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Dan Pfeiffer this morning examines the GOP push to psych out the public:
Despite minimal evidence, a full-bore effort is underway to make Democrats think Kamala Harris is losing the election. This effort is abetted by preternaturally anxious Democrats expressing their concerns on social media.
I have written a lot recently about the vibe shift in Democrats after Kamala Harris’s nomination. I don’t think the data validates such an extreme shift in emotions. However, I won’t shame anyone for being on edge these last two weeks. The stakes are enormous. Reproductive freedom, health care, democracy, and the planet are on the line in an election that could be decided by the weather in a random suburban Wisconsin county.
Simon Rosenberg has been on about Republicans flooding the zone with conservative “red wave” polls meant to skew polling averages in Donald Trump’s favor. This is a GOP psyop meant to a) depress Democrat enthusiasm and, b) lay the groundwork for another “stop the steal” movement post-Nov. 5. And if you’ve been paying attention, it’s clear that that that is when the Trump campaign expects to win the presidency. Not at the polls on Election Day. Look at how he’s campaigning.
Pfeiffer admits he tends to hang out “on the dark side,” but offers a counter to the GOP effort to psych out their opponents. Hope, he writes, “is a powerful force.” There are several reasons why Harris may have the advantage.
- Kamala Harris is Better Liked
- Harris Has a (Slightly) Easier Path to 270
- Trump is Not Closing Strong
- Harris Runs the Better Field Operation
Pfeiffer offers reasons behind all those. But there are wild cards beyond those four. Trump’s campaign has nowehere to grow. A large percentage of the Republican base voted for Nikki Haley in the primaries, even after she dropped out on March 6. She garnered 23 percent of the vote on March 5 in the swing state of North Carolina. Will those Haley voters return to the Trump cult fold or what?
The large expansion in independent voter identification over the last four years (where voters register that way) means that simply counting Ds and Rs as early voting continues is all but meaningless. How they will vote this year is anyone’s guess. They still tell pollsters that the economy is a top issue. Nate Silver’s “gut” this morning acknowledges reasons why polling may underestimate Trump support, or else be biased against Harris. (See Rosenberg above.)
The best Silver can offer is, “Don’t be surprised if a relatively decisive win for one of the candidates is in the cards — or if there are bigger shifts from 2020 than most people’s guts might tell them.”
Then of course, there is the Dobbs decision. Elections where women’s reproductive rights measures were on the ballot consistently tipped in Democrats’ favor even in conservative states. The horror stories of pregnant women bleeding out in parking lots have been powerful. The backlash against Trump and Dobbs has not gone away.
We just don’t know how it will all play out. Just don’t get psyched out. We are, as Dem strategists insist, within the margin of effort.
One of my favorite TV scenes was in a show called “6 Feet Under” in which Kathy Bates brings her friend to a department store and tells her to go ahead and shoplift because once a woman goes through menopause she’s invisible. It’s kind of true …
I thought of that today when I read this:
New polling shows Kamala Harris leads Donald Trump with women over the age of 50 by more than any presidential candidate since 2016. The survey shows that 54% of women in that demographic plan to vote for the vice president, over just 42% for Trump.
It’s a huge improvement from Joe Biden, who only led Trump by three points with women over 50 in January. The numbers are also better than Hillary Clinton‘s numbers in 2016, who polled 48%-40% over Trump.
[…]
‘Our polling over the years has shown them to be a key swing voting bloc,’ said AARP Executive Vice President Nancy LeaMond.
In the same survey, Democrats led Republicans 51%-42% on votes for who should control Congress. Overwhelmingly, women over 50 say that the economy and affordability are their biggest issue.
Trump on Friday dismissed polls showing him faring badly with women voters, calling them ‘nonsense’ and declaring that ‘women love me’ – except, he said, for one thing.
‘Without abortion, the women love me,’ Trump insisted.
They may be invisible but they vote. They really vote. And they affirmatively like Kamala Harris. On the other hand, I would guess hat quite a few of them really hate Donald Trump and JD Vance who said just the other day that post menopausal women’s only purpose in life is to watch the grandkids or Bernie Moreno in Ohio who said that women over 50 have no reason to care about abortion rights.
Sure guys, keep it up.
Jeffrey Goldberg has published a story in the Atlantic compiling many of the grotesque commnts from Trump about the military. I guess I’m not shocked by it anymore but I confess I’m still pretty stunned that Republican voters don’t care. I suppose they believe it’s all lies but on some level they do know he’s lying and have chosen to pretend to believe him when he says it didn’t happen. I will never understand what makes them so attracted or loyal to this man but that’s another story.
I’m linking with a gift link so that you can read the whole story. Much of it isn’t new but it’s still good to see it all in one place.
The newest piece is here. Trump had offered to personally help pay for funeral expenses for vaness Guillen a young soldier who had been killed by a fellow soldier. Months after the fact, he asked if they had ever received a bill:
According to attendees, and to contemporaneous notes of the meeting taken by a participant, an aide answered: Yes, we received a bill; the funeral cost $60,000.
Trump became angry. “It doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury a fucking Mexican!” He turned to his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and issued an order: “Don’t pay it!” Later that day, he was still agitated. “Can you believe it?” he said, according to a witness. “Fucking people, trying to rip me off.”
Khawam, the family attorney, told me she sent the bill to the White House, but no money was ever received by the family from Trump. Some of the costs, Khawam said, were covered by the Army (which offered, she said, to allow Guillén to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery) and some were covered by donations. Ultimately, Guillén was buried in Houston.
That comment was recorded contemporaneously. And then there’s this which I will never understand:
In their book, The Divider: Trump in the White House, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser reported that Trump asked John Kelly, his chief of staff at the time, “Why can’t you be like the German generals?” Trump, at various points, had grown frustrated with military officials he deemed disloyal and disobedient. (Throughout the course of his presidency, Trump referred to flag officers as “my generals.”) According to Baker and Glasser, Kelly explained to Trump that German generals “tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off.” This correction did not move Trump to reconsider his view: “No, no, no, they were totally loyal to him,” the president responded.
This week, I asked Kelly about their exchange. He told me that when Trump raised the subject of “German generals,” Kelly responded by asking, “‘Do you mean Bismarck’s generals?’” He went on: “I mean, I knew he didn’t know who Bismarck was, or about the Franco-Prussian War. I said, ‘Do you mean the kaiser’s generals? Surely you can’t mean Hitler’s generals? And he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, Hitler’s generals.’ I explained to him that Rommel had to commit suicide after taking part in a plot against Hitler.” Kelly told me Trump was not acquainted with Rommel.
Baker and Glasser also reported that Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, feared that Trump’s “‘Hitler-like’ embrace of the big lie about the election would prompt the president to seek out a ‘Reichstag moment.’”
Kelly—a retired Marine general who, as a young man, had volunteered to serve in Vietnam despite actually suffering from bone spurs—said in an interview for the CNN reporter Jim Sciutto’s book, The Return of Great Powers, that Trump praised aspects of Hitler’s leadership. “He said, ‘Well, but Hitler did some good things,’” Kelly recalled. “I said, ‘Well, what?’ And he said, ‘Well, (Hitler) rebuilt the economy.’ But what did he do with that rebuilt economy? He turned it against his own people and against the world.” Kelly admonished Trump: “I said, ‘Sir, you can never say anything good about the guy. Nothing.’”
This wasn’t the only time Kelly felt compelled to instruct Trump on military history. In 2018, Trump asked Kelly to explain who “the good guys” were in World War I.
Ok, so he’s an uneducated cretin and became president without knowing who “the good guys” in World War I were. And we know he probably has never read a whole book in his life. But he grew up in the shadow of WWII and should have ar least seen a boatload of movies like “The Longest Day” or “The Desert Fox” where he would have heard of Rommel. Most people his age, especially men, were steeped in WWII lore and would have known the story of the assasination plot by Hitler’s Generals.
Did he just spend all of his time as a young person looking in the mirror and giving himself affirmations? WTF?
Trump’s contempt for the military is well documented by now. I guess the flag waving, “love-it-or-leave-it” Republicans are equally contemptuous nowadays. This is yet another bit of hypocritical BS we won’t ever have to listen to them bleat about now.
If they start waving the flag in our faces in the future we should just call them suckets and losers. They’ll know what they means…
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.
Is the Harris-Cheney teamup unnerving the Trump campaign?
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.
But he’s their lunatic
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.”