Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Super Tuesday is over

“Presidential primary season is effectively over,” writes Jim Newell at Slate, rather anticlimactically. California’s Rep. Adam Schiff is on his way to being Senator Schiff. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema announced she would not seek reelection in Arizona, clearing the way for Rep. Ruben Gallego to become Senator Gallego. And Joe Biden and Donald “91 Counts” Trump will battle again for the presidency. Didn’t see that coming, didja?

Here in North Carolina, Attorney General Josh Stein will battle Lt. Gov. Mark “Choking on my own blood” Robinson for governor. Guess which is the Republican?

The problem going forward to November, as Digby observed of Josh Marshall’s take on the polling, is that “half the country doesn’t have a clue what actually going on, in some cases because they’ve been brainwashed and in others they’ve stopped paying attention order to preserve their mental health.” Ours here remains tenuous.

Greg Sargent on Tuesday:

Large swaths of voters appear to have little awareness of some of Trump’s clearest statements of hostility to democracy and intent to impose authoritarian rule in a second term, from his vow to be “dictator for one day” to his vague threat to enact “termination” of provisions in the Constitution.

That’s maddening for obvious reasons. But it also presents the Biden campaign with an opportunity. If voters are unaware of all these statements, there’s plenty of time to make voters aware of them—and the polling also finds that these statements, when aired to respondents, shift them against Trump.

Carpet-bomb the MFer.

It’s the same with Robinson in North Carolina, I suspect. Just as you, Dear Reader, know how crazy Trump is and that his mind is going because you come here each day and consume mass quantities of cable news, Joe and Jane Average do not. They are not as much siloed as busy with jobs and kids and their soccer practices, etc. They are likely unaware of just how crazy men like Trump and Robinson are. Or they’ve stuffed their ears and la-la-la to block it out. It’s the campaigns’ job to make sure voters know.

Carpet-bomb the lunatic GOPers until people get it.

Sargent comments on a poll that sheds light on the problem and the solution:

The survey—which was conducted by veteran Democratic pollster Geoff Garin for the group Save My Country and shared with The New Republic—did something novel. It polled 400 voters in each of three swing states—Arizona, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—and weighted them in proportion with each state’s Electoral College votes. It omitted respondents who voted for Trump in 2020 and also said Biden didn’t legitimately win.

In short, the poll was designed to survey voters who are genuinely gettable for Biden. The poll asked them about 10 of Trump’s most authoritarian statements, including: the two mentioned above, Trump’s claim that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” his vow to pardon rioters who attacked the Capitol, his promise to prosecute the Biden family without cause, his threat to inflict mass persecution on the “vermin” opposition, and a few more.

Result? “Only 31 percent of respondents said they previously had heard a lot about these statements by Trump,” the memo accompanying the poll concluded.

The good news for Biden is that when respondents were presented with these quotes, it prompted a rise in Trump’s negatives. For instance, after hearing them, the percentage who see him as “out for revenge” jumped by five points, the percentage who see him as “dangerous” rose by nine points, and the percentage who see him as a “dictator” climbed by seven points.

Joe Biden owns the bully pulpit. His job now and (hopefully) during his State of the Union Address on Thursday is to unleash Dark Brandon, to give Trump a taste of being bullied until he’s so apoplectic he won’t be able to pronounce it. (That shouldn’t be hard.) Then run the clip endlessly. There are already a wealth of Trump gag reels of him slurring his speech, spouting gibberish and clumsily trying to cover it up.

I’m hoping that Josh Stein will unleash similar hell on Robinson here in North Carolina. Like Gov. Roy Cooper (D) before him, the mild-mannered Stein does not exactly light up a room. But that worked for Cooper when pitted against Gov. Pat “Bathroom Bil” McCrory in 2016 and Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Forest in 2020. Low-key did not work for Cheri Beasley either in 2020 or in 2022. Few have heard Robinson’s pledge to “own this nation and rule this nation” for “Christian patriots” to the exclusion of anyone and everyone else. Stein needs to make sure voters hear it.

Americans want to pull for a fighter, for someone they feel will have their backs. That requires actually throwing punches.

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As I write this we’re awaiting the results of the Super Tuesday primary elections and obviously, we’ll be talking about that tomorrow. For now, I thought you might be interested in smart discussion of the presidential polls from Josh Marshall.

First of all, he says that the good pollsters have a pretty good way of modeling the electorate and we shouldn’t dismiss the polls just because people don’t answer the phone. Ok. I’m a little bit skeptical that anyone can correctly divine who’s going to turn out in election in these weird times but I’ll take his word for it.

Anyway, here are a couple more good insights worth thinking about:

You need to believe these polls. But we need to break down what we’re talking about. People often say polling right now isn’t the same as this fall. But it’s not just that the election’s eight months from now and things can change over eight months. Public opinion just functions differently in the weeks before a national election than it does eight months before it. It becomes clearer who is and who isn’t going to vote. People answer polls differently when they’re about to have to make a choice than they do months in advance.

Because of that I always find it a little difficult to answer questions about whether you should “believe” the polls. People say, well, this is just a snapshot. So it’s accurate for right now. But maybe not later. But now there’s not a general election. So in a real way, “now” isn’t even a thing.

With that said, I would absolutely much prefer Biden to be ahead by a couple of points than behind by a couple of points. That is 100% true. The best way to look at the current situation is that right now Biden’s the President and Trump is just some guy. Currently the election is a referendum and Biden is losing. The question is whether the Biden campaign and the dynamics of the election itself are going to change the election into a choice. Which of these two guys do you prefer? I think Biden will likely win a choice election. So whether this election is a referendum on Biden, or becomes a choice election between Biden and Trump, is the big question.

There’s another issue here on believing the polls.

From 2016 until 2022, in most elections you’d have the polls and then Trump or his candidates would outperform the polls. Not by a lot. But by a non-trivial amount. Often this difference was within the margin of error. So a pollster could say, we didn’t miss anything. That’s within the margin of error. It’s right there on the product label, as it were. But when it’s always or usually in one direction, that’s not the margin of error. There’s something wrong. And when you’re aggregating together large numbers of polls, the margin of error works differently. Then in 2022, pretty much after the Dobbs decision, that seemed to flip. Democrats started doing a nudge better than the polls.

We saw that in 2022. We’ve seen it in various special elections. We saw it in 2023. We haven’t yet seen whether that applies in a general election. That’s a big caveat. General elections are different. But if you’re looking for a reason that polls might be off by a bit and in Democrats’ direction, that’s it. Personally, I do think this is the case. And it’s the prism through which I look at a lot of this. I am not relying on this. But it is part of the picture when I look at these numbers.

Third: Okay, great. But isn’t the media awfulizing a lot about Biden? Obsessing about Biden’s age?

This one is complicated and the issue of media bias is one mostly best left for a different post. But there is some truth in this. It’s very paradoxical. I’ve written many times that D.C. remains wired for the GOP for all the reasons I’ve described. But it’s also true that there’s this kind of obsessing and negativity because most reporters are demographically and often politically closer to Democrats. For many of them it is kind of a given that Trump is a nut. And thus they are prone to focus on and amplify Democrats’ agita and anxieties.

Right now, Biden’s behind. Not by a lot. But he’s behind. That’s bad. That sucks. But even within that there’s a filtering of news in place that focuses on bad news for the Democrats. Let me give you just one example from today. Just after that batch of bad polls (NYT/Siena: Trump +4; Fox: Trump +2; CBS: Trump +4; WSJ: Trump +2) there was another batch of three. Those polls were TIPP Insights: Biden +1; Morning Consult: Biden +1.

On balance, the bad-for-Biden set includes pollsters I rate a bit better than the new, better-for-Biden set. But these are all quality polls. I don’t think I would have heard a peep about these other polls if I didn’t follow every poll that comes out. It’s also true that if you averaged all seven of those polls Biden would still be behind. But it is still unquestionably true that the bad polls are getting way, way more attention than the better polls for Biden.

We also see this a lot when reporters pick out a subsample in a poll as an example of Democratic oblivion. Trump is tied with African-American voters. Fifty percent of voters totally hate Biden. It’s almost never a good idea to base reporting on these internals of a poll. I actually recently saw a headline of a Quinnipiac poll which said that 70% of voters said Biden was too old. But he was actually up in that poll by 4 points.

There are more anecdotal examples. Over the weekend I was checking in on the number crunchers I follow on Twitter and Dave Wasserman, a great elections numbers guy, noted that Trump came within 40,000 votes of winning in 2020 and now, with Biden less popular than he was, Dems were “on the brink of disaster.” After posting that he caught some grief, I think, for speaking in such hyperbolic terms, and he followed up to say, “yes, losing to a candidate whom 53% of voters believe committed serious federal crimes would qualify as a disaster for any political party.”

Many would agree that Biden losing by even a single vote will qualify as a disaster. But Wasserman is a numbers analyst, not a partisan. He wasn’t talking about the substantive impact of a Trump presidency. He was talking about one party potentially losing. I note these comments because there’s a clear and consistent tendency to talk in really, really hyperbolic terms about Biden being slightly behind eight months before the election. This is real and it affects the overall tone of election coverage a great deal.

It’s worth remembering that Trump ran behind basically for the entire 2020 election and no one ever talked like this about his campaign. It’s just built in. It’s worth being aware of.

There’s a lot that’s baked in to this race and a lot that isn’t. Like Marshall I wish Biden was running ahead, (and speaking for myself I can’t believe he isn’t ahead by 30 points, to tell you the truth!) But I accept that half the country doesn’t have a clue what actually going on, in some cases because they’ve been brainwashed and in others they’ve stopped paying attention order to preserve their mental health. That’s not going to last.

Let ‘er rip:

Biden has told friends he thinks Trump is wobbly, both intellectually and emotionally, and will explode if Biden mercilessly gigs and goads him — “go haywire in public,” as one adviser put it.

Other sources tell us that Biden is looking for a fight.

Biden’s instincts tell him to let it fly when warning about the consequences of Trump winning the presidency again. Biden told The New Yorker that Trump would refuse to admit losing, again.

The “trigger Trump” approach would be a departure from a traditional Rose Garden re-election campaign.

Instead of focusing on jobs and the economy — areas in which polls suggest Americans aren’t giving Biden much credit — Biden would be making the contest as much about Trump as his own accomplishments.

One potential upside: It would help assuage concerns about Biden’s age by showing that at 81, he can still throw a Scranton punch.

Some Democrats want to see a return of the Joe Biden who sliced and diced his 2012 opponent, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), in the 2012 vice presidential debate.

Driving the news: It’s unclear whether Biden will flash his new fighting spirit at the State of the Union address on Thursday.

But Biden’s personal feistiness has been apparent in recent weeks. “Loser” has been a favorite Biden taunt of Trump lately.

“I’m the only one who has ever beat him,” Biden said in the rare, lengthy interview with The New Yorker, published Monday, “And I’ll beat him again.”

“Trump lost 60 court cases — 60,” Biden said, referring to the legal challenges on Trump’s behalf that alleged fraud in the 2020 election (It was 63, actually).

“The legal path just took him back to the truth — that I won the election, and he was a loser.”

[…]

Biden advisers have some evidence that Biden is already getting under Trump’s skin.

After Biden’s appearance with Seth Meyers, Trump quickly complained about the show on social media, calling the president a “basket case.”

Biden is using his campaign’s new TikTok account to take more jabs at his Republican rival. “Trump has no courage,” Biden said recently. “All Trump does is bow down to Putin.”

Why do I think that’s just fine? How about this from Kevin Drum?

Greg Sargent comments today on a poll saying voters aren’t really aware of Donald Trump’s most incendiary comments:

Large swaths of voters appear to have little awareness of some of Trump’s clearest statements of hostility to democracy and intent to impose authoritarian rule in a second term, from his vow to be “dictator for one day” to his vague threat to enact “termination” of provisions in the Constitution.

….The poll asked them about 10 of Trump’s most authoritarian statements, including: the two mentioned above, Trump’s claim that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” his vow to pardon rioters who attacked the Capitol, his promise to prosecute the Biden family without cause, his threat to inflict mass persecution on the “vermin” opposition, and a few more. Result? “Only 31 percent of respondents said they previously had heard a lot about these statements by Trump.”

Only 31%? Compare that to various questions asked in recent YouGov polls:

Hell, only 34% had heard about the Hur report. Only 24% knew we were striking back against the Houthis. And the fact that a star witness had lied about bribes paid to Hunter and Joe Biden? Only 22%.

Most people don’t know anything about anything. In fact, I’ll bet that even these numbers are inflated, with lots of respondents saying they’ve heard a lot about these things because they watched a segment on the evening news or got pointed to a Facebook post.

This is why I think Biden has a fair amount of upside in the presidential race. In September, when people start paying attention, what are they going to learn? Mostly bad stuff about Trump and good stuff about Biden’s little-known positive accomplishments. That’s where the greatest ignorance is right now, so it’s also where there’s the greatest potential for change.

According to IPSOS, some of the pollsters haven’t been asking an important question. When they do…

When questions concerning “political extremism and threats to democracy” and “Joe Biden and woke Democrats” and “Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans” are added to standard “main issue” questions about the economy, immigration, etc., the additional political questions rise to the top in importance, with Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans seen as a more important problems than Joe Biden and woke Democrats:

The issue landscape shifts significantly for Samples B and C, with explicitly political options rising in importance for Americans. In Sample B/Democracy, 24% choose political extremism as the most important problem facing the U.S., followed by immigration (20%), the economy (13%), war (6%), and crime (6%). In Sample C/Political, 23% say Donald Trump and MAGA republicans are the most important problem facing the U.S., with the economy (17%), Joe Biden and woke Democrats (13%), and immigration (10%) following in importance for Americans.

Also, more independents (25%) think that Trump and MAGA Republicans are the most important problem in the U.S. today than feel that way about Biden and woke Democrats (13%).

-Likewise, significant partisan gaps emerge in Sample C/Political too. About two in five Democrats (39%), one in four independents (25%), and 2% of Republicans say that Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans are the most important problems facing the U.S. today. Conversely, three in ten Republicans (29%), 13% of independents, and 1% of Democrats say Joe Biden and woke Democrats are the most important problems facing the country.

Elie Mystal’s latest piece in The Nation is a must read. I agree with his title and his premise:
The Supreme Court Must Me Stopped.

My question is “So how do we stop them?” There IS a way, and we need to act. Before you go into the, “Yeah, but…” read the whole piece, he lays out several steps to take, starting with changing our attitudes. We have to stop treating them as they want to be treated, as 9 law shamans. We need to treat them as “politicians in robes.”

This court has proven with its actions—through one politically motivated decision after another—that it is unfit to wield the power that it does.”

The Supreme Court Must Be Stopped, Elie Mystal in the Nation. March 1, 2024

I’m an activist so I know that there are multiple steps to make something happen. Elie starts out with changing how we in the public perceive the court.

Mystal, “The first step toward stopping the Supreme Court’s political actions is to treat the justices as political actors and subject them to all of the scrutiny, pressure, and protest normal political actors face every day. ” I like the way my friend Lisa Graves referred to them, “Politicians in robes.”

Elie points out that how we treat politicians in American is very different than how we treat Supreme Court Justices. We questions them, we have processes for getting rid of them when they do a bad job. We need to do the same with Supreme Court Justices. Part of our perception comes from how the media treats them. That needs to change. When our perception of the court changes, so should our response to them.

I LOVE the work that has been done by ProPublica on the corruption in the court, but the history of Thomas’ corruption has been known for a LONG time. What I’ve seen happen is that when corruption in the court is reveale, all the excuses pop up. “Sorry, nothing can be done!” I’ll ask a question like “Why can’t someone force Thomas to recuse?” and I’ll get a history lesson and answers about the separation of powers, so then I ask, “What do we have to do to change that, so that there are mandatory ethical rules and consequences for violating them?”

Lisa Graves is going to be on the Nicole Sandler show again on, Feb 5, 2024 if you want to listen live & ask a question it’s at 5ET/2PT. I’d like her to walk through the reasons given for no action. What steps need to be taken? Who needs to take them? Who does the public put pressure on? What do we demand? What are the excuses that will be used? What are our responses to the excuses?

Clarence Thomas should recuse and resign. He should impeached for his corruption. He should hang up his robe and cry.

The song is from The Parody Project & is called, “Hang Up Your Robe Judge Thomas,” It’s based on the song Tom Dooley. This is a short, speeded up version.

Listen to the whole song & show on the Nicole Sandler Show last week Lisa Graves talked about corruption in the Supreme Court. (Graves was Chief Counsel for Nominations for the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee for Sen Leahy) She recently wrote about how Thomas should have recused in the Colorado case. She then explained that when Clarence Thomas did NOT recuse on the Bush V. Gore case, Ginni Thomas got more than a million dollars from the Heritage Foundation after Clarence voted in that 5-4 decision. Ginni was promoted at the Heritage Foundation and began advising the Bush White House on appointments.

Read Grave’s whole article here: Clarence Thomas Has No Shame. But You Knew That.
Not recusing in a case such as this is unprecedented. It’s wrong. And it’s an appalling testament to how corrupted, how political, and how morally bankrupt the Roberts Court really is.

I’m all for FORCING Thomas off the bench. It might take impeachment, an indictment of Ginni Thomas, new stories about Clarence Thomas’s corruption, or Congress passing ethics laws for the Supreme Court. We really can’t let things continue as they have been. I like how Elie put it. “We must demand that our political leaders share with us their plans for stopping the court, in just the same way we demand to hear their plans to fix infrastructure or lower taxes.” YES! And, if they give mealy mouth answers, start the drum beat for real solutions.

Finally, Elie said, “all of us need to recognize how dangerous the court is. We are ruled by this court because we are too disunified and distracted to resist it. That has to end, because these nine people will not stop devouring democracy until there is none left to eat.”

Full video of that moment in Graham, N.C.

Men and women have told me they wouldn’t vote for Haley because she’s a woman before (and in plenty of other states), but rarely is it said this explicitly and in front of a camera. https://t.co/2t2GAw50Mk pic.twitter.com/nmTSL2Ymh6

— Shaquille Brewster (@shaqbrewster) March 5, 2024

And if you think it’s just men who think this sort of thing:

Siri, show me an example of internalized misogyny… pic.twitter.com/QoBb7CrfDa

— Shannon Watts (@shannonrwatts) March 5, 2024

That’s MAGA for you.

Pretty clear that Trump world wants non-MAGA Republicans to leave the party. They keep saying it over and over again. The idiocy of this is hard to believe but very Trumpy. https://t.co/u1K7VUApKU

— Simon Rosenberg (@SimonWDC) March 5, 2024

Trump: I don't need votes. We have all the votes we need pic.twitter.com/hMYyWDxeqA

— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) March 5, 2024

18% of Republicans are angry or dissatisfied with him. And he’s basically telling them to get lost, he doesn’t need them.

Economist Dean Baker:

Just to quickly point out why some of us would be very happy to see Biden back in the White House, apart from keeping the dictator out, let’s recount the record. 

Biden’s recovery act quickly boosted the economy back to full employment. We know Trump has problems with numbers, but employment growth had slowed sharply by the end of his term. 

Biden’s recovery package, which passed with zero R votes and over the yells and screams of many Democratic economists, quickly boosted the economy back to full employment. 

The bout of inflation we saw was overwhelmingly due to disruptions created by Covid and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Our inflation was little different than Germany’s, France’s or even Japan’s. 

The media tell us people don’t care about inflation in Germany, they care about inflation here. That’s fine, but if we don’t assume people are morons, they can understand a pandemic can cause inflation, just like it caused mass unemployment when Trump was in the WH. 

Biden also pushed through a massive infrastructure bill that is going far towards modernizing the country’s infrastructure. This has been on the agenda forever. Trump gave us dozens of “infrastructure weeks,” Biden gave us infrastructure. 

He also pushed through the Inflation Reduction Act, again with zero R votes. This is giving the I.R.S. the resources to crack down on RICH tax cheats (anyone see any jack-booted I.R.S. agents at their door?) 

The IRA also put in place a 1.0 percent tax on corporate share buybacks, the most administratively efficient tax EVER. 

Most importantly, the IRA jumpstarted a green energy conversion and the switch to electric cars. These industries are now soaring. 

We are way behind the curve on climate change, but if we have a prayer of limiting the damage, it is because of this bill. 

Biden also increased the subsidies in the Obamacare Care exchanges so that most people can get affordable insurance now. (Look it up )

Health Insurance Marketplace Calculator | KFFThe Health Insurance Marketplace Calculator, updated with 2024 premium data, provides estimates of health insurance premiums and subsidies for people purchasing insurance on their own in health insura…https://www.kff.org/interactive/subsidy-calculator/

He also made the income-driven student loan repayment plan far more generous. A single person making $33k year pays zero

FACT SHEET: The Biden-Harris Administration Launches the SAVE Plan, the Most Affordable Student Loan Repayment Plan Ever to Lower Monthly Payments for Millions of Borrowers | The White HouseSee President Biden’s Video Announcing the Plan HERE: “Today I’m proud to announce a new program called the SAVE Plan. It’s the most affordable student loan plan ever.” Borrowers can sign up by visiti…https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/08/22/fact-sheet-the-biden-harris-administration-launches-the-save-plan-the-most-affordable-student-loan-repayment-plan-ever-to-lower-monthly-payments-for-millions-of-borrowers/

And, he has an Federal Trade Commission that believes in enforcing anti-trust law and a NLRB that believes workers have a right to form unions. 

I realize that folks like Nate Silver don’t like the way Joe Biden looks on TV, but I’m an old-fashioned type who cares more about getting things down than impressing Nate Silver. (Yes, Gaza is horrible.) 

Also 401ks are going gangbusters.

If Democrats don’t turn out or vote for clowns like RFK Jr, West or Stein then we will finally have irrefutable proof that all these decades of political science showing that people vote their pocketbooks was bullshit.

.@jrpsaki: The economy currently has a 3.7% unemployment rate with a stock market near record highs. Asking sincerely, can you articulate one thing, just one, that Donald Trump has done or would do to make the economy better or your life better? pic.twitter.com/7Pgg3BkXuu

— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) March 5, 2024

Trump gets asked what he'll do to bring down prices at the grocery store and has absolutely nothing to say, perhaps because his policy agenda of putting a 10% tax on foreign goods and deporting a big chunk of the agricultural workforce will raise prices. pic.twitter.com/Kx4NQMNriS

— Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) March 5, 2024

In other Super Tuesday news….

“The lieutenant governor of North Carolina and the first Black person to hold the office, [Mark] Robinson is heavily favored to clinch the GOP nomination for governor in next Tuesday’s primary and, at a Saturday rally with Trump, got the former president’s formal endorsement,” The Washington Post reported Saturday. Should he win today’s primary, Robinson is expected in the fall to face Josh Stein, the state’s sitting Democratic attorney general.

Robinson is something to behold. “Mark Robinson is not running to be governor to be a bully over anybody,” Robinson told the MAGA rally crowd. Why did he feel the need?

Left unmentioned: the deluge of offensive comments that made such a declaration necessary. There was the time he called school shooting survivors “media prosti-tots” for advocating for gun-control policies. The meme mocking a Harvey Weinstein accuser, and the other meme mocking actresses for wearing “whore dresses to protest sexual harassment.” The prediction that rising acceptance of homosexuality would lead to pedophilia and “the END of civilization as we know it”; the talk of arresting transgender people for their bathroom choice; the use of antisemitic tropes; the Facebook posts calling Hillary Clinton a “heifer” and Michelle Obama a man.

Even in a Republican Party that, under former president Donald Trump’s leadership, has often rewarded crude insults, baseless claims and incendiary language, Robinson stands out among candidates this year for the volume of his bigoted attacks and vicious diatribes. The lieutenant governor of North Carolina and the first Black person to hold the office, Robinson is heavily favored to clinch the GOP nomination for governor in next Tuesday’s primary and, at a Saturday rally with Trump, got the former president’s formal endorsement.

But, of course, he did.

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Monday evening took note of Robinson’s flair for the conspiratorial.

North Carolina's governor should be seen as a leader on the national stage. But my opponent, @MarkRobinsonNC, is better known for harassing survivors of school shootings and spreading disgusting conspiracy theories. pic.twitter.com/4jh3goVhL1

— Josh Stein (@JoshStein_) March 5, 2024

Maddow ran with mild stuff from Robinson suitable (barely) for prime time. Here is Robinson from 2021 heralding the coming Christian caliphate that will rule America. That’s all y’all.

NC Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson Declares That ‘Christian Patriots’ Will ‘Own This Nation and Rule This Nation’ from Right Wing Watch on Vimeo.

“Tell our enemies on the other side of the aisle that will drag this nation down into a socialist hellhole that you will only do it as you run past me laying on the ground, choking on my own blood because I will not give up this nation to you!” Robinson bellowed. “It is not yours. You did not build it, you did not defend it, and you will not own it. We will. The Christian patriots of this nation will own this nation and rule this nation and help freedom survive for future generations.”

It’s an amazingly warped definition of freedom.

Time for the left to champion the real deal, Anand Giridharadas wrote almost a year ago:

The right’s desertion of freedom creates a historic opportunity for the left to reclaim what should never have been conceded. In reporting my book “The Persuaders,” I saw research showing that freedom is the most highly ranked value by people on the far right, far left, center right, and center left. There aren’t a lot of values like that left.

[…]

As Anat Shenker-Osorio, the progressive messaging guru whom I write about in “The Persuaders” says, the thing about freedom is that you can feel it. It’s corporeal. It’s not abstract. People know what it feels like to be free. And not to be free. This is a theme, a concept, a frame, a word that the left can no longer afford to hand to the right, and the good news is it seems like it no longer is.

Thanks, Mark Robinson, for making the contrast stark by campaigning on the opposite of freedom.

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Freedom for vs. freedom from

It’s Super Tuesday. Do you know where your polling place is?

MSNBC last night pointed to a New York Times story I’d missed, perhaps because it’s old news to me. The voter fraud fraudsters are — say it with me — doubling down:

A network of right-wing activists and allies of Donald J. Trump is quietly challenging thousands of voter registrations in critical presidential battleground states, an all-but-unnoticed effort that could have an impact in a close or contentious election.

Calling themselves election investigators, the activists have pressed local officials in Michigan, Nevada and Georgia to drop voters from the rolls en masse. They have at times targeted Democratic areas, relying on new data programs and novel legal theories to justify their push.

What began with True the Vote in Texas has spread into a nationwide network of voter fraud sleuths in places such as Michigan.

The Michigan activists are part of an expansive web of grass-roots groups that formed after Mr. Trump’s attempt to overturn his defeat in 2020. The groups have made mass voter challenges a top priority this election year, spurred on by a former Trump lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, and True the Vote, a vote-monitoring group with a long history of spreading misinformation.

Their mission, they say, is to maintain accurate voting records and remove voters who have moved to another jurisdiction. Democrats, they claim, use these “excess registrations” to stuff ballot boxes and steal elections.

The theory has no grounding in fact. Investigations into voter fraud have found that it is exceedingly rare and that when it occurs, it is typically isolated or even accidental. Election officials say that there is no reason to think that the systems in place for keeping voter lists up-to-date are failing.

Same as it ever was. Michigan pays data experts from the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) to keep its voter rolls as up to date as the law allows. (“Federal law requires clerks to keep voters who may have moved on the rolls for two election cycles, unless they receive notice from the voter,” the Times reminds.) But ERIC, you may recall, is part of a vast, left-wing voter fraud conspiracy. It’s given side-eye by the right’s “election intergrity” shock troops since being “exposed” by Gateway Pundit in January 2022 as a “left-wing plot to add more racial minorities to the voter rolls.”

Never fear. The voter fraud Scoobies are here.

The Scoobies’ goal in 2024 is not just flagging “questionable” registrations, but intimidating local election clerks, bogging down elections staff chasing their “leads,” and laying the groundwork for a replay of 2020 election challenges when Donald “91 Counts” Trump loses in November.

In Nevada, the Pigpen Project has set out to clean the voter rolls. Two longtime conservative activists, Chuck Muth and Dan Burdish, have organized door-to-door canvassing and enlisted landlords to compare voter rolls with their leasing records. More than once, they have escorted landlords to the Clark County registrar’s office so that they can flag registrations of former tenants.

Stephanie Wheatley, a spokeswoman for Clark County, said that the evidence was not enough to remove a voter but that it was “enough for the election department to do research and investigate.”

Nevada is also an ERIC state. And like Michigan, a blue state in 2020.

For readers new to my work, I attended a 2013 “election integrity” boot camp hosted by the Voter Integrity Project of NC (VIP-NC) a True the Vote spinoff led by one Jay DeLancy. The workshop taught aspiring voter fraud Scoobies how to sniff out bad registrations, including by “driving by abandoned homes and vacant lots, taking photos to prove to the local Board of Elections that people registered there no longer live there” (Crooks & Liars, 2013):

Arguing by anecdote, DeLancy related a story about people showing up to vote with clean, never-folded power bills for ID. He flashed on the screen a copy of former Gov. Bev Perdue’s power bill and asked, how do you think I got that? He made it on his computer. Those people with the power bills? It might be voter fraud. See, because it’s possible to mass-produce fake utility bills, someone, somewhere might be forging them to commit widespread voter fraud, undetected.

“How is fraud widespread if it’s undetected?” Colin Powell asked caustically while visiting Raleigh in August.

(This Super Tuesday, North Carolina voters must for the first time produce acceptable photo IDs to vote.)

What’s both sad and pathetic about our democracy-averse neighbors is not how they’re wasting their time, but what the Scoobies are not doing with it (added emphasis):

America is headed for greater plurality that will shift the political power balance. The sad part is, such legislation and citizen “boot camps” feel like white-knuckled exercises in protecting a demographic patch of electoral turf that’s shrinking beneath supporters’ feet. State after state erects barricades to voting and retreats behind them as for a siege. Not once did any speaker this weekend suggest opening up the franchise to greater participation, registering new voters and encouraging them to go the polls to exercise their right to vote.

This is what these Real American™ paranoiacs believe about their neighbors:

Nice, decent white people wake up on Election Day, shower, dress, eat breakfast, then go the polls to do their patriotic duty by casting their votes. OTHERS — Poors numbering in the invisible millions — are not like US. They go instead to commit felonies punishable by five years in prison and a $10,000 fine for each offense just to add a single extra vote to their team’s total.

The voter fraud Scoobies’ concept of freedom is negative, freedom from not freedom for. They are maximizing their freedom by keeping feared others from enjoying any.

From 2019:

A priest friend jokes, in America you are expected to have faith. Not faith in anything in particular, just faith. In a similar vein, politicians peddle abstractions like freedom. Not freedom for anything in particular. Just freedom.

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For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.

For all you political junkies out there, here’s Bolts Magazine’s fantastic Super Tuesday breakdown of important races:

2024 is starting off fast: Tuesday, March 5 is one of the busiest election days on the calendar this entire year. It’s just the first with non-presidential primaries on the ballot, but it’ll take care of roughly 25 percent of all House districts, in one fell swoop!

That’s because California and Texas, the two most populous states, are holding all their primaries, as are Alabama, Arkansas and North Carolina. Across these five states, millions of voters will decide critical state and local offices, referendums and bond measures. Plus, Vermont municipalities are holding their town hall days. (And that’s not all: Ten other states hold their presidential primaries, but voters will have to head back to the polls later this year for down ballot offices.)

So buckle up for a crowded election day. 

To help you, Bolts has identified more than 50 items to watch on Super Tuesday, and why they matter, including key races for supreme courts, governors, DAs, mayors, and lawmakers, plus referendums.

On the menu? Hotly contested judicial openings; prosecutor races in two of the nation’s three largest counties, Los Angeles County and Harris County; school boards that are deciding the rights of LGBTQ+ students; and partisan control of the nation’s fifth most populous county, San Diego County.

Voters will also take the first step in choosing the successor of California Senator Diane Feinstein. They’ll decide on the comeback bid of Alex Villanueva, LA’s scandal-plagued former sheriff. They’ll settle the latest conflict between a reform DA and police unions in Austin. They’ll arbitrate the Texas governor and attorney general’s revenge tours against GOP officials who defied them. And in Vermont, noncitizen residents of Burlington will get to weigh in on local elections for the first time after a 2023 reform.

Be sure to return to this page on election night, and on subsequent days, to check the results. Note that this guide is not exhaustive; it is Bolts’ selection of important races to monitor.

I know the presidential race is pre-ordained but there are other races that are not and we should pay attention. Bolts is the best resource for the state and local races we need to be aware of.