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Votes And Virality

Published by Tom Sullivan on October 19, 2024

Of bots and bad faith

Day 1 of early voting in Asheville, NC.

This is new. Following Simon Rosenberg’s advice to vote on Day 1, I did on Thursday. So did a lot of neighbors here in the Cesspool of Sin despite many still smarting from the wrath of Hurricane Helene and the loss of homes, jobs, businesses, and loved ones.

Learning to navigate new voting machines and North Carolina’s new requirement for presenting photo IDs slowed the voting process. There were long lines on Thursday (and Friday) that gave the false impression of heavier turnout here than previous elections. It looked like the 2008 Obama election. Friday’s statistics revealed Day 1 turnout here in Helene-wracked Buncombe County was down about 40% from 2020. Not so in the rest of the North Carolina (NC Newsline/Yahoo News):

North Carolina set a new all-time record for early voting with a surge of more than 350,000 voters on the first day of open polls.

The State Board of Elections reported 353,166 voters Thursday, narrowly beating out the 2020 record of 348,559 ballots — a staggering shift in enthusiasm from the start of the campaign, when voters seemed to largely dread an expected rematch between a pair of familiar presidential candidates.

[…]

The result is even more noteworthy in consideration of the devastation to western North Carolina from Hurricane Helene, which observers widely predicted would present major disruptions to the election. According to the State Board of Elections, voters reported “no significant issues or problems” on Thursday.

“Yesterday’s turnout is a clear sign that voters are energized about this election, that they trust the elections process, and that a hurricane will not stop North Carolinians from exercising their right to vote,” said election board executive director Karen Brinson Bell.

The news story featured the photo I posted to FKA Twitter and other social media sites to help Rosenberg’s Day 1 promotion. It went viral. As of this moment, 6.5 million views.

https://x.com/BloggersRUs/status/1846943176864538884

The image cheered a lot of X users and triggered seemingly as many Trump supporters. Plus a lot of bots with next to no followers that joined Elon Musk’s MAGA magnet within the last year. Many of them seemed programmed to respond to good news from the left by the “I know you are but what am I?” rule.

“I landslide victory incoming for Trump. It’s a beautiful thing.”

“Trump really brings the people out!”

“Vote trump in droves”

“I know nobody voting Harris”

There were also “lefty” bots programmed to fight with the “righty” bots, though since they are bots they are neither. They are programmed to stir up anger and sow discord like the pass-it-on emails of the aughts.

An AI-powered bot army on X spread pro-Trump and pro-GOP propaganda, research shows (NBC News):

An army of political propaganda accounts powered by artificial intelligence posed as real people on X to argue in favor of Republican candidates and causes, according to a research report out of Clemson University.

The report details a coordinated AI campaign using large language models (LLM) — the type of artificial intelligence that powers convincing, human-seeming chat bots like ChatGPT — to reply to other users.

While it’s unclear who operated or funded the network, its focus on particular political pet projects with no clear connection to foreign countries indicates it’s an American political operation, rather than one run by a foreign government, the researchers said.

As the November elections near, the government and other watchdogs have warned of efforts to influence public opinion via AI-generated content. The presence of a seemingly coordinated domestic influence operation using AI adds yet another wrinkle to a rapidly developing and chaotic information landscape. 

The network identified by the Clemson researchers included at least 686 identified X accounts that have posted more than 130,000 times since January. It targeted four Senate races and two primary races and supported former President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign. Many of the accounts were removed from X after NBC News emailed the platform for comment. The platform did not respond to NBC News’ inquiry. 

The accounts followed a consistent pattern. Many had profile pictures that appealed to conservatives, like the far-right cartoon meme Pepe the frog, a cross or an American flag. They frequently replied to a person talking about a politician or a polarizing political issue on X, often to support Republican candidates or policies or denigrate Democratic candidates. While the accounts generally had few followers, their practice of replying to more popular posters made it more likely they’d be seen.

And what aren’t “RW” bots are swarming bad faith actors with way too much free time on their hands. It’s just not something to which I’ve paid much attention before.

But 15k retweets I’ll take.

It’s not all good news:

Michael Bitzer, a political science professor at North Carolina’s Catawba College, said early voting showed an equal number of Democrats and Republicans cast ballots on Thursday, a dramatic change from 2020, when more Democrats took advantage of early voting on the first day.

“There’s a great deal of interest in both sides of the aisle,” Bitzer said. “The great unknown is what are the unaffiliateds doing. We don’t have a good sense of where they may be landing in all of this.”

What have I been saying?

Trump’s grift is starving his campaign

Published by digby on October 18, 2024

Donald Trump is grifting from his cult members as he’s running for president. This is unprecedented. Normally, candidates just beg for money to get themselves elected. But Trump is begging to line his own pockets. And his followers don’t seem to think there’s anything wrong with it.

Philip Bump at the Washington Post notes that he’s doing so much of it thathis campaign is suffering from a shortage of cash:

The New York Times looked at the “creative bookkeeping” it said the campaign was undertaking to expand its relatively modest coffers. That phrase is a fraught one. Earlier this year Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts in New York for using “creative bookkeeping,” if you will: creative bookkeeping specifically centered on hiding money that was spent to boost his 2016 campaign. That is one way to run a low-cost presidential campaign: skirt the laws around transparency.

Another is to outsource campaign functions. Trump’s team has done this in some obvious ways, including tasking outside groups with running his turnout efforts. But the effort goes well beyond that, with the Times noting that his campaign had only 11 employees on its payroll in August, the most recent month for which full spending data was available.

This is in part because the campaign has offloaded its direct voter contact, which often means setting up offices in targeted states and hiring people to staff them and do the actual outreach. It is in part, too, because the campaign is “bending the rules to their breaking point,” in the words of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Dan Weiner, who spoke to the Times. Consider that in 2020, Trump’s campaign employed more than 200 people in August. And even that was modest: In August 2012, Barack Obama’s reelection bid employed about 900.

If we visualize the August spending by each major-party campaign since 2012, we can see just how small the purple “payroll” sliver is in the 2024 spending for Trump. (The circles below are scaled to total spending.)

Both in terms of raw spending and as a percentage of total August spending, Trump’s 2024 campaign expenditures on staff are modest. (You can also see that a lot of those August 2020 employees weren’t making very much.)

He doesn’t like to pay people. We know that. Bump speculates that if he wasn’t getting his donors to buy his worthless junk to pad his own wallet maybe the campaign would have more money to spend. But then, why bother? He’s got billionaires to pay for his super pacs and paupers to give him their last pennies to buy his hideous sneakers and blasphemous Bibles so why change a thing? Man’s gotta make a living. And he’s tied in the polls…

How is it possible that this lecherous criminal cretin is tied in the polls????

Another Myth Busted

Published by digby on October 18, 2024

If you want to know why Trump is popular, blame social media. That’s the kind of bs that’s making the rounds. This is the truth:

This is a perfect example of the propaganda that’s got millions of people believing myths about Trump, conspiracy theories and lies. It’s a huge problem and I don’t know if anyone has enough juice to counteract it. The attempts that were being made by the platforms themselves a few years ago are gone and there’s nothing to take its place.

“Lincoln was probably a great president, but…”

Published by digby on October 18, 2024

Trump thinks he would have settled the slavery question before the civil war. I suspect he thinks he could have “settled” it the way he “settled” the abortion quesiton: by giving the assholes everything they want and then saying it was what everyone wanted all along.

Also:

He looks tired. Does he have the “strength and the stamina” to be president for four more years? I don’t think so:

Former President Donald Trump has pulled out of a string of campaign events and interviews over the last two months, often leaving his hosts frustrated after being promised a visit by the GOP presidential candidate.

The staff of The Shade Room, an entertainment site with wide reach among young and Black audiences, shortly after wrapping an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris last week were left feeling that their “feet were being dragged in the Trump campaign,” according to two sources who spoke to Politico Playbook. When they called to reschedule, a campaign official reportedly gave them a concise explanation: the former president was “exhausted.”

Because of this, the official continued, Trump was “refusing [some] interviews but that could change” at any time, according to the two people familiar with the conversations. Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt pushed back against the report, telling Playbook that Trump’s alleged exhaustion is “unequivocally false” and that he “has never backed down from an interview.”

She did not provide an explanation, however, for why Trump has been flaking despite his constant criticism of Harris for not making enough media appearances. While Trump did show up to some interviews, most of them have been with friendly hosts like right-wing radio host Laura Ingraham and networks such as Fox News.

Most of the cancellations, on the other hand, have been on territory not predisposed to coddle the GOP nominee. In late August, Trump dropped an interview with The Detroit News, reportedly after he was asked to back up his claims about crime statistics. The cancellations ramped up in October, with Trump ditching a 60 Minutes interview mere hours before the taping, a Squawk Box interview due to “scheduling conflicts,” and an NBC News interview because, according to his campaign, he decided to go instead to Michigan. He also cancelled an appearance at the National Rifle Association and at less overtly political events like the unveiling of a Polish-American Catholic shrine in Pennsylvania.

He’s not used to all this activity. He spent the last four years watching TV, tweeting, playing golf and entertaining his dinner guests at Mar-a-lago. In other words he’s come out of retirement at the age of 78 to run for president. He’s just not up for it.

Were You Better Off 4 Years Ago?

Published by digby on October 18, 2024

Apparently, most Americans think so

In September of 2020, 200,000 Americans had just died of COVID. There was no vaccine, unemployment was at 8%. The whole world had just been shut down and was only slowly coming back to life. Donald Trump was pushing snake oil cures and pretending the whole thing wasn’t much of a problem.

And yet 55 percent of Americans believed they were better off than they’d been four years ago.

And only 39 percent believe that now.

WTF?

Trump’s Most Revealing Town Hall

Published by digby on October 18, 2024

We have officially entered the manic stage of the presidential election in which the candidates are suddenly everywhere. At least Kamala Harris is everywhere. She’s holding huge raucous rallies all over the swing states, appearing on podcasts and mainstream interviews even going on Fox and subjecting herself to a barrage of hostile Trump inspired accusations from anchor Brett Baier who didn’t seem to want her to actually answer them. (She showed she cannot be intimidated which was probably the point of the interview in the first place.) Nobody at this point should complain that she isn’t being available to the public. Just turn on your TV and you’ll see her there.

Trump, on the other hand, is as present as always by holding looney rallies and post on crazy comments on Truth Social, but is refusing to debate Harris again and has cancelled numerous scheduled interviews this week. Yet he’s holding events in California and New York which aren’t even on the radar.

According to Tara Palmieri at Puck, the Mar-a-lago insiders say this is all because Trump is so assured he’s going to win that he’s just letting his freak flag fly and the campaign figures that Trump’s “self-assurance” may create a bandwagon effect as voters decide they want to go with a winner. Republicans do love the bandwagon effect strategy, but Trump is seeming off his rocker in a way that doesn’t easily read as “confident” except to the extent he may believe his “election integrity” plans will ensure that he “wins” even if he doesn’t win.

Trump did do some events this week and it’s a big leap to say he showed self-assurance. There was the now notorious “swaying to the music” town hall that I wrote about earlier. That appearance was so bizarre that it actually managed to dominate the conversation for a couple of days which is really saying something in this frenzied news cycle.

Then he held a taped Fox News town hall with host Harris Faulkner, who sat him down with a group of allegedly undecided women. We know that a large majority of women voters in this country loathe him and they’d like to mitigate that by allowing him to beguile a few of them with his suave charm. They did seem rather weirdly ecstatic by his presence, but that’s because they were all Republican party shills and ardent supporters brought in by Fox. It even turned out that Fox edited out one of the questions that gave away the scheme.

But Trump did do one event this week that may turn out to be important because of the substance of what he said. He appeared on the Spanish language network Univision for a town hall with Latino voters. I think we all know what an important demographic this is and have heard that Trump is garnering a larger percentage of Hispanic men than ever before. I suspect he believed that it would, therefore, be an easy exchange like the one with the women plants the day before. So he wasn’t prepared for the kind of questions he got.

A man named Ramiro Gonzales, who identified as a Republican, asked Trump why he should support him when people from his own administration, including his Vice President, refuse to do so? He said January 6th and his COVID mismanagement had disturbed him but he wanted to give him a chance to win back his vote.

Trump replied that 97% of people in the former administration supported him and said that January 6th was “a day of love”, “nobody was killed”, and “we didn’t have guns, the others had guns but we didn’t have guns.” You can see from the look on Gonzales’s face and that of the people in the audience, that they knew he was full of it.

Gonzales later said that he would not be voting for Trump.

Trump has been charged with several felonies related to the January 6th insurrection. He claims that he bears no responsibility for any of it. And yet here he said that “we” didn’t have guns, the others had guns, by which he can only mean the police. One imagines that Special Prosecutor Jack Smith will be looking at that footage with keen interest. (Needless to say, there were plenty of guns among the rioters and certainly many of those whom Trump calls “hostages,”and promises to pardon on day one, were charged with violent acts against the police. )

But there was another question that interested me the most because I’ve been dying for someone to ask it for months. A 64 year old man named Jorge Velazquez, who described himself as having spent many years working with his hands “hunched over picking strawberries and cutting broccoli”, asked Trump who he thought was going to do this type of work if he deported all the undocumented workers who account for most of the agricultural work force.

Trump went into his usual rant about criminal immigrants, showing once again that he is completely clueless about how anything actually works. Trump seems to think they’re taking the jobs away from American citizens, specifically “African Americans and Hispanics” who are suffering as a result. These are the “Black jobs” he was talking about.

Trump made a point of saying that he wants laborers (who love our country) to come legally which suggests he’s talking about something like the old bracero program which was replaced by the issuance of H-2a and H-2b visas. The problem is that his agenda, as articulated in Project 2025, wants to discontinue all temporary worker visas. His immigration guru, Stephen Miller, has made it very clear that he intends to drastically curtail legal immigration as well.

Trump’s grotesque xenophobic rhetoric, whether or not he fully understands it, is paving the way for the GOP’s mainstream adoption of “The Great Replacement Theory” which holds that all foreigners from the so-called “shithole countries” must be barred, not just because they are criminals or are taking all the “Black jobs” but because they are supposedly destroying the culture of America. When Trump reads Stephen Miller’s screeds on the stump about immigrants “poisoning the blood,” there is no distinction between legal and illegal.

His new best friend Elon Musk is pushing the Great Replacement Theory constantly, having signed on to the idea that Democrats are trying to import immigrants so they will vote for them, an old standby promoted by the likes of Ann Coulter in her book “Adios, America.” One would think that with all the talk about Latinos voting in large numbers for Trump this time they’d stop and think about whether this is a good long term strategy for them but they’re so hooked on the idea that migrants are marauding gangsters who are also inexplicably motivated beyond reason to vote, that they aren’t thinking clearly on the subject.

On a more material level, I have to wonder how everyone’s going to like the prices at the grocery store when strawberries and broccoli are necessarily selling at 20 times what they cost today from the combination of labor shortages and tariffs on imported food. Trump may not ever eat a vegetable but I’d guess even Republicans like to eat a salad once in a while.

While I doubt that Trump’s ever read a treatise on The Great Replacement Theory, he’s fully on board with it and we know that because he’s recently promised to deport the Haitian immigrants in Springfield despite the fact that they are here legally, are working at jobs that others didn’t want and profess to love America. He believes they’re polluting the culture of Springfield Ohio and need to go back where they came from. That’s what this is all about. And that, my friends, is fascism with a capitol F.

Salon

“It’s the First Amendment, stupid”

Published by Tom Sullivan on October 18, 2024

Federal judge slaps down Florida’s surgeon general

In another smackdown for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his lackeys, a federal judge on Thursday issued a temporary restraining order against state threats to prosecute TV stations that run ads in support of Florida’s abortion-rights amendment:

The temporary restraining order addresses a lawsuit filed against the state by Floridians Protecting Freedom, a group campaigning for Amendment 4, which will appear on the Nov. 5 ballot. This order expires Oct. 29, when a hearing on the lawsuit is scheduled.

Chief U.S. District Judge Mark E. Walker’s sharply worded ruling prevents the department from “taking any further actions to coerce, threaten, or intimate repercussions” against broadcasters for airing the ads or “undertaking enforcement action” against them.

In citing one case used in his ruling, he offered a brief summary:

“To keep it simple for the State of Florida: it’s the First Amendment, stupid.”

“Political advertisement is political speech — speech at the core of the First Amendment. The government cannot excuse its indirect censorship of political speech simply by declaring the disfavored speech is ‘false,’ “ wrote Walker, of the U.S. District Court Northern District of Florida in Tallahassee.

Trumptyism

Is that plain enough for you, Ron? (I’ll bet not.)

The lawsuit was the latest in a series of legal tussles between the DeSantis administration and advocates for amendment, which would protect the right to abortion until fetal viability. It would override the state’s ban on abortion in most cases after the first six weeks of pregnancy.

The commercial, produced by Floridians Protecting Freedom, features a Tampa woman describing how she was diagnosed with brain cancer when she was 20 weeks pregnant, ahead of state restrictions that would have blocked the abortion she received before treatment.

On Oct. 3, the health department, part of the DeSantis administration sent a cease-and-desist letter to several Florida broadcasters threatening criminal prosecution if they did not stop airing the commercial. This order expires Oct. 29, when a hearing on the injunction is scheduled.

The law and order party, friends. When they read the Constitution, it means just what they choose it to mean. That is, it’s no protection for you when they are the ones defending it and appointing judges who think as they do. (Walker was appointed by Barack Obama.)

As we were saying….

Essence of Trumpism

Published by Tom Sullivan on October 18, 2024

Or is it Dumptyism? Trumptyism?

The former Republican Party (now the Party of Trump) sold itself for decades as opponents of the Soviet empire and insistent on upholding law and order. LAW! ORDER! As I’ve said of other professed “values” from that team, those boasts were always a mile wide and an inch deep. The people who for decades of accused the left of being squishy on morality have taken squishy to a new level.

Helpfully, Jonathan Chait offers a kind of phrasebook for interpreting “law and order” as Donald Trump understands it (Intelligencer):

One of the most important and consistent facets of Donald Trump’s thinking is that the law, as most people understand it, is conceptually meaningless. Legal activity, as he understands the term, means anything done by or on behalf of Donald Trump (this can include tax fraud, stealing and refusing to give back classified documents, assaulting police officers in an attempt to overturn an election, or other clear violations of federal criminal statutes). Illegal activity is anything Trump disapproves of or finds harmful: criticizing pro-Trump judges, displaying too many news stories that make Trump look bad, being “stupid,” or almost any action that works against his interests.

Trump’s view of elections flows from this belief system. A fair election is one that Trump wins. An unfair election is one he loses. Trump has begun to define the very existence of Kamala Harris’s candidacy as a crime.

I’d misssed that last part. But yes, I recall him thinking the Democratic Party swapping out its candidate for president was unconstitutional for the private organization which, Chait reminds, “for most of their existence chose nominees without any public voting at all.”

“Conceptually meaningless” has a satisfying mouth feel, don’t you think? And also serves as a fine description of Trump’s notions for replacing Obamacare.

Essence of Trumpism

Anne Applebaum offers yet another reminder in The Atlantic that Trump talks like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini with a purpose. It’s calculated, if squishy. But I digress.

Trump’s on an authoritarian roll, and his fans are all in, Chait writes:

Now, in a new message, he pairs a call for removing CBS’s broadcast license (one of his older authoritarian threats) with demands that Harris be removed as his opponent. “Kamala should be investigated and forced off the Campaign, and Joe Biden allowed to take back his rightful place (He got 14 Million Primary Votes, she got none!),” he rants. “THIS WHOLE SORDID AND FRAUDULENT EVENT IS A THREAT TO DEMOCRACY!”

If you try to ask questions like “Investigated for what?” and “Which law does he believe was violated?,” you’re missing the essence of Trumpism. And if you’re willing to support the election of a president who cannot conceive of any distinction between what he wants and what the law permits, you are placing the survival of the Republic at risk.

One might as well have a dialogue with Humpty Dumpty, who famously explained:

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
 “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
 “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”

It’s the master part that appeals most to Donald John Trump. That’s the part his would-be-serfs followers don’t seem to grasp. People living under Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini learned the hard way what it means to have a master. Most Black people in this country don’t need reminding.

Power Moves

Published by digby on October 17, 2024

Harris handles a protester:

And then there was that debate:

Is she strong enough? You bet she is. And that seems to be the main complaint among those who say they’re not happy with Trump but just don’t think she has the “strength and the stamina” (remember that one?) to be president. It’s sexism, of course. But I think her toughness is obvious now.

She’s making power moves. And it’s impressive.