Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

The Washington Post published a feature about the CIA whistleblower whose revelations led to Trump’s first impeachment.

He described his experience, which included death threats that upended his life and required the CIA to provide him with round-the-clock protection, in interviews over the past two months. The Washington Post is granting him anonymity because of the ongoing concerns for his safety and has confirmed his account with more than a half dozen former senior officials.

His story mirrors those of dozens of other bureaucrats, diplomats, intelligence analysts, FBI agents, politicians and military officers who stood up to what they saw as efforts by Trump to subvert the country’s democracy. Some of these officials were fired or resigned in protest. Others sought to temper Trump’s demands without alienating him and, in the process, protect themselves and their institutions from retribution.

Trump has routinely described these people as participants in a “deep state” conspiracy to destroy the country and rob his voters of their voice. If elected next month to a second term, he’s vowed to purge them from government.

Think about that for a moment. Then think about this:

On top of that, we have the world’s richest man blatantly trying to buy votes in Pennsylvania:

Elon Musk says on stage at a town hall that America PAC will be awarding $1 million every day until the election to a registered Pennsylvania voter who has signed his petition. Musk awarded the first $1 million this evening to someone at the town hall, bringing the guy onto the stage and handing him a jumbo check, lotto-style. Musk is essentially incentivizing likely Trump voters in PA to register to vote: Petition is to support for 1A and 2A, so basically R voters. But they also have to be registered to vote, so if they weren’t already, they would do it now.

Election Law expert Rich Hasen:

Though maybe some of the other things Musk was doing were of murky legality, this one is clearly illegal. See 52 U.S.C. 10307(c): “Whoever knowingly or willfully gives false information as to his name, address or period of residence in the voting district for the purpose of establishing his eligibility to register or vote, or conspires with another individual for the purpose of encouraging his false registration to vote or illegal voting, or pays or offers to pay or accepts payment either for registration to vote or for voting shall be fined not more than $10,000 or imprisoned not more than five years, or both…” (Emphasis added.)

See also the DOJ Election Crimes Manual at 44: “The bribe may be anything having monetary value, including cash, liquor, lottery chances, and welfare benefits such as food stamps. Garcia, 719 F.2d at 102. However, offering free rides to the polls or providing employees paid leave while they vote are not prohibited. United States v. Lewin, 467 F.2d 1132, 1136 (7th Cir.
1972). Such things are given to make it easier for people to vote, not to induce them to do so. This distinction is important. For an offer or a payment to violate Section 10307(c), it must have been intended to induce or reward the voter for engaging in one or more acts necessary to cast a ballot.… Moreover, payments made for some purpose other than to induce
or reward voting activity, such as remuneration for campaign work, do not violate this statute. See United States v. Canales 744 F.2d 413, 423 (5th Cir. 1984) (upholding conviction because jury justified in inferring that payments were for voting, not campaign work). Similarly, Section 10307(c) does not apply to payments made to signature-gatherers for voter registrations such individuals may obtain. However, such payments become actionable under Section 10307(c) if they are shared with the person being registered.” (Emphases added.)

I’d like to hear if there’s anyone who thinks this is not a clear case of a violation.

UPDATE: Musk said at his rally that one had to be a petition signer to be eligible for the $1 million prize. (“So– we really want to try to get as many people as possible to sign this petition. So. I have a surprise for you [crowd cheers] which is that we’re going to be awarding a million dollars, randomly, to people who have signed the signed the petition every day from now until the election.”) I’ve also learned that to get the $100 bounty one also must be a petition signer. And who can sign the petitions? Only registered voters in swing states, which is what makes it illegal. See the screen shots of the offers below:

If Trump wins, Musk will be highly influential. If Harris wins I doubt anything at all will be done about this either. We crossed the oligarchy moment some time ago, I’m afraid.

I know that I’m leaning hard on the outrage today (and frankly feeling little bit stressed) but I had one of those moments this morning as I was watching the Sunday shows and reading one quote after another from voters who are clearly deluded in which it came home to me again just how terrifying a Trump win will actually be. Yes, I know we all fear it and expect that he’ll be a hundred times worse than he was before. But at this point in the election you tend to get caught up in the contest and think too much in terms of winning qnd losing and forget about the stakes a little bit.

The stakes have never been higher. In fact, someone said to me this morning, “it’s the greatest threat since Hitler” and I honestly don’t think that’s hyperbole. It’s beyond terrifying that it’s even slighty close.

She turns 60 today. She’s just the right age for the first woman president. She’s had enough time to gather the experience any woman would be required to have (unlike a man who vcan get away with none, apparently) and yet she’s young and vigorous enough to get the job done.

This was nice:

I don’t know if everyone knows that Kamala Harris has a rabid fan base that’s been with her ever since the 2020 primaries. It’s called the KHive and they are true believers of the kind only Obama and Trump can boast. This was their birthday present to her.

Have we ever had to think about genitalia in political discourse more than we have since Donald Trump came on the scene? Actually, did we ever have to think about it in politics before? We’ve heard about his own dick size constantly, starting when he talked about it in a presidential primary debate all the way back in 2015. We heard him say that he liked to grab women by the pussy and dozsens of women have testified to the fact that he did that routinely. He’s been found liable of doing even worse to e.jean carroll. Stormy Daniels also testified about the size and shape of his penis.

Just this week, as his closing argument apparently, Trump can’t stop talking about genitals. He complained about Harvbey Weinsten being “schlonged” and then dropped this insane comments:

He also said he could hit a golf ball farther than Palmer which I guess means his dick is actually bigger?

This story seems to be getting a lot of traction in the media today which I guess is good? I just don’t know anymore. I’m feeling so cynical about the half of the American people who are going to vote for this cretin that I wonder if this will actually help him.

Maybe Trump is right and we really are a nation in decline. His candidacy does sort of prove it.

To follow up on Tom’s post below, Democracy is great and all but … damn:

“Trump is obviously insane, and then Harris, I don’t think she has a plan,” said Clayton Ewing, a 63-year-old retiree from Shelby Township, Mich. who has voted for Trump in prior elections.

Ewing said he may wait until he gets to the polls to make a final decision.

Regina Gallacher, a 58-year-old physical therapist from Rochester Hills, Mich., said she is looking for a third party candidate because Trump “really scares me” but and she doesn’t “get warm fuzzies” when she hears Harris talk and found her replacement of President Biden on the ballot “very slimy.”

Her husband, a union Democrat, is voting for Trump for the first time but they don’t talk about it at home because Gallacher, who grows repulsed when Trump appears on television, would rather avoid a heated conversation with her husband, who is unlikely to change his mind. If she has to choose between the two, it will be Harris, she said. But she is unsure.

“We’ll get through it” if Trump wins, she said. “I just won’t be happy about it.”

He started the conversation saying he would vote for Trump for the third time because he’s going to “stop the flood of people coming to this country.”

“You know, I shouldn’t be saying that, because I am a foreigner,” said Fram, who moved from Jordan in 1981.

He is angry about a recent break-in at his brother’s mansion by Ecuadorian migrants here illegally, he said. And he pointed to sky-high unemployment in Jordan, which has one of the world’s highest refugee populations, as a cautionary tale.

But the conversation flipped when he began discussing Trump’s refusal to concede the 2020 election and his increasingly authoritarian rhetoric.

“I don’t really like that,” Fram said. “The reason we first immigrated to this country was to be free and to get rid of those dictators.”

He put his current odds of supporting Trump at 60% and said it would depend on a meeting with his large family.

These people ll seem to be acting in good faith so I’m not going to say they are MAGA jerks. (Maybe they are and are just being more polite to a reporter.) But they are just not being rational. I don’t know what we an do about it.

And because she asked

Don’t hold me to these back-of-the-napkin figures, but an out-of-state friend asked this morning if Hurricane Helene was impacting voter turnout here in Asheville. Here’s how I replied (edited to add post-coffee clarity):

Current statewide registration: Ds: 31%, Rs: 30%, UNAffiliated (registered independents): 38%

Despite the lines we saw on Th and Fr (my tweet has almost 10 million views), turnout is down about a third from 2020. The hurricane took out 4 of our planned 14 early voting sites and shortened daily voting hours to 9-5 in this county. We’ve got new voting machines adding to slowing the process. Can’t speak to other WNC counties. 

But despite that depressed vote and a strong first-day vote by Republicans here, we seem back to our normal pattern of Ds outvoting Rs in Buncombe County by over 2:1. What’s more (recognize UNAffiliated registrants statewide have overtaken Ds & Rs since 2020), the UNA vote is UP in Buncombe almost 40% (over Rs by 2:1) from 2020, and in this county they vote with Ds by 56%.  But I warn freshman candidates: Republicans bat last. 

Turnout will be determinative across North Carolina, but not D turnout. Ds statewide are outvoting Rs by only 12k votes as of Saturday and nearly 300k UNAs have voted (31% of votes cast by 38% of the registrants). But UNAs don’t vote with Democrats statewide. They voted 58% against Democrats in both 2020 and 2022. UNA turnout in our big, blue counties will decide our electoral vote. Under 45 they lean heavily our way, but don’t vote. (See graphic.) I’m hoping Anderson Clayton (26) can get a big boost out of the 30-and-unders. Just don’t get me started on why Ds won’t think outside the box and target more of the friendly UNAs for GOTV. I have tried, both here (and in AZ).

Note how NC registration has changed since January when it was Democrats: 33%, Republicans: 30%, UNAffiliateds: 36%. That UNA spike may reflect a bump in younger voters that Old North State Politics noticed after Kamala Harris became the Democrats’ presumptive nominee. Total registration in NC is up 5% since January. But like “signs don’t vote,” registrations don’t either. People who vote vote. And Early Voting Data Are Not Predictive of Final Election Outcomes.

Michael Bitzer wrote on August 6:

Before July 21, registered Republicans were ahead of Democrats, but Unaffiliateds dominated both (with the one exception of July 14th with the GOP spike). After July 21, registered Democrats took the advantage over Republicans, with Unaffiliateds still dominating.

This unaffiliated dominance isn’t surprising, simply due to who is registering: namely, Millennials and Generation Z, who are more likely than not to register non-partisan.

In North Carolina, non-partisan is UNAffiliated, and Millennials and Generation Z are under 45. And over half of voters roughly 45 and younger identify as independents. The question is will those young-uns (new registrants and existing) turn out where it counts for Democrats: in urban precincts where UNAs lean heavily blue? Will Democrats’ turnout operations target enough of these (from their database’s perspective) relative “unknowns”?

As I’ve said before of urban UNAs who don’t turn out like their voting UNA neighbors:

Chicken or egg? Are these lower-propensity voters not turning out like their independent neighbors because they are simply less-engaged? Or because Democrats are not engaging them?

We’ll know soon enough.

What Michael Sokolove found in a tiny Pennsylvania town

Comprehending what’s become of a large faction of Americans and a majority of the Republican Party will be the object of study for historians and psychologists for decades. Reporting from Riegelsville, Pa., a hamlet of 800 that voted in 2020 for Donald Trump by a mere two votes, Michael Sokolove found not one of the 60 Republican and Democrat voters he spoke with is changing sides this election. Just why will be the subject of doctoral dissertations (gift link):

Most of the Harris supporters I spoke to in Riegelsville cited the vice president’s personal qualities — what they perceived as positivity and decency — along with a desire for a president who might somehow calm our rancorous political climate. Most of the Trump supporters were unconcerned with matters of character. If they ever had a hope that a U.S. president would be someone they admired, a person who might represent the best of us — a war hero, say, like Dwight Eisenhower; a straight arrow like Jimmy Carter; or a trailblazer like Barack Obama — they had abandoned it. Many said that was an outdated or even naïve notion. They know who Mr. Trump is and don’t care.

“They know it’s wrong and they don’t care” (October 2014) was one of my earliest observations on this site.

“He’s a shyster, but I’d take him over her,” Marvin Cegielski, 84, the retired stone mason, told me. “He’ll block off the border.”

“I detest him as a person,” said Natalie Wriker, 37, who works at the Lutheran church in town, “but he’s the lesser of two evils.” She said she believes that politicians are “easily bought” but that Mr. Trump has less motivation to do things for money because of his wealth.

Among the Harris voters I talked with was Jaycee Venini, 23, who grew up in Riegelsville and works as a landscaper. “She is actually a human being,” he said. “I feel like that’s a minimum requirement. And she’s not full of greed or a convicted felon.”

The Good Liars clearly cherry-pick the videos they post of Trump supporters absolutely certain of what Trump has done for them until asked to name it. Mitigating their cherry-picking is how many they find. These people are almost impossibly uninformed. What people who believe Trump incorruptible because he’s rich miss is this: the more people have, the less secure they feel and the more they feel they need.

In this exchange from “The Rise of the New Global Elite” (2011), Chrystia Freeland recounts:

As an example, she described a conversation with a couple at a Manhattan dinner party: “They started saying, ‘If you’re going to buy all this stuff, life starts getting really expensive. If you’re going to do the NetJet thing’”—this is a service offering “fractional aircraft ownership” for those who do not wish to buy outright—“‘and if you’re going to have four houses, and you’re going to run the four houses, it’s like you start spending some money.’”

The clincher, Peterson says, came from the wife: “She turns to me and she goes, ‘You know, the thing about 20’”—by this, she meant $20 million a year—“‘is 20 is only 10 after taxes.’ And everyone at the table is nodding.”

As out of touch with them are the Trump voters Sokolove encountered. On Trump’s Chinese menu of character defects, “they offered a range of explanations and rationalizations that did not align with any knowable reality.”

In this Hallmark town, Sokolove expected to find people who had grown tired of the divisiveness and chaos he spawns. He was disappointed.

I was wrong. One of my last conversations was with a construction worker at the general store who asked that his name not be used. He brought up the assassination attempt on Mr. Trump in western Pennsylvania. “It was Biden’s fault,” the man said. How so? I asked. “Oh, c’mon,” he said. “The deep state tried to take him down. You have to be an idiot not to be able to see that.”

I also heard Riegelsville described as “quintessential Americana” — and in a slightly altered way, that also felt apt. It is America in 2024. It’s defenseless, like everywhere else, from the ever-rising tide of division and madness in the civic life of our nation.

So get out and vote, willya? Knock some doors. Make come calls if MAGAland is not the America in which you care to live.

Axios reports:

In the heat of this historic election, educated elites who should know better — billionaires, elected officials, journalists — keep falling for fakes, conspiracy theories and outright lies…

Each day on the digital campaign trail has brought a torrent of false or misleading claims, often courtesy of partisan accounts with massive audiences. In the last few weeks alone:

-MAGA influencers breathlessly spread the false claim that Vice President Kamala Harris used a teleprompter during her Univision town hall, which the X algorithm then promoted in its trending topics as fact.

-Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) posted a purported screenshot of a headline in The Atlantic that read: “To Save Democracy Harris May Need To Steal An Election.” It was fake, and Roy deleted the post.

-Bill Ackman, a hedge fund billionaire with 1.4 million followers on X, obsessively promoted allegations from an ABC News “whistleblower” that the network had given Harris questions in advance of her debate with Trump. On Wednesday, more than a month later, Ackman admitted it was “fake.”

 Elon Musk, whose takeover of X has enabled fake news slop at scale, is among the most consistent offenders — credulously promoting baseless claims about voter fraud that rack up billions of views.

“Is this true?” the pro-Trump billionaire will often ask his legions of followers about blatant bunk, helping it spread like wildfire.

Musk frequently touts the “Community Notes” system, whereby X users can vote to add fact checks to false posts, but many posts don’t get the Community Notes treatment until well after they go viral, if at all.

Axios reports that liberals do this too, noting that there was a viral untrue rumor that Karl Rove was stumping for Harris and a spate of conspiracy theories about the Trump assassination attempt. (I might add that the rumors were even more plentiful on the right about that last one.)

Anyway, as we know this takes a real toll on people’s lives when it affects the information necessary to help people in a disaster.

“The truth is, it’s getting harder to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality,” The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel wrote in an article about hurricane conspiracies headlined: “I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is.”

And apparently, 54% of respondents in an Axios Vibes survey published last month agreed with the statement, “I’ve disengaged from politics because I can’t tell what’s true.”

Come on people. It’s crazy out there for real. We all know that. Just look at the circus sideshow the Republicans are trying to sell us for the presidency. And it’s also crazy out there because our media econsystems are full of lies and BS. But if you use your intuition and your brain you can get your way through it even if you screw up once in a while and believe something that’s fake. But it’s important to stay engaged. Reality still exists.

Coming from the man who has demeaned and insulted every judge in every one of his cases except for Aileen Cannon in Florida who was clearly biased in his favor, that was pretty rich.

Just yesterday he did it again:

Trump called the release of the documents “election interference” during his podcast appearance and said it was “a terrible thing, what’s happening. And the judges, this judge is the most evil person.”

“They all said, ‘Well, make sure you don’t get Chutkan.’ And who did I get? I got Chutkan. So, you know, they supposedly pick, they pick balls, right?” Trump continued, referring in lottery-like terms to the random selection system used to assign federal judges to cases. “It’s not— I don’t think it works that way, but that’s what they say. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. You pick out of a hat, and that’s the judge.”

I guess it’s not very useful to point this stuff out because almost half the country doesn’t think his addled hypocrisy even matters. But it’s important, I think, to at least put it on the record.

Those of you who read this blog know about the Republicans’ affinity for the bandwagon effect — tell everyone you’re winning and in the end people will want to go with the winner. Trump is especially enamored of this because he brags about everything anyway.

Dan Pfeiffer has a piece today explaining that it might not be the smartest move this time out.

Believe it or not, there are strategic reasons why Republicans publicly assert they are winning no matter what the polls say, and Democrats always hypothesize that a stunning defeat is right around the corner.

However, this election is unlike any other. The electoral coalitions have shifted, and the Trump campaign did not adjust its playbook to address the new reality.

For the longest time, the Republican coalition was comprised of older, mostly college-educated voters who participated in every election. Democratic success, on the other hand, depended on turnout from lower-propensity voters who rarely voted in midterms.

This explains why Republicans generally did better in lower-turnout midterm elections and Democrats have won the popular vote in all but one presidential election since 1988 (Yep, you read that correctly). Higher turnout was good for Democrats and bad for Republicans. Higher turnout means irregular voters show up and dilute the power of the GOP’s hard-core base of regular voters.

[…]

Because of the differing nature of their coalitions, Democrat and Republicans took different approaches to motivating their voters.

The Republican theory depends on the “Bandwagon Effect.” They believe that undecided voters will tip to the likely winner. The Republicans want the illusion of momentum at the end of a campaign. They often go to extreme measures to create that illusion. They rely on a barrage of junk polls that show their candidates winning. They assert that the map is shifting in their direction — even campaigning in solidly Blue states as a demonstration of confidence.

Democrats worry about complacency. Lower-propensity voters are less likely to vote if the outcome is assured. In other words, their decision to turn out depends on believing their vote matters. We learned this lesson in 2016. Approximately four million people who voted for Obama in 2012 stayed home during that election, which helped put Donald Trump in the White House.

Pfeiffer points out that coalitions have changed dramatically since 2016, however. With those college-educated suburbanites moving to the Democrats, it’s the GOP that depends on low propensity voters. He quotes a Cook Report survey that found”

Our final poll finds Harris leading 51%-47% among high-engagement voters — a remarkably stable four-point lead the same as the previous two polls — only this time with just 2% remaining undecided. But Trump has bounced back to a seven-point lead with low/mid-engagement voters, 52%-45% — smack dab in between his 10-point lead over Biden among those voters in May and his three-point lead over Harris in August. The likely explanation? Since August, Trump has consolidated more Robert F. Kennedy Jr. supporters and other third-party voters to his column, allowing him to increase his low/mid-engagement vote share from 48% to 52%, while Harris’s share among that group has remained stagnant at 45%.

Pfeiffer notes:

Trump and the Republicans now need less-likely voters to turn out — the exact type of voter prone to complacency. There is now real dissonance between the Trump campaign’s messaging and its target voters.

Trump is literally telling his voters that he can’t lose (unless the other side cheats) and it’s clear they are already measuring the drapes for the White House. He’s campaigning in states he can’t win and is refusing to do interviews and events by the dozen. He’s acting like he’s already got it in the bag. Of course.

Pfeiffer points out that Obama’s team knew they had to turn out those low propensity voters so they built a massive, sophisticated field operation. I remember it well and it started months before the election. As you know (just read the previous post) the Trump team has not done that. They outsourced their field operation to Super PACs one of which, Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point ,has been relegated to just one state after failing to meet goals this month and the other a late comer to the party, Elon Musk, who’s apparently having similar problems.

As Pfeiffer says, the GOP hasn’t updated its campaign strategy and frankly, I don’t think they could if they wanted to because Trump lives by the bandwagon effect. He just lies and lies about everything, under the assumption he can make people believe anything. And he’s certainly right about the members of his cult. But whether he can count on that working with low propensity voters in another thing. They might just hear him bragging about how great he is and assume he’s going to win whether they vote or not. If they like him, that’s a problem.