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Month: November 2024

Preparing For The Win

Published by digby on November 1, 2024

No matter who gets the most votes

A couple of weeks ago the gang down in Mar-a-lago was popping the champagne and gleefully drawing up plans to further destroy the White House gardens once the Trump’s are in residence again. They were looking at the early voting in the swing states and they figured they had it in the bag. According to Puck’s Tara Palmieri:

It hit Trump in the last couple of weeks that early voting is a good way to win,” a person with knowledge of his thinking said. The campaign has been papering Pennsylvania with signs like, “Swamp them with votes,” “Make it too big to rig,” and “Vote early today!” 

They’ve actually been strutting around for a while, but that’s to be expected. Republicans always go with the bandwagon effect, and no one is more natural at it than Trump who just last night told an audience in Arizona, “if Ronald Reagan came back from the dead at the height of Ronald Reagan, if he went to California to have a rally, he would 250–300 people in a ballroom. We have fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety, a hundred thousand people.” (At the same event he fanatisized about putting Liz Cheney in front of a firing squad in lurid detail, so he was really on a roll.)

However, Palmieri wrote an update to her piece yesterday and the mood down in Florida has dampened a bit in recent days. She writes that the campaign is starting to believe that surge they were al celebrating was premature. Apparently. the campaign still feels confident that they can win the sunbelt states (N. Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada) but since Michigan is looking less and less doable, Pennsylvania is the must-win state. And suddenly things have started to look very dicey there “where women have outpaced men by 13 points in the early vote which has sent the campaign into a tailspin during the past two days.”

This has led to the most predictable reaction in American politics today:

Not unlike 2020, Trump and his allies are preemptively making outlandish and extreme assertions to lay the groundwork for a claim, if they don’t prevail, that the election was stolen. They’re also engaging in the early stages of election lawfare.

“They’re going so crazy here,” said a campaign source. “Anyone who hears how rabid they are about this issue can’t walk away from this and think they feel comfortable about where they’re at in PA. They’re talking about criminal referrals. They want to find poll watchers who they feel are engaged in voter suppression so that they can refer criminal prosecutions.

Of course they are. They’ve already started with the lawsuits. They complained that in Bucks Country people standing in line to apply for a mail in ballot past the deadline should have been allowed to get them anyway. A judge agreed and actually extended the deadline there and in another county until Friday. If you are rolling your eyes at the irony of Republicans demanding that deadlines be extended in the voting process, you aren’t alone.

But of course, the point of the whole thing is to help spread the idea that the election system is rigged against him, even when he is being accommodated.

Here’s Trump reaction:

He’s claiming that they’ve “found votes” which is blubbering nonsense:

We’ve already been through two presidential elections with Donald Trump and in both cases he said that he would only accept the results of the election if he wins. And even when he won he insisted that he actually won the popular vote and established a commission to investigate it (which went nowhere.) Contesting the elections is now par for the course in presidential elections. We have no idea what will come after if he loses but nobody in this country thinks for a minute that he will concede gracefully. This is how we do it now.

A big part of the strategy (and at this point I don’t think we can see it as anything else) is the touting of phony polling numbers that will convince his followers that he was leading so much before the election that it makes no sense that he possibly could have lost. In fact, one of his staunchest supporters and top surrogates, Tucker Carlson, laid it out with his patented snotty delivery at the Madison Square Garden hate rally last weekend:

It’s gonna be pretty tough for them, ten days from now, to look in the eye to America with a straight face — it’s gonna be pretty hard to look at us and say, “You know what? Kamala Harris, she’s just, she got 85 million votes because she’s just so impressive. As the first Samoan, Malaysian, Low-IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected president. It was just a groundswell of popular support. 

This week the campaign “leaked” an internal polling document to Axios that showed Trump leading everywhere based upon the Real Clear Politics averages (which includes all the right wing pollsters that have been flooding the zone without weighting them.) The author Mike Allen writes, “the memo reflects the exuberance that Trump staffers and allies exude in interviews and behind-the-scenes conversations.”

It’s not uncommon for campaigns to slip reporters positive internal memos during the campaign for any number of reasons. In this case it’s just the usual Trump spin that he’s winning more than anyone’s ever won and nobody’s ever seen anything like it. But it’s done to reinforce the new Republican doctrine that Donald Trump cannot lose unless the other side cheats because he is so obviously superior to his opposition whether it’s Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. In fact, Trump said the same against fellow Republicans who ran against him and his followers believed him when he said that too.

There are many plans to contest the vote, file lawsuits, intimidate voters, whatever it takes to make sure that Donald Trump will never, ever be seen as a loser among his cult followers. Nothing is more important than the belief that any loss is the result of a corrupt conspiracy to deny them their rightful victory and the leader they truly believe is the preference of the vast majority of the American people. As their Dear Leader told them just today:

His campaign knows he’s lying. They’re still trying to win legitimately. But they go to sleep at night secure in the knowledge that even if they lose they can just claim they really won but the other side stole it. And it’s not just campaign operatives. Tens of millions of people in this country will believe for the rest of their lives that our election are all rigged unless their candidate wins. How long will it take before we have a majority of American who believe in democracy again?

Monsters From The Id

Published by Tom Sullivan on November 1, 2024

He’s behaving like a cornered animal

Image by Todd Alcott.

Lt. ‘Doc’ Ostrow: Monsters, John. Monsters from the id.

The Monster from the Id is the main antagonist of the 1956 American science fiction film Forbidden Planet. It is a creature made of solidified psychic energy derived from the subconscious thoughts of Dr. Edward Morbius, powered by the Krell Great Machine.

Driving the MAGA movement and what was once the GOP this election are several notorious Ids. But one in particular. Even Matt Drudge sees it.

https://twitter.com/scarylawyerguy/status/1852338103073091744

Trump has reason to be having violent fantasies about women such as former Rep. Liz Cheney. There are a lot more where she came from (Newsweek):

Women are dominating early voting in the 2024 election so far, prompting concern among some of former President Donald Trump‘s allies.

Women are outpacing men in casting ballots nationally and in all seven battleground states, according to NBC News’ tracker of early ballot returns. Of the more than 58 million mail-in and early in-person votes that have been cast nationally, 54 percent were cast by women and 44 percent by men.

In the swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia and North Carolina, there is at least a 10-point gap between men and women in the early vote. The gender gap was widest in Pennsylvania as of 2 a.m. ET on Thursday, with women accounting for about 56 percent of the early vote, and men for about 43 percent.

In North Carolina, the gender gap was 11 points when I ran the numbers on Wednesday.

That’s got to have Trump’s Id burning.

God bless you, Mike Luckovich.

Elect Me. I’ll Screw You Over.

Published by Tom Sullivan on November 1, 2024

When you’re a Republican, they let you do it. You can do anything.

Republicans ignore voters’ wishes. This shouldn’t surprise anyone. Democracy is not exactly their jam. They’ve made that clear again and again. But now there’s a little-noticed study analyzing that affliction in our beleaguered constitutional republic.

Timothy Noah gives the study by Mary Ellen Klas and Carolyn Silverman published last month in Bloomberg Opinion some extra press at The New Republic.

The way elections are sold, candidates tell us what they promise to do for us (or in MAGA’s case, to us) “and then voters decide which set of policies they prefer.” If only.

See, Democrats are more likely to respond to the majority of voters’ wishes than their GOP counterparts:

The Klas-Silverman piece didn’t attract much notice when it was published because it was packaged, in rather boring fashion, as a story purporting to show that in the 40 “trifecta” states where a single party controls both halves of the state legislature and the governorship, voter preferences get ignored. A plague on both your houses! But what the story really shows is that Republican officeholders in the 23 Republican trifecta states routinely ignore voter preferences, even as Democratic officeholders in the 17 Democratic trifecta states work much harder to do what voters want. Indeed, Democratic trifecta state government policies match up with voter preferences more frequently than in states in which power is shared between Democrats and Republicans.

[…]

“For the past quarter century,” Klas and Silverman write, “the public has become more progressive on many social issues,” including “abortion, gender identity, climate change, guns, immigration and voting rights.” Blue trifecta states have kept pace with these changes, they write, and red trifecta states have not. Instead, they’ve become known more for “rejecting Medicaid expansion, relaxing gun laws and cutting unemployment insurance.” The authors go on to explain that “Blue monopolies channel the goals of their voters, while red monopolies channel the goals of their legislators (often at the expense of voters).”

It’s not that Republican trifectas never give the majority what it wants. They just do it far less than Democratic trifectas.

What’s a voter to do? Vote out the malefactors of great wealth? Maybe in Teddy Roosevelt’s day, but not in ours. Republican gerrymandering, particularly after REDMAP-powered 2010 redistricting, has ensconced politicians in state legislative seats where, Klas and Silverman, explain:

Nearly half of all state legislators running for reelection in recent decades faced challengers only in the general election, and 35% of all legislators were elected with no opposition at all, according to Steven Rogers, professor of political science at Saint Louis University.

It’s not that Democrats don’t gerrymander, Noah writes, but data suggests “gerrymandering is almost entirely a Republican problem.” And what gerrymandering doesn’t accomplish, GOP vote-suppressing measures supplement.

Klas and Silverman:

A Bloomberg analysis of data compiled by the non-partisan Voting Rights Lab found that more than 120 election law changes in Republican-led states over the last four years have had at least one component intended to restrict voter access or election administration — such as tightening voter ID requirements, restricting mail-in voting, limiting ballot drop-off locations and shortening the early voting period. By contrast, the analysis showed, Democrats’ legislation has focused on improving voter access by standardizing voter registration, ensuring a sufficient number of polling sites and expanding the early voting period.

“They want everyone to vote,” complained Paul Weyrich, co-founder of The Heritage Foundation, the Free Congress Foundation, and the American Legislative Exchange Council, in 1980 to a conference of religious conservatives. “I don’t want everybody to vote.” In GOP circles, that’s chiseled on stone tablets.

Citing the collapse of local newspapers and “news deserts,” Klas and Silverman suggest perhaps voters’ lack of information contributes to politicians stealing their candy. Noah adds that

… this problem is especially acute in conservative areas. Steve Waldman and Lori Henson, crunching data from the 2023 Medill State of Local News report, note that fully 83 percent of those counties Medill judged either news deserts or in danger of becoming news deserts voted Republican in the 2020 election. The 13 states with the most news deserts—Texas, Mississippi, Tennessee, etc.—were all red states except Georgia. In the absence of information, people vote based on cultural affinity. When people self-identify as conservative, as they do in many regions of this country, they vote Republican.

Noah devotes a lot of pixels to these news deserts. Granted, as he explains, “Democrats’ primary obstacle is that 80 to 85 percent of Americans pay little attention to any news source, readily available or not, according to the political scientists Yanna Krupnikov and John Barry Ryan, both of the University of Michigan.”

But I’m not so sure news deserts account for people voting based on cultural affinity more than on policies. They just do. “I wouldn’t trust anyone my dog doesn’t like” is how most people really vote. On their guts. Voters in 2000 thought they’d rather have a beer with Gov. George W. Bush, recovering alcoholic, for heaven’s sake. They’re not looking for more information (see disingenuous complaints about Kamala Harris) as much as authenticity. That’s as true for national candidates as it is for state officials.

Many of our conservative neighbors simply find the orange con man more authentic than Democrats. Perhaps because they are accustomed from childhood to being sold prayer cloths, prosperity plans, and afterlife insurance by loudmouth hucksters in church pulpits. It’s what they know. It’s comfortably familiar.

Send your prayers to God and send your money to me has a parallel in politics.