Those two quotes are correct. The first, the second.
I share this after having watched a bunch of evangelicals drool all over Trump as if he’s the second coming and I’m reminded that we don’t have to listen to the Christian Right about morality ever again. There was a time when they’d be trotted out as the avatar of Real American values. No more. They showed themselves to be simply lackeys for a demagogic cult leader. I don’t think we have to have any doubt WJWD.
Elon Musk and Charlie Kirk taking over the Trump field operations may be one of the worst decisions he’s made and that’s saying something:
Donald Trump’s ground game in Arizona and Nevada may be undercut by canvassers working for America Pac using GPS spoofing to pretend they have knocked on doors when they haven’t, according to multiple people familiar with the practice and a leaked how-to-fake-location video.
The ramifications for Trump may be far reaching, given America Pac has taken on the bulk of the Trump campaign’s ground game in the battleground states, and the election increasingly appears set to be decided by turnout.
A bootleg how-to-spoof video, made by an America Pac canvasser in Nevada and obtained by the Guardian, shows the apparent ease with which locations can be changed to fake door-knocks, calling into question how many Trump voters have actually been reached by the field operation.
The video, shared with a few hundred canvassers, walks through the setup: a user downloads a GPS-spoofing app to falsely place themself at the door of a Trump voter, fakes responses to the survey and takes steps to cover up the fraud by varying the survey responses to make it believable.
The scope of the GPS-spoofing practice is unclear because it is difficult to catch cheaters without cross-referencing data with another tracker. It is also not a problem limited to America Pac; GPS spoofing has been a problem for years and it has become increasingly resource-intensive to catch cheaters.
[…]
The video comes as America Pac has struggled to grapple with 24% of the door knocks in Arizona and 25% of the door knocks done in Nevada last week – by less sophisticated cheaters working for Blitz – being flagged internally as potentially faked or fraudulent, according to data obtained by the Guardian.
I’m shocked that a hastily assembled operation in which many of the people already working were fired in September and nobody knows who’s reponsible for what, may not be working efficiently. Musk has reportedly spent $75 million since the PAC was formed three months ago, with $30 million going to this GOTV work. He’s also giving away a million dollars a day to someone who signed his bogus petition. Sounds great.
This whole thing seems very haphazard. They’ve got money but you have to know how to spend it…
This piece by Josh Marshall takes an in-depth look at the GOP ground game. It’s well worth reading if you’re interested in this subject.
One of Obama’s top strategy and data guys, Patrick Dillon, has written a statement today that I think you may want to read. It’s not just phony Hopium, it’s based on educated analysis, experience and possibly some inside knowledge.
Anyway, I don’t know if this will be real or not and he admits he doesn’t know either. But this is his best guess. An excerpt:
My texts are full these days of “are we gonna be okay?” and, then, a beat later, “are you really sure?” Over and over, my answers are basically “yes” and “as sure as I can be.”
I also used to get paid to make big presentations this time of year to tell clients what was going on and what might happen. That process forced me to be rigorous in assessing every bit of data I could lay my hands on, and keep myself honest.
That said, I’m no Nate (neither Silver nor Cohn.)3 I still believe at the end of the day campaigns are more art than science. Call it 51% gut / 49% data.
And I believe the pool of modern, comparable presidential elections is such a small sample that each is sui generis: from which we may draw lessons, but not much in the way of hard and fast rules.
So, to save some time and in the spirit of “to hell with it,” here in one place is what data and my gut tell me I believe: she’ll win and outperform the polls. Trump will be rejected, as he has been in every election since he first became president – 2018, 2020, 2022, 2023 – either where he was on the ballot directly or by proxy through candidates closely identified with him, including in multiple of the same swing states we’re all obsessing over now.
His campaign’s relentless focus on anti-trans ads will come to be seen as an epic strategic blunder, in addition to unforgivably morally repugnant. We’ll acknowledge that the supposedly disciplined, well-planned campaign to beat Biden never quite found its footing ever again once the candidate changed. We’ll remember that his one and only, and very close, win in 2016 came when he was, despite controversy, new and fresh and funny (to his people at least – and no small amount of journalists.) He was energetic, went EVERYWHERE, and was able to at least occasionally give the impression of being in on the joke and enjoying himself. In 2016, he had an underrated strategic ambiguity on what kind of Republican he was, whether promising to protect Social Security or maintaining a wink-wink ambivalence on abortion, aided by voters’ inability to truly imagine him doing the most outrageous things, or the horror of Roe being overturned. In his own way, he had a kind of disciplined, positive and constructive message about what he would do: make America great again, build the wall, drain the swamp. In 2024, he has none of it, much less the vitality and clarity of eight years ago.
We’re going to see afresh what’s been staring us in the face since 2022: Dobbs was a political earthquake, with aftershocks still reverberating out. It wasn’t just digested and processed in 2022 and now behind us. As much as Roe catalyzed a new movement for its opponents, brought in new groups of voters (many crossing old partisan lines), and energized activists for decades; Dobbs is doing the same here and now.
To the extent poll error happens, I believe it is likelier to be in her favor than his after eight years of pollsters obsessively focused on how to not miss Trump supporters. We are all understandably so traumatized by 2016’s loss, and so many were surprised by 2020’s margin (though notably, not the Biden campaign itself) that, even though there are fairly convincing theories for how each happened, we’ve become hostages of superstition and anxiety – even when we can’t quite articulate a good theory for why it would happen this time. And all this despite the various modeling geniuses gently and repeatedly reminding us there’s no iron law that every error happens in the same direction cycle after cycle, indeed that it might be a little weird for it to happen three cycles in a row.
In particular, while his gains with voters of color and young voters are real and absolutely need long-term attention, I believe we will find that they were nonetheless meaningfully overstated in polling for a variety of reasons; including that these groups are hard and getting harder both to poll and to turn out.
We will also find, like Democrats in Virginia in 2021 when we were painfully shown that we could fall even further in the rural reaches, the floor even lower than we imagined, that Republicans in 2024 had further to fall in the suburbs and among college-educated voters – and did.
The almost comically late and slapdash, make it up as we go along, build the plane in the air, field effort run by people with more money than political or managerial sense (ahem, Elon) will, unsurprisingly, fail at the one thing they admit they very much need: sufficiently getting his low-propensity supporters to the voting booth. And it will be substantially outclassed by the massive, well-trained and targeted first-Biden now-Harris field operation that has been building on the ground all year.
We’ll also realize all the rush to analyze early vote returns on here and extrapolate to unsupported conclusions, and the attendant panics, was off base because 2024 is not like 2022 is not like 2020. And for either campaign to win, they’re simply going to need to have won some number of what will initially look at first like votes for the other team.
I’ll keep saying what I’ve been saying for months. To me, an obsessive political observer, this feels more like 2012 than 2016. At this point in that campaign the Republicans were measuring the drapes and I just didn’t see it. In fact, Obama won by four. Of course, 2016 changed me as it did everyone else and I’ve never trusted my gut since then. But if I had it would have told me that the Democrats were going to overperform in every election since then and they have.
So, for what it’s worth, I think that’s true again this time. Trump is a fasacist, criminal imbecile and while it shakes me to the core that so many of my fellow Americans seem to love that about him, I’m just not convinced that there are enough to put him back in the White House.
I would also read between the lines in this Ron Brownstein analysis of where the Harris campaign says they are. I’ve been listening to David Plouffe out there saying over and over again that the race is razor thin and they aren’t taking anything for granted. I’m sure that’s true. But I also think there’s just a bit of spin on that and not in a bad way. I detect just the tienies bit of confidence in his statements. (Of course that may just be what I want to see ….)
Brownstein’s analysis is very good. Way better than refreshing 538 once an hour.
I’m staying away form the horserace polls. But some of the other questins are interesting. Like this one:
“Voters who made their decision on who to support over a month ago break for Trump, 52-48%, while voters who made up their mind in the last month or week break for Harris, 60-36%.” Voters who say they could still change mind? Harris +5
I don’t know if that’s meaningful. I can’t imagine why so many people haven’t been sure that they would vote for a fetid pile of garbage over Donald Trump. But if they’re coming around, that’s good news.
Former Trump aide Alyssa Farah Griffin wonders if the Kamala Harris / Liz Cheney teamup is working against Donald Trump. Griffin reminds CNN viewers that as many as 20 percent of voters voted for Nikki Haley in Republican primaries even after she dropped out. The fact that Trump is still insulting her instead of reaching out to Haley voters is not the way to win them over. Team Trump is going after Cheney as well.
But that’s because “Donald Trump is going to do Donald Trump,” says Republican stragetgist Erin Perrine. Whatever comes out of his mind (mouth) is his strategy. That is, if it’s not to simply flood the zone with crazy, Griffin adds. Anything to distract from his claims about using the U.S. military against U.S. citizens.
Many voters are shrugging it off as Trump being Trump. But deploying the military against Americans is also the crazy coming out of Trump’s mouth. So if crazy is a distraction strategy, Trump lacks the self-discipline to adhere to it.
Cheney, meanwhile, gets to say things Harris the candidate cannot, and from the same stage in joint events with Harris. That strategy may be working (The Guardian):
“I’m pro-life and I have been very troubled, deeply troubled by what I have watched happen in so many states since Dobbs,” said the former Wyoming congresswoman and daughter of former vice-president Dick Cheney. “I have been troubled by the extent to which you have women who – as the vice-president said, in some cases have died – who can’t get medical treatment that they need because providers are worried about criminal liability.”
The current situation is “untenable”, Cheney said, and America needs a president “who understands how important compassion is, who understands that these shouldn’t be political issues, that we ought to be able to have these discussions and say, ‘You know what? Even if you are pro-life, as I am, I do not believe, for example, that the state of Texas ought to have the right, as they’re currently suing to do, to get access to women’s medical records.’
“There are some very fundamental and fundamentally dangerous things that have happened and so I think that it’s crucially important for us to find ways to have the federal government play a role and protect women from some of the worst harms that we’re seeing.”
The women’s vote will be crucial. Trump will be a hard sell for many. Cheney’s making it harder.
Two weeks from now, Election Day polls will be open. Vanity Fair‘s Bess Levin summarizes what Donald Trump’s been doing with his last days to build a winning coalition.
Policy? Did he finally lay out his health care plan after over eight years of promises? Perhaps explain his plan for resurrecting an America he claims Democrats “destroyed”? Did he explain [timestamp 1:05:00] how he’ll “cut your taxes, end inflation, slash your prices, raise your wages,” etc.? (More on raising wages in a moment.) If Trump promised everyone in Greenville, N.C. a pony yesterday, I missed it.
“Donald Trump’s closing message to voters appears to be: I’m insane,” read the tweet from Vanity Fair promoting Levin’s take:
Instead, he talked about the size a famous golfer’s penis, pretended to be a fast-food worker at a closed McDonald’s, and claimed every single goose in Springfield, Ohio, has has gone missing.
Yes, that’s correct: On Saturday, the Republican nominee for president of the United States told rallygoers in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, that golf legend Arnold Palmer had a huge schlong. “Arnold Palmer was all man, and I say that in all due respect to women—and I love women. But this guy, this guy…this is a guy that was all man. This man was strong and tough. And I refuse to say it, but when he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there, they said, ’Oh my God, that’s unbelievable.’”
The following day, Trump pretended to be a fast-food worker at a McDonald’s that—to be clear—was closed to the public. There, while serving pretend customers, he baselessly claimed that Harris is lying when she says she worked at a McDonald’s during college, telling reporters: “Now I’ve worked for 15 minutes more than Kamala.” Asked why she would fabricate having held such a job, he responded: “Because she’s Lyin’ Kamala.” Note: In case it was not clear, Trump was born with several silver spoons in his mouth; in 2018, The New York Times reported that “By age 3, Mr. Trump was earning $200,000 a year in today’s dollars from his father’s empire” and was “a millionaire by age eight.” While being born wealthy does not preclude a person from caring about the working class, there is a laundry list of reasons supporting the notion that Trump does not actually give a crap about such people. In fact, while “working” at the McDonald’s on Sunday, he declined to give an actual answer re: increasing the minimum wage.
But pandering? He’s hell at pandering.
Over the weekend, Trump declared all the geese in Springfield, Ohio, had gone missing (cooked and eaten by Haitian immigrants is implied). He confirmed his belief that America’s real enemies reside within the U.S. The “enemy from within” is you, Dear Reader. And he believes he should use the military against people like you who don’t support him.
On his way to the Greenville, N.C. rally on Monday, Trump blew through here to visit devastated Swannanoa so fast that I missed it while the internet was down again. He stopped adjacent the exit, stepped out of his limousine, and walked a few steps to reach a makeshift podium.
Asked by a Politico reporter if he still urged his voters to support Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson for governor, Trump pretended not to know the man he once called “Martin Luther King on steroids” and who once called himself a “Black Nazi.”
“I’m not familiar with the state of the race right now,” Trump said amidst the dust and wreckage. “I haven’t seen it.”
No Trump stop would be complete without him repeating debunked lies. Swannanoa was no different.
Tom Fiedler of the Asheville Watchdog recounts:
And he repeated several false claims that FEMA is running out of money because funds were being diverted to help “illegal migrants” enter the country with the possible intention of illegally voting for Democrats in the election.
“It’s all gone,” Trump said. “They [FEMA] spent it on illegal migrants. Many of them are murderers. Many of them are drug dealers. Many of them come out of mental institutions and insane asylums, and many of them are terrorists.
“And they spent money to bring these people into our country and they don’t have money to take care of the people of North Carolina and the other states.”
“Is it helping the recovery effort in North Carolina to keep making these claims that FEMA isn’t doing their job well?” asked a reporter, referencing a supporter arrested for threatening FEMA workers. William Jacob Parsons, Fiedler writes, “said the threats were needed to prevent the FEMA workers from taking the actions Trump falsely claimed they were engaged in.”
Trump evaded:
“I think you have to let people know how they’re doing,” he replied, apparently referring to his false statements. “. … But, you know, [there are] very bad statements coming out about the job that FEMA and this administration has done.”
Incumbent NC-11 Republican Rep. Chuck Edwards issued a statement debunking the lies on October 8. He stood by silently on Monday. Except:
Edwards, however, told Trump that by “getting dust on your shoes,” he had done more to view the devastation than the president or vice president.
The fawning and kowtowing Trump cult members exhibit over this obvious (emotionally stunted) career con man in visible mental decline is beyond comprehension. I sat at my parents dinner table in early 2016 and declared him mentally unstable. Nothing he’s done since has undermined that assessment. Hundreds of thousands of Americans dead because of his incompetence in handling the Covid-19 pandemic are beyond commenting.
When you surrender to the MAGA media bubble, you don’t get to choose which items confirm your prejudices, which ones hurt you in service of making you mad at people Trump wants you to be mad at. Some may wake up to the cruel manipulation. Others will be victims to the end.
Witness the difference in the photos at the top.
Former Rep. Liz Cheney framed the choice facing voters in this presidential election as succinctly as anyone. It’s a matter of trust: “If you wouldn’t hire somebody to babysit your kids, you shouldn’t make that guy the President of the United States.”
Kamala Harris held some Q&As with Liz Cheney today in an attempt to persuade Republican women to vote for Harris. When asked how she deals with the despair so many are feeling she said this:
Let me just speak to what people are feeling. We cannot despair. We cannot despair. You know, the nature of a democracy is such that I think there’s a duality. On the one hand, there’s an incredible strength when our democracy is intact. An incredible strength in what it does to protect the freedoms and rights of its people.
Oh there’s great strength in that.
And, it is very fragile. It is only as strong as our willingness to fight for it. And so that’s the moment we’re in. And I say do not despair because in a democracy, as long as we can keep it, in our democracy, the people — every individual — has the power to make a decision about what this will be.
And so let’s not feel powerless.
Let’s not let the — and I get it, overwhelming nature of this all makes us feel powerless. Because then we have been defeated. And that’s not our character as the American people. We are not ones to be defeated. We rise to a moment. And we stand on broad shoulders of people who have fought this fight before for our country. And in many ways then, let us look at the challenge that we have been presented and not be overwhelmed by it.
The baton is now in our hands, to fight for, not against, but for this country that we love. That’s what we have the power to do.
So let’s own that? Dare I say be joyful in what we will do in the process of owning that which is knowing that we can and will build community and coalitions and remind people that we’re all in this together.
Let’s not let the overwhelming nature of this strip us of our strength.
That’s how I feel about this.
Words to the wise.
In a video obtained by CBS News, the leader of an “election protection” activist group of 1,800 volunteers in North Carolina is seen instructing attendees at a virtual meeting to flag voters with “Hispanic-sounding last names” as one way to identify potentially suspicious registrations as the group combs through voter rolls ahead of the 2024 election.
“If you’ve got folks that you, that were registered, and they’re missing information… and they were registered in the last 90 days before the election, and they’ve got Hispanic-sounding last names, that probably is, is a suspicious voter,” said James Womack, the leader of the effort, who chairs the Republican Party in Lee County, North Carolina. “It doesn’t mean they’re illegal. It just means they’re suspicious.”
Womack is the president and founder of the North Carolina Election Integrity Team, a group of self-described patriots dedicated to investigating the election for what they perceive as incidents of fraud in the pivotal presidential battleground state — where polls put the contest at a statistical tie between the Republican former President Donald Trump and Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.
Womack describes his organization as comprised mostly of retirees working remotely from their computers to analyze public records related to voting. He says the group has a list of multiple factors they are using to flag suspicious voters, a task he believes is necessary because of flaws in how voter information has been collected in recent years. […]
Juan Proaño, the CEO of the League of United Latin American Citizens, told CBS News it defies logic to expect undocumented immigrants would take the risk of crossing the border and then place themselves in legal jeopardy by registering to vote and actually voting in an election.
“It’s very much a myth,” said Proaño,” but the campaigns have essentially used it as rhetoric, again, to try and suppress and intimidate the Latino vote.”
It’s absurd. The last thing an undocumnted migrant wants to do is get involved in some highly regulated American legal ritual. Fergawdsakes.
But this is really about intimidating Hispanic voters because they have traditionally been a Democratic constitutency. With all the talk ab out Trump making huge headway with that group you’d think thay’d contemplate whether this is so smart but then these are Republicans we’re talking about.
I keep hearing that there are Democratic lawyers in place in all the battlegrounds to defend the vote. I hope that’s true because the Republican yahoos have been trained to challenge anyone they see as “an enemy within” whether it’s Latinos. Black voters, college students whatever. We’re already seeing signs of it:
A junior at Franklin & Marshall College was wrongfully turned away from the Lancaster County elections office on Tuesday, told he was ineligible to vote in Pennsylvania unless he could prove he was not registered in his home state, Connecticut.
The student was already a registered voter in Pennsylvania and had voted by mail in Lancaster County in 2022, according to records obtained by LancasterOnline last year from the Department of State.
The student went to the county elections office in downtown Lancaster last week to apply for a mail-in ballot. His plan was to fill it out immediately and submit it in person.
It turns out it was illegal:
Marian Schneider, an attorney for the ACLU of Pennsylvania, said the removal of the student’s voter registration violated federal law, which prohibits removing people from the voter rolls in the final 90 days before a national election.
She said Pennsylvania law is also clear about the right of out-of-state college students to register and vote in the county where their college campus is, so long as they meet all the other criteria for voting. The F&M student met all of those criteria.
“They should restore that registration. They had no business removing it,” Schneider said.
How many people are going to go to the trouble to contest these petty disqualifications? Not all of them, I can guarantee.
LISTEN TO THIS:
His closing argument is: Vote for me. I’m batshit insane!
This should be devastating for Donald Trump but since his cult has been trained not to believe anything bad about him, it probably won’t have much of an impact. Still, it’s pretty shocking for a man who depends on older people to vote for him:
Former President Donald Trump’s campaign plans would significantly accelerate the already-fast-approaching date when Social Security is projected to run out of money, a nonpartisan budget group said Monday.
Trump’s agenda would make the popular government program, relied upon by millions of American seniors, insolvent in six years — shrinking the current timeline by a third, the group found.
The Republican nominee’s proposals would also expand Social Security’s cash shortfall by trillions of dollars and lead to even steeper benefit cuts in the coming years, said US Budget Watch 2024, a project of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
“We find President Trump’s campaign proposals would dramatically worsen Social Security’s finances,” the CRFB budget group said in a blog post.
They didn’t find that Harris’s polities would do the same. The reasons Trump is draining the system include his tariffs, of course, but also his proposal to ends all taxes on Social Security, tips and overtime and lowering taxes on corporations.
When asked about it the campaign said that deporting migrants would restore social security solvency.
They are very, very confused because it’s obvious that Trump is just randomly pandering like crazy without any serious contemplation of the consequences of his policies. I cetainly hope no one is counting on his actually enacting any of these plans with the exception of tax cuts for corporations and rich people. But be advised that if he does it won’t be pretty.