Vice president Kamala Harris is trying to win the 2024 presidential election by appealing to Americans’ hearts and minds. Donald Trump is campaiging in blue states he cannot win, as he did again on Sunday, to draw press attention to himself, not voters. Trump is not even trying to win the election. He means to monkeywrench the post-election. That contrast ought to get more press than it does.
I’ve mentioned before the 2013 “election integrity” boot camp I sat in on sponsored by a North Carolina True the Vote spinoff. Much of it was sad. All of it was conspiratorial. None of it was about increasing voter participation. Trump’s campaign is no different, just better funded. All defense. No offense. Okay, plenty of offense, just not the game-winning kind.
Harris last night at The Ellipse in the nation’s capitol, contrasted her to-do list with Trump’s enemies list.
“On day one, if elected, Donald Trump would walk into that office with an enemies list. When elected, I will walk in with a to-do list full of priorities on what I will get done for the American people.”
Trump is running on vengeance, on making himself dictator, and on staying out of jail. That ought to get more press too.
He’s also got a lot of help with propaganda sponsored by billionaires and foreign agents. Perhaps you’ve noticed?
“Polymarket is a foreign information operation against Harris,” tweeted Simon Rosenberg last night.
Huh. I somehow hadn't thought about this. Why is Polymarket advertising to Americans, who can't legally use its services? https://t.co/iBMA6WlImD
When I obtain a copy of some state Democratic Party’s county chair’s manual, they are often heavy on party administration and light on electing Democrats. Trump’s campaign is light on doing anything to make the country a better place. That’s because the country and his supporters are not Trump’s primary interests. That ought to get more press.
When he loses next week (I’m hopeful), he’ll take once again to the courts and attempt to litigate a win. He doesn’t see the law as a process for finding the truth and working out justice. It’s a tool for gaming democracy and bleeding dry his opponents.
Trump uses litigation as a tool to create a grievance structure that will allow him to claim he is a victim when he loses fair and square. He will lie about the outcome, but it won't change the results.
Like Lewis Carroll’s oysters, election conspiracy theories are coming “thick and fast,” and “more, and more, and more.”
A voter engagement group yet unnamed by Pennsylvania law enforcement submitted batches of voter registration applications suspected of being fraudulent both in York and Lancaster counties. Or about 60 percent of those examined in Lancaster.
“It is not uncommon, especially in presidential election years, for paid workers of such groups to turn in fabricated applications,” explains Katie Bernard of The Philadelphia Inquirer.
It won’t matter who is paying the group. Donald Trump will use the episode to declare the election invalid when he loses Pennsylvania next week.
Lancaster County was not “caught with 2600 Fake Ballots and Forms, all written by the same person,” as former President Donald Trump claimed on Truth Social Monday night.
Trump, who has a long history of spreading false information about Pennsylvania elections, took aim at Lancaster and York Counties, both of which have reported encountering voter registration applications that showed signs of fraud.
But Trump’s post drastically overcounted the affected documents, and went beyond reality to falsely claim that Lancaster County had encountered “Fake Ballots.”
“No actual ballots have been deemed fraudulent,” reports WGAL Harrisburg. Nevertheless, Trump is priming his base for Insurrection 2.0.
Federal officials are on alert for election conspiracy-inspired violence between now and the presidential inauguration, reports NBC’s Brandy Zadrozny:
U.S. intelligence agencies have identified domestic extremists with grievances rooted in election-related conspiracy theories, including beliefs in widespread voter fraud and animosity toward perceived political opponents, as the most likely threat of violence in the coming election.
In a Joint Intelligence Bulletin that was not distributed publicly but was reviewed by NBC News, agents from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security warn state and local law enforcement agencies that domestic violent extremists seeking to terrorize and disrupt the vote are a threat to the election and throughout Inauguration Day.
The report identified the potential targets as candidates, elected officials, election workers, members of the media and judges involved in election cases. The potential threats include physical attacks and violence at polling places, ballot drop boxes, voter registration locations and rallies and campaign events.
The documents obtained by Property of the People, a nonprofit government transparency group, “are unmistakably a product of a radically heightened threat environment,” said Ryan Shapiro, executive director.
FKA Twitter under Elon Musk has become a constant vector for spreading “super-nova viral lies” and disinformation about elections and stolen votes, Chris Hayes said Tuesday in introducing Zadrozny’s reporting.
The reports follow others released in recent weeks that warn of an increase in online chatter about an impending civil war, as well as several incidents of violence or thwarted attacks before the election. Agents wrote that some extremists were “reacting to the 2024 election season and prominent policy issues by engaging in illegal preparatory or violent activity that they link to the narrative of an impending civil war.”
A separate October bulletin from Colorado’s state threat assessment center highlighted threats posed by people who dispute the legitimacy of the 2020 election results. The report underscored the problem of “insider threats,” in which people with authorized access to the election process might attempt to derail it. It also noted a “continued dialogue amongst individuals on extremist discussion groups and forums that the results of the 2020 elections were inaccurate.”
Former Mesa County, Colorado, clerk Tina Peters was sentenced on Oct. 3 to nine years in jail for distributing screenshots of election software in 2020. The Colorado bulletin suggests other potential conspirators are not deterred by her conviction.
Hayes asked how seriously we should take these warnings.
“Incredibly seriously,” Zadrozny replied. On Jan. 5, 2021, people wrote about chatter that reactionaries were headed to the Capitol, bringing guns, and “all hell’s going to break loose,” she said. Yet there wasn’t any joint intelligence bulletin released to local law enforcement. There was instead concern over trampling free speech protections. Yet this bulletin mentioned “two thwarted attempts and three actual attacks” based on election lies. Elections offices have invested in increased security for 2024.
“Maricopa County looks like a war zone, with snipers on the roof and panic buttons,” Zadrozny said.
Trump is running to stay out of jail over federal prosecutions and, like a cornered animal, will do anything to escape the trap. He’s devious, but not clever. He’s planning to run the same election schemes that failed him in 2020 in 2024, including capitalizing again on the “Red Mirage” to allege election theft and preemptively declare vistory.
Robert Reich explains how the “Red Mirage” and “Blue Shift” feed into conspiracists’ stolen election narrative (and potential 2024 election violence). “But if you know what they are, you won’t be fooled by them,” Reich naively advises.
Trump’s dirty election night trick doesn’t work if you know it’s coming. Let me explain. pic.twitter.com/hTRilkPqus
But MAGA is a movement that luxuriates in spreading misinformation in pursuit of dominating the majority of us by hook or by crook, which, in MAGAstan is all that matters. They know it’s wrong and they don’t care.
"He called it 'a day of love' … the American people are exhausted with his gaslighting. Enough. We are ready to turn the page. We're done." — Harris highlights Trump's comments about January 6 during his Univision town hall pic.twitter.com/rW6LWEdwvF
Trump held a hastily arranged “press conference” in which he took no questions and basically droned on for a while as per usual. Clearly, they felt they needed to address the raging scandal over his MSG rally but he couldn’t bring himself to apologize or even say that he didn’t agree with the comments. Instead he just lied and said it was a lovefest and told voters once again that they can believe him or they can believe their lying eyes.
They are nervous. Their rally didn’t go as planned and now Harris is holding a huge event on the Ellipse where they expect about 50 thousand people. I doubt there’s going to be a bunch of speakers crudely insulting half the country.
Woman at Trump rally NC today says she is retired because the stock market is booming but Trump says it’s going to crash any day now so she may have to go back to work if Harris wins. She says Harris is a communist & people only support her because she’s black. pic.twitter.com/G2Di86pEJd
Police arrested an 18-year-old wielding a machete with an 18-inch blade outside a polling station in Florida on Tuesday, who was part of a group of teenagers accused of intimidating Democratic supporters.
The teenager, Caleb James Williams, was arrested after 4 p.m. when officers were called to the Beaches Branch Library in Neptune Beach.
Williams was arrested on charges of aggravated assault for allegedly brandishing his weapon at two unidentified women, ages 71 and 54, and improper exhibition of a weapon, Neptune Beach Police Department said.
He and his bros were waving Trump flags.
It's astounding how Trump cultists can believe this stuff when Trump was actually president for four years and did literally none of it pic.twitter.com/0sHFMoJB4b
New Trump closing ad begins: “Kamala backed Biden on everything.” Ends with: “Remember, Kamala broke it. president Trump will fix it” pic.twitter.com/kRfAq6LP4K
On Friday, we published an article about how former President Donald Trump’s campaign has made a habit of deceptively using quotations in television ads attacking Vice President Kamala Harris.
Then, just days later, the campaign released perhaps the most egregious example yet.
A new minute-long ad revives two of the quote distortions from previous Trump ads – and sprinkles in two more for good measure. Here is a fact check.
Cutting out key words about Harris and taxes
The new ad cuts out critical words from a news article about Harris’ tax proposals.
The ad, like a previous Trump ad, features the following on-screen text attributed to an August article in The New York Times: “Harris is seeking to significantly raise taxes.” But as the Times itself has noted, this is a misleading snip. What the Times article actually said was this: “Harris is seeking to significantly raise taxeson the wealthiest Americans and large corporations.”
That’s a big difference.
The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment for this article. For the Friday article on the campaign’s misleading use of quotations, the campaign declined to address any of the specific examples we raised; instead, spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said, “President Trump has the hardest-hitting, most well produced ads in the business.”
Cutting out a key word about Harris and the border
The new ad also deletes a crucial word from a news article about immigration policy.
The ad features the following on-screen text the ad attributes to a CBS News piece in September: “Harris vows to keep Biden’s border.” The text is accompanied by a narrator saying, falsely, that “Kamala was in charge of his open-border policies.”
But what the CBS News article’s headline actually said was this: “Harris vows to keep Biden’s border crackdown: ‘The United States is a sovereign nation.’” The article began: “During a visit to the U.S.-Mexico border on Friday, Vice President Kamala Harris vowed to keep President Biden’s asylum crackdown in place if elected, solidifying Democrats’ embrace of more stringent immigration rules.”
Taking an immigration quote out of context
The ad features on-screen text that says, “welfare for illegals,” attributing those words to an NBC News article from 2018.
But as we noted when a previous Trump ad featured similar on-screen text, that NBC News article did not even mention Biden or Harris, whose administration did not begin until 2021. And the article used the phrase “welfare for illegal immigrants” only in passing – in a totally different context than the Trump ad uses it.
The article criticized occupational licensing rules that were preventing immigrants enrolled in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program from working in certain jobs. It said: “It’s a complete travesty that otherwise qualified individuals can’t get the government’s permission to cut hair. Regardless of one’s position on welfare for illegal immigrants, a license is clearly different from food stamps and other government safety nets.”
Taking a quote about national security out of context
The new ad features giant on-screen text with the words “global war,” attributing them to a July article by the media outlet Axios, as the ad’s narrator says, “Their weakness invited wars.”
But the Axios article did not claim there is “global war” under the Biden administration. The article was headlined, “U.S. not ready for global war, commission warns”; it was about a bipartisan commission’s findings about the country’s preparedness for hypothetical future conflict, not about the present situation.
Luckily most people don’t actually watch TV ads anymore. But online, the comments to this ad are “wow, they’re using Kamala’s own words against her.”
There have always been misleading and hysterical ads in political campaigns and it isn’t confined to the Republicans (although they’ve made a fetish of it.) But with Trump it’s just “anything goes” and there’s very little blowback because everyone knows he’s a pathological liar and that’s just par for the course. I suspect all the other Republicans are watching and learning that the key is to lie so flagrantly that it shocks people and never admit you are wrong.
This isn’t going to go away when Trump finally shuffles off to Mar-a-lago for the last time (whenever that will be.) It’s the new ethosewhich, combined with organized disinformation, is going to make politics a lethal minefield for a long time to come.
Many don’t realize that the first people Hitler sent to his concentration camps weren’t everyday Jewish citizens, but his political opponents. So, when Trump rants about retribution, locking up his opponents, and giving them “very long sentences,” I can’t help but take him… pic.twitter.com/Wu6rnUg72K
This is something that has driven me crazy for years. Here in California it’s an ongoing problem. Even this year we have a couple of these things on the ballot. Bolts.com took a look at one of them on the Ohio ballot and it’s an incredible story of political gamesmanshipt and special interest influence. It’s a gerrymandering initiative and it could affect all of us:
When Songgu Kwon went to the polls earlier this month, he was eager to help Ohio adopt an independent redistricting commission. The comic book writer and illustrator, who lives near Athens, dislikes the process with which politicians have carved up Ohio into congressional and legislative districts that favor them, enabling Republicans to lock in large majorities. So he was pleased that voting rights groups had placed Issue 1, a proposal meant to create fairer maps, on the Ohio ballot this fall.
“I’m in support of any measures that make the process more fair to reflect the will of the people, instead of letting the politicians decide how to gerrymander,” says Kwon.
In the voting booth, he reviewed the text in front of him. His ballot read that voting ‘yes’ would set up a panel “required to gerrymander the boundaries of state legislative and congressional districts,” and that it would “repeal constitutional protections against gerrymandering.”
So Kwon voted ‘no’ on the measure—given what he’d just read, he thought, that had to be the way to signal support for independent redistricting. He’d gone in planning to vote ‘yes,’ but he was thrown off by this language he saw; he guessed that he must have been wrong or missed some recent development. “The language seemed really specific that if you vote ‘yes’, you’re for gerrymandering,” he now recalls in frustration.
But when he left the polling station and compared notes with his wife, he quickly figured out that he’d made a mistake: He had just voted to preserve the status quo. To bring about the new independent process and remove redistricting from elected officials, as was his intention, he would have had to vote ‘yes.’
Kwon says he got confused by the language that was crafted and placed on the ballot by Republican Ohio officials. The official most directly responsible for this language, Secretary of State Frank LaRose, had a direct hand in drawing the gerrymandered maps that Kwon opposes and that the reform would unwind.
“I didn’t think that they would go so far as to just straight up lie and use a word that means one thing to describe something else,” Kwon told me. “They are using the term gerrymandering to describe an attempt to actually fix the gerrymandering.”
As I said, I’ve been there. And when you add in the misleading ads and social media disinformation you end up feeling like throwing up your hands and not bothering. That’s one reason why a site like Bolts is so helpful. Hardly anyone follows these local and state stories in depth.
Here is the link to their Election Cheat Sheet which is really thorough. Whether you’re looking for some help with your own ballot or just want to know what’s going on around the country, it’s invaluable.
I'm insanely jealous of @KamalaHQ for renting the Vegas dome. I've pitched multiple clients on it. Came close once—so, so cool. pic.twitter.com/iXDfVcv3Ba
When the cops came for her Patience Frazier had no idea why:
Earlier that month, Frazier had shared a Facebook post about the son she lost. She had apologized to Abel, saying she was “so scarred n afraid” and “didn’t know what to do,” court records show.
“Why would you be sorry?” asked Jacqueline “Jac” Mitcham, the 31-year-old deputy on Frazier’s doorstep, according to body-camera footage obtained by The Washington Post. “Why would you be sorry, Patience?”
Frazier looked over at the other armed officers standing 10 feet away.
“I’m not allowed to have personal things in my life?” said Frazier, a mother of three. “I had a miscarriage, okay? A miscarriage. Why are you guys here over a f—ing miscarriage?”
Even before Roe v. Wade fell, a broad consensus had emerged across much of the antiabortion movement that women who seek abortions should not be prosecuted. The abortion bans that have taken effect since Roe was overturned, as well as abortion restrictions that existed before the 2022 Supreme Court ruling, do not allow women who terminate their pregnancies to be punished, instead targeting doctors and others who help facilitate abortions.
But those measures don’t tell the full story. In rare and often little-noticed cases, authorities have drawn on other laws to charge women accused of trying to end their pregnancies.Some prosecutors in both red and blue states have used sweeping statutes entirely unrelated to abortion — like child abuse, improper disposal of remains or murder — while others have relied on criminal laws written to protect a fetus.In Nevada, Frazier would eventually be charged with manslaughter under a unique 1911 law that supplements the state’s abortion restrictions, titled “taking drugs to terminate pregnancy.”
As in Frazier’s case, women who are prosecuted are typically accused of trying to end pregnancies without the help of a medical professional — a method frequently chosen because they live far from an abortion clinicand can’t afford to get to one. These prosecutions also often occur when women are thought to be relatively far along in pregnancy, near or past the point when a fetus could potentially survive outside of the womb.
Based on a review of hundreds of documents, hours of body-cam footage and interviews with those involved, a Post investigation of Frazier’s case offers new insight into the messy complexities and intensely personal emotions embedded within such a prosecution. From the start, deep moral questions loomed over a local justice system as it struggled to distinguish a miscarriage from an abortion, a fetus from a baby — culminating in a conviction one judge would ultimately characterize as “a total miscarriage of justice.”
[…]
Out on bail in the months before that day’s sentencing hearing, Frazier had felt like an outcast in her small town of 8,000. Her best friend had stopped talking to her. False details about her case swirled around Facebook. The first time she tried to go to the grocery store, she said, a group of teenage boys chased her down the aisle yelling, “baby killer.”
“Winds of prejudice have arisen,” Frazier’s public defender, Matt Stermitz, wrote in a court filing. “A lynching-like atmosphere hangs heavy over the City of Winnemucca.”
She was sentenced to 30 months to 8 years largely on the basis of the anti-abortion fanatic cop who arrested her. The whole story is aboslutely appalling. I’ve included a gift link (yes, it’s the Washington Post, but the reporters who wrote this story aren’t Jeff Bezos) and I urge you to read the whole thing to see just how screwed up our abortion policies have been for a very long time.
A high profile lawyer came on to the case after she’d been in prison for a year and she was eventually released on the basis of ineffective counsel.
“Patience has been portrayed as an antichrist, but this Judge thinks she is, instead, just a mother caught hopelessly in the web of poverty with a lack of any support system,” Judge Charles McGee wrote in an emotional 40-page decision, describing Frazier’s case as a “total miscarriage of justice.”
The emotional intensity of the abortion issue subtly propelled Frazier’s case from the start, the judge said later in an interview with The Post.
By taking up Frazier’s case, he said, the prosecutor in Winnemucca was able to send a clear message to the antiabortion constituents who elected him: “We don’t tolerate that kind of stuff here in cowboy country.”
Women have been cannon fodder in the culture wars over this issue for a very long time. The frightening thing is that it’s getting even worse in the Trump ban states. We know what these forced birth fanatics have always wanted and they’ve now been exposed.
Let’s just hope that the voters understand the stakes in this election and send a strong, unambiguous message that right wing zealots are not going to be allowed to control the most intimate decisions of people’s personal lives any longer.
I don’t actually think that’s hopium. The vibe I’m getting from everything I see and read is that the Harris campaign is feeling cautiously optimistic. That doesn’t mean that it’s in the bag but I think it certainly means they aren’t seeing anything that would lead us to believe that Trump has it in the bag, contrary to what the MAGA crowd is saying.
Again, this feels like 2012 to me. Romney and his people were measuring the drapes at this point. The polls were very close and Karl Rove was strutting around telling everyone that it was over.
On election night, we had this silly scene (which happened to make Megyn Kelly’s career.)
They simply could not believe that Obama had won because the polls were close and they’d convinced themselves that they couldn’t lose. After Trump came along in 2016, many of them convinced themselves that they can never lose.
Obviously, we have no idea if this will go our way. We got schooled in 2016 too, after all. I was certainly convinced that Clinton would win because I couldn’t imagine how anyone could vote for that miscreant. We all know what happened.
But I don’t think we have to assume that every close election is going to go their way either. It didn’t in 2012, 2018, 2020 and 2022. Maybe they’re due. But maybe the real truth is that 2016 was just a fluke because we had a close election with the first woman nominee whom a lot of people didn’t like and a TV celebrity who captured the imagination of a large enough segment of the population to eke out a win. I’m not saying that’s the case but it’s as easily proven as the idea that Trump is a juggernaut who can’t lose — when we know that he can.
