Month: October 2024

Spare us

https://t.co/ZCTwZSqZND pic.twitter.com/Y9MT3uj97b

— MELANIA TRUMP (@MELANIATRUMP) October 3, 2024

Fergawdsakes:

Melania Trump doubled down in her first public response to news of her passionate support for abortion rights, a position starkly at odds with that of her husband, Donald Trump, and the Republican party he leads.

“Individual freedom is a fundamental principle that I safeguard,” the former first lady said in a video released on Thursday. “Without a doubt, there is no room for compromise when it comes to this essential right that all women possess from birth. Individual freedom. What does, ‘My body, my choice’ really mean?”

Set to classical music and posted to social media, Trump’s words were a paraphrase of those in her forthcoming memoir, Melania, which the Guardian revealed on Wednesday.

On the page, Trump says: “It is imperative to guarantee that women have autonomy in deciding their preference of having children, based on their own convictions, free from any intervention or pressure from the government.

As Trump said when they came to tell him that Mike Pence was in danger: “so what?”

Melania Trump believes in nothing, She’s been missing in action for the past 3 years and has come out now to grift and sell her book. I’m quite sure the campaign said, “hey Melania, put in you book that you’re pro-choice, ok? It might help with the bitches.” I’m sure she said “I really don’t care, do u?”

This is actually an old GOP ploy. Back in the day Barbara and Laura Bush were always coy about their abortion position. It was clearly a tactic to try to dog whistle some pro-choice Republicans into believing their husbands weren’t as hard core as they seemed.

But that was before the Republicans caught the car. They can’t finesse this issue anymore knowing that the right is protected under the Constitution. And nobody takes Melania Trump seriously about anything.

Luckily he has his Truth Social binky

Trump had a bad night after the Jack Smith brief was released.

Then he ran over to News Nation to whine some more:

“He’s a deranged person,” Trump said of Special Counsel Jack Smith. “He just lost the big documents case, that was the biggest of them all.” In August, Smith formally filed to appeal a district court judge’s dismissal of the case in July.

“This was a weaponization of government and this is why it was released 30 days before the election,” Trump said. “And it’s nothing new in there, by the way, nothing new. They rigged the election. I didn’t rig the election. They rigged the election.” He repeated those claims numerous times throughout.

The former president criticized Smith for releasing the documents despite the fact he claimed he was nonplussed over the information. “They should have never allowed the information to come before the public,” he said, adding, “My poll numbers have gone up instead of down. It is pure election interference.”

His poll numbers have not gone up but he needs to say it to soothe himself and convince his cult followers that the election was rigged if he loses again.

As I wrote in the previous post, it’s doubtful that any of this will make the slightest dent in his MAGA support. He literally could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and not lose them. But there are independents and some still squishy Liz Cheney Republicans who hate the January 6th stuff and are being reminded of just what a miscreant he is.

.@SarahLongwell25: “With swing voters and these sort of right-leaning independent soft GOP voters reminding them about January 6. That is the number one way to sort of push those voters back away from Donald Trump.” pic.twitter.com/mRoOX2njQv

— Republican Voters Against Trump (@AccountableGOP) October 2, 2024

Many Republicans just refuse to believe their own eyes. And those that do believe their own eyes apparently don’t give a damn that Trump tried to overturn an election and incited an insurrection.

Philip Bump at the WaPo takes a look at why that might be:

Why don’t Republicans think the statement about Georgia — referring to a conversation in which Trump said that he wanted officials to “find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have” — is believable? Perhaps in part because right-wing media hasn’t spent a lot of time talking about Trump’s actions. That includes limited coverage of the House select committee, and it includes less coverage of things like the Georgia call.

Trump’s request to the officials has often been summarized as his asking them to “find 11,000 votes.” Since January 2021, when The Post first reported on the call, there have been 475 15-second segments on the three most popular cable news channels in which those words appear. Only 44 of them were on Fox News.

When Fox News has covered the Georgia call, as it did more frequently in August 2023 at the time that Trump was indicted in the state, it has often done so in a way that’s overtly sympathetic to Trump’s position.

Judge Jeanine Pirro said, “If you say, ‘Look, I need to find 11,000 votes. That’s very different from saying, ‘I need you to find 11,000 votes somewhere.’”

???? Talk about dancing on the head of a pin.

CNN polls show that “7 in 10 [Republicans] have consistently said they thought the election wasn’t legitimate. The only change has been that, in January 2021, more than half said there was solid evidence to that effect. Now, far more are likely to say that this is only their suspicion.”

Bump continues:

Trump’s supporters and members of his party have excused his actions from the outset. In January 2021, Monmouth University asked Americans whether they approved of the House impeaching Trump for his post-2020 efforts. Most Americans said they did — but only 3 in 10 Republicans agreed. In polling conducted by Pew Research Center earlier this year — after more than four years of additional evidence coming to light, about half of Republicans said Trump did nothing wrong in his efforts to subvert the last election.

It’s those kinds of findings that make me despair about this country. Nothing he does will separate these people from Dear Leader:

This pattern is very much in keeping with polling over Trump’s presidency. Views of Trump’s actions didn’t change over the course of the Russia investigation or over the course of his first impeachment, with Republicans generally unmoved by the aggregation of evidence against him. The 2020 response was no different. The argument from Trump critics that his actions subverted democracy simply haven’t gotten traction from members of his party willing to excuse them.

He can literally do no wrong with these people.

How do you deprogram 40 million people from a cult?

I realize there’s a lot going on. But the future of the nation, possibly the world, is on the line in this election and it is the most important story right now even with the middle east on fire and a major disaster in the southeast. It’s not old news.

This is why the NY Times is getting such blowback. It’s not generally the reporting itself, much of which is as great as ever. It’s the editorial decision making that’s the problem. The headlines, the reflexive “both sides” framing, the way they downplay the Trump story because he’s been behaving like a monstrous cretin for years so they are inured to it. It’s not just them but as the paper of record it looms large.

That Clinton front page arguably brought us Trump in 2016. The coverage of that penny ante email scandal, breaking when it did, was so over the top that people were convinced she was uniquely corrupt and unfit to be president. Look what that got us. Now they are “adjusting” by downplaying the monumental crimes and corruption of the man who is uniquely corrupt and unfit to be president — the same man who benefited from their skewed coverage eight years ago.

It shouldn’t be hard for the press to care about preserving democracy. Their survival, and ours, depends on it.

You’ll recall that a few weeks ago I wrote about Thomas Miller, the data scientist who has a different way of measuring voter sentiment based upon the betting markets and some other things. His method has been quite successful over the past few cycles apparently. It seems like more soothsaying mumbo jumbo to me, to be honest but as we try to get through this next month I figure it can’t hurt to add it to the polling parlor game.

Here’s what he’s saying right now: Harris has a lead in the electoral college and it’s pretty solid:

Miller found that the campaign’s turning point was Trump’s appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists convention on July 31, when he suggested that Harris had mislead voters about her race. Prior to that gaffe, Trump was running at around 290 electoral votes, 20 more than the number needed to win. The day following the NABJ event, Harris bolted into the lead, and she’s stayed in front ever since. Trump briefly pulled nearly even just before their debate on September 10. Days earlier, Trump got a lift, courtesy of a New York State judge’s decision on to delay sentencing in the GOP standard-bearer’s hush money case until after the election. “On September 10, Trump stood at 261, only 9 short of a win, and Harris had 277,” says Miller. “By the end of the day, Harris had added 35 to get to 312.” Miller also credits Taylor Swift’s endorsement, delivered moments after the candidates left the stage, for giving Harris an added boost.

Harris’ electoral count soared over the next two weeks, climbing to a high point of 337 electoral votes by September 20.

Since Harris achieved that summit, her electoral count has fallen from nearly 340 to the current 302, and Trump’s rebounded from just 201 to 236. But for Miller, that shift doesn’t indicate that Trump’s staging a comeback. He notes that for the past week that spans the VP debate, Harris’ position’s been consistent at just over 300 electoral votes. Most of all, he says, the bettors’ views of who will prevail seem locked in place. And for Trump to regain the White House, a huge share of wagerers must move to his camp.

“I don’t regard Harris’ drop as significant,” says Miller. “Investors in the predictions markets sometimes change their minds, but not many of them are doing that.” He points to the low volumes on PredictIT. “The last time we saw a spike was at the moment of the debate and Swift endorsement,” he adds. “There was a little uptick for Trump after the VP debate, but the last significant event for moving the odds was the presidential debate. Now, most people aren’t changing their bets, they’re keeping their contracts in place.”

By basic electoral math, says Miller, Harris as of today holds a lock on most of the big swing states, looking like a sure winner in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. He adds that Harris also had Georgia in her column when she reached 337 EVs at the apex of her post-debate climb on September 20. Now, he says the modest Trump bump has put the Peach State back in play, and that Trump also stands a good chance in North Carolina. But for now, the states that have loomed as most pivotal since the race began remain beyond his reach.

The world’s gotten a lot more dangerous in the last few days as the dock workers’ strike threatens to hike the likes of grocery prices and the mideast teeters on the brink of widespread warfare. Big events could still change the course of this election. But for now, Harris is in command, says Miller. The betting sites get it, and predictably, the polls lag far behind the curve. According to the bettors, Trump blew a nice lead by stumbling before the NABJ and botched a budding comeback by floundering at the debate. He may need a watershed moment or a Harris screwup to turn the race around. It could happen. But the bettors doubt it will happen, and as Miller’s shown, the bettors are best at cutting through the fog of polling and pundits, and getting elections right.

Remember, nobody knows nothin’. The polling is dicey and this is probably even dicier. This election is inexplicably close and there is a lot going on. Certainly, Donald Trump did not want people to be talking about January 6th right now. And Harris didn’t need a longshoreman strike as an October surprise. But if you are a poll addict, as I am, consider this a little methadone (hopedone?) for the morning. I won’t get you high but you might feel a little bit better.

Some of it, at least

That was last night. This is today:

Special counsel Jack Smith has outlined new details of former President Donald Trump and his allies’ sweeping and “increasingly desperate” efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss, in a blockbuster court filing Wednesday aimed at defending Smith’s prosecution of Trump following the Supreme Court’s July immunity ruling.

Trump intentionally lied to the public, state election officials, and his own vice president in an effort to cling to power after losing the election, while privately describing some of the claims of election fraud as “crazy,” prosecutors alleged in the 165-page filing.

“When the defendant lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office,” the filing said. “With private co-conspirators, the defendant launched a series of increasingly desperate plans to overturn the legitimate election results in seven states that he had lost.”

When Trump’s effort to overturn the election through lawsuits and fraudulent electors failed to change the outcome of the election, prosecutors allege that the former president fomented violence, with prosecutors describing Trump as directly responsible for “the tinderbox that he purposely ignited on January 6.”

“The defendant also knew that he had only one last hope to prevent Biden’s certification as President: the large and angry crowd standing in front of him. So for more than an hour, the defendant delivered a speech designed to inflame his supporters and motivate them to march to the Capitol,” Smith wrote.

The lengthy filing — which includes an 80-page summary of the evidence gathered by investigators — outlines multiple instances in which Trump allegedly heard from advisers who disproved his allegations, yet continued to spread his claims of outcome-determinative voter fraud, prosecutors said.

“It doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election. You still have to fight like hell,” Trump allegedly told members of his family following the 2020 election, the filing said.

“It doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election. You still have to fight like hell.”

Yowza:

The redacted brief, made public by Judge Tanya S. Chutkan of the Federal District Court in Washington, adds new details to the already extensive public record of how Mr. Trump lost the race but attempted nonetheless to cling to power.

Part of the brief focuses, for example, on a social media post that Mr. Trump sent on the afternoon of the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, telling supporters that Vice President Mike Pence had let them all down. Mr. Smith laid out extensive arguments for why that post on Twitter should be considered an unofficial act of a desperate losing candidate, rather than the official act of a president that would be considered immune from prosecution under a landmark Supreme Court ruling this summer.

After Mr. Trump’s Twitter post focused the enraged mob’s attention on harming Mr. Pence and the Secret Service took the vice president to a secure location, an aide rushed into the dining room off the Oval Office where Mr. Trump was watching television. The aide alerted him to the developing situation, in the hope that Mr. Trump would then take action to ensure Mr. Pence’s safety.

Instead, Mr. Trump looked at the aide and said only, “So what?” according to grand jury testimony newly disclosed in the brief.

Hey JD. Do you think he’d treat you any differently? You’ve sold your soul and he won’t give it back

Rick Perlstein is out with another interesting piece in the American Prospect today, this time about “undecided voters.” He references the great Chris Hayes piece from 2004 that I’ve often discussed over the years. It had the same effect on me that it had on Perlstein who describes it as “the most important piece of political journalism I have ever encountered.” As he says:

The future MSNBC host’s TNR piece was an account of the lessons he learned canvassing among undecided voters in Wisconsin for John Kerry. It incinerates a basic foundation of how political junkies think: “Perhaps the greatest myth about undecided voters is that they are undecided because of the ‘issues.’ That is, while they might favor Kerry on the economy, they favor Bush on terrorism; or while they are anti-gay marriage, they also support social welfare programs.”

Chris noted that while there were a few people he talked to like that, “such cases were exceedingly rare. More often than not, when I asked undecided voters what issues they would pay attention to as they made up their minds I was met with a blank stare, as if I’d just asked them to name their favorite prime number … the very concept of the ‘issue’ seemed to be almost completely alien to most of the undecided voters I spoke to.”

You would think others among the veritable armadas of mainstream journalists reporting out what undecided voters think would have met with such blank stares themselves. It is a testament to how bad framing narratives and rigid, ossified genre conventions distort perception so much that no mainstream journalist ever admits such a thing. Instead, they ram voters’ responses into their false frame, square-peg-in-round-hole style. They let objective reality take the hindmost.

He asks why are so many people attracted to the simple-minded blatherings of Donald Trump?

Millions of pages have been filled by scholars explaining the psychological appeal of fascism, most converging on the blunt fact that it offers the fantasy of reversion to an infantile state, where nothing can come and harm you, because you will be protected by an all-powerful figure who will always put you first, always put you first. It is simply indisputable that this promise can seduce and transform even intelligent, apparently mature, kind-hearted people formerly committed to liberal politics. I’ve written before in this column about the extraordinary film The Brainwashing of My Dad, in which director Jen Senko describes the transformation of her Kennedy-liberal dad under the influence of right-wing talk radio and Fox News—and also how, after she explained the premise of her film for a Kickstarter campaign, scores of people came out of the woodwork to share similar stories about their own family members.

I’ve learned a lot about the psychological dynamics at work from the X feed of a psychologist named Julie Hotard, who drills down on the techniques Fox uses to trigger infantilization in viewers. The people at Fox who devise these scripts, one imagines, are pretty sophisticated people. Trump’s gift is to be able to grunt out the same stuff just from his gut. Trump’s appeals have become noticeably more infantile in precisely this way. When he addresses women voters, for instance: “I am your protector. I want to be your protector … You will no longer be abandoned, lonely, or scared. You will no longer be in danger …”

Or when he grunts the other side of the infantilizing promise: that he will be your vengeance. His promise to destroy anything placing you in danger. Like when he recently pledged to respond to “one really violent day” by meeting criminals with “one rough hour—and I mean real rough. The world will get out and it will end immediately.”

Fascism, for all its macho trappings, really does appeal to a certain kind of arrested development, a characteristic of Trumpism that I’ve noted many times in the past. The whole ouvre is puerile. And frankly, so are those undecided voters many of whom don’t really even know what politics are.

Perlstein thinks the “undecided” contingent in today’s electorate is “poised at a threshold.” That “Undecided” is a way station between the final surrender to the Trumpian fantasy, and all the imaginary comforts it offers, and sticking with the rest of us in the reality-based community, despite all the existential terrors the real world affords.”

If that’s true we have to hope they either choose the real world or decide to stay home and watch the “Real Housewives” or “The Bachelor” and leave politics to the grown-ups.

A reader friend by the name of Sean Kelly, a scientist, seeing me flail about trying to deal with polling, offered this explanation and agreed to let me share it with you in case you are feeling the same way. It cleared a few things up for me:

So. Political polling. It is basically experts making data informed guesses, and the reported margins of error are pretty much meaningless in context. Experts making informed guesses are a useful thing, and the best realistic option, but poll results are not scientifically rigorous things. Let me explain some of that context.

The reality of political polling usually involves people that answer their phone when the call is from an unknown number. That skews the sample to older people, as many people avoid scammers and random sales people by not answering calls by unknown numbers. Older people grew up in a society where avoiding callers was impolite, so are more likely to pick up – not certain, but more likely.

Alternatively, a small army of people can buttonhole people on the street, but that skews the poll to shoppers or business people that are out on the street. Other polls might try a combination of sampling techniques in a quest to be more representative, but they all have their strengths and weaknesses.

This problem gets wrapped under the heading ‘representative sample’. The hard math pollsters imply they use by using statistics form and jargon gets reduced to guesswork, with the fudges each pollster applies to their data to make the data conform to that pollsters view of what a representative sample should look like.

Pollsters fudge their sample by ‘correcting’ the results to the population proportions. If the poll includes half the ratio of the young people the population contains, each young persons choice is weighted twice as much. In the last presidential election, young people voted at a lower rate than older people, so a factor is applied to represent that lower likelihood of voting. This is not a slight on pollsters, as, if properly executed, these fudges improve the results, and history shows it’s better than not correcting it.

A weakness is that many pollsters derive those corrections from past polls – comparing the past polls to the actual election results in the same period, and adjusting for changing demographics. 

Older people in past elections were significantly more likely to vote than younger people, but there are reasons to suspect that margin may shrink this election. Particularly with young women, who have obvious concern over healthcare driven by the abortion bans in many states.

It is of note that Covid, statistically, killed more older voters in republican states than in democratic ones. Additionally, the proportion of young people is increasing over other age groups, in part because the baby boomers are inevitably dying off, and in part because the baby boomers had a lot of kids. Those demographic changes should be adjusted for, and the pollsters do that.

No poll of voters ever succeeds in being perfectly random in all respects, or perfectly corrected to reality, at least not without a sample size that approaches the entire voting population. The reported margin of error can understate the real poll error by a lot, depending on how those experts at voting predictions weight their results. 

That is why the polls were so wrong about Hillary Clinton in 2016. The combination of sampling bias and incorrect corrections left the pollsters with egg on their face. The Trump electorate was unlike previous elections, so the model the pollsters used for their adjustments broke. Luckily, a poll that includes the entire voting population is done every few years, with nearly no significant errors. It is called an election.

Pollsters have coalesced on a reported margin of error, or confidence interval, at a 95% certainty (or 19 times out of 20). It is a mathematical construct that assumes a perfect sample. The construct states that a value calculated as 2 standard deviations (or 2 sigma) in a perfectly random poll gives that 95% margin. 

A standard deviation is defined as 1/(square root of n), where n is the total number of people in the poll. Three standard deviations would give a 99.7% margin. One standard deviation gives a 66% margin. Pick your poison. The polling industry standardized on a 95% margin because reasons. Some areas of science like to see 6 or more sigma before declaring something proven, but they have hard data in their data set.

With the particular corrections each pollster makes, the errors added to that mathematically rigorous definition make the reported margin of error nothing of the kind in reality. The reported margin of error is a rigorous value calculated from a non-rigorous data set, full of mushy human responses.

Even if two polls are within that rigorously defined margin of error, it says little about the relative election prospects of the candidates. Additionally, in a rigorously applied situation, the error on each individuals result is actually twice the reported margin of error, so in a close election like this one, the math says whatevs, even if the data set was perfect.

So what use are the polls? They are particularly useful to determine trends. Is a candidates chances increasing or decreasing? If a polling methodology is consistent from one polling event to the next, even with questionable results, the trend lines are likely correct. The direction of the change is likely right, even if the magnitude of the results are less certain.

The other use for polls involves those corrections different pollsters apply. If a great set of social scientists apply perfect corrections that are representative of the voting population in this election, their results might be bang on. But it means a poll is effectively a data informed best guess as to the results from a group of experts. Which poll you are looking at matters.

The trappings of mathematical certainty are used to dress up those guesses, misleading the public about what is really going on. The pollsters are experts in how poll result should be transformed into that informed guess, but the details are much more fuzzy than the trappings imply. Expert opinion is a useful tool, but back to Hillary, it can be completely misleading.

There are reasons to suspect that the balance of error this time biases the democrats low (mostly in that young people thing), so Harris might blow this thing out, as opposed to squeaking it. I think Florida and Texas might be close, so yay! I also really want Trump to lose, so I might be interpreting things to let me sleep at night, but whatevs.

Of course, the world has completely transformed a few times this election, so things may look very different at some later date…or many later dates. It’s been a wild ride so far.

Yes, I’m Canadian, but most of the world really wants Trump to lose, and it matters to us economically (tariffs, world trade), politically (Ukraine war, NATO, Israel), and morally (Trump in general). Canada tends to follow American trends with a few years delay. Trump losing lets Canada correct without going into as dark a hole. Please vote!! (Unless you plan to vote for Trump. Trump voters should stay home)

It’s probably best to just stay away from polls right now. They will make you feel crazy. If you’re into writing postcards, phone banking or canvassing now’s a good time to get offline and do that. If you have to refresh 538 several times a day, just do it knowing that those is all not much more than educated guesswork. And have a drink. It’s going to be a long month.

Representative Mike Collins posted this “perfected” image of JD Vance on his Twitter feed yesterday:

Uhm, no:

Is this Collins’s fantasy? Vance isn’t hot enough for him as he is? What?

And they wonder why people think they’re weird.

I thought this was a BS way to frame the abortion issue last night and because of the rule that the moderators could not fact check Vance’s lies (or even their own questions!) Walz had to just repeat over and over again that it wasn’t true. As TNR reports:

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz was asked to respond to Donald Trump’s outlandish abortion talking point during the vice presidential debate Tuesday.

“Former President Trump said in the last debate that you believe that abortion ‘in the ninth month is absolutely fine.’ Yes or no, is that what you support?” asked CBS moderator Norah O’Donnell.

“That’s not what the bill says, but look, this issue is what’s on everyone’s mind,” Walz replied, explaining that Trump had made way to destroy national protections for abortion.

During the presidential debate last month, Trump had claimed that Walz supported abortion in the ninth month—and after. Trump claimed that Walz “also says, ‘Execution after birth’—execution, no longer abortion because the baby is born—is OK. And that’s not OK with me.”

This is utter nonsense, nobody believes this, and the CBS moderators shouldn’t have used this as the basis for a question about abortion rights.

The moderators repeatedly asked questions of Walz that were shaped around right-wing talking points. When asking the two candidates to explain their leadership qualities, Walz was asked specifically to respond to reporting Tuesday that suggested he’d lied about being in Tiananmen Square in May 1989—a startlingly specific question, which clearly knocked Walz off his game. Walz took the opportunity to introduce himself to the viewers, and when pushed on the question, said that he “misspoke.”

Meanwhile, J.D. Vance was not asked about admitting to blatantly lying about Haitian immigrants in Ohio.

In fact, Vance wasn’t asked to account for a whole lot of things, in particular extreme views on the status of unmarried and childless people (aka childless cat ladies), his support for the Great Replacement Theory, his close ties to the Project 2025 people, his positive forward to the right wing provocateur Jack Posobiec’s book called “Unhuman” (referring to liberals) or his close association with very wealthy silicon valley weirdos among other things.

But we were able to get to the bottom of Tim Walz’s confusing the dates during a couple of months he spent in China during the Tienanmen uprising almost 40 years ago. Thank God for that.