That’s how they roll. Heads I win tails you lose. And sadly, the press let’s them do it.
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From Scott Rosenberg’s Hopium Chronicles (to which you should subscribe for a little bit of political positivity.)
As we often discuss here the central dynamic in American politics since Dobbs in the spring of 2022 has been Dem overperformance, Republican struggle in race after race, all across the country. We saw it in the battlegrounds in 2022, as we improved our standing over 2020 in AZ, CO, GA, MI, MN, NH, PA; and got all the way up to 59% in CO, 57& in PA, 55% in MI, 54% in NH. We saw it all throughout 2023 as we took away Colorado Springs and Jacksonville, two of the largest GOP held cities; the Supreme Court seat and rancid gerrymandering in WI; the six week abortion ban in OH; the Virginia Assembly and the fantasy that the 15 week abortion ban would be a safe haven for Republicans; and so much more, all across the country.
When I started Hopium in early 2023 I wondered whether this dynamic that we saw in 2022 would continue in 2023, and it did. 2023 was really a blue wave year across the US. And here in early 2024 we’ve been wondering would this same dynamic carry over to this year? And look what we’ve seen this week:
Iowa – huge sums spent, competitive race, unprecedented investment in ground operations, lots of candidate time, and overall GOP turnout was abysmal, coming in at 110,000, down from 186,000 in 2016, and the lowest 24 years. If Rs were fired up, ready to take on Biden they would have shown up and voted. They didn’t. It’s another sign of this ongoing GOP struggle we discuss aboe.
Don’t let weather be an excuse here – the drop was much too big to be explained by weather; the test of the strength of a campaign or party is whether they can get their voters to show up – and here they didn’t; this GOP enthusiasm problem is something that just keeps repeating all across the country in election after election.
Florida – Dems flip this GOP held seat, despite all the advantages Republicans currently have in Florida. Another sign of Dem heightened performance, GOP struggle, another Dem takeaway of something Republicans hold.
In his piece yesterday, he gave some reasons why this is happening. I think this is Particularly compelling:
I think the GOP has been struggling since Dobbs because this MAGA, Trumpy party is deeply unattractive even to many Republican voters. Trumpy candidates in the 2022 battlegrounds saw their party splinter, Republicans vote for Democrats and they lost, some times by enormous margins. Democrats then took away important things from Republicans in 2023 due to this ongoing GOP electoral struggle – a SCOTUS seat and outrageous gerrymandering in WI; Colorado Springs and Jacksonville – two of the largest GOP held cities in the country; the six-week abortion ban in Ohio; the state House and the hope of the 15 week abortion ban as a safe heaven in VA; and cities, city councils, state legislative seats and school board races across the US.
The fundamental problem Republicans face in 2024 is that their Presidential candidate and party are more unattractive than they’ve ever been. They’ve brought unprecedented chaos and extremism to Congress, and a historic appeasement of genocidal Putin; dozens of their leaders across the US have been indicted for supporting a party wide effort to overturn an election and end American democracy; they are content to leave pregnant women to die on a hospital table, denying them the life saving care they need; they are refusing to pass common sense reforms to make it easier for the US government to manage our border and rising immigrant flows. They want more dead kids in schools, the planet to warm faster, to strip health insurance from tens of millions, establish mass deportation camps, and to keep taking away freedoms and rights common throughout the modern world……
And then there’s Trump. More degraded, extreme, dangerous than 2016 and 2020. His performance on the stump is far more erratic and wild. He keeps making big, consequential unforced errors due to his mental decline and mania. And there are the things he’s done that voters did not know about last time – his rape of a woman in a department store dressing room; his decades-long financial fraud; his leading of a party-wide effort to overturn an election and end American democracy for all time; his being more responsible for ending Roe and stripping American women of rights and freedoms than any other single person; his rancid stealing of America’s secrets and sharing them with others; his taking of more money from foreign governments than any politician and political family in history. None of these things were known in 2020. Any one of them could disqualify him with voters. Taken together it’s an unprecedented basket of awfulness, and it’s just hard to imagine how he survives it all.
I can easily imagine how he survives it all. However, people do get burned out on endless chaos and his problems are numerous so it may be taking a toll.
There is no denying that Democrats have been on a roll in 2022 and 2023. And this first race of 2024 down in Florida, which Tom posted, is yet another surprise. Will it hold up? Who knows? But this recent history is promising. As much as the media loves to laud the alleged enthusiasm of Trump’s cult, results indicate that there has been a quiet, determined resistance to MAGA at work since 2018.
Trump is acting like a juvenile delinquent in the federal courthouse today. His lawyer is too. Is there anyone else on earth who would be allowed to do this?
Millions of people want this monster to be president of the United States. This is a very, very sick political culture.
Really?
He’s got a lot of nerve…
I carry no brief for Nikki Haley. She would be an awful president but not because she’s not “tough” enough. This is reminiscent of his fatuous claims against Hillary Clinton that she didn’t have the “strength and the stamina” to be president. He thinks all women are weak. But as he proved when he was president nobody is a bigger patsy than he is.
By the way, he’s also going after her for her ethnicity:
In case you were wondering:
Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday went after Nikki Haley while referring to her by her first name, Nimarata, in the latest example of Trump using racist dog whistles to attack his GOP presidential rival.
Haley is the daughter of Indian immigrants and was born Nimarata Nikki Randhawa. She took her husband Michael Haley’s last name after they married.
Trump misspelled Nimarata as “Nimrada” as he attacked her in a new post on his social media platform Truth Social.
The MAGA crowd has been calling her “Nimroda” (nimrod, get it?) for months. naturally he’s doing it now too. Most Republicans don’t care. They also have a sophomoric sense of humor and think being a “clever racist” is cute. There’s nothing we can do about that. They are soulless assholes. Let’s just hope that there are a few around the margins that have finally had their eyes opened or are finally mature enough to see that this man should not be president.
Trump’s win in Iowa showed his weakness
The Trump juggernaut rolled into Iowa on Monday and won what the media is calling a “historic” victory. He won 51% of the vote while his closest rival Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis only won 21% and Former S. Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, 19%. Obviously, it was a tremendous victory for the former president, demonstrating his massive strength going into the 2024 election. Or was it?
First of all, this was no surprise. Donald Trump has been destined to win this caucus and frankly, every primary from the moment he announced he was running. Unlike in 2016, he reportedly had a very professional campaign in the state and was polling over 50% throughout the race. It is very probable that he will be the de facto nominee within the next month and will have it all wrapped up by Super Tuesday.
However, taking a closer look at those Iowa numbers shows some of the pit falls awaiting him in the general election.
If there’s one state in the nation you can call MAGA country, it’s Iowa. It’s something like 95% white, older than most states, extremely rural and the Republican Party there is as conservative as it gets. And yet, 40% of the voters who came out voted for someone else. Yes, sure, a good many of them voted for Trump-plus and Trump- X (DeSantis and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy) but nearly 20% of them voted for the daughter of immigrants positioned as the “moderate ” in the race. Trump beat the Democratic candidate Joe Biden statewide with 53% in 2020. He won the Republicans with a smaller majority in 2024. That is not a good sign.
Trump may have won over 50% of the vote in a field that included a handful of others but as far as the Republican Party is concerned, he’s the incumbent (some think he’s secretly running everything even now) and he barely got a majority. Despite all the crowing about history being made, that’s not what Trump wanted.
For a campaign that’s supposed to be Trump’s thrilling return from exile it doesn’t appear to have particularly motivated the faithful. Yes, it was very cold on Monday night for the caucuses, below zero. But this is Iowa. They are used to extreme cold in January. And Dear Leader Donald Trump told them to go out and vote even if they were on death’s door and passed away afterwards. “It will be worth it!” he quipped. Even though there is supposed to be a ton of excitement among his MAGA followers, the turnout was abysmal.
Only 110,000 people turned out, which comes out to about 15% of registered Republicans. This means that he only won 7% of GOP voters in the state of Iowa, a MAGA stronghold. Considering that this is the beginning of his supposed big comeback, that’s pretty underwhelming.
The Des Moines Register poll which was released last weekend showed some other rather surprising numbers about the Republican electorate in Iowa. It found that if Trump is the nominee 11% said they would vote for Joe Biden while another 14% said they would vote for a third party candidate or someone else. That adds up to 25% of the party saying they will vote for someone else in the general election. That seems worth pondering. And we hear constantly about how all these criminal and civil proceedings just make his base love him more, but even more concerning for the Trump campaign should be the fact that according to the entrance polls, 32% of caucus participants believe that if Trump is convicted he will be unfit for the presidency.
If that’s the case in conservative Iowa, what do you suppose the numbers would be in some of the swing states?
There is no doubt that Trump dominates the Republican Party. In fact, MAGA is the Republican party and vice versa. GOP luminaries like Marco Rubio, who once called Trump a con man, endorsed Trump just before the caucuses, no doubt after looking at the final polls and determining that he wanted to be on the winning side early enough to curry favor with the boss. All the top GOP House members have rushed to join the party. He is their undisputed leader. But there is reason to question whether beyond his hardcore base and the craven politicians who seek his favor, the party he leads is the same party that voted for him in 2016 and 2020.
All this does raise the question: why are the national polls so close? In the last few months they’ve shown Trump and Biden neck and neck within the margin of error. You would think that if there was really a substantial faction of Republicans and GOP leaning Independents who aren’t going to vote for Trump that it would be showing up. But remember, the data we’ve been discussing was all from Iowa, a state that has been inundated with campaign ads and personal appearances by the Republican candidates for the past year. Unlike the rest of the country they’ve been forced to pay attention to this race. They are the canaries in the coal mine.
As evidence of how important this is, CNN reported that “the majority of undecided voters simply do not seem to believe – at least not yet – that Donald Trump is likely to be the Republican presidential nominee.” If you’re reading this you probably find that to be absurd. He’s the front runner! But most of America has tuned out the Trump show since he left office. When they realize that he’s going to be the nominee and the show is unavoidable again, they are going to see what at least a quarter of Iowa Republicans and all of Iowa’s Democrats have been seeing these past few months and it’s not pretty. Let’s just say, that show has not aged well.
The polling in New Hampshire, which is set to vote next week, suggests that voters there are not prepared to nominate Trump by acclamation either. In fact, there’s even a slight chance that Nikki Haley might edge him out. It certainly doesn’t look as if he’s going to get over 50%. These people have been tuned in just as long as those Iowans and a good number of them are not enthusiastic about the big Trump comeback. Soon the rest of the country will be tuned in as well.
Sure, Trump won Iowa and he’s highly likely to win New Hampshire and all the rest of the states as well. The Republican Party establishment will back him to the hilt and he’ll have plenty of money to wage his campaign. But there are some very big cracks in his coalition and they are becoming more and more pronounced. Remember, if the election is close, as it may very well be, it only takes a small number of GOP and Independent defections in the right states to put the country out of this misery at long last.
Has only read paper four times in recent months
First, if you didn’t know already, Sinclair Broadcasting is based in Baltimore, David Folkenflik reminds Threads readers:
Post by @davidfolkenflikView on Threads
About David D. Smith, Judd Legum adds:
Smith is the son of Sinclair founder Julian Sinclair Smith and, along with his brothers, controls the company. Sinclair, a publicly traded company, owns or operates 185 local television stations across 86 markets. A 2018 study published in the American Political Science Review found that stations purchased by Sinclair “coverage of national politics at the expense of local politics” and undergo “a significant rightward shift in the ideological slant of coverage.”
Smith is the executive chairman of Sinclair Inc., reports the startup Baltimore Banner.
[Smith] told New York Magazine in 2018 he considered print media “so left-wing as to be meaningless dribble.” Asked Tuesday during the meeting whether he stood by those comments now that he owns one of the most storied titles in American journalism, Smith said yes. Asked if he felt that way about the contents of his newspaper, Smith said “in many ways, yes,” according to people at the meeting.
Folkenflik again:
Smith said he paid nine figures, a seemingly staggering sum. (Bezos paid $250M for the WashPost.)
Unclear if the undisclosed figure includes the licensing fees required by Alden Global Capital, the hedge fund that sold the Sun. Smith will rely on Alden’s CMS and other services.
Smith announced the Sun was profitable and that he’d make it more profitable. He mocked Bezos, saying he didn’t intend to lose $50M a year on the paper.
(The Amazon founder is losing more than that.)
Smith was dismissive of the Sun’s journalism, saying it wasn’t publishing enough stories that readers were interested in, saying there was fraud in local government and schools.
And he pointed repeatedly to Sinclair’s local station WBFF’s flashy reports “Project Baltimore.”
The Sun won a Pulitzer in 2020 for exposing “a lucrative, undisclosed financial relationship between the city’s mayor and the public hospital system she helped to oversee.”
The new Sun owner deflected questions about his own political activities, calling himself apolitical.
Smith has been a major funder of GOP candidates; more recently he has funded far-right outfits like Project Veritas and Turning Point USA & financed local ballot initiatives.
Former Republican campaign operative Tim Miller observes, “This feels like a scene from a bad TV movie. Evil rich guy buys newspaper, announces to staff he doesn’t read and wants more racist cartoons.”
David Simon, former Sun reporter and co-creator of “The Wire,” responded on Formerly Twitter:
While never a paid employee, I wrote many op-eds for the local paper. I enjoyed having an editor to keep me from making stupid errors of grammar and usage. Since being bought by Gannett, the editorial staff I worked with is gone, the reporting staff has been slashed, the printing plant was shuttered, and my “local” paper is printed in another state.
For local investigative reporting, we now have the free, not-for-profit Asheville Watchdog, a hobby project of a band of retired journalists, mainly “unpaid part-time volunteers.” They include several Pulitzer winners & finalists, many from major Florida outlets and others from The New York Times, The Dallas Morning News, and The Financial Times of London.
This is what we’ve come to. Locally, at least, we are blessed.
Florida Democrats flip state House seat
With few exceptions (Hi, Hillsborough!) Democrats in Florida have not been showing us how it’s done lately. Maybe that’s changing (Daily Kos):
Florida Democrats kicked off the new year with a major victory as businessman and Navy veteran Tom Keen flipped a Republican-held seat in the state House―a development that represents Gov. Ron DeSantis’ second electoral humiliation in the span of 24 hours.
Keen defeated his Republican rival, Osceola County School Board member Erika Booth, 51-49 in Tuesday’s special election for the 35th House District, a constituency in the Orlando suburbs that Joe Biden carried 52-47. The Democrat will succeed Republican Fred Hawkins, whom Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed in June to serve as president of South Florida State College despite lacking any background in higher education.
“Republicans will hold an 84-36 supermajority in the state House,” writes Jeff Singer, with “a similarly lopsided edge in the state Senate.” Keen’s seat will be up for reelection in November, so he had best not get too comfortable.
Keen’s showing comes only a little over a year after DeSantis and other Republicans romped to victory in this district. According to Florida data analyst Matt Isbell, DeSantis carried the 35th District 56-43 in 2022, while GOP Sen. Marco Rubio took it by a 53-46 spread.
Both parties understood that Tuesday’s results could resonate far beyond the Florida House of Representatives, and they spent heavily to win here. Florida Politics wrote Tuesday that Booth had outraised Keen $323,000 to $121,000, but the official campaign committee of Florida House Democrats had outspent its GOP counterpart $541,000 to $207,000 through Jan. 11.
And the race may have been even more expensive than these figures suggest. Isbell estimates that Republicans altogether deployed $1.5 million, while Democrats put in $1.2 million, though he cautions that “so much money is hard to trace.”
That’s an insane amount in total spending for a state house seat where I’m from.
“Obviously, this is not the result we wanted- but I respect the will of the voters,” said Booth. “I congratulate Tom Keen on his win and a race well run.”
These days, that concession from a Republican deserves its own headline. Even if Booth ran on fighting “Sleepy Joe’s” “woke agenda” and on protecting our kids from indoctrination (which puzzlingly has something to do with immigration). She is also committed to election integrity, which during the Republican Iowa caucuses on Monday looked like popcorn buckets and grocery bags.
Keen ran a campaign on reproductive rights and the crisis in Florida property insurance.
WFTV-9 reports:
Digging into the numbers shows Keen overperformed with non-party affiliated voters, winning roughly 65% of the NPA vote, enough to overcome a raw vote lead in the race where Republicans cast some 900 more votes in the contest. Keen also overperformed in Orange County, where he beat Booth by 1,859 votes.
That 65% is the sort of result Democrats see in more urban counties. It’s flipped in “Trump country.”
Remember when Ann Coulter used to ecstatically describe Donald Trump as an “alpha male” who was going to set the country straight? She even wrote a book called In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome! Well, she’s been off of him for quite some time because he failed to build the wall. And she doesn’t seem to believe him when he and his henchman Stephen Miller promise to deport millions of people who look like they might not be citizens.
She’s going after him and his voters on twitter and it’s kind of hilarious. She doesn’t think he can beat Biden:
“How many people who voted for Biden in 2020 have since switched to Trump?”
If there are ANY, it’s a lot fewer than:
1) those who voted for Trump but who’ve since died (older white people);
2) immigrants who turned 18 in the last 4 yrs and will vote (minorities);
3) Republicans who voted for Trump in 2020, but have since changed their minds over, e.g. his behavior in the GA runoffs, and the 2022 “red wave” —
… losing election after election for the GOP by demanding that Republicans run on the “stolen 2020 election,” e.g. Blake Masters, Kari Lake, Doug Mastriano, Adam Laxalt, Don Bolduc, Joe Kent, etc.
Then she really let them have it:
Trump voters are morons cont’
NYT: <<“I prefer Trump because Democrats are trying to find any way they can to jail him,” she said.>>
Dems lie about Trump, THEREFORE he’d make a great president!
There aren’t enough drugs in the world that could make me that stupid.
Granted, her reasoning is typically absurd. But it’s interesting to see Trump hit from the right in this way. And frankly, it’s helpful. The idea that Trump was a great president has been baked into many voters’ minds and it’s useful to have someone like Coulter making the case that he wasn’t — even if it’s for the wrong reasons.
Bravo.
(In case you haven’t seen it, this ad is sending up a viral video shared by Trump all over social media.)
Zeynap Tufekci studies authoritarian movements around the world. She took a look at the MAGA movement for the NY Times and it’s quite interesting. (Gift link, here.) An excerpt:
Cheryl Sharp, a 47-year-old sales associate who was among the many Iowans turned away from a filled-to-capacity Trump rally last month, sounded pretty confident she knew why Donald Trump was so appealing to many voters. For her and many others, she said, his most important quality was strength: He had the fortitude to keep the country safe, avoid new wars and ensure the economy hummed along.
“You want someone strong, globally, so that it creates mutual respect with other countries, and maybe a little bit of fear,” she told me. “Yes, it’s true, not everyone likes him. It’s good not to be liked. Being strong is better.” Sharp readily conceded that not everything Trump said was great, but she saw that as part of the right personality to be president. “You gotta be a little crazy, maybe, to make sure other countries respect and fear us,” she said. “And he can run the country like a business, and they will leave him alone.”
Three days later, inside a Trump rally in New Hampshire, Scott Bobbitt and his wife, Heather, also brought up Trump’s strength. “He commands respect and fear around the world,” Scott Bobbitt told me. “Many people may be driven by fear of him because he’ll do what he says he’s going to do, and he’s not afraid to talk about it. And I think that that’s very powerful. That does protect our country, and he’ll stand up instead of rolling over.” […]
In my talks with more than 100 voters, no one mentioned the word “authoritarian.” But that was no surprise — many everyday people don’t think in those terms. Focusing solely on these labels can miss the point.
Authoritarian leaders project qualities that many voters — not just Trump voters — admire: strength, a sense of control, even an ends-justify-the-means leadership style. Our movie-hero presidents, Top Gun pilots and crusading lawyers often take matters into their own hands or break the rules in ways that we cheer. No, they are not classic authoritarians jailing opponents, but they have something in common with Trump: They are seen as having special or singular strengths, an “I alone can fix it” power.
What I heard from voters drawn to Trump was that he had a special strength in making the economy work better for them than Biden has, and that he was a tough, “don’t mess with me” absolutist, which they see as helping to prevent new wars. His supporters also see him as an authentic strongman who is not a typical politician, and Trump sells that message very well to his base.
In New Hampshire, Jackie Fashjian made the case to me that during Trump’s presidency, “there weren’t any active wars going on except for Afghanistan, which he did not start. He started no new wars. Our economy was great. Our gas prices were under 2 bucks a gallon. It’s just common sense to me. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
At the same rally, Debbie Finch leaped to her feet when Trump walked into the arena, and like many around us, she started filming. Finch defies stereotypes of Trump supporters: She’s Black and is concerned with racism, which she says greatly affects her life and that of her children. She doesn’t deny there are racists among Trump’s supporters, but as far as she’s concerned, that goes for Democrats, too. She told me she supports Trump because the economy was better under him. She doesn’t care about Trump’s indictments; the justice system has been derailing Black men forever, she says, and she predicts more and more minority voters will cast their ballots for him. (Trump does poll higher among minorities than past Republican presidents in the modern era and his current competitors for the nomination.)
Trump’s vulgar language, his penchant for insults (“Don’t call him a fat pig,” he said about Chris Christie) and his rhetoric about political opponents (promising to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country”) are seen as signs of authenticity and strength by his supporters. All the politicians say things like that in private, countless Trump supporters asserted to me and argued that it’s just Trump who’s strong and honest enough to say it out loud — for them, a sign that he’s honest.
…Many Trump supporters told me that had Trump been president, the war in Ukraine wouldn’t have happened because he would have been strong enough to be feared by Vladimir Putin or smart enough to make a deal with him, if necessary. Neither would Hamas have dared attack Israel, a few added. Their proof was that during Trump’s presidency, these wars indeed did not happen. Of course, the more relevant question is whether these wars would have happened during a second Trump term — a counterfactual that can’t be proved or disproved.
They rationalize everything backwards to their support for Trump. It’s a confusing world and he makes it simple for them.
Like many of these right-wing populists, Trump leans heavily on the message that he alone is strong enough to keep America peaceful and prosperous in a scary world. Right after his recent landslide re-election, Orban said his party had won despite everyone being against them, and now he would ensure that Hungary would be “strong, rich and green.” In Iowa, Trump praised Orban himself before telling a cheering crowd: “For four straight years, I kept America safe. I kept Israel safe. I kept Ukraine safe, and I kept the entire world safe.”
As he spoke such words at various rallies, the crowds often interrupted him with applause and cheering. From another politician, such claims might have sounded so implausibly grandiose as to fall flat. But from Trump, these statements often resulted in the crowds leaping to their feet (actually, some rallygoers never sat down) and interrupting him with applause and cheering.
That’s charisma. Charisma is an underrated aspect of political success — and it’s not necessarily a function of political viewpoint. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama oozed it, for example, and so does Trump.
Charisma is so central to politics that Max Weber, a founder of sociology, included charismatic authority (along with legal authority, as in republics and democracies; and traditional authority, as in feudalism or monarchy) as one of three types of power people see as legitimate. Charismatic leaders, Weber wrote, “have a certain quality of an individual personality, by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men,” and is sought as a leader, especially when people feel the times are troubled.
She asked them all about January 6th and democracy and they all had reasons why it wasn’t what we all know it was and why Trump was blameless. I think you have to grapple with the fact that the people who love a strongman are either willing to lie to themselves or are just plain dumb.
It’s easy to see why Trump’s political message can override concerns about the process of democracy for many. What’s a bit of due process overstepped here, a trampled emoluments clause there, when all politicians are believed to be corrupt and fractured information sources pump very different messages about reality?
Politicians projecting strength at the expense of the rules of liberal democracy isn’t a new phenomenon in the United States, or the world. Thomas Jefferson worried about it. So did Plato. Perhaps acknowledging that Trump’s appeal isn’t that mysterious can help people grapple with its power.
To be honest, this piece doesn’t really answer that for me. I have heard all this before from Trump voters for years now. They think he’s “strong” and “tough” and he alone can fix it blah, blah, blah. And I realize that some people think he has charisma. But this cult-like devotion goes far beyond this explanation. They just like him, not his “policies” or his agenda or even what he stands for. He’s all over the place. He’s hardly a stereotypical tough guy — he wears make-up and has the wildest hair-do this side of Ru Paul’s drag race. He’s a sucker for flattery and shows weakness every time he goes on the world stage. He’s a punchline.
I think it’s at least partly explained because some people have no bullshit detector and when they hear him bragging and whining about being persecuted they just believe it because they want to believe it and don’t have any innate skepticism.
They are marks and Trump is a con-man. It’s no more mysterious than that.