Why must these candidate interviews be masturbatory efforts designed more to boost the journalist’s profile, reinforce media-created narratives, sell ads, and provide filler for the 24-hour news cycle than to, you know, actually inform the voters?
Most Americans are not political geeks. They don’t spend their mornings writing things like this, or reading things like this. They don’t stay up late at night generating charts trying to get politicos higher up the food chain to address turnout anomalies that could help them win up and down the ballot. (UNA stands for UNAffiliated voter.)
Most Americans don’t really pay attention to the fall elections until after Labor Day. Nor do they pay attention to crucial downballot races that have much more impact on their daily lives than the presidential contest.
It’s basically Labor Day. That means Election Season for most Americans, who avoid politics better than they do COVID, has finally begun.
Of course, this particular election—with its 34 felony convictions, Republican-on-Republican shooting, and miraculous elevation of Kamala Harris to the top of the ticket—has attracted more attention than most presidential races. And the surprising result of all this mishegas is that Democrats are pumped.
But what’s depressing as hell is that all the joy for the top of the ticket isn’t helping downballot candidates. Instead, it’s actually hurting them.
And no one would know better than our patron saint of Reverse Coattails, who has worked with hundreds of young, progressive downballot candidates, operating basically as the farm team for the Democratic Party and democracy itself.
Check out the video above to hear her explain the current fundraising crisis. She then quickly offers a perfect example of why winning downballot races is essential to ending our crisis, where our freedoms are on the line every election. If you’re not inspired to go downballot and back Run for Something after listening to this two minutes and 26 seconds, democracy may not be for you.
But the truth is nothing can replace money doing directly to downballot campaigns for a simple reason: it frees candidates up to reach out to voters in every possible way.
Some imagine a trickle-down effect from the money sent to the top of the ticket. And, yes, an exceptional presidential campaign can lift most boats. But Harris/Walz isn’t going to take that extra cash and start spreading it out. First of all, there’s no such thing as extra cash. Campaigns should spend every dime to ensure the candidates win, and that’s why donors send checks to a particular campaign.
Without the money in the bank, the campaign and the candidate cannot plan; they can’t invest in ads, swag, or staff. And the time when they can do that is quickly fading.
So if you have the money you can give, please give it to a downballot candidate as soon as possible. And if you need ideas about where the best opportunities are, check out Downballot for Democracy, and please share this with anyone who cares.
Do. Not. Forget. Downballot candidates.
It is legend here in N.C. that Chief Justice Cheri Beasley lost her seat on the state Supreme Court in 2020 by 401 votes out of 5.5 million cast. Voters fill in the top of the ticket races and “drop off” as they go down the ballot. They leave blank critical races. Help remind your neighbors how important those races are. Democrats here lost control of the state’s highest court and have suffered the gerrymandering and vote-suppressing consequences.
Don’t let this happen to you.
Pro Tip: Don’t just trust what comes out of the computer.
Notice he didn’t actually say he would vote for it but either way you can see what quicksand this is for him. He went out to speak to his rally goers shortly thereafter and complained about the “horrible” interview he just had to give.
For years, the anti-abortion activist Lila Rose has pushed the GOP to curtail access to abortion. But now, as Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance conspicuously soften their abortion message ahead of the November election, Rose — who leads the prominent anti-abortion group Live Action — is embracing a more radical strategy: Urging her followers not to vote for Trump unless he changes course.
You’ve been arguing online that Trump and Vance’s position on abortion has made it “impossible” for anti-abortion voters to support them. What was the breaking point for you?
[My] direct quote is that “they’re making it impossible” for us. This is an active thing. The recent statements that they have been making — increasingly pro-abortion statements — and the positions that they are choosing to take are making it untenable for pro-life voters to get out the vote for them. This is, unfortunately, the path that they’ve chosen.
So just to be clear, as things currently stand, you don’t plan to vote for Trump. Is that correct?
I am going to see how the next few weeks unfold.
[…]
Anti-abortion activists who support Trump and pro-abortion rights activists who oppose him seem to implicitly agree with each other that Trump is just moderating his message on abortion for political purposes, but that a second Trump administration would ultimately benefit the anti-abortion movement. Do you think that’s wrong, and if so, why?
You’re saying that people think Trump’s lying about his position right now, and when he gets into office he’ll secretly do pro-life things?
Yeah, that he’s moving to the center for the general election, but if you look to his first term as a guide —
I think that’s pie-in-the sky thinking. I’ve received no confirmation from the Trump campaign that they’re going to secretly lie about abortion and then go do pro-life things afterward. I think that’s a narrative that there’s no proof to back up. And I think that if he actually is secretly pro-life and he’s just doing this to win both — I think it’s morally wrong and it’s extremely misguided politically.
He’s alienating his base. Kamala Harris spent a whole week at the DNC rallying her pro-abortion base. Abortion was a headline issue at the DNC, and Trump’s response to that is saying, “Well, I guess I’m going to alienate my base.” He’s not getting Kamala’s base.
You said you have not received any assurance from Trump that he will substantively help the anti-abortion movement in office. Have you sought those assurances from his campaign?
In my personal capacity, I’ve reached out to both campaigns, but I’ve certainly reached out to the Trump campaign…
They have not told me, “Oh, we’re lying with our public statements, and we’re actually going to go back on our public statements and do otherwise in our administration.”
I think this is a foolish narrative to say Trump is just going to lie, say pro-abortion things, secretly somehow get the pro-abortion vote, then he’s going to be in office and then he’s going to do pro-life things. I don’t think there’s any evidence to back that up.
I think people look at his record [on overturning Roe] and extrapolate forward — but I take your points.
If you look at the 2016 campaign, he was much more vocally pro-life than he is now, and he had more public promises to do pro-life advocacy. Now he’s changed his position. And he is not only not saying pro-life things — he’s actively saying he would support pro-abortion policy. That’s a very important distinction, and no amount of “Well, it’s just politics” cover up that fact. Vance has come out and said that [Trump] would veto an abortion ban, that he supports abortion pills, that he supports “reproductive rights” without clarifying what that means. [Trump] was behind the RNC platform being weakened on this, which for four decades was strong on life, and now it’s been weakened.
Don’t get me wrong — I would love to see Trump coming out standing strong with life and say, “I’m going to fight for life” [with] a strong pro-life message. I would love to see him stop saying this nonsense about supporting abortion. But unfortunately, that’s not the case.
They’re beyond the “wink wink, nod, nod” strategy that they were content to use in years past. They got a big win with Dobbs and now they want it all.
Democrats deal with single issue voters like this all the time and it’s difficult. But it’s unusual for the Republicans, especially Trump, who are used to styrick loyalty and adherence to the company line. This is will be an interesting little side story, although I have little doubt that the anti-abortion zealots will come around in the end. Most of them are hypocrites anyway.
All the polls are showing Harris either tied or ahead in the swing states. She has opened up the map.
Simon Rosenberg:
We’ve had a lot of polling this week and taken together it is all showing the same thing – the election has seen a 6-7 point shift towards the Democrats, and Harris now has a 3-4 point lead in national polling. We are tied or lead in all seven battleground states and are closer to 270 than Trump now. All seven states are clearly in play, and we are competing hard in all seven. As things are still close in the battlegrounds we still have a lot of work to do to have 2024 become the election we all want it to be.
Here is what Fox News’ polling unit released last night:
This polling, and new polls today from USA Today showing Harris up 5, 48%-43%, and Ipsos/Reuters showing her up 4, 45%-41%, is making it impossible for Trump to continue say, as he does at the beginning of every interview, that he is leading in the polls. And this matters. For as we’ve discussed, the entire brand architecture of the Trump campaign is built upon him being ahead in the polls and being strong, and his opponent trailing in the polls and being weak. It is in essence all they ever had and they don’t have it any more.
Trump: “Everyone is saying who the hell is Harris. Nobody knows who Harris is. What's the vice president's name? They have no idea what the name is.” pic.twitter.com/v7c4HYTjyv
— Republican Voters Against Trump (@AccountableGOP) August 29, 2024
Trump: I hear that I don't do well with American women. I don't know how that’s possible pic.twitter.com/q0OqBH7faQ
Trump: I make a speech, I speak for two hours. Everybody loves it. I got thousands of people, by the way, outside trying to get in. I never— they never said Trump's a great speaker. I don't even want that. But I must be a great speaker, right? pic.twitter.com/HGMDnRCDL6
Trump: We will bring back the American dream better, stronger and just better, bigger, better. They don't talk about it. They copy every thing else I do so I guess that'll be next. They'll be copying saying the American dream. pic.twitter.com/d4Z1JHiEAw
Josh Marshall on the Arlington scandal is really good. He makes the important point that the whole thing was designed as a campaign stunt to make Harris look bad for supposedly failing to honor the dead. We all know how that worked out:
Three days ago, the Trump campaign held a campaign event at Arlington National Cemetery. The idea was to lay a wreath honoring the 13 members of the U.S. military who were killed during the evacuation of Kabul in 2021 and film a political ad. They would distribute the video and attack Vice President Harris and President Biden for not “showing up” for their campaign event, which they sought to portray was an established memorial. As soon as the video circulated, military policy experts I know said right off the bat they were shocked that the campaign had been allowed to hold a campaign event on the grounds of the cemetery and circulate video of it. It isn’t just unseemly. It’s against the law. How were they allowed to do that?
That turned out to be a good and prescient question.
The first hint that anything else had happened on the visit came in a brief NPR article, published a day later, which reported that cemetery staff had sought to prevent the campaign from violating the law by holding a political event on the cemetery grounds. The details were limited but it seemed a verbal altercation became violent and two Trump campaign staffers physically assaulted a cemetery employee. The impression I got from the article was that they likely shoved the woman to the ground. But the details were cryptic.
What wasn’t cryptic was the Trump campaign’s wildly over-the-top response. Campaign spokesman Stephen Cheung denied a physical altercation had taken place and claimed the campaign was prepared to prove its claim with the release of a video tape. “We are prepared to release footage if such defamatory claims are made.”
He then proceeded to make a series of bizarre claims suggesting the attacked employee was actually some random person undergoing some sort of psychotic break. “The fact is that a private photographer was permitted on the premises and for whatever reason an unnamed individual, clearly suffering from a mental health episode, decided to physically block members of President Trump’s team during a very solemn ceremony.”
Later the campaign’s hyper-aggressive co-chair Chris LaCivita gave an even wilder comment to the Times, calling the assaulted cemetery employee “a despicable individual” and “a disgrace” who “does not deserve to represent the hallowed grounds of Arlington National Cemetery.”
What’s so perverse about this is that this isn’t one of Trump’s predatory moments. There’s just something broken about the man since it doesn’t occur to him that a grinning thumbs up isn’t appropriate at the grave of a fallen soldier.
It was worse than we imagined:
The cemetery employee, a woman, filed a report about the incident. But she later declined to press charges, fearing — according to military officials who spoke to The New York Times — that Trump supporters would try to retaliate against her. So the woman was assaulted for trying to enforce federal law. She filed an official report about the incident but later declined to press charges because she feared reprisals from violent Trump supporters. Late this evening, the Daily Caller reported that Speaker Mike Johnson actually got involved to force cemetery officials to allow Trump to hold his campaign event on the grounds. The Caller, unsurprisingly, portrays this as the Gold Star families requesting help from Congress after Arlington officials tried to prevent Trump from accompanying them to the cemetery.
Spin aside, what I take as the relevant point is that Arlington cemetery officials could see this was a trainwreck-in-the-making from the start. And the Speaker of the House was brought in to overrule cemetery officials simply trying to enforce the prohibition against holding partisan political events on the cemetery grounds, especially in the area of recent burials. This whole thing went on, involving an assault on a cemetery employee, and it was all under the media radar until this NPR report.
It was one thing if Trump wanted to privately pay homage to the dead at the request of one of the families. That’s not a problem. But Trump isn’t alive unless he’s on camera and he and his henchmen thought using dead soldiers as a campaign prop was a great way to troll Kamala Harris. That’s what this was all about.
Considering that LaCivita is one of the swift boa strategists , we shouldn’t be too surprised. Using the military for crass political purposes is in the GOP DNA. But they should be smarter than to have Donald Trump pull a stunt like this. The guy who is known for saying that dead soldiers are suckers and losers probably ought to stay away from military cemeteries. Nothing good can come of it.
“WTF Is Happening To The NY Times?” Digby wrote just days ago. A chorus of critics believe the Gray Lady has lost its way, and they’ve brought receipts. The Times giving space this week to National Review‘s editor Rich Lowry, for example, to suggest that on character Donald Trump has a better case to make for his election led one FKA Twitter user to suggest, “The Onion writers are now running the @nytimes.” The New York Time Pitchbot account added, “I think we may be nearing the end of civilization.”
Dan Froomkin caustically distilled a March speech publisher A.G. Sulzberger gave at Oxford University explaining Sulzberger’s editorial stance thusly:
One: You will earn my displeasure if you warn people too forcefully about the possible end to democracy at the hands of a deranged insurrectionist.
And two: You prove your value to me by trolling our liberal readers.
The Times headline writers have been an issue for years, as journalist Jennifer Schulze again noted on Tuesday:
I couldn't find a single headline or story when Trump was ahead in the polls that asked a similar question. What is up with that @nytimes!?
Here's an Alt headline: "Harris's polling numbers have bounced as she transforms campaign. Can Trump fight back?" 1/ pic.twitter.com/QbWRunqY4c
In a follow-up comment, Schulze adds, “It’s actually a very interesting piece about the state of the race -especially the remarkable campaign Harris has run. But the times has to do do it’s ‘yes, but’ headlines when it’s about a Democrat. Good grief.”
But it’s not just the headlines at issue. It’s the paper’s decisions about what constitutes a newsworthy story and what does not. James Fallows illustrated Wednesday with two Times front pages eight years apart. The Times that ran “but her emails” stories about Hillary Clinton for months in 2016 placed news of Trump’s superseding indictment by a fifth grand jury on Tuesday not just below the fold, but on Page A11.
On left: Oct 29 2016. James Comey discovers some emails, revives inquiry into HRC email. (Later dismissed.)
On right: Aug 28 2024. A new grand jury re-indicts Trump on criminal charges of plotting to overturn 2020 election. (Look closely at bottom of page.)
“And, if you were wondering,” Fallows continued, “the inside-page article about Trump’s visit to Arlington Cemetery is framed as a “dueling attacks” story and does not mention the photo-op controversy.”
If trolling liberal readers is the way to Sulzberger’s heart, Deputy Opinion Editor Patrick Healy is bucking for Employee of the Month with pieces noted by both NYU’s Ruth Ben Ghiat and Fallows.
Bruce Bartlett posted a thread to FKA Twitter on Wednesday on how the Times’ choice of what constitutes news is its own kind of bias, shown, as Fallows observed, in its coverage of Hillary Clinton in 2016:
The real power of the Times on other media is establishing priorities–what is news and what isn’t. The Times clearly has the power to make nothingburgers, such as Hillary’s emails, into those that all media must cover. It can also bury stories, as it has often done for Trump.
Its comprehensiveness is its defense. If one asks why a certain story wasn’t covered, it can always find an article or op-ed where is was covered–once and only once, and henceforth buried. Implicitly, the Times acts as if every article it’s ever published was read by everyone.
The Times’ constant repetition of certain stories or lack of such coverage on others constitutes bias. But it’s hard to find bias in any individual story. It’s the sheer repetition of stories that should have been dropped that constitutes the bias.
There is a certain Times’ methodology that also constitutes de facto bias. That is the widely criticized policy of implying that both sides are equally guilty of some action or intellectual wrongdoing.
Quite often, one side’s minor misdemeanor is equated with the other side’s first-degree murder, as if all lawbreaking is equally wrong. The law itself doesn’t say so and the Times shouldn’t either. Unfortunately, the bothsidesism disease has spread throughout the media.
Finally, read John Harwood’s assessment on how the media is failing to meet the moment and a candidate like Trump with an agenda like Project 2025. The Times’ fetish for prioritizing neutrality over preservation of the culture that sustains it makes preferencing balance a suicide pact:
Experts warn his brazen dishonesty exceeds that of any of his predecessors. And the threat he and his allies pose to the norms, freedoms, and institutions of the world’s most powerful nation lends extraordinary gravity to the collective decisions of the news business.
Is the paramount responsibility of U.S. journalists to help protect their country’s 2½-century-old democratic experiment, which not coincidentally also protects the existence of their craft? That requires braving the ire and denunciations of Republicans long conditioned to scream bias.
The Times is not up to it. Harwood cites political scientists Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein who believe “a balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon distorts reality.”
The nation’s leading newspaper rejected the democracy-above-all-else approach out of hand. In an interview with the digital outlet Semafor, New York Times executive editor Joseph Kahn suggested that such a framework would compromise the very norms its advocates aim to preserve.
“To say that the threats [to] democracy are so great that the media is going to abandon its central role as a source of impartial information to help people vote — that’s essentially saying that the news media should become a propaganda arm for a single candidate, because we prefer that candidate’s agenda,” Kahn said.
“It’s our job to cover the full range of issues that people have,” he added. “At the moment, democracy is one of them. But it’s not the top one — immigration happens to be the top [in opinion polls], and the economy and inflation is the second.”
Kahn later clarified his comments, promising more coverage of issues around democracy and the expected thrust of a new Trump presidency. But the controversy generated by his remarks laid bare the dilemma American news executives face.
But Kahn’s response simply raises more questions. Harwood asks why news executives should “organize their coverage based on opinion surveys.” Another question “is whether some of their coverage has misshapen public opinion itself,” reinforcing Bartlett’s point above. The snake eats its own tail.
Jay Rosen suggested months ago that the news’ framing should emphasize “not the odds, but the stakes” of the 2024 election. The Times has yet to take up his challenge and revels in criticism that it hasn’t.
No, the Republicans’ vice-presidential nominee is not weird. Not weird at all:
JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential candidate and US senator from Ohio, attacked teachers who do not have children in newly resurfaced remarks from 2021.
In the resurfaced clip, Vance, who was speaking at a forum held by the Center for Christian Virtue, attacks “leaders on the left” and Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, for not having children.
“So many of the leaders of the left, and I hate to be so personal about this, but they’re people without kids trying to brainwash the minds of our children, that really disorients me and disturbs me,” Vance can be heard saying in the clip.
“Randi Weingarten, who’s the head of the most powerful teachers’ union in the country, she doesn’t have a single child. If she wants to brainwash and destroy the minds of children, she should have some of her own and leave ours the hell alone.”
The Gallup poll shows that voter enthusiasm is higher than it’s been since 2008. (That was a very good year for Democrats, by the way.)
Guess why?
It’s the Democrats.
Democrats’ current level of enthusiasm is one percentage point shy of the group’s high in Gallup’s trend since 2000. That was the 79% measured in February 2008, when Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were engaged in a spirited battle for the party’s presidential nomination. Enthusiasm subsided later that year, but by the end of the campaign, consistently more than seven in 10 said they were more enthusiastic than usual about voting. Democratic enthusiasm was also elevated during the 2004 and 2020 presidential campaigns.
I’d rather be the Democrats than the Republicans….
