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How about moving the middle?

October 31 is a good day for exploring magical thinking, eh?

We oh-so sensible American lefties look down our noses at QAnon loons and their belief that a cabal of adrenochrome-drinking, baby-eating pedophiles secretly run the world. When everyone knows “the private-equity industry is devouring” public companies at an alarming rate. In secret, “with almost no regulatory or public scrutiny,” Rogé Karma explains in The Atlantic:

A private economy is one in which companies can more easily get away with wrongdoing and an economic crisis can take everyone by surprise. And to a startling degree, a private economy is what we already have.

[…]

Across the economy, private-equity firms are known for laying off workers, evading regulations, reducing the quality of services, and bankrupting companies while ensuring that their own partners are paid handsomely. The veil of secrecy makes all of this easier to execute and harder to stop.

Investors hunt weak companies, consume them, and jobs disappear overnight with no Van Helsings stepping up to stop them. But I’m stretching the metaphor.

Brian Klaas explains (also in The Atlantic) that belief in magical forces resides in populations far beyond QAnon:

Roughly two-thirds of Latvians, half of Brazilians, a third of Spaniards, and a fifth of French people self-report a belief in witchcraft. In the United States, the figure is 16.4 percent—one in six Americans. And in the United States, unlike, say, in France, a subset of those who believe in demonic forces and witchcraft have become a potent political force, exerting significant sway on right-wing elected officials.

The reality-based community insists in the face of evidence that the crazies respond to logic, data and sound policy “rather than to the knock-on effects of widely held conspiracy theories or other nonrational beliefs.” Feelings trump facts. Sorry.

Klaas writes:

In other words, most of us who professionally study human societies—or try to explain political systems in the press—have a severe case of rationality bias: We think of ourselves as purely rational agents, and we too often wrongly assume that everyone else thinks about the world the same way we do. This assumption distorts our understanding of how people actually make decisions, why they behave the way they do, and, by extension, how and why big social and political changes take place.

Figures vary, but by most estimates, about 85 out of every 100 people in the world believe in God. And yet, an analysis of top political-science-research journals found that only 13 out of every 1,000 articles published were primarily about religion (a rate of just over 1 percent). That figure is absurdly low—professional malpractice for a field that attempts to explain political systems. But the scholarship is even thinner on disorganized but widespread belief systems, such as acceptance of the power of witchcraft. The analysis didn’t provide data on how many research articles focused on other forms of supernatural belief, including shamanism, animism, and the like, which we can safely assume have received even lower billing. The upshot is that we political scientists have an enormous blind spot. Pundits are even worse: When’s the last time you heard a serious cable-news discussion about the political influence of witchcraft and demonic forces? A serious rift divides the way professional analysts explain political systems and the way voters within those systems actually see the world, whether in the United States or in societies where such seemingly strange beliefs are more openly discussed.

The Bulwark’s Jonathan Last finds that beliefs about Joe Biden are wildly out of step with “Based Joe Biden.” Among a certain class of liberal pundit, the reason Democrats have lost ground with non-college voters has something to do with notions floating around the social media fringe: decriminalizing illegal immigration, defunding the police, transgender issues, etc.

In fact, Last argues, Biden’s administration resembles none of those:

Here are some actual policies Biden has enacted in the real world during his administration:

• Building a portion of Trump’s border wall
• Adding $37 billion in federal money to support local law enforcement
• Approving the Willow oil project in Alaska
• Standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Israel

Too far left? How about these?

• Killed Ayman al-Zawahri
• Bitch-slapped Vladimir Putin back to the ‘70s
• Blew up a bunch of Iranian Revolutionary Guard troops in Syria
• Secured the release of U.S. hostages from Iran and then re-froze the ransom money
• Spent a bunch of money to kickstart semiconductor manufacturing as a way to (a) bring jobs back to the United States and (b) create a hedge against Chinese aggression
• Passed Joe Manchin’s bipartisan infrastructure law with tons of spending for red states and rural areas
• Passed gun reform so moderate that he got 14 Republicans in the House and 15 in the Senate to vote for it

So what’s the deal? Why do non-college voters perceive Biden and Democrats as out of step with mainstream America? Is Biden really too far left? Is the problem bad comms strategy (per Matt Yglesias) and Biden needs to punch more hippies? Or is it voters who are out of touch?

Last writes:

Voters literally believe that we are in an economic environment as bad as the Great Recession of 2008/2009. There’s no way to argue people out of their vibes; no policy or metric you can point to. My feelings don’t care about your facts.

If those feelings are stubbornly immovable, Last suggests, “Orange Man Bad might be Biden’s best strategy.” Emphasize all the ways in which Trump’s policies are the ones out of step.

Still, it’s somewhat magical to believe that what moves voters comes primarily from the top down. A reader asked the other day why, if he receives a dozen fundraising emails a day, Democrats don’t use those lists “to carefully explain what they intend to do in Congress, foreign policy, and, generally, for the good of the American people.”

Long story short, there’s no one in charge of coordinated messaging. Republicans aren’t any better. They just have billionaire-funded media outlets and a dozen right-wing think tanks to tell Republicans what their message is and to help disseminate it.

But an idea a friend posed has potential. There are tons of small, understaffed, rural weekly papers hungry for free content. When I peruse them, there are frequently op-eds from right-wingers and none from the left. (Letters to the Editor from far-flung readers are less like to see print.) It’s worth a try. I’ll be gathering their contact info here in N.C. I may have to get back into the op-ed business.

You can’t win if you don’t show up to play.

Happy Halloween.

This is big. Even if nobody’s talking about it.

Huzzah!

A six-week wave of strikes that hobbled the three largest U.S. automakers has resulted in tentative contract agreements that would give workers their biggest pay raises in decades while avoiding a protracted work stoppage that could have damaged the economy.

On Monday, General Motors and the United Automobile Workers reached a deal that mirrored agreements the union had reached in recent days with Ford Motor and Stellantis, the parent company of Ram, Jeep and Chrysler. The terms will be costly for the automakers as they undertake a switch to electric vehicles, while setting the stage for labor strife and demands for higher pay at nonunion automakers like Tesla and Toyota.

The tentative agreements, which still require ratification by union members, also appeared to be a win for President Biden, who had risked political capital by picketing with striking workers at a G.M. facility in Michigan last month.

“They have reached a historic agreement,” Mr. Biden said Monday after speaking with Shawn Fain, the U.A.W. president. The deals, the president said, “reward autoworkers who gave up much to keep the industry working and going during the global financial crisis more than a decade ago.”

The strike stretched longer than White House officials would have liked, but was resolved before causing significant shortages of new cars and trucks that might have frustrated voters already angry about inflation.

“The near-term impact of this strike will be relatively minor,” said Karl Brauer, executive analyst at iSeeCars.com, an online auto sales site.

But Mr. Brauer warned that, in the long term, Ford, G.M. and Stellantis would have to raise car prices to maintain their profits. Their competitors will follow suit to take advantage of the opportunity to earn more money, he said. “This is going to make cars more expensive,” Mr. Brauer added.

G.M.’s chief executive, Mary T. Barra, said in a statement on Monday that the tentative agreement “reflects the contributions of the team while enabling us to continue to invest in our future and provide good jobs in the U.S.”

Potentially the most far-reaching effect of the strike could be on manufacturing workers not represented by the U.A.W. The contracts the union negotiated are the latest in a series of prominent victories for organized labor, including Hollywood writers, UPS workers and even some university employees.

Mr. Fain has portrayed the tentative agreements as a signal for the union to begin organizing drives at Tesla, which dominates the fast-growing electric car business, and foreign-owned companies like Toyota, Honda and BMW that have large nonunion operations in the United States. The union will “organize like we’ve never organized before,” Mr. Fain said Sunday.

Companies without unions can expect the U.A.W. to deploy the same hardball tactics that Mr. Fain used against Ford, G.M. and Stellantis, including rhetorical attacks on multimillion-dollar executive pay and hourly wages that have failed to keep pace with high inflation.

Even if those union campaigns fail, as they often have in the past, they may prompt some employers to pre-emptively give workers raises.

“This agreement is going to have a trickle-down effect,” said Helen Rella, who specializes in employment litigation at Wilk Auslander, a New York law firm.

Ford agreed on a tentative pact on Wednesday. Stellantis followed on Saturday. Details of all the agreements had not yet been published, but they include a 25 percent pay increase over the next four and a half years and provisions to make sure the raises are not eaten up by inflation.

The top U.A.W. wage would rise to more than $40 over the life of the new contracts, from $32 an hour. That would allow employees working 40 hours a week to earn about $84,000 a year.

The agreements provide at least some protections to workers as electric vehicles replace gasoline models, and jobs at battery factories supplant jobs making components for combustion engine vehicles.

In Ford’s case, workers at battery factories that the company plans to build in Tennessee and Michigan would be covered by the terms of the union contract. (Ford suspended work at the Michigan plant in September, saying it was not sure it could manufacture batteries there at a competitive price.)

The U.A.W. said its new contract with G.M. would cover workers at Ultium Cells, a battery-making joint venture with LG Energy Solution. One Ultium factory, in Ohio, is up and running, and two others are under construction in Tennessee and Michigan.

Those Starbursts* are tasting very sour these days:

A self-proclaimed MAGA Republican plans to run against Kevin McCarthy for his House seat, a primary challenge that represents the latest fallout from his speakership ouster.

And David Giglio is praising the eight Republicans who voted to remove the former speaker, as the GOP challenger prepares to launch his run for California’s 20th District Monday morning.

“Kevin McCarthy was removed as Speaker by 8 courageous members of his own party for failing to keep his promises and capitulating to Joe Biden and the radical Democrats,” Giglio said in his press release, first obtained by POLITICO. “Kevin McCarthy must be defeated.”

McCarthy was booted from the speakership by those eight, led by Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), nearly a month ago — a move that was widely criticized within the House GOP. That spiraled into a chaotic 22 days without a speaker, until Mike Johnson won the gavel last week, with a Nov. 17 shutdown deadline on the immediate horizon.

McCarthy, a Bakersfield native, has previously cruised to victory in his district. He’s a prolific fundraiser and would be difficult to beat, if he chooses to run for reelection, even after being stripped of the gavel. He has vowed that he plans to run again after POLITICO previously reported he was considering early retirement, but that hasn’t tamped down speculation about whether he stays through the rest of his term and beyond.

Giglio, who has a business selling sports cards and memorabilia online, according to his campaign website, previously ran for California’s 13th district, but he ultimately lost to Rep. John Duarte (R-Calif.). That district is more of a battleground than McCarthy’s, which former President Donald Trump won by 25 points in 2020.

McCarthy does not currently have any GOP challengers who have reported raising money with the Federal Election Commission, but more could join Giglio. California has a jungle-primary system, which means the top-two vote getters advance to the general election, regardless of party.

Trump won his district with 53% in 2020. Kev won by 65%. It seems unlikely that he’ll be beaten but you never know with this jungle primary system.

*In case you forgot, MyKev got Trump’s attention and favor when he noticed that he only liked the red and pink ones so he had an intern get rid of all the other flavors and put them in a jar for the Dear Leader. That’s how the puerile president and his faithful servant MyKev became close.

Meet Maga-Mike’s extremist wife

She’s a Christian “counselor” and it’s just scary:

Kelly Johnson, the wife of the newly elected House speaker, ran a Christian counseling service that is affiliated with an organization that advocates against abortion and homosexuality and whose practices are built on the teachings of the Greek physician Hippocrates.

It is not clear if Kelly Johnson will continue her practice. Not long after Rep. Mike Johnson became House speaker last week, Kelly Johnson’s website became inaccessible. Johnson, her husband of more than 24 years, rose overnight from a virtually obscure House lawmaker to the position that is second in line to the presidency.  The couple is deeply religious; both Kelly and Mike Johnson previously worked with religious organizations and causes the religious right advocates for. Along with her counseling, Johnson is also listed as an advisor to the Louisiana Right for Life, an anti-abortion organization. 

Kelly Johnson’s website listed a specialty in Temperament counseling, a specialty that she received training for from an organization founded in the 1980s by a Christian couple. According to the materials the organization provides, the National Christian Counselor’s Association is adamant that its offerings take place outside of more traditional state-licensed settings so that counselors and clients can be fully engaged through their faith.

“The state licensed professional counselor in certain states is forbidden to pray, read or refer to the Holy Scriptures, counsel against things such as homosexuality, abortion, etc,” a catalog of the organization’s offerings states. “Initiating such counsel could be considered unethical by the state.”

The temperament-based approach breaks people down into five types: Melancholy, Choleric, Sanguine, Supine, and Phlegmatic. Richard and Phyllis Arno, who established a test to identify people’s temperament, founded the National Christian Counselors Association in the early 1980s. They and their advocates prefer the term temperament over personalities as the term personality is characterized as a “mask” while temperaments are “inborn” and thus inherent to each individual regardless of outside influences such as parenting. Their work is largely based on Hippocrates’ view that there were four temperaments.

Tim LaHaye, a controversial and influential figure on the evangelical right, pointed to Hippocrates’ beliefs when he began his own work in the 60s and 70s. The Arnos cited LaHaye in one of their books. LaHaye was vehemently opposed to LGBTQ people, writing an entire book on why he believed gay people were depressed because homosexuality was immoral and antithetical to the Bible. According to The New York Times, LaHaye’s anti-Catholic and antisemitic writings led him to step down from an honorary position leading Congressman Jack Kemp’s 1988 GOP primary campaign. LaHaye later pushed President George W. Bush’s election in 2000 and worked with then-Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee in the 2008 presidential primaries. LeHaye became enormously popular and wealthy later in his life after he penned a series of apocalyptic novels. 

One post for an affiliated counselor on the organization’s website describes a deliverance ministry in addition to temperament testing. Using this approach to drive demons out of a client makes sure the person is “better able to receive and act upon godly counsel, including recommendations from the APS profiles.” (APS profiles are the abbreviation for the couple’s temperament testing system.)

Not all Christian counseling is created the same. Some more traditional counselors may add Biblical elements to science-based approaches, while others counseling might take the form of pastoral guidance, and some reject more science-based approaches in favor of a faith-based model that emphasizes the power of God and scripture. 

It’s not entirely clear where Johnson falls on this informal scale. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Elementary Education from Louisiana Tech and a Master’s in Education from Centenary College. In a personal testimonial, Johnson wrote about “deliverance through extraordinary trials, including her recovery from a broken neck in a 2007 car accident and other serious health challenges.” Her counseling, which had a varying fee structure, was affiliated with Cypress Baptist Church in Benton, La., which according to Louisiana Baptist Message is where the couple attends services. Their church, in keeping with the denomination’s views, proclaims it is welcoming to all, but makes it clear it “recognizes only the biblical definition of marriage” and only sex through marriage.

The organization does advise counselors to follow some elements of more traditional counseling, including maintaining the confidentiality of what is discussed. Counselors are also advised to hold malpractice insurance.  A representative for the organization did not immediately return Insider’s request for comment.

The Johnsons have both publicly professed their “biblical worldview.” The future House speaker rose to fame in the 1990s when he and Kelly became de facto spokespeople for “covenant marriages,” a special agreement offered in some states that makes it more difficult for married couples to get a divorce. Johnson later cut his teeth as a litigator seeking to advance school prayer and defend bans on same-sex marriage. He also served in a leadership role with the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the US. Before his rapid political rise, Johnson wrote frequent guest columns for his local newspaper in which he questioned LGBT Americans, as CNN previously reported. At one point, he wrote in favor of criminalizing gay sex.

Johnson said on Thursday night that he now views the issue of same-sex marriage as settled law after the Supreme Court’s landmark Obergefell v. Hodges ruling. He said he has nothing personally against LGBTQ people, he just questions “their lifestyle choices.”

These people are Christian fundamentalist weirdos. But then recall that Amy Coney Barrett lives with some kind of fringe cult so this seems to be mainstream in the GOP these days.

DeSantis tried to pass Trump in his own lane and lost control

The cult wasn’t buying it. And neither was anyone else:

Some moderate Republican voters here recoiled at ads that Ron DeSantis’s allies started running last month broadcastingthe Florida governor’s vows to use deadly force at the southern border.

“I don’t like the fact that we’re going to start murdering people,” said Becki Kuhns, 71, who is eager for an alternative to Donald Trump and brought up the commercials unprompted.

Down the road at a cigar bar in Nashua, where regulars talk politics and watch debates together, a different DeSantis problem came into focus: Trumpsupporters were unmoved by DeSantis’s pitch that he’d deliver the former president’s agenda more effectively.

The people he’s targeting “belong to Trump,” said Howard Ray, 43, who went to a DeSantis event but wasn’t persuaded. “He comes across kind of hard right.”

He added:“Those types of people are in Trump’s camp, and they’re not moving.”

DeSantis began the year widely viewed as theRepublican with the best chance to build awinning coalition against theformer president — the Trump alternative who could entice Trump critics yet was alsoin many ways a continuation of Trump’s “America First” platform. But DeSantis’s support has shrunk dramatically since then, erodingon both ends of the party spectrum, interviews with dozensof early state voters, as well as pollsters and strategists, show.

The GOP minority that disapproves of Trump — and thatfavored DeSantis before he and most other candidates announced — has splintered to other hopefuls. Boosted by them and by independents, former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley has surpassed DeSantis in New Hampshire and, in one poll released Monday, pulled even with the Florida governor in Iowa — where DeSantis has poured his resources.

At the same time, DeSantis has struggled amongTrump supporters, losing ground with those who approve of the former president, who has used his four criminal indictments to re-energize a base that once looked readier to move on from him. And DeSantis has struggled on both ends to make personal appeals that resonate, with a stiffer presentation than freewheeling Trump.

Now, DeSantis is left in a perilous position with just over two months until the first nominating contest, mired in a second tier of candidates well behind Trump.

Despite his appeals to the Trump base, DeSantis has at times tried to offer something for everyone, eliciting sometimes discordant descriptions of his candidacy from voters.

Tosome in Iowa and New Hampshire he was a “fresh voice” and a “true conservative” unlike Trump. To others he was “America First” or, to those who disdained him, a “Trump wannabe.” They said he stood for “freedom” and “families” and fighting wokeness in schools, with his record in Florida sometimes defining him despite his months-long efforts to talk in national terms.

DeSantis’s average support in national polls of the GOP primary dropped from more than 30 percent in March to 24 percent in May, when he officially joined the race, to 14 percent today.

Faced with that slide, DeSantis’s team has focused most of its attentionon Iowa, where it hopesintensive campaigning and a sophisticated ground operation will turn the tide against Trump. They note that a pro-Trump super PAC is resuming ad spending there against DeSantis — after earlier signaling that it was focused on the general election — and that polls show a growing share of voters considering candidates besides Trump, who holds a large polling lead.

But Haley, rather than DeSantis, has been gaining there, with a highly-anticipated Des Moines Register/NBC News/Mediacom poll on Monday showing both Haley and DeSantis at 16 percent and Trump in the lead at 43. In a sign of Haley’s rise, a pro-DeSantis super PAC has started to air ads against her.

Advisers and allies argue that Haley appeals to the anti-Trump wing for stances that alienate the rest of the GOP and that DeSantis is still the only candidate who can bridge those camps — with most of his voters migrating to Trump if he drops out. Anti-Trump voters will eventually coalesce behind whoever can beat the former president, they say.

“The reality is this party is going to nominate somebody … that has a record of delivering on America First principles,” DeSantis said last week in New Hampshire, embracing that core identity even as he underlined moderate-friendly themes like “economic vitality.”

Speaking to voters at a bar in Creston, Iowa, this month, DeSantis said he would enact Trump’s ideas and take them further. He said he would “clean house” at the Justice Department, push to end the war in Ukraine and finish the wall at the southern border. He said that he would “make Mexico pay for it” by charging fees on remittances and that if drug traffickers tried to break through, they would wind up “stone cold dead.”

Trump backers ‘just not voting for him’

As DeSantis launched his campaign in May, adviser Ryan Tyson laid out the strategy to wealthy fundraisers who gathered at the Four Seasons Hotel in Miami. “Trump without the crazy,” was how supporters saw him, Tyson said.

The “Never Trump” voters in the party were saying DeSantis was too much like Trump, he added, but they made up about 20 percent of the GOP. Tyson was more focused on what he called “soft” Trump voters. “These voters here in this segment are gonna collapse to the governor,” he predicted.

Trump has instead consolidated support, surging back from a low point after last year’s midterm elections, when many Republicans blamed him for their losses and took note of DeSantis’s landslide reelection victory. Indictments on a slew of criminal charges, starting in March, galvanized the base and rallied the party back to Trump’s side, all as the former president attacked DeSantis. “I am your retribution,” Trump has told voters.

Some DeSantis allies debate whether he should have announced earlier, to capitalize on his post-midterms momentum. Maybe, they say, he should have hit Trump hard from the start. They lament certain comments — like DeSantis’s dismissive statement about a “territorial dispute” in Ukraine — as unforced errors. But mostly they view Trump’s resurgence as a force beyond DeSantis’s control.

“To this day he has a very high favorable rating among those favorable to Trump,” said Charles Franklin, who directs the Marquette Law School Poll. “They’re just not voting for him.”

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Dennis Martin, for instance, worries that Trump’s indictments will be a distraction and even says, “I don’t like Trump as a person.” The 57-year-old from a suburb of Des Moines is considering Trump, DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy, a first-time candidate who has also embraced the Trump agenda.

But Martin is also outraged at the charges against Trump, thinks he did “a hell of a job as president” and says he’s leaning slightly toward supporting Trump again.

Heading to breakfast in nearby Ankeny, David Melssen said he’d been following DeSantis’s response to the war between Hamas and Israel. “Great man. He sent an airplane to bring back Americans,” he said immediately when a reporter mentioned DeSantis’s name.

Asked if he could vote for DeSantis, he said: “Yeah, if Trump decides that Ron DeSantis is the guy to back.”

The Trumpers are in cult and they aren’t abandoning their Dear Leader for a usurper. And the few Republicans who don’t like Trump aren’t going to vote for an extremist jerk like DeSantis because that’s exactly what they don’t like about Trump. What lane did he think he was running in anyway? His strategy was always flawed.

If he thought he was just doing it to be the fallback in case Trump falls over on the golf course and breaks a hip, he’s now revealed himself to be a creepy weirdo so I don’t think that would work either. And anyone who thinks Trump is going to endorse DeSantis is smoking something very, very potent.

He’s also unstable

The NY Times:

One of Donald J. Trump’s new comedic bits at his rallies features him impersonating the current commander in chief with an over-the-top caricature mocking President Biden’s age.

With droopy eyelids and mouth agape, Mr. Trump stammers and mumbles. He squints. His arms flap. He shuffles his feet and wanders laggardly across the stage. A burst of laughter and applause erupts from the crowd as he feigns confusion by turning and pointing to invisible supporters, as if he does not realize his back is to them.

But his recent campaign events have also featured less deliberate stumbles. Mr. Trump has had a string of unforced gaffes, garble and general disjointedness that go beyond his usual discursive nature, and that his Republican rivals are pointing to as signs of his declining performance.

On Sunday in Sioux City, Iowa, Mr. Trump wrongly thanked supporters of Sioux Falls, a South Dakota town about 75 miles away, correcting himself only after being pulled aside onstage and informed of the error.

It was strikingly similar to a fictional scene that Mr. Trump acted out earlier this month, pretending to be Mr. Biden mistaking Iowa for Idaho and needing an aide to straighten him out.

In recent weeks, Mr. Trump has also told supporters not to vote, and claimed to have defeated President Barack Obama in an election. He has praised the collective intellect of an Iranian-backed militant group that has long been an enemy of both Israel and the United States, and repeatedly mispronounced the name of the armed group that rules Gaza.

“This is a different Donald Trump than 2015 and ’16 — lost the zip on his fastball,” Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida told reporters last week while campaigning in New Hampshire.

“In 2016, he was freewheeling, he’s out there barnstorming the country,” Mr. DeSantis added. “Now, it’s just a different guy. And it’s sad to see.”

It is unclear if Mr. Trump’s recent slips are connected to his age. He has long relied on an unorthodox speaking style that has served as one of his chief political assets, establishing him, improbably, among the most effective communicators in American politics.

But as the 2024 race for the White House heats up, Mr. Trump’s increased verbal blunders threaten to undermine one of Republicans’ most potent avenues of attack, and the entire point of his onstage pantomime: the argument that Mr. Biden is too old to be president.

Mr. Biden, a grandfather of seven, is 80. Mr. Trump, who has 10 grandchildren, is 77.

Even though only a few years separate the two men in their golden years, voters view their vigor differently. Recent polls have found that roughly two out of three voters say Mr. Biden is too old to serve another four-year term, while only about half say the same about Mr. Trump.

If that gap starts to narrow, it’s Mr. Trump who has far more to lose in a general-election matchup.

According to a previously unreported finding in an August survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, 43 percent of U.S. voters said both men were “too old to effectively serve another four-year term as president.” Among those voters, 61 percent said they planned to vote for Mr. Biden, compared with 13 percent who said the same about Mr. Trump.

Last week, similar findings emerged in a Franklin & Marshall College poll of registered voters in Pennsylvania, one of the most closely watched 2024 battlegrounds.

According to the poll, 43 percent of Pennsylvanians said both men were “too old to serve another term.” An analysis of that data for The New York Times showed that Mr. Biden led Mr. Trump among those voters by 66 percent to 11 percent. Among all voters in the state, the two men were in a statistical tie.

Berwood Yost, the director of the Franklin & Marshall poll, said that Mr. Biden’s wide lead among voters who were worried about both candidates’ ages could be explained partly by the fact that Democrats are much more likely than Republicans to identify age as a problem for their party’s leader.

“The age issue is one that if Trump gets tarred with the same brush as Biden, it really hurts him,” Mr. Yost said.

Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, noted that the former president maintained a commanding lead in Republican primary polls and that in the general election, several recent polls had shown Mr. Trump with slight leads over Mr. Biden.

“None of these false narratives has changed the dynamics of the race at all — President Trump still dominates, because people know he’s the strongest candidate,” Mr. Cheung said. “The contrast is that Biden is falling onstage, mumbling his way through a speech, being confused on where to walk, and tripping on the steps of Air Force One. There’s no correcting that, and that will be seared into voter’s minds.”

Mr. Trump’s rhetorical skills have long relied on a mix of brute force and a seemingly preternatural instinct for the imprecise. That beguiling combination — honed from a lifetime of real estate negotiations, New York tabloid backbiting and prime-time reality TV stardom — often means that voters hear what they want to hear from him.

Trump supporters leave his speeches energized. Undecided voters who are open to his message can find what they’re looking for in his pitch. Opponents are riled, and when they furiously accuse him of something they heard but that he didn’t quite precisely say, Mr. Trump turns the criticism into a data point that he’s unfairly persecuted — and the entire cycle begins anew.

But Mr. Trump’s latest missteps aren’t easily classified as calculated vagueness.

During a Sept. 15 speech in Washington, a moment after declaring Mr. Biden “cognitively impaired, in no condition to lead,” the former president warned that America was on the verge of World War II, which ended in 1945.

In the same speech, he boasted about presidential polls showing him leading Mr. Obama, who is not, in fact, running for an illegal third term in office. He erroneously referred to Mr. Obama again during an anecdote about winning the 2016 presidential race.

“We did it with Obama,” Mr. Trump said. “We won an election that everybody said couldn’t be won, we beat …” He paused for a beat as he seemed to realize his mistake. “Hillary Clinton.”

At a Florida rally on Oct. 11, days after a brutal terrorist attack that killed hundreds of Israelis, Mr. Trump criticized the country for being unprepared, lashing out at its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Mr. Trump appears to have soured on Mr. Netanyahu, once a close ally, after the Israeli leader congratulated Mr. Biden for winning the 2020 election.

In the same speech, Mr. Trump relied on an inaccurate timeline of events in the Middle East to criticize Mr. Biden’s handling of foreign affairs and, in the process, drew headlines for praising Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group.

Last week, while speaking to supporters at a rally in New Hampshire, Mr. Trump praised Viktor Orban, the strongman prime minister of Hungary, but referred to him as “the leader of Turkey,” a country hundreds of miles away. He quickly corrected himself.

At another point in the same speech, Mr. Trump jumped into a confusing riff that ended with him telling supporters, “You don’t have to vote — don’t worry about voting,” adding, “We’ve got plenty of votes.”

Mr. Cheung, the Trump campaign spokesman, said the former president was “clearly talking about election integrity and making sure only legal votes are counted.”

In a speech on Saturday, Mr. Trump sounded as if he were talking about hummus when he mispronounced Hamas (huh-maas), the Islamist group that governs the Gaza Strip and carried out one of the largest attacks on Israel in decades on Oct. 7.

The former president’s pronunciation drew the attention of the Biden campaign, which posted the video clip on social media, noting that Mr. Trump sounded “confused.”

But even Republican rivals have sensed an opening on the age issue against Mr. Trump, who has maintained an unshakable hold on the party despite a political record that would in years past have compelled conservatives to consider another standard-bearer. Mr. Trump lost control of Congress as president; was voted out of the White House; failed to help deliver a “red wave” of victories in the midterm elections last year; and, this year, drew 91 felony charges over four criminal cases.

That was refreshing. Now let’s see the media spend some time challenging the belief that Trump had an unprecedented number of accomplishments making him the greatest leader the world has ever known. His followers seem to believe that he single-handedly changed the world and the country was basically utopia when he was president. They believe this because he told them so 1,450,000 times. Needless to say, it is not true. Everything they believe about his is not true. It’s a case of mass delusion.

He’ll be lucky if it lasts until Christmas

Now that the curtain has finally come down on the sideshow of the House of Representatives Speaker’s race it’s tempting to think that we can leave behind that political show for a while and focus on something else. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth. If anything, the next few weeks and possibly months are going to be just as dramatic and much more relevant to the everyday lives of the American people. The MAGA movement is now 100% in charge of one house of congress and they show no signs that they have accepted the fact that their tiny majority entitles them to get their way 100% of the time. The new speaker is a far-right Christian Nationalist and Trump cultist and he appears to be ready to push the envelope farther than it’s ever been pushed before.

Speaker Mike Johnson, second in line for the presidency, is the most extreme leader this country has ever had. When asked about his governing philosophy he said, “go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. … That’s my world view. That’s what I believe. And so I make no apologies.” That appears to be literally correct. As my colleague Amanda Marcotte points out in this piece [insert link] Johnson is an antediluvian, patriarchal ,misogynist with all that that that implies and he has devoted his life to re-making America into an explicitly Christian fundamentalist state.

Despite his belief that the 1960s ushered in a decadent culture that is destroying the moral fabric of the nation, like most conservative Evangelicals, Johnson is also a fervent follower of the thrice married, sexual abuser Donald Trump. He was deeply involved in the GOP House caucuses attempt to help Trump overturn the 2020 election which he no doubt believes was justified since the United States is a “biblical Republic” rather than a constitutional one in his view. It would seem that his stern morality does not preclude him being practical enough to make allowances when political power is at stake.

So, what can we expect going forward? He is evidently a very affable fellow, not as grim or hostile as some of his colleagues on the MAGA right. That will probably buy him a bit of a honeymoon. After all, he was voted in unanimously by the full caucus which nobody thought was possible. And his extremist credentials help him with the bomb throwing back benchers who ousted his predecessor, Kevin McCarthy. The main instigator of that coup, Matt Gaetz, R-Fl., appeared on former Trump adviser and podcaster, Steve Bannon and crowed:

The swamp is on the run, Maga is ascendant and if you don’t think that moving from Kevin McCarthy to Maga Mike Johnson shows the ascendance of this movement, and where the power of the Republican party truly lies, then you’re not paying attention.

There couldn’t be a more enthusiastic endorsement for an extremely pious Christian from a man who was credibly accused of partying and drug use with very young women for years. Who says the Republican Party is in disarray?

“Maga Mike” is going to have to hope that his party is in full cooperation mode because he has no leadership experience of any kind. He was a staff lawyer for an ultra with wing Christian advocacy organization for years before he ran for office. But perhaps he’s a natural and will be able to bring this fractious caucus together in ways that former speakers John Boehner, Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy were unable to do. His poise and demeanor in presenting himself to the media as a very measured, dare I say, moderate fellow shows a certain amount of public relations savvy that will certainly be useful, at least in the beginning.

He appeared with Sean Hannity for the ceremonial softball Fox interview and sounded very much like his predecessors. He heavily criticized the Biden administration of course, made a passing insult implying that the president has diminished capacity and indicated his support for impeaching him. I assume a majority of his colleagues feel the same way since their 2024 strategy is to create a counter-narrative of Biden’s alleged corruption to offset the fact that Trump is under 91 felony indictments.

But everything else he said was anything but fire breathing wingnut rhetoric. The man whose entire career has been based on the idea that gay sex and abortion should be criminalized told Hannity that gay marriage has been decided and that there’s no national consensus on abortion, suggesting that they will not take up the issue in the House. His pro-Israel comments weren’t particularly bellicose. He indicated that he was ready to engage in talks over the budget with the White House and said he didn’t want a government shutdown.

I wonder if the audience was impressed with his newfound pragmatism? Or is it just that he’s in over his head?

He railed against Vladimir Putin saying that Ukraine defeating him was essential in order to dissuade China from moving on Taiwan. But this is a person who Republicans for Ukraine gave an “F” rating for voting over and over again to deny funding to help repel Putin’s invasion of the country. What gives? Well, if one were to guess, it would be that Mike Johnson is pulling a fast one:

https://x.com/atrupar/status/1718630670409347291?s=20

For all his alleged concern about Putin’s aggression it appears that he hasn’t changed his spots. Johnson is slickly using Israel to advance his agenda to stop funding for Ukraine. And keep in mind that one of the Gaetz faction’s obsessions is to have each bill decided separately —- for everything, not just Ukraine and Israel — so this is yet another feint to the MAGA caucus of which he is a card-carrying member.

We’ll have to see how this all shakes out over the next few weeks. The continuing budget resolution expires on November 18th and Johnson has said that he would like to extend it to January 31st — with conditions. What those are going to be is anyone’s guess. But it does appear that at least in the beginning he’ll have the support of the hardliners. But he should keep in mind that Kevin McCarthy’s ouster was precipitated by his debt ceiling negotiations and with the White House that contained numerous concessions to the GOP and Johnson’s MAGA friends who refused to take yes for an answer. Unless any deals he makes with the White House and the Senate are tantamount to complete capitulation by the Democrats, they’re not going to be happy. There’s a very good chance his honeymoon will be over before Christmas.

Salon

Muddying the waters

When Republican Rep. Madison Cawthorn lost his North Carolina District 11 seat in Congress in the 2022 primary, he had help from Democrats. Republican voters may have found Cawthorn embarassing in the extreme, but many Democrats loathed the young extremist. Enough loathed him that they switched their registrations to unaffiliated so they could choose a Republican ballot and vote against him in the primary. Plenty of real unaffiliated voters who lean left chose to vote in the GOP primary as well.

Both could prove a problem for Democratic campaigns in 2024.

“I’m not a Republican,” wrote Theodore R. Johnson last week in the Washington Post, “but I’ll play one on Super Tuesday, March 5.” Johnson live in Virginia where an open primary allows voters registered nonpartisan to participate.

“I always cast my ballot in whichever primary is more competitive,” he explains. “In 2016, it was the Republicans’; in 2020, the Democrats’. The one constant is that deciding whose box to check is hard.”

That choice will be harder for him in 2024. The GOP presidential field is a basket of undesirables, “a master class in making a comically complex decision tragically complicated.”

Johnson elaborates:

With politics like these, it’s little surprise that most of the country avoids primary elections altogether by simply choosing not to vote. Those who do vote in general elections often stick to partisan lines that track through a tangle of cultural, ideological and social markers. Parties make the choosing easier.

But there is such a thing as too easy. The current state of our two-party system increasingly causes voters to view one of the two as tolerable and the other as a threat. It reduces complicated issues to simplistic battles of good vs. evil, us vs. them. That makes the choice quite straightforward: Vote for your side (the good guys) and against the side filled with bad people and their bad ideas. Even independents have picked a team, effectively partisans without the membership card. The simplicity of it all is a feature, not a bug. And it’s terrible for democracy. Some things, including political decisions, are supposed to be a little bit hard.

Johnson explains his thinking process without explicitly suggesting he’ll vote in the GOP primary to promote the Republican most likely to lose in November 2024.

For those unversed in how Democrats target voters for persuasion and turnout efforts, unaffiliated voters who “date around” and Democrats like those who switched to vote against Madison Cawthorn muddy the targeting waters.

In states where unaffiliated voters may vote in party primaries, choosing a Democratic ballot in a primary suggests to campaigns that an unaffiliated voter leans left and goes on the list for persuasion and turnout contacts. So left-leaning independents who vote in the GOP primary look like right-leaning independents. It lowers their Democratic support scores. That’s a problem for Democrats needing unaffiliated voters to reach a 50%+1 win margin:

Independents (UNAffiliated voters in NC) are the largest bloc of registered voters in NC: 36% (2.6 million voters). But statewide they voted against Democrats here 58% of the time in the last two elections. Democrats cannot win without them, but their traditional tactics, as [David] Pepper recognizes, focuses only on “the most frequent voters.” This tactic leaves many “removed from the political conversation” in what I’ve dubbed “No Voter’s Land.” These are voters campaigns are reluctant to contact (using the tactics of the last war, you might say) because computer scoring deems them not good bets.

In a sense, Democrats believes low-scoring UNAs are (in Seinfeld terms) not sponge-worthy. It’s not that they won’t vote with Democrats, it’s that Democrats lack the data to give them confidence that they might, so they cautiously avoid them.

Oh yes, in 2020 only roughly 17% of NC’s registered unaffiliated voters bothered to vote in the Democratic primary. In 2022, it was only 5.4%. If Democratic campaigns are relying on primary voting to steer them toward friendly independents in 2024, they’ve got a problem.

There’s not enough antacid for this

Seeing so many anti-Trump conservatives and libertarians dig in their heels in opposition to the rise of Donald Trump was at least somewhat encouraging. Yes, their efforts to secure political power had helped create the monster. But looking it in the eye was entirely different from war-gaming for a billionaire-funded think tank. The experience may not have scared them “left,” but we got to watch more than a few revaluate their trajectories in life, at least temporarily. (America loves a redemption story.) Should MAGA wither and blow away, some will backslide. Count on it.

All of which is prelude to citing David French for the second time in a month. Strange bedfellows.

President Joe Biden’s long political experience, warts and all, have prepared him for what might be the most perilous set of foreign policy crises of the 21st century. With the Israel-Hamas war dialing up, it is unclear how Biden threads the needle between supporting America’s longtime ally presently led by a lunatic and expressing compassion for innocent Gazans presently dominated by lunatics. I’m not even sure there is a needle.

The war has driven a wedge between Biden and younger and left-leaning voters. French believes Biden has the right stuff even while a recent poll shows Biden’s support slipping 11 points with Democrats (New York Times):

Consider what he confronts: a brutal Russian assault on a liberal democracy in Europe, the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust and an aggressive China that is gaining military strength and threatens Taiwan. That’s two hot wars and a new cold war, each against a nation or entity that forsakes any meaningful moral norms, violates international law and commits crimes against humanity.

In each conflict abroad — hot or cold — America is indispensable to the defense of democracy and basic humanity. Ukraine cannot withstand a yearslong Russian onslaught unless the United States acts as the arsenal of democracy, keeping the Ukrainian military supplied with the weapons and munitions it needs. America is Israel’s indispensable ally and close military partner. It depends on our aid and — just as important — our good will for much of its strength and security. And Taiwan is a target of opportunity for China absent the might of the United States Pacific Fleet.

The Washington Post Editorial Board devoted its Sunday editorial to China’s stepped-up provocations in the South China Sea. The U.S. is the indispensible nation to allies Australia, the Philippines and Taiwan on that side of the globe as well. Thus, the Post writes, “it’s imperative that the administration send constant reminders to Beijing and to America’s allies in the region that the United States is a Pacific power and can deal with multiple crises at once.” So far, the Editorial Board suggests, Biden is striking the right pose in the Pacific.

French continues:

And keep in mind, Biden is managing these conflicts all while trying to make sure that the nation emerges from a pandemic with inflation in retreat and its economy intact. In spite of economic growth and low unemployment numbers that make the American economy the envy of the world, Americans are still dealing with the consequences of inflation and certainly don’t feel optimistic about our economic future.

Biden is now under fire from two sides, making these challenges even more difficult. The populist, Trumpist right threatens his ability to fund Ukraine, hoping to engineer a cutoff in aid that could well lead to the greatest victory for European autocrats since Hitler and then Stalin swallowed European democracies whole in their quest for power and control.

You thought the first Trump presidency was a disaster and deadly? A second could be the apocalypse for which his evangelical cult thirsts.

French, the former National Review writer, sees in Biden a steady hand in a political climate that insists a leader overreact to every poll and public demonstration. Biden’s policies seem “fundamentally sound.”

History will have the last word on that. For now, the domestic threat from a Congress and Supreme Court dominated by MAGA lunatics and funded by self-interested billionaires is enough to recommend investing in manufacturers of antacid.

French, himself a non-MAGA evangelical, sees Biden as an American leader in the right place at the right time:

If Biden can persevere in the face of the chaos and confusion of war abroad and polarization at home, all while preserving a level of economic growth that is astonishing in contrast with the rest of the world, he’ll have his own story to tell in Chicago, one that should trump the adversity of any given moment or the concern generated by any given poll. If Biden can do his job, then he can take the stage in Chicago with his own simple pitch for re-election: In the face of disease, war, inflation and division, the economy thrives — and democracy is alive.

May we all survive the next fifteen months. Especially Joe Biden.

Pandas!

This video of pandas just being pandas while a zookeeper desperately tries to rake leaves is the best video on the internet pic.twitter.com/6kspStJ6O5

— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) October 29, 2023

My friend the high school teacher told me this reminded her of her freshman class. Lol.

I think we need some more cute panda action, don’t you? (Along with a nice tall adult beverage):