Kowtowing before the magistrate in Guangzhou, pre-1889. (Photo public domain via Wikimedia Commons.)
Alleged coup plotters, election subverters, and concealers of classified documents now find themselves under state and federal indictment. After doing the bidding of former president Donald Trump they risk not just jail for themselves and ruined reputations, but also financial ruin for their families.
Over a dozen of former President Trump’s close allies face growing legal bills when he’s least able to help — and they’re turning to desperate measures to raise money for their fights.
Why it matters: Trump’s co-defendants in the Fulton County case each need legal teams that could cost well into the six figures.
“Even if you do some back-of-the envelope accounting, I’d think each motion filed is going to cost a defendant in the five figures minimum,” Caren Morrison, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of New York and an associate professor of law at Georgia State University, wrote in an email to Axios.
“I don’t see anyone’s fee less than $250,000-500,000” unless they strike a plea deal with prosecutors, Cornell Law School adjunct professor Randy Zelin told Axios.
Trump co-defendants Jenna Ellis (former Trump lawyer), Cathy Latham (former Republican Party chair of Coffee County, Georgia), John Eastman (former Trump lawyer), and Jeffrey Clark (former Department of Justice official) have all launched crowd-funding appeals to pay for their defense. Their piles are less than yooge.
Former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani is so short on cash for his defense that his son is organizing fundraiser dinners:
Andrew Giuliani, a former New York Republican gubernatorial candidate, told CNBC in a statement: “It is helpful that President Trump has agreed to headline two events, one on September 7 at Bedminster and another this winter at Mar-a-Lago, where we are getting strong donor interest.” He declined to comment further.
Co-defendant Harrison Floyd remains behind bars after a judge denied bail, Reuters reports:
Harrison Floyd said at his first court appearance that he could not afford a private lawyer and had been denied representation by a public defender because he did not qualify.
Floyd, who appeared virtually, said that it typically cost between $40,000 to $100,000 just to retain a private lawyer to fly to Georgia.
“I cannot afford an attorney for something like this,” he said, telling Fulton County Superior Court Judge Emily Richardson that he did not want to put his family in debt.
Richardson told Floyd that he could either hire a lawyer or represent himself.
Richardson denied Floyd bail because he is accused in a separate case in Maryland of assaulting an FBI agent who tried to serve him with a subpoena. She considers him a flight risk.
Trump should consider them all a risk to his staying out of jail. Those who cannot afford to pay for a vigorous serious defense will cut deals Trump does not want to be on the losing side of.
“He has not learned yet that … three people you don’t want to throw into the bus like that: your lawyer, your doctor and your mechanic. Because one way or the other, you’re gonna go down the hill and there’ll be no brakes.”
Thousands gather today at the Lincoln Memorial for the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington. There in 1963 Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have A Dream” speech to more than 200,000 there to demand America make good on its promise. Today, King’s granite statue stands nearby as another memorial to consequential figures in American history.
The civil rights movement, its speeches and marches, the white violence against protesters’ demands for Black equality, led after the assasination of President Kennedy later that year to passage of the transformational Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts under his successor, Lyndon Johnson. Decades of backlash to that cultural transformation today threaten that still-unfulfilled dream (Washington Post):
In the wake of court rulings, legislation and political extremism that organizers say has undone or stymied crucial racial and social progress, the rally’s leaders say they plan not a commemoration, but a reassertion of the demands made at the Memorial in 1963.
“It feels like we’ve gone backwards,” King’s eldest son, Martin Luther King III, said before the rally.
“Dad talked about eradicating the triple evils of poverty, racism and violence. … Just about any problem that we are faced with in our nation falls under one of those categories,” he said.
“Over the past two years when we are literally witnessing oppression being legislated, when we have witnessed the physical attack on democracy with an insurrection, I believe it is more critical than ever to have some type of optimism,” said his wife Arndrea Waters King. “We all have a role in realizing the dream.”
Overhead photograph of March on Washington as Martin Luther King, Jr., speaks at Lincoln Memorial, sixty years ago next week: #APpic.twitter.com/dpDwToO70w
Andrew Young, the former Atlanta mayor and civil rights leader, tells AP, “We take two steps forward, and they make us take one step back.”
King said during his famous speech:
In a sense we have come to our Nation’s Capital to cash a check. When the architects of our great republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.
This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given its colored people a bad check, a check that has come back marked “insufficient funds.”
King’s promised land remains an unfulfilled promise. And it will so long as some believe, as Heather McGhee said, “that progress for people of color has to come at white people’s expense.”
A rare patternless giraffe was born last month at a family-owned zoo in Tennessee—and experts say she may be the only completely brown giraffe alive on the planet, report Emily Hibbitts and Clarice Scheele for WJHL.
Bright's Zoo in Tennessee is looking to name a one-of-its-kind female giraffe born without spots. pic.twitter.com/8SGotDKfeh
Though her appearance is unusual, the six-foot-tall calf appears healthy and is thriving under her mother’s care, Brights Zoo officials tell the publication.
“She is very inquisitive,” David Bright, the zoo’s director, tells Insider’s Fern McErlane and Grace Eliza Goodwin. “She stays very tight with her mom, doesn’t wander off too far, but she’s very curious what’s going on around her. She has a very positive personality when it comes to giraffes.”
The calf is a reticulated giraffe (Giraffa reticulata), one of four giraffe species—until 2016, scientists recognized only one species of giraffe. The last known spotless reticulated giraffe was likely Toshiko, a calf born in 1972 in Tokyo, writes Caitlin O’Kane for CBS News. Only two others have ever been recorded—the older sibling of Toshiko and an individual in Uganda, per Insider.
“From day one, we’ve been in contact with zoo professionals all over the country,” Bright tells WJHL. “And especially the old timers, that have been around for a long time: ‘Hey, have you seen this? What’s your thoughts?’ And nobody’s seen it.”
Fred Bercovitch, a wildlife conservation biologist at Kyoto University and executive director of the nonprofit Save the Giraffes, tells Insider the animal’s color is likely due to a specific genetic mutation. Though many questions have yet to be answered about giraffes and their spots, a calf’s pattern is probably at least partly inherited from its mother, he tells the publication.
“What the birth does show is, in some ways, how little we know about animals,” Bercovitch says to Insider. “There are exceptions to almost every rule in biology.”
Reticulated giraffes use their spotted coats to help with camouflage in the East African savannahs where they live. Each individual’s coloration pattern is unique, like a human fingerprint.
But all-brown giraffes aren’t the only differently colored individuals that have earned special attention—in recent years, three all-white giraffes with a genetic condition called leucism were recorded in the wild, but two were killed by poachers in 2020. Later that year, the last remaining white giraffe was fitted with a GPS tracker that alerts rangers of its location every hour.
The new calf’s birth has cast a “much-needed spotlight” on giraffe conservation, as the zoo’s founder, Tony Bright, tells CNN’s Scottie Andrew. Only about 16,000 reticulated giraffes remain in the wild, a decline of more than 50 percent from 35 years ago, per the Giraffe Conservation Foundation. Habitat loss, fragmentation and hunting have all contributed to this decline. And as humans expand agriculture and developed areas, they cut down acacia trees, which are the animals’ preferred food source.
Out of the 106 dates listed in the timeline, only four are instances when Biden met someone related to Hunter’s business dealings. The timeline says that on December 4, 2013, Biden traveled to China with his son and met with Jonathan Li, the CEO of Chinese company Bohai Harvest, or BHR. Hunter later joined the BHR board.
While the timeline makes it sound like Biden went to China specifically to meet his son’s potential colleague, in reality, the then vice president went to Beijing on an official trip on behalf of the White House. He brought his son and one of his grandchildren along, as well as several reporters who noted it was common for Biden to bring family members in tow. While Hunter had business meetings with Li, Biden only met Li once. Hunter arranged for them to shake hands, but the two men did not interact further on the trip.
The timeline also says that Biden met Vadym Pozharskyi, an executive at the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, at a dinner Hunter hosted in Washington, D.C., on March 20, 2015. The dinner actually took place nearly a month later, on April 16, 2015. Pozharskyi emailed Hunter after the meal to thank him for “giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent some time together.”
But Biden only spoke to one person, a recently retired leader of the Greek Orthodox Church, the whole evening. One dinner attendee, then-president of the World Food Program USA Rich Leach, told The Washington Post that Biden “didn’t even sit down,” but only spoke to Father Alex Karloutsos. Karloutsos confirmed Leach’s account.
Republicans also allege Biden attended a meeting for Chinese energy company CEFC in Washington on May 1, 2017. This information comes from Republicans’ star whistleblower, Gal Luft, who has been charged with acting as a foreign agent for China and of arms trafficking. It is unclear if Biden attended the meeting—texts from Hunter never confirm whether his father put in an appearance, and Biden himself has denied being there—that actually took place on May 3, 2017, in Los Angeles.
Finally, the timeline states that on July 30, 2017, Hunter sent a WhatsApp message to an unspecified Chinese company that he was “sitting here with my father.” Hunter’s lawyer Abbe Lowell, however, has slammed the message and others as “complete fakes.”
Biden’s utter lack of involvement matches testimony from multiple supposed whistleblowers. Republicans have heard testimony from IRS agents, Hunter’s former business partner Devon Archer, and former Rudy Giuliani associate Lev Parnas. None of them was able to provide concrete evidence that Biden was involved in his son’s business. In fact, both Archer and Parnas said nothing could be further from the truth.
Beyond the tenuous evidence connecting Biden to his son’s work, the rest of the timeline contains sloppy mistakes, including on details mentioned in previous Republican reports about the Bidens’ wrongdoing.
In one instance, the timeline says BHR joined with a Chinese Communist Party–affiliated company on September 1, 2015, to buy the U.S.-based automotive producer Henniges Automotive. The deal actually took place on September 15, 2015, according to a 2019 report by the Senate Finance Committee.
The timeline says Hunter met with the U.S. ambassador to Romania in that country on November 13, 2015. Hunter actually met the ambassador in Washington, D.C. He didn’t travel to Romania until the following year.
Republicans have repeatedly accused Hunter of receiving illicit payments. According to the timeline, he received a payment from his associate Rob Walker on November 11, 2015. It says that Robinson Walker, a company associated with Walker, also made payments to Hunter’s company Owasco P.C. on February 12, 2016, and May 23, 2016.
The reasons for the payments are unspecified, and all three dates are wrong. As the House Oversight Committee already stated in a report from May this year, the payments actually took place on November 9, 2015, February 24, 2016, and August 15, 2016.
Hunter Biden is currently under investigation for tax evasion, and he will likely go to trial. But proof of his guilt or innocence will not be found in the Oversight Committee’s timeline.
The timeline is sloppy work done by a party on a political vendetta. Republicans have already admitted multiple times that they have no proof of wrongdoing by the president. They have said they don’t know whether the information on which their accusations are based is even legitimate.
That last sentence is the most important. They are blowing a lot of smoke in order to create the false narrative that they have tons and tons of evidence proving that Joe Biden is a worse criminal than Donald Trump. If you watch Fix 24/7, you’d believe it must be true. And this will be the basis for their bogus impeachment. In that event, one hopes that the Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee are figuring out a way to unravel this load of bullshit in a way that people can easily understand it.
The survey results suggest Americans are taking the cases seriously — particularly the Justice Department’s 2020 election case — and that most people are skeptical of Trump’s claim to be the victim of a legally baseless witch hunt or an elaborate, multi-jurisdictional effort to “weaponize” law enforcement authorities against him.
Furthermore, public sentiment in certain areas — including how quickly to hold a trial and whether to incarcerate Trump if he’s convicted — is moving against the former president when compared to a previous POLITICO Magazine/Ipsos poll conducted in June. This latest poll was conducted from Aug. 18 to Aug. 21, roughly two-and-a-half weeks after Trump’s second federal indictment and several days after Trump was criminally charged in Fulton County. The poll had a sample of 1,032 adults, age 18 or older, who were interviewed online; it has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.2 percentage points for all respondents.
Here are some of the most notable findings from our latest survey.
— Most Americans believe Trump should stand trial before the 2024 election
On Monday, Trump’s lawyers will face off against federal prosecutors before U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan over when to schedule his trial in the Justice Department’s 2020 election case — a high-stakes dispute that could have dramatic implications for the 2024 election. Federal prosecutors have proposed that the trial begin on Jan. 2, 2024, while Trump’s lawyers have countered that the trial should take place in April 2026. If Trump gets his way, that would, perhaps not coincidentally, leave him plenty of time to complete his reelection bid and, if successful, shut the case down after retaking the White House.
Americans are far closer to the Justice Department’s position than to Trump’s. Fifty-nine percent of respondents in the poll said that the federal trial in Trump’s 2020 election subversion case should take place before the 2024 Republican primaries begin early next year. A slightly higher number — 61 percent of all respondents — said that the trial should take place before the general election next November.
There was a predictable partisan split among Democrats and Republicans, with nearly 90 percent of Democratic respondents seeking an early trial date androughly a third of Republican respondents agreeing.
It was the reaction of independents, however, that may prove most ominous for Trump. Nearly two-thirds (63 percent) of independents said that Trump should stand trial before next November — a figure that suggests particular interest in and attentiveness to a case that effectively alleges that Trump tried to steal the last election. By way of a rough comparison, when we asked a similar question in June following Trump’s indictment by the Justice Department in Florida concerning his retention of classified documents, fewer than half of independent respondents (48 percent) said that the trial in that case should take place before next November.
About half believe he’s guilty:
I think everyone agrees that he did what they are accusing him of doing. Trump’s people think it was just politics and fully justified. Everyone else thinks it was an assault on the law and the constitution. That’s what’s going to be decided in these cases. I’m not sure people fully realize that.
This is the big problem for Trump:
— A conviction in DOJ’s 2020 election case would hurt Trump in the general election
Our latest poll also makes clear that it would be unhelpful for Trump’s presidential bid if he is federally convicted of a criminal scheme to steal the last election at the same time that he is asking the American people to send him back to the White House.
A plurality of respondents (44 percent) said that a conviction in the case would have no impact on their likelihood of supporting Trump, but the numbers tipped decisively against Trump among those who said that the result would inform their vote. Nearly one-third of respondents (32 percent) said that a conviction in the case would make them less likely to support Trump, including about one-third of independents (34 percent).
Only 13 percent of respondents said that a conviction would make them more likely to support Trump, and that figure was comprised mostly of Republicans.
I must say that’s kind of a relief. If we are so polarized that even a felony conviction (or many) wouldn’t change anyone’s mind then this country is in even worse shape than I thought.
And then there’s this:
I love how 43% of Republicans think there should be no penalty if he’s convicted. That’s not how this works I’m afraid.
Personally, I would be happy with strict house arrest for the full prison term with no right to personally communicate with the public or profit from his crimes. As much as I think he deserves to be in jail as he has so often called for other people (some of whom were innocent of the crimes and he didn’t care) it seems to me that exiling him to Mar-a-Lago without any ability to play golf or tweet or hold court or ever be involved in politics again would be enough. Jail would be a very difficult undertaking unless they build one specifically for him and his secret service detail, which is constitutionally required to protect him for the rest of his life.
Your mileage may vary on that, I understand. I might not even really believe it.
— Trump and the GOP’s ‘weaponization’ defense appears to be having limited traction
For months, Trump and his Republican allies have claimed that the Justice Department has been “weaponized” against him by President Joe Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland. We asked a series of questions in order to try to get some understanding of what Americans make of this claim. The results were decidedly mixed for team Trump.
Fifty-nine percent of respondents — including nearly two-thirds of independents — said that the Justice Department’s decision to indict Trump in the 2020 election case was based on a fair evaluation of the evidence and the law. At the same time, however, 44 percent of respondents — including 20 percent of Democrats and 40 percent of independents — said that the decision was based on trying to gain a political advantage for Biden.
In fact, more people believe Trump is guilty of weaponizing the legal system than Biden. Fifty-three percent of respondents — including 56 percent of independents — said that the Trump administration actively used the Justice Department to investigate political enemies with little or no evidence of actual wrongdoing. The comparable number for the Biden administration was 45 percent across all respondents, including 43 percent of independents.
What’s with the 20% of Democrats who think this was about gaining political advantage for Biden? This is the DOJ and the FBI we’re talking about here. They aren’t liberals, no matter what Trump says! Even Merrick Garland isn’t really a liberal. The best you can hope for is that they are apolitical.
This is kind of a killer:
— Trump is the prevailing villain in the story of his indictments
To further test whether the indictments are helping Trump, we asked respondents if they had favorable or unfavorable opinions of the actions, statements and behavior of key players in the federal cases — including not just Trump, but Biden, Garland, special counsel Jack Smith and the Justice Department more generally.
I’m not sure why only 36% see Biden’s actions as favorable since he hasn’t said a word about any of it. Maybe some Democrats want him to be more vocal? I dunno.
All in all, this is a very interesting poll. It shows that for all of Trump’s bellowing about how this is helping him, it isn’t actually true.
Once in a while, as I peruse the morning headlines, I can’t help but ask myself: What would I have thought if I’d seen these stories 10 years ago? I’m always shaken by what it looks like from that perspective. It’s not as if shocking events hadn’t taken place in the decade before that. The 9/11 attacks came as a total shock and the financial crisis of 2008 was as close as I’d ever come to experiencing cataclysmic economic dislocation. But those, at least, were on par with historical world events like Pearl Harbor and the Great Depression, so there was a sense that they were not entirely unprecedented.
On Thursday I read headlines that former President Donald Trump was turning himself in to be arrested for the fourth time, two of those arrests stemming from his attempt to overturn the election in 2020, another for stealing classified documents and yet another for illegally paying hush money to a porn star with whom he’d had an affair. Other headlines tell me that the first Republican presidential primary debate was held without the frontrunner in attendance — that frontrunner being Donald Trump, the man with the four felony indictments. Today that seems like just another day in American politics. In 2013, I would have laughed at the sheer absurdity of the entire premise. But ever since Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016, nothing has ever been normal in American politics — and it’s getting weirder every day.
Wednesday night’s GOP debate looked, on the surface, like relatively normal political spectacle. Eight candidates qualified for the stage, some familiar faces along with others who are new to national politics. The production was standard issue campaign-season material. But the fact is that Donald Trump leads this entire pack by north of 40 points, so he didn’t consider it necessary to show up. Although the candidates on stage largely acted as if he didn’t exist, Trump hung over the event like a giant orange specter, and must have laughed uproariously as all but two of the other contenders pledged to vote for him even if he is convicted on any of the criminal charges he now faces.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis yelled and grimaced throughout the debate, presumably because he’d been coached to be aggressive and to “smile” as much as possible, lot and that was as close as he was able to come. As usual, DeSantis said chilling things about invading Mexico and summarily executing people “stone cold dead” along the border. Then he told the most bizarre abortion anecdote I’ve ever heard:
I know a lady in Florida named Penny. She survived multiple abortion attempts. She was left discarded in a pan. Fortunately, her grandmother saved her and brought her to a different hospital.
At first I thought DeSantis was claiming that a woman named Penny had been forced to have an abortion and then was left “in a pan,” which made no sense. Then I realized that this Penny was actually supposed to be an aborted fetus who made it to another hospital and somehow lived to tell the tale. Jezebel reports that this is an oft-repeated but unverifiable story told by a woman from Michigan (not Florida) named Penny Hopper, who claims she was born alive in 1955 after a botched 23-week abortion and whose legend has fueled “a whole string of so-called ‘Born Alive’ bills in state legislatures and Congress.”
But DeSantis didn’t leave much of an impression anyway. He was upstaged by the newcomer, biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who understands that the Republican base loves anyone who owns the libs with a bit of style. Trump may not have been there in the flesh but Ramaswamy channeled him effectively enough, getting the rest of the pack to gasp like anxious old ladies at every outrageous thing he said. The MAGA base won’t make him president, of course. He’s just a bit too … exotic. But they liked his performance a lot.
As I perused all those crazy headlines on Thursday morning, I noticed something curious. There was almost no mention of Trump’s “counterprogramming” initiative, his interview with Tucker Carlson on the platform formerly called Twitter, now X. It was set up as a big slap in the face to Fox News by Trump, Carlson and Elon Musk. The idea was that people would be more excited to see the two political stars together than a bunch of wannabes who haven’t got a chance. Maybe they were, but that’s an unproven premise.
Trump claims that his interview broke all records and that more than 100 million people watched it. He posted a right-wing article on Truth Social claiming that his chat with Carlson was the most watched interview ever, “beating Oprah and Michael Jackson.” That was a lie, of course. It clocked more than 180 million views on X, which only describes how many times it showed up in someone’s feed — including multiple views by the same users — and says nothing about how many people actually watched it. Engagement numbers offer a somewhat more useful clue. Yahoo News reports:
As of this writing, Carlson’s interview with Trump has been reposted (formerly “retweeted”) 171,800 times, quote-posted (formerly “quote-tweeted”) 14,500 times, liked 578,100 times, bookmarked 46,500 times, and has been replied to around 47,000 times. Not especially low numbers. It’s undeniable that Trump has a lot of supporters, many of whom swarm on Twitter.
Well, those aren’t especially high numbers either. Many celebrities generate much bigger numbers than that when they promote a new album or movie. Fox News reports that the Republican debate garnered 12.8 million viewers, which is perfectly respectable considering that the frontrunner wasn’t even there.
Did Trump say anything particularly notable in his interview with Carlson? Not by his standards. The former Fox News superstar kept pushing the ex-president to endorse political violence, asking if he thought the U.S. was moving toward civil war. When Carlson asked whether “the left” might try to kill Trump, the latter described his opponents as “savage animals” and turned to the subject of Jan. 6, 2021:
[P]eople in that crowd said it was the most beautiful day they’ve ever experienced. There was love in that crowd, there was love and unity. I have never seen such spirit and such passion and such love, and I’ve also never seen simultaneously, and from the same people, such hatred of what they’ve done to our country.
I assume “they” in that last sentence refers to the “savage animals” of the left. And yes, he’s right: His supporters really do hate them. That much is obvious by the violence being perpetrated by Trump’s followers against perceived foes on a regular basis.
As Trump rhetoric goes, that’s nothing. He’s said much worse things than that many times over. But once again I have to refer back to myself in 2013, when I would have been stunned to see those two men casually discussing possible civil war and heightened political violence the way Republicans once talked about tort reform or capital gains taxes. Like a lot of Americans, I’ve grown numb to that now. I don’t even want to think about what I might see if I could look 10 years further down the road from here.
At a mixer last night, a friend mentioned the Democratic Data Exchange referenced recently at Axios:
The database, run by an independent firm called Democratic Data Exchange (DDx), allows Democrats and allied groups — campaigns, state parties, super PACs and hundreds more — to bridge a longtime inability to share information.
It’s a legal workaround. DDx allows 501(c) nonprofit groups to pool data with campaigns and the party that their nonprofit status otherwise prohibits. They cannot formally coordinate. Here groups just dump data into a pool that other allied groups can draw out of. The GOP has one too.
How it works: DDx doesn’t hold any information that identifies voters by name, Democratic officials say.
Instead, it uses a numbering system that’s attached to names in public voting files and organizations’ databases that typically include people’s names, addresses, phone numbers and preferences.
Democratic campaigns and allied groups such as House Majority PAC and Everytown for Gun Safety pay a membership fee to join the exchange and earn credits by contributing data.
They can then take out as much data as their credits allow. The more data they contribute, the more they can harvest.
Campaigns and organizations receive data associated with ID numbers that they can then match with individuals with the same ID numbers in voter files.
Efficiency, huh?
Back in the corporate world, when buzzwords like “efficiency” and “shareholder value” began circulating in the office it was time to update your resume.
What they’re saying: Becca Siegel, a senior adviser who led the Biden campaign’s analytics team in 2020, said access to DDx data allows the campaign to be more efficient with their resources — zeroing in on voters who seem persuadable voters and spending less energy on those who don’t.
“When we’re talking about billions of dollars of voter outreach, a little more efficient is very meaningful … and may be the difference between winning and losing an election,” she said.
Listen, I do a lot of voting data analysis. Enough that I regularly hear Darth Vader in my head insisting, “Don’t be too proud of this technological terror you’ve constructed.”
Not that this DDx effort is not worthwhile, but it’s doubling down on microtargeting. What it’s not about is Democrats growing their voter pool.
Most volunteer leaders see their state Democratic party’s efforts to organize outreach as “too little, too late.” One in four call their party unresponsive. A majority of respondents said the party does a terrible job targeting voters, saying that its lists are far too narrow.
In Murray Waas’ “Rule of Law” newsletter this morning he writes, “Unaffiliated voters in Colorado are currently the state’s largest voting bloc— a sizable plurality of about 46%—and their numbers are growing.” It’s the same in North Carolina where they are 36%. Party registration and past voting history are principal factors that make a voter “seem persuadable” to campaigns.
I’ve identified hundreds of precincts across North Carolina where unaffiliated voters who do get to the polls vote 60, 70, 80-90% for Democrats. Except they turn out at 12% below their Democratic neighbors. Those who stayed home bothered to register but are not regular voters.
Are they not turning out like their neighbors in these already heavily Democratic precincts because they are unengaged, or because they are not being engaged? Because our technological terror does not see them as low-hanging fruit? I’m talking about tens of thousands of Democratic votes left on the table in blue, blue neighborhoods because efficiency means these voters are, in Seinfeld terms, not “sponge-worthy.”
Efficiency was the sprite behind corporate consolidation, massive layoffs, and sending jobs overseas. Be careful about putting too much faith in it:
The pilot made the following announcement over the plane’s intercom: “Ladies and gentlemen I have two announcements to make. One is good news and the other is bad news. First I’ll give you the bad news—we’re lost! Now I’ll give you the good news — we’re making very good time.”
