“Saturday Night Live” made mad fun over the weekend of comments that President Joe Biden is sharp as a tack “behind closed doors.”
The New Yorker this morning offers a peek behind those closed doors. John Harwood tweets that the interview, like his own last fall, “shows talk of his alleged mental decline as utter bullshit.”
If you spend time with Biden these days, the biggest surprise is that he betrays no doubts. The world is riven by the question of whether he is up to a second term, but he projects a defiant belief in himself and his ability to persuade Americans to join him. For as long as Biden has been in politics, he has thrived on a mercurial mix of confidence and insecurity. Now, having reached the apex of power, he gives off a conviction that borders on serenity—a bit too much serenity for Democrats who wonder if he can still beat the man with whom his legacy will be forever entwined. Given the doubts, I asked, wasn’t it a risk to say, “I’m the one to do it”? He shook his head and said, “No. I’m the only one who has ever beat him. And I’ll beat him again.” For Biden, the offense of the contested election was clearly personal. Trump had not just tried to steal the Presidency—he had tried to steal it from him. “I’d ask a rhetorical question,” Biden said. “If you thought you were best positioned to beat someone who, if they won, would change the nature of America, what would you do?”
Trump tried to steal the presidency “from him.” That sense, that feeling, is how Republicans have sold imaginary voter fraud over decades to undermine the democratic process. They encourage conservatives to imagine how it would feel to have their vote stolen from them, to imagine it as a grotesque, personal violation like rape or assault. Perhaps Democrats should encourage their Bidenly serene base to conjure the same feelings. What the Trump GOP means to do this fall is exactly the personal violation of which they’ve accused the left for decades. If it motivates the right, could it motivate the left?
The rest of the piece is about Biden’s view of the upcoming election, about Trump’s weaknesses, and about polling on various policy stances and economic measures. And Biden’s age. Give it a rest. And stop giving column inches to David Axelrod.
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, of Rhode Island, voiced a position that I encountered among many high-ranking Democrats. “He’s not the only option that we had,” he told me. “But, once he’d made the decision to go, he became the only option that we have.” In the months that remain, Whitehouse said, the best way to beat Trump is a strategy that he called “Biden plus offense.” When people are “frightened or angry, you need to convince them that you, too, are equally concerned and you’re willing to throw punches and pick fights,” he said. “If you’ve got your sleeves rolled up and you’re waist-deep fighting alligators in the swamp, then nobody’s really thinking about your age.”
A Biden campaign staffer, Mike Donilon, opines on Biden’s “freedom agenda”:
It’s easy to miss how unusual a “freedom agenda” is for a Democratic Presidential campaign. Since the nineteen-sixties, Republicans have held fast to the language of freedom—from the backlash against civil rights to the Tea Party to the Freedom Caucus. But Democrats have been trying to convince the public that the Republican Party under Trump has transformed into the “MAGA movement,” an authoritarian crusade bent on dominion. Donilon said, “At its heart, it doesn’t believe in the Constitution, doesn’t believe in law, embraces violence.” He sees an opportunity for Democrats to be “in a place where they usually aren’t.” They can lay claim to the freedom to “choose your own health-care decisions, the freedom to vote, the freedom for your kids to be free of gun violence in school, the freedom for seniors to live in dignity.”
Bruce Reed, a close Biden aides, tells Osnos, “We live in abnormal political times, but the American people are still normal people. Given a choice between normal and crazy, they’re going to choose normal.”
Remind normies just how crazy is crazy. Cut to the chase. Trump and his anti-Constitution, anti-rule-of-law, anti-democracy, royalist cult will sure as hell try to steal your vote this fall to install Trump as a monarch. Let the policy wonks quibble about polls and policies. Remind voters that it’s not just abstract democracy on the line this fall.
Republicans mean to fuck you over and gut your freedoms. What are you prepared to do about it? At a minimum, get off your ass.
Credit: Fred Schilling, Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States. (Public domain)
One day ahead of Super Tuesday, the speculation is that shortly after this posts we may see the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on Donald “91 Counts” Trump’s Colorado ballot access case. Anyone who listened to the oral arguments knows not to hold their breath for the court to agree with the Colorado supremes (and others) that he’s committed crimes (Washington Post):
The high court took the unusual step Sunday of scheduling an opinion announcement for a day when it is not in session. The justices typically issue rulings from the bench, with the author of the majority opinion presenting a summary of the court’s decision. Instead, the court said opinions could be posted on its website Monday at 10 a.m.
Colorado’s top court ordered Trump, the Republican front-runner, off the ballot in December after finding that he engaged in insurrection around the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol. The state court put its ruling on hold while litigation continued, and the former president’s name will appear on the state’s primary ballot. (If he was ultimately ruled ineligible, the votes for him would not count.)
Trump appealed as Trump does. But he’s on the Colorado ballot tomorrow. Should he lose his SCOTUS appeal, his votes would not count.
Democrats are always “maximally crimey”
Ian Bassin and Dahlia Lithwick suggest that what the court does not say in its ruling is likely as important as what it does. The court is unlikely to render an opinion on whether Trump engaged in an insurrection, as Colorado found, nor on the presidential immunity appeal still outstanding. That does not mean the justices won’t be speaking volumes. “The real question is whether our media will be savvy enough to hear it,” the pair explain.
Consider how the press reported the Robert Mueller findings on Hillary Clinton’s email server or Special Counsel Robert Hur’s decision not to indict Joe Biden for his handling of classified documents (Slate).:
One might wonder why it is that when it’s Donald Trump openly committing crimes and evading responsibility, the default media narrative is that he didn’t commit crimes, yet when Democrats are found to have committed no crimes, the story becomes that they are still sufficiently crime-adjacent to be maximally crimey, The coverage of the Comey and Hur reports focused orders of magnitude more on their non-conclusion details than the decision not to press charges. Whereas our press largely fell for Attorney General Bill Barr and Donald Trump’s efforts to spin the Mueller report into an “exoneration” at the expense of the damning facts about obstruction of justice that were laid out in its pages.
The press casts doubt on the Democrat, perhaps to elide legal technical jargon that is less digestible, just not when it is the Republican. The simplified storylines became “But Her Emails” and “Biden So Old!”
Maybe this is all unfair. Maybe we can expect better. Maybe if the Supreme Court issues an opinion ruling for Trump on technicalities while still remaining silent on the lower court’s finding that he engaged in insurrection, we’ll see headlines and reporting capturing the dual nature of such a ruling, and the momentous implications of a court that seems to accept that he did what we know he did. But we’re not holding our breath.
Curated for your protection
Bassin, Lithwick and the rest of us saw what Trump did. The House Select Committee investigated Jan. 6 exhaustively and broadcast its findings to the world. “Hundreds of participants have been sentenced for participating in it,” many admitting they attacked the Capitol and police at Trump’s behest. “The only material question for the high court is whether he will be allowed to get away with it.”
Yet the Roberts Court’s conservative majority seems determined not just to let Trump get away with it, but to let themselves get away with not upholding their judicial oaths to “administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich.” MAGA Republicans elsewhere across the U.S. are working to ensure that, when we hold “free and fair” elections, Americans are merely going through the motions. Watch this morning to see if the U.S. Supreme Court has elected to do the same.
In a digital age when our attention is curated for us, don’t hold your breath for the press to make much of it if it does.
UPDATE:Court rules 9-0 that the 14th Amendment’s Section 3 is not self-executing (quick skim and reporting). Congress alone is the primary enforcement mechanism. Trump may stay on the Colorado and other state ballots. Court does not exonerate Trump for insurrection.
I wanted to share Scott Rosenberg’s analysis of this NY Times Poll that has everyone melting down today:
It’s A Close, Competitive Election – Yes, the NYT released a poll today that has Trump ahead. Some initial thoughts:
Lots of other polls show the race even, competitive – Three national polls released this week (below) have the race even. 538’s Congressional Generic tracker is tied, 44%-44%. A new battleground state poll produced by top Democratic pollsters has Trump and Biden tied at 40%. Another battleground state poll that hasn’t been released yet that I was just briefed on has it 41%-39% Trump, essentially the same results. Senate polling is slightly better for us than for Republicans right now.
The Times poll has Trump leading among likely voters by 4 points, 48%-44%. This is a gain of 6 points for Trump since the December Times poll. None of these other polls have found a GOP surge of this magnitude or even a GOP lead. So the NYT results are not confirmed in lots of other recent polling which finds the race close and competitive, which is where I think it is now.
Biden 36% Trump 36% – AP/IPSOS
Biden 44% Trump 44% – Economist/YouGov
Biden 43% Trump 44% – Morning Consult (Biden’s gained 4 pts in recent weeks in this poll)
There are problems with the NYT poll – It has Trump winning both Hispanics and women – an impossibility. It’s likely voter electorate is +3 Republican – something we haven’t seen in a general election in actual voting in 20 years, and only once in the last 8 Presidential elections going all the way back to 1992. In the last 4 Presidential elections, Democrats have averaged 51%, Republicans 46%, and we gained ground in the 2018, 2020, 2022 and 2023 elections. After all these years of strong Democratic vote performance for the electorate to become +3 Republican this year is, um, unlikely. Overestimating their intensity and strength and underestimating ours was a central reason so many saw the red wave that never came in 2022.
The poll has Trump winning all his 2020 voters, and keeping his party unified – something that is not happening either in the actual voting or polling in the early states. It has Dean Phillips at 10% in the Dem primary against Biden. In Michigan this week he got 2.5%, and came in behind Marianne Williamson who dropped out of the race a month ago.
The poll’s initial likely voter sample was 29% Dem, 28% Republican and was “weighted” through a complex formula to become 32% R and 29% D. That’s a shift of 4 percentage points, something that would take an even race and make it +4 R, as this poll finds.
The poll has Biden winning Democrats 90%-7%, Trump winning Republicans 91%-6%, and Biden winning Independents 45%-41%. These results would normally produce a Biden lead but with the aggressive weighting and a very Republican sample, it produces a 4 point Trump lead.
The poll only interviewed 980 people, which is a relatively small sample for such an influential poll. Its margin of error is 3.5% for registered voters and almost 4% for likely voters. The sub-samples have margin of errors in double digits.
I want to thank my friends Tom Bonier and Joe Trippi for their help in putting together this quick analysis.
It helped Trump with his ludicrous assertion that Hillary didn’t have “the strength and the stamina” to be president.
Do you think this garbage happens by accident?
As we slog through yet another week of media onslaught saying “Biden’s old, old, old so everybody’s going to vote for Trump!” I thought I’d remind people of 2016, when one of the ongoing narratives was that Hillary Clinton was frail and dying from some unrevealed illness.
I wrote this for Salon back in 2016:
The right-wing smear machine is working at warp speed to convince the nation that Hillary Clinton has brain damage. That is not hyperbole or some kind of a joke. They are literally claiming that she is hiding a physical and mental disability that renders her unfit for office. And they are, as usual, being helped by members of the mainstream media who are simply unable to resist “reporting” such a juicy tale even knowing that it is absurd. And so it becomes part of the narrative, true or not, that will color the rest of the campaign and Clinton’s presidency should she win.
Karl Rove first crudely suggested that Clinton had a serious brain disorder when she fell and suffered a concussion a few years ago which required her to wear her thick prism glasses instead of contacts to correct temporary double vision. Nobody took him seriously at the time, but the rumor has been percolating in the fever swamps and Trump and company were obviously aware of it. Trump himself has been saying from the beginning that Clinton doesn’t have the “strength or the stamina” to be president. He also claims that she can’t campaign more than a couple of days a week and then she has to go hide and recover. (This is one of those lies so blatant that it renders people mute — Clinton is clearly campaigning constantly, indeed she’s out there more than he is.)
This attack was echoed by Matt Drudge as far back as October when he appeared on conspiracy monger Alex Jones’ show and said “she’s old and she’s sick, she is not a viable, vibrant leader for this country.” It’s no surprise then that this latest full blown swiftboat offensive began on Drudge’s web site. It’s one of his specialties.
On Aug. 7 he linked to an obscure right wing website that had posted a picture of Clinton tripping on some porch steps and being steadied by a couple of aides under the title “2016: Hillary Conquers the Stairs.” He neglected to mention that the picture was taken in February.
The next salvo came from Trump’s friends at the National Enquirer which published a screaming headline “Hillary Clinton’s Secret Health Crisis.” And according to Ben Collins at the Daily Beast, “by the middle of the day the No. 2 trending Google search about Hillary Clinton was: “Is Hillary having health problems?”
That night Trump surrogate Sean Hannity devoted his show to fanning the rumors, even bringing in the Fox Medical A-Team who appear regularly on the network to diagnose her from afar and demand to see a complete neurological workup and all of Clinton’s medical records. He continued the rumor mongering throughout the week.
By this time the fall was old news. Now she was said to be having seizures and speaking oddly and having weird expressions on her face and exhibiting muddled thinking. When a protester tried to rush the stage at one of her rallies and a secret service agent stepped to the podium and said they had things under control, people said he had a diazepam pen in his hand at the ready, apparently in case she had a seizure right there on the spot. (It’s all rubbish, of course.)
Meanwhile, the “Alt-right” has gone completely over the edge with this craziness. Collins writes that the conspiracy site Info Wars has turned over its entire site to these rumors:
Hillary Clinton supposedly has Parkinson’s disease, syphilis, brain damage, a brain tumor, autism, a degenerative disease that is giving her seizures and/or strokes, and a blood clot, according to InfoWars writer Paul Joseph Watson. Oh, and he says she has a drug problem. All of these diagnoses — save for Parkinson’s, which commanded a separate full-length article—came in a single one of Watson’s YouTube videos released on Thursday. It now has over 1.6 million views at press time.
And yes the mainstream media has joined in the fun. On MSNBC, Chris Matthews has devoted several segments to the issue, apparently convinced that where Republicans blow smoke there must be fire saying, “what are the Republicans up to on this health issue? Why are they on to this? What do they know? Is there something we don’t know in the health records? Something that could change this election around?”
Last night Trump surrogate Katrina Pierson took it to a new level by offering up a full diagnosis on MSNBC, saying there are “reports of observations of Hillary Clinton’s behavior and mannerisms,” that Clinton suffers from “dysphasia” — a neurological condition that limits a person’s ability to communicate or understand speech. I’m going to take a guess that Pierson didn’t come up with those talking points herself.
This confluence of activity didn’t happen by chance. It was planned and executed from InfoWars to Youtube to Drudge to Hannity to The Daily Mail to MSNBC and finally the NBC Nightly News and The New York Times. And regardless of what the fact checks say, a whole lot of people in this country now believe that Hillary Clinton, a woman of great intelligence and impressive endurance, is a brain-damaged invalid.
The press went into full-blown breaking-news mode and when tape emerged of Clinton wobbling and appearing to faint as she got into her car, the cable networks and journalists on social media went with wall to wall with breathless medical speculation. They showed the video in slow motion over and over again like it was an outtake from the Zapruder film scene in Oliver Stone’s “JFK” (“back and to the left, back and to the left.”)
She emerged from her daughter’s home smiling and waving a few hours later (prompting hilarious right-wing conspiracy theories that it must have been a body double.) But when her doctor released a statement saying she had been diagnosed with pneumonia on Friday, the press became hysterical.
At that moment media outlets could have chosen to analyze Clinton’s pressing on with the campaign in spite of having pneumonia as an indication of her grit and dedication to the campaign. And in fairness some did. For instance, contrary to the widely assumed rumor that she’d been taking it easy all month, Jeff Zeleny of CNN said that he’d covered five presidential campaign and never seen a more brutal schedule than Clinton’s.
Or the media organizations could have taken Clinton’s doctor at her word that she is being treated and will recover nicely. Instead, they settled on their tedious narrative of righteous indignation about Clinton’s supposed pathological secretiveness in failing to inform them of her diagnosis the minute she received it. It’s all about them.
They also know very well that this febrile coverage plays into an ongoing theme of the presidential campaign: Donald Trump’s claim that Hillary Clinton doesn’t have “the strength or the stamina” to be president. On one level, it’s a simple sexist charge against a woman candidate from a man who believes that all of life is a game of primitive dominance. But it’s more than that. Trump made the same charge against Jeb Bush during the primaries; in that case it was the taunt of a schoolyard bully.
And there has been yet another layer to Trump’s “strength and stamina” charge in recent weeks, leveled first by surrogates like Alex Jones, Breitbart News and Matt Drudge and taken up recently by the campaign itself, which has implied that Clinton was suffering from brain damage and possibly Parkinson’s disease. I wrote about this elaborate conspiracy theory a couple of weeks ago.
Despite the fact that this is a right-wing smear, “the health issue” has worked its way into the mainstream press, leading to coverage of a couple of coughing fits as if they were obvious signs that she’s on death’s door and current events as if they show something is seriously wrong. (How pneumonia relates to brain damage has yet to be explained.)
But the truth is that coughs and throat problems are probably the most common problem a politician has. And when one personally hugs, shakes hands and gets breathed on by thousands of people in a week, getting pneumonia isn’t really all that surprising either. It’s obvious that if the Drudge smear wasn’t in full bloom, this story would have been covered differently. Instead, unable to resist the lure of the sexy tabloid lede, Politico just let it all hang out: Clinton scare shakes up the racePhysical weakness caught on camera turns health conspiracy into a legitimate campaign concern.
President Ronald Reagan was shot and had cancerous polyps removed from his colon while in office. Lyndon Johnson had gall bladder surgery while holding the top office in the land and proudly showed his scar to the press corps. President Dwight Eisenhower had a heart attack and emergency surgery for a bowel obstruction. There’s no need to reiterate all of President Franklin Roosevelt’s health problems, but it’s pretty clear that the right wing and the press today would find him unfit for office.
And the list of macho men who have fainted in public is a lot longer than you might think. This is just a sample:
To put it simply, if you discard the inane right-wing conspiracy theories about Clinton’s alleged brain damage and Parkinson’s disease, you’ll realize that ailments like coughing, fainting, pneumonia, flu, etc., are common among politicians and other leaders because they’re common among humans.
Despite some truly ridiculous speculation from members of the press, this is unlikely to be more than a slight blip on the campaign. It’s pneumonia not a brain tumor and she will recover. But it’s almost sure that the drumbeat for her to release her full medical records for the press to paw through for juicy tidbits is going to become louder and she’ll undoubtedly end up complying. Medical privacy is not allowed for presidential candidates.
Well, unless they are named Donald Trump. While everyone is breathlessly speculating about what Clinton is hiding in her records, you’d think the press would be equally curious about why a 70-year-old billionaire’s doctor is a cartoon character who wrote the most ridiculous letter attesting to a presidential candidate’s fitness in American history. Does he not have a real doctor? Will the hysteria this past weekend force the media to ask that question at long last? It’s actually much more suspicious than Clinton’s mundane fainting spell and bout with pneumonia.
"A cynic focused on power… only to be swallowed by the monster that he enabled to obtain it." @jrpsaki on the real legacy of Mitch McConnell pic.twitter.com/IqfbX8xIZE
— Inside with Jen Psaki (@InsideWithPsaki) March 3, 2024
Mitch is leaving because his health is failing and he’s lost his grip on the caucus. Five years ago he was all in and did everything he could to maintain power by any means necessary. He’d do it again if he could. He just ran out of gas.
Poll angst is a Democratic pastime but it’s a waste of time and energy
If you are fretting about the NY Times poll (which polled 900 people) that everyone is fretting about, here’s a reminder of a time in the not too distant past when everyone was fretting about another NY TImes poll from Joan Walsh in 2022:
It’s said to be wrong to kick a person when he or she is down. If Monday’s New York Times/Siena poll were a person, it’s been stomped so severely that a compassionate observer would step in to stop the fight. But even though the poll that launched a thousand headlines claiming the midterms are moving back toward Republicans, and that the so-called Dobbs effect—a shift to Democrats after the Supreme Court did away with a 50-year-old constitutional right to abortion—is subsiding, has been pretty thoroughly debunked by pollsters and progressive analysts, it still deserves attention (but no kicking here, folks).
It’s a case study of what even “good” polls can do wrong, and, maybe more important, of how journalists looking for a “new” story line hype outlier polls without understanding the first thing about what they mean—as well as the way voters should think about new polling as we get closer to the crucial election.
In case you were without a computer or television earlier this week, here’s the gist of the poll of 792 “likely voters.” In September, those polled by New York Times/Siena favored Democrats on a “generic” congressional ballot, by one point. A month later, those polled back Republicans by four. The big news, from the Times headline: “With elections next month, independents, especially women, are swinging to the G.O.P. despite Democrats’ focus on abortion rights.” The economy, the poll found, mattered much more to voters than abortion.
And despite the fact that a “gender gap” showing women favoring Democrats has been a defining feature of American politics since Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, the poll showed women dividing their votes equally between the two parties. “The poll showed that Republicans had entirely erased what had been an 11-point edge for Democrats among women last month in 2022 congressional races to a statistical tie in October,” the Times wrote.
The detail that got the most hype, though, from the Times write-up: “The biggest shift came from women who identified as independent voters. In September, they favored Democrats by 14 points. Now, independent women backed Republicans by 18 points—a striking swing given the polarization of the American electorate and how intensely Democrats have focused on that group and on the threat Republicans pose to abortion rights.”
Wow. That’s a 32-point swing. Big if true.
Fun fact. It wasn’t true:
After polls closed on Nov. 8, Democrats held on to more seats in the House and Senate than is typical for the in-power party in a non-presidential election year, and they retained control of the Senate.
According to ABC News exit polling, that competitiveness was fueled by a number of factors, including voter passion about abortion access and antipathy to Trump-style election denialism and extremism…
In strong Republican years, ABC exit polling shows, independents typically break for the GOP — by 7 points in 2016, 14 in 2014 and 19 in 2010. This year, according to exit polling, independents voted for Democratic House candidates over Republicans by 2 points.
Walsh continued:
Bonier, Lake, and other pollsters agree: The decisive “tell” that the poll was flawed was its finding that women are splitting their votes evenly between Republicans and Democrats. “Do you really believe just months after losing a fundamental right, women will split their votes [between Republicans and Democrats]?” Bonier asks. “Have we ever since the ’90s had a situation where women didn’t vote more Democratic than men did?” pollster Anna Greenberg asked rhetorically in The New Republic.
Lake was more scathing: “There isn’t another poll in America that shows that,” she says. “If I did an outlier poll like that for a candidate, I’d have to do it over again at my own expense.” The Times should have tossed its October findings and started over, she says.
This latest NY Times poll shows the same thing, that the gender gap has disappeared. And it’s ridiculous.
According to CNN exit polls, women constituted 52% of the vote and men 48%. That is an enormous difference. Let’s assume that turnout in 2022 ends up being about the same as the record 2018 turnout—roughly 116 million votes. The women’s share of that vote? 60,320,000. Exit polls also show that 53% of women voted Democratic. That’s 31,969,600 votes—a big number. Hillary Clinton, who clearly shares our frustration with those who discounted the women’s vote, tweeted out the following clearly sarcastic comment: “It turns out women enjoy having human rights, and we vote.”
Apart from the sheer magnitude of the women’s vote is the issue of intensity. Unlike men, women spend a great deal of their lives thinking about reproduction. They have no choice. Even in the 21st century, pregnancy is still a dangerous business, and women’s health care is no place for government bureaucrats. No wonder that women think abortion is a lot more important than men do. As the election season entered its final stretch, and many Republican candidates got a crash course in obstetrics, some pulled back and/or softened their previous hard lines on abortion.
The importance of the issue was seen most clearly in the Senate debate in Pennsylvania. Although the Democrat, John Fetterman gave a halting performance because he was still recovering from a serious stroke, his opponent, Republican Mehmet Oz, managed to make what had to be one of the most damaging comments on abortion ever: “I want women, doctors, and local political leaders…” to make these decisions.
The sheer absurdity of that comment went a long way towards distracting voters from the issue of Fetterman’s health and reminded many that government shouldn’t be making those decisions.
Finally, abortion is fundamentally different from inflation. Inflation is unpopular with both parties—there is no pro-inflation and anti-inflation party. In fact, if we’ve learned anything about politics in our polarized time it’s that voters see almost all issues through their partisan lens. Democrats worried about inflation could think that Joe Biden was dealing with it and Republicans that Joe Biden caused it. But abortion is different. One party is clearly in favor of keeping it legal in most or all circumstances and the other is not.
If you put together the sheer size of the women’s vote, the intensity of the issue and the fact that, unlike inflation or the economy, the two parties have stark differences on the issue, you get a powerful driver of the vote. There were five states with abortion referenda on the ballot and in every single one—including the deep red state of Kentucky—the pro-choice position won. In Michigan, where the abortion referendum won by 13.4 percent, it is not far-fetched to assume that it helped the Democrats keep several congressional seats. And in Pennsylvania, where abortion topped inflation by 9 points, Democrats picked up the only Senate seat so far.
The following table shows the percentage of voters in each of the crucial states and how they rated inflation and abortion. In most cases abortion was a close second; in Michigan and Pennsylvania it was far ahead of inflation.
TOP ISSUES IN THE 2022 MIDTERMS (%)
*Results according to CNN exit polls
Central to the story of the 2022 midterms, then, is an issue central to women’s lives, powerful enough to snatch victory from the Republicans, and durable enough to send a message about the future.
They will prove these polls wrong again, at least on that count. A majority of women are not gravitating to Trump and they haven’t stopped caring about reproductive rights as a matter of basic human rights and everyday economic rights. It’s bullshit. Right now, states are banning IVF, women who have miscarriages are being arrested, rapists are being given joint custody of the child their 12 year old victim was forced to bear, women are almost dying because they can’t obtain abortion care and the right wing is talking about outlawing abortion and birth control using the Comstock Act from 1873 in a 2nd Trump administration. I really don’t think the majority of American women are signing up for that.
I guess he thinks he can entice some of those RFK Jr voters over to his side. He’s also following this guy’s guidance:
Shortly before Joseph Ladapo was sworn in as Florida’s surgeon general in 2022, the New Yorker ran a short column welcoming the vaccine-skeptic doctor to his new role, and highlighting his advocacy for the use of leeches in public health.
It was satire of course, a teasing of the Harvard-educated physician for his unorthodox medical views, which include a steadfast belief that life-saving Covid shots are the work of the devil, and that opening a window is the preferred treatment for the inhalation of toxic fumes from gas stoves.
But now, with an entirely preventable outbreak of measles spreading across Florida, medical experts are questioning if quackery really has become official health policy in the nation’s third most-populous state.
As the highly contagious disease raged in a Broward county elementary school, Ladapo, a politically appointed acolyte of Florida’s far-right governor Ron DeSantis, wrote to parents telling them it was perfectly fine for parents to continue to send in their unvaccinated children.
“The surgeon general is Ron DeSantis’s lapdog, and says whatever DeSantis wants him to say,” said Dr Robert Speth, a professor of pharmaceutical sciences at south Florida’s Nova Southeastern University with more than four decades of research experience.
“His statements are more political than medical and that’s a horrible disservice to the citizens of Florida. He’s somebody whose job is to protect public health, and he’s doing the exact opposite.”
Ladapo’s advice deferring to parents or guardians a decision about school attendance directly contradicts the official recommendation of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which calls for a 21-day period of quarantine for anybody without a history of prior infection or immunization.
It is also in keeping with Ladapo’s previous maverick proclamations about vaccines that health professionals say pose an unacceptable danger to the health of Florida residents. They include official guidance to shun mRNA Covid-19 boosters based on easily disprovable conspiracy theories that the shots alter human DNA and can potentially cause cancer – “scientific nonsense” in the view of Dr Ashish Jha, a former White House Covid response coordinator.
Meanwhile, with measles having been eradicated in the US since 2000, the disease’s resurgence, paired with Ladapo’s latest misadventure, have prompted a new round of mocking commentary. Florida: Come for the Sunshine, Leave With the Measles, opined the Orlando Sentinel; “Measles? So On-brand for Florida’s Descent Into the 1950s”, was the take of the Tampa Bay Times.
[…]
To Speth, and numerous other medical experts, Ladapo’s risky succession of positions denying even the most obvious benefits of immunization and vaccination is a symptom of a wider political assault by the rightwing, which carries deadly potential.
Its origins, Speth believes, lie in a long-discredited study by the disgraced British former doctor Andrew Wakefield falsely tying the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine to autism, but which was enthusiastically embraced by anti-vaxxers and other extremists in the US.
“The Wakefield study was a gross fraud, yet today up to 25% of our population believes it, and opportunistic politicians seize on the sentiment to tell people what they want to hear about the danger of vaccines,” he said.
“Republicans are at war with medical science, and that’s a horrible tragedy. But I feel like Cassandra, talking about the public health threat. We’re going to start seeing a lot more children die of infectious diseases that could be prevented if they were vaccinated.”
If Trump wins and his Project 2025 is enacted, there is no reason they won’t be able to do this. If it pleases the conspiracy addled far right, that’s all that matters because that’s their ticket to power and dominance.
Trump manifested a number of phonemic paraphasias. He was trying to say evangelist, for example, but haltingly said “evangelish.” He was trying to say “three years later,” but said, “three years, lady, lady, lady.” Trying to spit out the word “lately,” he sounded like a car with a bad battery struggling to turn over. When Trump can’t find a word his whole demeanor changes. It’s almost like someone pulled the metaphorical plug. Trump looks blank, stops in mid-sentence (or mid-word), his jaw goes a little slack, and when he starts to talk again, he slurs, speaks haltingly, and often looks confused. Trying to get the word out, he shifts to a non-word that is easier to pronounce. When people are losing their ability to use language they use non-words. They start with the stem of the real word, and then they improvise from there.
In my family we call sandwiches “slamichs” because that’s what my stepson called them when he was three. It was cute then. It’s not cute watching and adult man regress to the mental age of a three-year-old. It can make you even feel sorry for Trump in those moments when he appears so vulnerable, confused, and disoriented. I asked several highly specialized experts about Trump’s use of language, and they told me that what Trump is doing in total, but especially the phonemic paraphasias, were almost certain evidence of brain damage. This is not minor, or within normal limits, like forgetting who the president of Germany is, for example, as Biden has been pilloried for. Trump is evidencing formal thought disorder, where his basic ability to use language is breaking down.
Trump is also showing signs of “semantic aphasia” where he is using words in the wrong way. For example, when Trump talked about “the oranges of the investigation.” We saw an example of that this weekend, as well. Trump said, “We’re going to protect pro-God….” In mid-sentence, he goes blank and looks at the ceiling. The words he uses to complete the sentence don’t really make sense: “…context and content.”
Trump is bragging about passing the MOCA, a screening test for dementia, as if it made him MENSA, when it’s a test any kindergartener should pass. Specialists tell me a patient can be in steep diagnosable organic decline for an extended period before they fail the MOCA. Someone with an advanced degree from an Ivy League school, for example, has a lot of IQ points to give before they hit kindergarten level. If you pass the MOCA it certainly does not mean you’re cognitively equipped to be President of the United States. Trump can’t even name the current president of the United States. Seven times he’s said he’s running against Obama. That’s not a gaffe or joke. That’s hard clinical evidence of serious organic brain damage.
His Nikki Haley mistake was shocking. But that first video at the top says it all about his obvious distress as far as I’m concerned. That is not normal, even for him.
Later in the day:
We need to talk about why there is so much focus on Biden's age, as he navigates multiple tough situations effectively, and so little on Trump, who can't even remember who the current president, his November opponent, is. https://t.co/2idFWRpuvQ
Jonathan Last throws water on the magical thinking about skittish Democrats replacing Joe Biden on their presidential ticket. (Really? Are we still talking about this?) Scary New York Times polls? How about scarier polls? Virtually all the also-mentions poll worse than Biden against Trump: Harris, Newsome, Whitmer and Shapiro.
Ten days ago already, Lawrence O’Donnell’s “the governing will not be televised” monologue refuted Ezra Klein’s speculation about Democrats replacing Biden. If that was not sufficient to dispel the notion that the DNC is going to rub a monkey’s paw and produce a younger presidential candidate, Last provides bullets on why it won’t (The Atlantic):
Let’s say that one of these not–Kamala Harris candidates is chosen at the Democratic National Convention in August. In the span of 10 weeks they would have to:
Define themselves to the national audience while simultaneously resisting Trump’s attempts to define them.
Build a national campaign structure and get-out-the-vote operation.
Unify the Democratic Party.
Fend off any surprises uncovered during their public (and at-scale) vetting.
Earn credit in the minds of voters for the Biden economy.
Distance themselves from unpopular Biden policies.
Portray themselves as a credible commander in chief.
Lay out a coherent governing vision.
Persuade roughly 51 percent of the country to support them.
Democrats may have a knack for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, but not since 2018. Unless the carnage abates in Gaza soon, there will exist the potential for protests in Chicago that (for those of a certain age) will evoke bad memories from 1968. Even the rowdies of The Big Tent Party will want to avoid that kind of bad press. All the more reason for DNC and FBI bloodhounds to alert on any ratfucking schemes the RNC or Russia may cook up to recreate that chaos on Democrats’ “behalf.”
Joe Biden is Joe Biden. He isn’t going to win a 10-point, realigning victory. But his path to reelection is clear: Focus like a laser on suburban and working-class white voters in a handful of swing states. Remind them that Trump is a chaos agent who wrecked the economy. Show them how good the economy is now. Make a couple of jokes about the antlers. And then bring these people home—because many of them already voted for him once.
Having a sure thing would certainly be nice, given the ongoing authoritarian threat we face. But there isn’t one. Joe Biden is the best deal democracy is going to get.
He’s already beaten Trump once. A brokered convention, Last warns, is unlikely to help Democrats win when “Biden has a 50–50 shot.”
Perhaps it’s my own magical thinking, but that tight polling feels off. We’ve seen them wrong too often. The media focus on Biden’s age is, at least in part, MAGA- and horse-race-driven. What’s not being polled enough is “Trump fatigue.” As my friend found, students may not be “excited to vote for the 80 year old president,” a question pollsters love to ask, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t planning to vote.
High card still wins when your opponent’s got nothin.’
Yes, our outrage is selective. In a world of double standards, Nicholas Kristof reminds readers how much we have one toward Israel (New York Times):
Rabbi Marvin Hier in The Jerusalem Post condemned “an unprecedented double standard” that relentlessly criticizes Israel’s bombing of Gaza but is unbothered by the Allied bombing of civilians in Germany and Japan in World War II. And the World Jewish Congress cites “criticizing Israeli defensive operations, but not those of other Western democracies” as an example of antisemitism.
A fair criticism, Kristof writes, and a false one.
In 2023, for example, the United Nations General Assembly adopted 15 resolutions critical of Israel, and only seven resolutions critical of all other countries in the world together, by the count of one pro-Israel group. Does anyone think that represents even-handedness?
People are more focused on Israel than on what Unicef describes as a “wave of atrocities” currently underway against children in Sudan, while the number of children displaced by recent fighting in Sudan (three million) is greater than the entire population of Gaza. University students in America and Europe protest about Gaza but largely ignore the 700,000 children facing severe acute malnutrition in Sudan, after a civil war began there last April.
The Darfur region of Sudan two decades ago endured what is widely described as the first genocide of the 21st century. Now bands of gunmen once more are killing and raping villagers belonging to particular ethnic groups. I was seared by my reporting from Darfur during the genocide, and it staggers me that the world is ignoring another round of mass atrocities there.
Not to mention that some of the worst crimes against civilians in recent years were committed against Arabs were “by by Arab rulers themselves, in Syria and Yemen.” But Gaza right now is the most dangerous place in the wold for a child.
Consider that in the first 18 months of Russia’s current war in Ukraine, at least 545 children were killed. Or that in 2022, by a United Nations count, 2,985 children were killed in all wars worldwide. In contrast, in less than five months of Israel’s current war in Gaza, the health authorities there report more than 12,500 children killed.
Among them were 250 infants less than 1 year old. I can’t think of any conflict in this century that has killed babies at such a pace.
Kristof adds the obligatory “of course Israel has a right to respond” and Hamas should release its hostages, etc.
Because of America’s support for Israel’s invasion and diplomatic protection for it at the United Nations, this blood is on our hands, and that surely justifies increased scrutiny.
Yet here’s another double standard: We Americans condemn Russia, China or Venezuela for their violations of human rights, but the United States supports Israel and protects it diplomatically even as it has engaged in what President Biden has called an “over the top” military campaign.
So yes, some of the campus outrage is selective, and yes, we condemn some attrocities of war here and ignore others there. Double standards, Kristof concludes, “run in many directions, shielding Israel as well as condemning it.”
But it seems to me that in a world of screens (like this one) screaming for our attention, people have only so much bandwidth. Our selective attention goes to places with the most cameras in places that look the most like our homes, and to people who seem most like us.
I’ve noted before that the left is more critical of its friends than its adversaries. We expect little of our adversaries and wield little leverage for modifying their behavior. But the U.S. is heavily invested in its ally Israel, both financially and culturally. We have both interest and leverage. For Jewish Americans, history and family. For Christians, a theological heritage. For others, a kind of moral muscle memory that grants Israel undeserved grace because of crimes visited during the Holocaust.
“[W]e should never let our very human tangles of double standards and hypocrisies be harnessed to deflect from the tragedy unfolding today for the children of Gaza, or America’s complicity in it,” writes Kristof. Netanyahu may not be movable, but Israel can be pushed. So push.
For supporters of Israel reluctant to demand better behavior, whether from a sense of loyalty or a sense that because of Hamas’ attrocities, Gaza “had it coming,” perhaps the New Testament provides guidance.
To whom much is given, much will be required (Luke 12:48).
