a president a defender-in-chief, anyway? The answer is in the book’s subtitle: It’s the “fight for presidential power.” You earn your laurels by defending the office’s prerogatives—genuine or imagined—thereby keeping the flame of “energy in the executive” alive for future presidents. Trump amply deserves the honorific, Yoo argues, because he fought back against the special counsel investigation, defended his travel ban in court, dropped bombs without congressional authorization—or, as Yoo frames it, “stood up for traditional executive leadership in foreign affairs and war”—and made some judicial appointments Yoo likes.

It’s really that easy: On Yoo’s scorecard, even Ukrainegate earns Trump points for defender-in-chiefing. Sure, the author concedes, the president “might [!] have had ulterior political motives in mind” when he used military aid as leverage for ginning up an investigation into the Bidens. But even if what was really afoot was a Nixonian attempt to screw a political enemy, Trump was also “protecting the right of future presidents to develop and carry out an effective foreign policy.” 

Just by beating the rap on impeachment, Trump became a Yoovian constitutional paladin, fending off an assault that “would undo the original Constitution’s greatest innovation: an independent executive.” Twenty years ago, Bill Clinton got snorts and eye-rolls for his post-acquittal boast that he’d just “saved the Constitution of the United States.” But by Yoo’s logic, where’s the lie?

In fact, it’s difficult to think of a modern president who wasn’t a defender-in-chief by the standards Yoo sets out. They all fight for their agenda items in court, none have been ready to roll over for special counsels or impeachment inquests, they all strive to put their mark on the judiciary, and, alas, when they’re in a mood to hurl Tomahawk missiles, very few can be bothered to ask Congress first. That’s just how the modern presidency operates. In the words of the political scientist William Howell, “the need to acquire, protect, and expand power is built into the office of the presidency itself, and it quickly takes hold of whoever temporarily bears the title of chief executive.”

Yoo has set the bar low enough to make all the presidents above average, but he seems oblivious to that fact. In consecutive paragraphs, he’ll swerve from calling Clinton and Obama hypocrites for waging war without congressional approval to lauding Trump for his drive-by bombings of Syria.

And inconsistent application is the least of the problems with Defender in Chief‘s thesis. By Yoo’s lights, “energy in the executive” is practically the whole of the Constitution and a good in itself, no matter what it’s used for. The author is at pains to stress his disagreement with Trump’s hostility toward immigration and with Trump’s (largely rhetorical) desire to reduce overseas entanglements. But by pushing to do what he wants, Trump preserves the prerogative of future presidents to do what they will, and that alone a staunch Defender makes. It’s a perverse metric for measuring constitutional fidelity.

The Trump presidency has been a stress test for maximalist theories of presidential power. Even the narrower versions of unitary executive theory, which hold that the president has an indefeasible right to direct and remove executive branch officers, present vast opportunities for mischief. With those powers, a crooked president can cover up corruption by barking “You’re fired!” to inspectors general who might expose it, or direct federal prosecutors to protect his cronies and screw his enemies. Trump’s efforts in this direction so far have been unsubtle, to say the least, but they reveal how much rests on a bed of unenforceable “norms.” Alexander Hamilton’s argument for “energy in the executive” in Federalist 70 took as a given that we’d have a president vulnerable to “the restraints of public opinion,” not one for whom, as has been said of Trump, “shamelessness is a superpower.”

Yoo’s hardly blind to Trump’s character flaws. He admits his hero Hamilton erred badly in predicting that the office would be filled by “characters preeminent for ability and virtue.” Instead, the 20th century drift toward “quasi-plebiscitary” selection favors the sort of figures Hamilton feared: men with “talents for low intrigue and the little arts of popularity”—a description, Yoo concedes, that “could not have anticipated Donald Trump’s public life in more accurate terms.” But if we’re increasingly likely to get people we can’t trust, might it have been unwise to concentrate so much power in the presidency in the first place? 

Hamilton also argued that energy in the executive would provide “steady administration of the laws.” This is, perhaps, another area where the $10 Founding Father could’ve been a lot smarter. The last three presidents have assumed an extraordinary amount of unilateral power to make the laws, as with Trump’s recent decision to conjure up $400 a week in supplemental employment benefits with the stroke of a pen.

Under Yoo’s tutelage, Trump appears poised to take pen-and-phone governance still further. The president is “privately considering a controversial strategy to act without legal authority to enact new federal policies,” Axios reported in July, in a scheme “heavily influenced by John Yoo, the lawyer who wrote the Bush administration’s justification for waterboarding after 9/11.”

The gambit centers on the Supreme Court’s recent decision, in DHS v. Regents of the University of California, blocking Trump’s reversal of Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, itself an arguably illegal use of executive power. The ruling, Yoo lamented in National Review, “makes it easy for presidents to violate the law”—and hard for their successors to undo those violations. In a matter of days, though, Yoo decided Regents was really a blueprint for action and began urging Trump to “weaponize the DACA decision” to enact his own agenda.

One problem with forging new weapons is that you can’t keep them out of the hands of future presidents, some of whom are sure to combine Trump’s shamelessness with actual competence.

Oh, well: The upside is that Yoo’s new theory of executive empowerment scored him an audience with the president. After his Oval Office visit in July, Yoo reported that Trump is “really on top of things,” and, despite what you hear, not all “Nixonian in the bunker and paranoid and dark.” So we’ve got that going for us.

He’s a real “man of principle” isn’t he? And let’s all give a big hand to the supposedly responsible adults of the GOP of yore for putting him atop the conservative legal establishment, shall we? He and Donald Trump couldn’t have gotten anywhere without them …

No he’s not dead. But it’s almost as bad. I love Dennis Quaid. This is just plain sad:

Americans should expect to see more of actor Dennis Quaid during television commercial breaks, according to a new report by Politico.

“The health department is moving quickly on a highly unusual advertising campaign to ‘defeat despair’ about the coronavirus, a $300 million-plus effort that was shaped by a political appointee close to President Donald Trump and executed in part by close allies of the official, using taxpayer funds,” Politico’s Dan Diamond reported Friday.

“The ad blitz, described in some budget documents as the “Covid-19 immediate surge public advertising and awareness campaign,” is expected to lean heavily on video interviews between administration officials and celebrities, who will discuss aspects of the coronavirus outbreak and address the Trump administration’s response to the crisis,” Politico explained, citing “six individuals with knowledge of the campaign.”

“Senior administration officials have already recorded interviews with celebrities like actor Dennis Quaid and singer CeCe Winans, and the Health and Human Services Department also has pursued television host Dr. Mehmet Oz and musician Garth Brooks for roles in the campaign,” Politco noted. “The public awareness campaign, which HHS is seeking to start airing before Election Day on Nov. 3, was largely conceived and organized by Michael Caputo, the health department’s top spokesperson who took medical leave last week and announced on Thursday that he had been diagnosed with cancer.”

Caputo said on Facebook before going on leave that the ad blitz was “demanded of me by the president of the United States. Personally.”

I guess he’s not a shy Trump voter. It turns out he’s spoken about him positively in the past.

Sigh…

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This is one of the most illuminating discussions I’ve seen about the state of the pandemic.

I’m not a big believer in shaming and scolding as a general rule either. In fact I pretty much hate it. And let’s be honest, shaming and scolding has become very common in our modern culture. We are giving the puritans a run for their money when it comes to using social ostracism and public opprobrium as a method of enforcing social conformity. (And I’m not talking about “cancel culture” although that’s a part of it. This isn’t confined to social media or the left. In fact, the right was the first to make a profit at it.)

He’s right that it didn’t work with HIV. You couldn’t tell people they couldn’t have sex. But they did have big public safety campaign to have people use condoms and get tested. So when it comes to health and safety I have to say that you don’t have to shame anyone but there should be a huge campaign to get people to follow the rules instead of just shrugging and saying “oh there’s nothing you can do about it.”

Smoking is a good example. They had all the information about cancer from smoking in the 1960s but wasn’t until a combination of public opprobrium about second hand smoke and legal sanctions came in that the numbers of smokers really came down. Drunk driving is another risky behavior that risked other people’s lives that required a full-fledged public safety and legal sanctions campaign to cut back on the behavior. Neither have been eliminated by a long shot. But they are no longer considered acceptable behaviors by most people and there are fewer people doing it today than ever before. The reason is that it was framed not just as a risk for the individual which we worship as a fundamental right in America. It was shown that it risked others and those other people decided they didn’t think it was right to lose their lives for your right to smoke and drink.

This is probably a short term issue that doesn’t require such a long-term solution. But I think the principles are the same. COVID may not be all that risky for certain individuals. But the risky behaviors by people who are careless or asymptomatic do put other people’s lives at risk. I guess I just don’t understand why a short period of wearing masks and social distancing is such a sacrifice that it’s simply impossible to ask people to do it if it saves lives. Even for young adults. They aren’t babies. We require them not to drive drunk and they vote and they join the military and they hold full-time jobs at which they are required to conform to certain behaviors like everyone else. Of course they can be responsible about this. It’s just that nobody really expects them to and they know it.

Michael Grunwald in Politico:

The U.S. budget deficit tripled this year to $3.3 trillion, by far the highest ever. The U.S. economy shrank at a 31.7 percent annual rate in the second quarter, by far the worst ever. The trade deficit is at its highest level in 12 years. Consumer confidence is at its lowest level in six years. Unemployment claims, which had never topped 700,000 in a week before March, have topped 700,000 every week since March. Farm bankruptcies are rising, even though government payments to farmers are at an all-time high. Homicides are rising in America’s cities after decades of decline, while a series of police killings of unarmed Black Americans has triggered anguished protests and civil unrest. The West Coast is on fire, and 2020 may turn out to be the hottest year in recorded history. America’s reputation abroad is the worst it’s been since the Pew Research Center began doing international surveys.

In related news, a virus that has already killed 200,000 Americans is still spreading in much of the country, even though it’s mostly under control in most of the rest of the world. Now the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, less than two months before an election that was already inflaming some rather scary tensions, has created a potential constitutional crisis, while President Donald Trump is refusing to commit to a peaceful transition of power if he loses the election to Joe Biden.

And yet 40+ % of Americans worship the man in charge of all that winning because he hates all the people they hate. Is this a great country or what?

Biden ought to just read that as his opening statement in the debate next week and then just say “vote for me, I couldn’t possibly do any worse.”

Mr MSM, Dana Milbank, ladies and gentlemen:

This is real

America, this is not a drill. The Reichstag is burning.

For five years, my colleagues and I have taken pains to avoid Nazi comparisons. It is usually hyperbolic, and counterproductive, to label the right “fascists” in the way those on the right reflexively label the left “socialists.” But this is no longer a matter of name-calling.

With his repeated refusals this week to accept the peaceful transfer of power — the bedrock principle that has sustained American democracy for 228 years — President Trump has put the United States, in some ways, where Germany was in 1933, when Adolf Hitler used the suspicious burning of the German parliament to turn a democracy into a totalitarian state.

Overwrought, you say? Then ask Yale historian Timothy Snyder, a top authority on Nazism and Stalinism. “The Reichstag has been on a slow burn since June,” he told me. “The language Trump uses to talk about Black Lives Matter and the protests is very similar to the language Hitler used — that there’s some vague left-wing conspiracy based in the cities that is destroying the country.”AD

Trump, as he has done before, has made the villain a minority group. He has sought, once again, to fabricate emergencies to justify greater powers for himself. He has proposed postponing elections. He has refused to commit to honoring the results of the election. And now, he proposes to embrace violence if he doesn’t win.

“It’s important not to talk about this as just an election,” Snyder said. “It’s an election surrounded by the authoritarian language of a coup d’etat. The opposition has to win the election and it has to win the aftermath of the election.”

Sign up for The Odds newsletter for election updates from data columnist David Byler

If not? There won’t be another “normal” election for some time, he said. But that doesn’t have to happen, and Snyder is optimistic it won’t. To avoid it, we voters must turn out in overwhelming numbers to deal Trump a lopsided defeat. The military must hold to its oath. Homeland Security police must not serve as Trump’s brownshirts. And we citizens must take to the streets, peacefully but indefinitely, until the will of the people prevails.AD

“It’s going to be messy,” Snyder said. “He seems pretty sure he won’t win the election, he doesn’t want to leave office,” and he appears to Snyder to have “an authoritarian’s instinct” that he must stay in power or go to prison.

It’s abundantly clear that Trump plans to fabricate an election “emergency.” First, he claimed mail-in balloting, a tried-and-true system, is fraudulent. Now his supporters are trying to harass in-person voters.

When Virginia’s early voting opened this week, Trump supporters descended on a polling station, waving Trump signs and flags, chanting and forming a gantlet through which voters had to walk. When the New York Times reported that this voter intimidation campaign began at a nearby rally featuring the Republican National Committee co-chairman, the Virginia GOP responded mockingly from its official Twitter account: “Quick! Someone call the waaaambulance!”AD

Let’s be clear. There is only one political party in American politics embracing violence. There is only one side refusing to denounce all political violence. There is only one side talking about bringing guns to the polls; one side attempting to turn federal law-enforcement officials into an arm of a political party. And Trump is trying to use law enforcement to revive tactics historically used to bully voters of color from voting — tactics not seen in 40 years.

Some of what Trump and his lieutenants have been doing is merely unseemly: using the machinery of government to attack previous and current political opponents, likening pandemic public health restrictions to slavery, or threatening to overrule regulators if they question the safety of vaccines.

But embracing violence to resolve democratic disagreement is another matter. Trump embraced the “very fine people” among the homicidal neo-Nazis in Charlottesville. He embraced as “very good people” armed protesters who stormed the Michigan Capitol to intimidate lawmakers. He embraced his supporter who allegedly shot and killed two people at a protest in Wisconsin. He embraced the “GREAT PATRIOTS” who drove into Portland, Ore., hurling paintballs and pepper spray at demonstrators. He embraced officers who kill unarmed African Americans, saying they simply “choke” under pressure.AD

Now he’s rejecting the peaceful transfer of power. Worse: Most Republican officeholders dare not contradict him. The Times reported that of all 168 Republican National Committee members and 26 Republican governors it asked to comment on Trump’s outrage, only four RNC members and one governor responded.

In Federalist 48, James Madison prophetically warned that tyranny could triumph under “some favorable emergency.” In 1933, Hitler used the burning of the Reichstag to do just that. Trump now, it appears, is aiming to do likewise.

America, this is our Reichstag moment. We have the power to stop it. Don’t let democracy burn to the ground.

This post is going to be whatever random Get Out The Vote tools that come to me off the top of my head. In no particular order.

First, if you are not registered to vote, REGISTER TO VOTE. Get your friends to, especially those 45 and under. They are more likely not to be regular voters. But new registrants are more likely to show up and cast ballots.

Many states have convenient, same-day voter registration during early voting, on Election Day, or some combination. See Same Day Voter Registration page here for where that applies or just Google your state election board. Bring some form of ID. You’ll need it to register even if you don’t need it to vote.

Register2Vote.org is an online tool that allows you to check someone’s voter registration status. The group will mail them a pre-filled application and a pre-stamped, pre-addressed envelope for mailing it to the local Board of Elections. Caution: By mail. This doesn’t mean a new registrant cannot drop off the form in person.

Progressives for Biden – bios of Biden and Harris and volunteer links

#YouthVote GOTV Summit – virtual event Saturday, Sept. 26, 1:30-3 p.m. EDT TODAY.

Phone Bank NOW for Joe Biden with Progressives for Biden

DNC: Combating Online Disinformation

Don’t like all that party activity? Join an Indivisible action or help MoveOn mobilize voters.

Here’s some messaging advice from my friend, Anat, that might help motivate people to head to the polls.

Yup.

And, in fact, message testing shows that when you ascribe motivation – that Trump does what he does because he knows he is losing – you increase high potential voters’ (folks who don’t normally turnout) desire to engage.

Messaging guide: https://t.co/N273WlYYLh https://t.co/ec3EjYe2gt

— Anat Shenker-Osorio 🟧 (@anatosaurus) September 24, 2020

Asked about Trump’s refusal to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker (R) reacted as if he has had all he can stands of Donald Trump, and he can’t stands no more.

A Republican governor who is as angry as every Republican should be right now who claims to be patriotic. pic.twitter.com/BuXCwlGQX6

— Mike Birbiglia (@birbigs) September 26, 2020

More of that, please.

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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.

“It’s just sad when a political party has so lost faith in its ideas that it’s pouring all of its energy into election mechanics. I am not willing to defend them anymore.” – retiring Wisconsin state Sen. Dale Schultz, March 2014.

“Trump is an aspiring fascist who would burn democracy to the ground to salve his diseased ego,” Michelle Goldberg wrote Thursday. His niece Mary Trump agrees.

Some Trump followers make a related calculation. If they can’t have their beloved America as theirs and theirs alone, they will kill her so no one else can, à la the traditional murder ballad, “Banks of the Ohio.” (Neil Young’s “Down by the River,” if you prefer.)

So Rick Wilson’s #ETTD thesis was already on my mind before I read Dana Milbank’s afternoon column in Friday’s Washington Post. “Everything” now includes the country itself.

Despite favorable polling showing the presidential contest leaning former Vice President Joe Biden’s way, unease grows that there are more authoritarian shoes to drop the closer we get to Jan. 20 — no matter what happens on Nov. 3.

“This is not a drill. The Reichstag is burning,” warns Milbank, dispensing with his usual ironic stance. “Don’t let democracy burn to the ground.”

Donald Trump’s back is to the wall. Yale historian Timothy Snyder, “a top authority on Nazism and Stalinism” tells Milbank that Trump knows he must stay in power or go to prison. He is no longer trying to win the election. Watch his campaign’s spending for signals. The cheapskate cannot help himself. He will not spend money on a project he expects to lose when he means to remain in power by other means.

Trump is spreading unfounded allegations of mail-related election irregularities and plans to use them to challenge the vote count on Election Day and afterwards. Even before Election Day, perhaps. Whatever he thinks works for him.

FBI Director Christopher Wray testified this week to Congress that “we have not seen, historically, any kind of coordinated national voter fraud effort in a major election, whether it’s by mail or otherwise.”

But White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows dismissed Wray’s testimony on “CBS This Morning” on Friday. “With all due respect to Director Wray, he has a hard time finding emails in his own FBI, let alone figuring out whether there is any kind of voter fraud,” Meadows said.

This, of course, is Grade A bullshit. There is no widespread voter fraud. Republican voter suppression efforts are “predicated on some belief there is a massive fraud or irregularities, something my colleagues have been hot on the trail for three years and have failed miserably at demonstrating,” former Wisconsin Sen. Dale Schultz (R) said in 2014.

The Bush II administration charged federal attorneys with rooting out and prosecuting voter fraud and fired them when they failed to find any. Trump’s own voting integrity commission assigned to prove it exists failed to. There are isolated cases only, as famously committed by a Republican operative in 2018 in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District race.

The Heritage Foundation has tracked this stuff for years. Heritage reached back to 1948 to bump its database of “proven instances” over 1,000. For its purposes, “voter fraud” includes any and every form of election malfeasance from vote buying to ballot stuffing to registration and ballot petition fraud to voter impersonation at the polls. The last you can count on your fingers and toes and includes several instances of election workers running the poll and a man trying to prove it is easy to impersonate a voter. They were all caught and prosecuted.

Yes, Trump himself is incompetent. But he is surrounded by acolytes smarter and just as unscrupulous. The Atlantic‘s Barton Gellman this week described how Trump’s attorneys and allies in Republican-controlled legislatures are gaming out how to use legal delays in certifying the election to throw out the popular vote for Biden in key states. They could hand the state’s electors to Trump, either handing Trump an outright electoral win or sending the decision to the U.S. House of Representatives. There, in a “contingent election,” the vote to elect the president is by state delegation, not by head count. Republicans currently control the majority of delegations. *

Because Trump cannot help himself, he has been spilling key details of this evil plan in public like a movie villain just before it goes up in smoke and explosions.

This is where you come in, Captains America. You can do this. You are called to preserve the republic. Register. Vote. Volunteer. Donate. Our local Board of Elections worried it might not be able to staff all 80 precincts on Election Day. Yet, Millennials have stepped up across the country to man polling stations their grandparents cannot because of the COVID-19 risk. Our Board now has met its quota. That younger people are this engaged is also a great sign of what turnout among their cohort might look like on Nov. 3.

This is a fight we can and must win.

* MSNBC’s Joy Reid this week thought it unlikely that GOP legislators would ignore the will of voters they would have to face in the next election. She should visit the home of gerrymandering with “surgical precision” (NC), where for much of the last decade voters have cast a majority of votes for Democrats for Congress, yet receive only 3 seats while the GOP gets 10. GOP legislators who gerrymandered the congressional districts drew their state districts to be Democrat-proof as well.

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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.