Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Obviously, it would be very bad to get your hopes up. We’ve all learned our lesson over the past 8 years. But still, there is a bit of a case to be made that things could go very well on election day for Harris and the Democrats. I think it’s ok to fantasize a little bit about that, just for kicks.

Here’s an article in Fortune about the possibility of a big win:

In late 2020 and early 2021, this reporter wrote several stories focusing on the election predictions advanced by Thomas Miller, a data scientist at Northwestern University. I was intrigued by the highly original methodology Miller deployed in calling the trends, and outcomes, first in the presidential race, then for the two Georgia senatorial contests, where the surprise twin victories gave Democrats control of the upper chamber.

[…]

In all three 2020 contests, Miller beat virtually every pollster, and modeler parsing multiple voter surveys. He missed the size of Biden’s win in the electoral college by just 12 votes, tagging every state for the correct column save Georgia. For the two senate runoffs, Miller refined his approach to sorting data on the Peach State, and scored again. A week before Election Day on December 6, 2020, the polls gave Republican David Perdue a wide lead over Democrat Jon Ossoff, and showed the GOP’s Kelly Loeffler in a dead heat versus opponent Raphael Warnock. By contrast, Miller’s numbers had Loeffler heading for a big loss, and Ossoff en route to a modest victory. Once again, the contrarian academic nailed it: Miller was just 0.2% short on Warnock’s 2.0% margin, and precisely on target in forecasting Ossoff’s 1.0% final bulge at the ballot box.

Ok, so now you know who this is and why we are listening to him. Miller doesn’t rely solely on polls but also uses the betting markets. He says the right question isn’t “who are you voting for” but “who do you expect to win.” Ok.

Here’s how it worked in 2020:

For the 2020 Biden-Trump face-off, Miller deployed the pricing posted on the largest U.S. political betting site, Predictit. He took the Predictit odds in the 56 individual voting jurisdictions, tracked the hourly changes, and used his proprietary model to roll the data into daily odds that were extremely current given that folks were posting bets for one candidate or the other 24-7 on the site. For the Senate races, Miller took a different tack. He assembled a group of about 1,200 Georgians whom he lured by agreeing to pay them a few dollars to participate, and extra dollars if they named the contender most likely to win—not the necessarily one they planned to vote for, as well as predict the margin for victory. The method he developed, called a “prediction survey” taking the best parts of the polling and the betting market guided Miller to a near-perfect reading of the voting shares.

He’s using Predictit again this time. He tracked the Biden-Trump race over the course of many months and it had Trump winning “bigly.” The Democrats odds went up after Harris took over and ended up at about 400 electoral votes by the end of the DNC.

But…

Then, Trump staged a comeback. In the days before the September 10 Trump-Harris debate, Harris was still ahead, but Trump had nearly caught up. “At that point, the race was essentially a tossup,” observes Miller. “The forecast for the Democrats was 288.” It was the onstage battle in Philadelphia that wrecked the 78-year old former POTUS, according to the Miller numbers. Within a day after the candidates left the podium, Harris had jumped to exactly over 400 electoral votes. The Harris endorsement from Taylor Swift, secured the day of the debate, probably helped sink Trump’s chances, according to Miller. Since then, Harris has maintained for 400-plus vote total.

As of September 16, Predictit is showing a price of 55 cents for Harris, and 45 cents for Trump, the reverse of the scenario before Biden’s departure. Once again, those odds translate in 55% of the popular vote for the Democrat according to Miller’s model. If the situation persists, Trump faces an absolute rout. “It would be somewhere between the defeats of Barry Goldwater by Lyndon Johnson in 1964, and Bob Dole by Bill Clinton in 1996,” says Miller. “We’re talking about a blowout where Harris gets over 400 electoral votes and wins Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and every other swing state.”

Miller notes that at least in recent history, America’s never witnessed a reversal of fortune remotely as dramatic as this one. “It’s gone from a drastic landslide in Trump’s direction to a drastic landslide for Harris,” he marvels. The distance is now so great that only another epic swing would bring Trump back into contention, and Miller predicts that right now, it looks like Harris will win big on November 5. As a coda, he recalls a slogan the Johnson campaign used to bash Goldwater: “In your gut you know he’s nuts.” Miller’s markets-based analysis posits that the people betting their own money are right in predicting that by the time the candidates left the stage on September 10, millions of voters likely to back Donald Trump abandoned the ex-President, starting the shock waves that could cause an avalanche for Harris that as of now, few see building

Is that all bullshit soothsaying? Could be. And even if it’s all true, the wild swings are concerning, especially since we know the late swing against Clinton in 2016 from the Comey letter probably precipitated the loss. Who knows what might happen in the next month and a half?

Still, it’s kind of fun to contemplate. If she pulled out every swing state, including North Carolina and Georgia it would be so, so sweet. Trump will say it was stolen, of course. There is no scenario in which he won’t. And there will no doubt be post election shenanigans with the electoral vote and the courts and maybe even violence. But if she could win them all it would make it all look even more ridiculous than it already does.

Personally, I’m not putting any money on any of this because I’m paranoid and assuming it’s going to be close. But wouldn’t it be great if it wasn’t?

The NY Times poll is out! Oh my god! Now we know the truth!

Take a look at the list below from 538 which shows all the national polling results since September 11th. You may notice that there’s only one that shows Trump ahead. That’s the NY Times/Sienna poll.

Maybe it’s right and all these other polls are wrong. It could happen. But I would think that the media would show a tiny bit of skepticism about that since every single poll other than this one shows Harris leading.

And yes, these are all within the margin of error. And maybe it’s better psychologically for Democratic voters to believe they are losing but there’s a fine line between feeling motivated feeling despondent. I just hope the Democrats are able to keep up the energy that we’ve been seeing since Harris took over the ticket.

I should point out that the good news is the NY Times poll (with the Philly Inquirer) found Harris ahead in Pennsylvania by 4 points. (They didn’t poll Wisconsin and Michigan or didn’t reveal it, if they did.) That’s actually better than some of the other polls from the same period and who knows what it really means. But because this poll is taken so much more seriously by the media, these numbers are getting exposure and I suspect that makes all the people working hard in Pennsylvania feel a little bit better.

Now the Trump campaign is urging him to drop out because of this story on CNN:

Mark Robinson, the controversial and socially conservative Republican nominee for governor of North Carolina, made a series of inflammatory comments on a pornography website’s message board more than a decade ago, in which he referred to himself as a “black NAZI!” and expressed support for reinstating slavery, a CNN KFile investigation found.

Despite a recent history of anti-transgender rhetoric, Robinson said he enjoyed watching transgender pornography, a review of archived messages found in which he also referred to himself as a “perv.”

The comments, which Robinson denies making, predate his entry into politics and current stint as North Carolina’s lieutenant governor. They were made under a username that CNN was able to identify as Robinson by matching a litany of biographical details and a shared email address between the two.

Many of Robinson’s comments were gratuitously sexual and lewd in nature. They were made between 2008 and 2012 on “Nude Africa,” a pornographic website that includes a message board. The comments were made under the username minisoldr, a moniker Robinson used frequently online.

Robinson listed his full name on his profile for Nude Africa, as well as an email address he used on numerous websites across the internet for decades.

CNN is reporting only a small portion of Robinson’s comments on the website given their graphic nature.

They’re gross but they’re entirely in keeping with other things he’s said and done. He was reportedly a very regular visitor to a porn store where he visited the little private room to watch them. He was there many days a week. He’s said, “some people need killing” (in a church!) and condemned women for getting pregnant saying they need to get “control down there.” There’s a lot more that they all knew about before this latest revelation. He’s a pig but being a pig is a MAGA selling point.

Trump is terrified a he’s going to lose N Carolina so they’ve seized on this to try to get him off the ballot because they believe he’s dragging them down. But they already got RFK taken off the ballot to help Trump and the delayed ballots are already printed and slated to go out on the 21st. Will the courts issue another stay to delay the ballots so they can try to get this weirdo off the ballot? Seems like a stretch but in this race anything can happen.

It’s unclear how this is going to go but so far, Robinson isn’t quitting:

I suspect that he’d think about it for the right amount of money. He’d better get it upfront because Trump doesn’t pay.

(If only the media would report it…)

Media Matters with yet another of Trump’s insane comments:

Major newspapers and newswires failed to report that at a September 17 campaign event in Michigan, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump proposed reducing food imports in response to a question about how he’d reduce food costs, claiming that “our farmers are being decimated.” Several economists explained the obvious point that reducing the supply of food by restricting imports would actively increase food prices.

During the town hall, an audience member asked Trump how he would “bring down the cost of food and groceries.” After Trump rambled about unrelated energy prices and Federal Reserve interest rates, he responded:

“We gotta work with our farmers. Our farmers are being decimated right now. They’re being absolutely, absolutely decimated. And you know, one of the reasons is we allow a lot of farm product into our country. We’re gonna have to be a little bit like other countries. We’re not gonna allow so much come — we’re gonna let our farmers go to work.”

Several economists were quick to point out that this would not reduce food prices. In fact, it would raise them.

University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers wrote, “I’m exhausted even saying it, but blocking supply won’t reduce prices, and it’s not even close.” 

Cato Institute vice president Scott Lincicome posted: “Well, technically, you can’t get a price lower than zero (bc the food won’t be available at all bc it can’t be grown in the US for most of the year).” 

Center for Economic and Policy Research senior economist Dean Baker commented: “That’s what you get when you ask someone who both knows nothing about economics and has never had to buy his own groceries in his life.”

Former Labor Secretary and University of California, Berkeley public policy professor Robert Reich added: “Trump’s plan to lower food prices is to reduce the supply of food. Think grocery prices are high now? Just wait.”

Yet, according to a search of the Factiva database from September 17 through noon on September 18, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Associated Press, and Reuters all failed to cover this statement from Trump. (These newspapers have a history of almost entirely failing to cover Trump’s inflationary policies in their print news coverage of inflation.) 

Why? It seems like all we’ve heard for the past three years is massive bellyaching about inflation and Trump is out there saying that he’s not only going to raise the price of groceries but he’s going to make a whole lot of stuff just disappear from the shelves for most of the year. (Those of you on the older side, like me, will recall what it was like when you could only get produce in season and often couldn’t get it at all.) Why isn’t his daft “economic plan” a huge story on the front page with headlines that say, “Trump promises to hike inflation with huge taxes on groceries.” That would be the truth.

It’s getting hard to tell anymore

Daniel Dale at CNN breaks down a few of Trump’s bizarre ramblings:

Former President Donald Trump is littering his public remarks with fictional stories.

This isn’t run-of-the-mill political spin, the kind of statistic-twisting and accomplishment-exaggerating that political candidates of all stripes engage in. Rather, the Republican presidential nominee is telling colorful lies that are completely untethered to reality.

He talks about the “eating the dogs” thing of course. But there are more:

Harris and the military draft

At a rally in Las Vegas last week, Trump claimed his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, is talking about forcing Americans to serve in the military: “She’s already talking about bringing back the draft. She wants to bring back the draft, and draft your child, and put them in a war that should never have happened.”

That’s absolute bunk. Harris is not talking at all about bringing back the draft.

Harris’ CNN interview

Trump claimed during a Fox News event in Pennsylvania in early September that Harris “had notes” to assist her during the television interview she did with CNN in late August. He even performed an impression in which he portrayed Harris supposedly looking down at these notes.

She didn’t actually have any notes.

Transgender children and schools

At an event held by a conservative group in late August, Trump claimed that schools are sending children for gender-affirming surgeries without their parents’ knowledge. He said, “The transgender thing is incredible. Think of it. Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child.”

Trump’s campaign subsequently made clear to CNN that it could not find a single example of such a thing having happened anywhere in the United States. Parental consent is required for gender-affirming operations; schools have not performed or approved these surgeries for minors behind their parents’ backs.

Even after Trump’s campaign demonstrated that it couldn’t substantiate the story, he repeated it days later at a Wisconsin rally in early September.

Harris and the Russian invasion of Ukraine

Trump told a vivid story on Fox News in late August about how President Joe Biden supposedly sent Harris to negotiate with Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2022 in an effort to prevent an invasion of Ukraine. Trump claimed Harris was sent “to see Putin in Russia three days before the attack. She went. She said – she gave her case. He attacked three days later. He attacked three days later. He laughed at her. He thought she was a joke.” Trump also told a version of the story at the September debate.

But this story, too, is wholly false.

Biden never sent Harris to negotiate with Putin – in fact, the Kremlin said in July that Harris and Putin have never spoken – and Harris did not travel to Russia just prior to the invasion. Rather, Harris traveled to a conference in Germany to meet with US allies, including Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelensky.

Harris’ 2020 primary performance

Trump has repeatedly claimed during the last month that Harris was so unpopular when she previously ran for the presidency, in 2019, that she was the very first candidate to drop out of the crowded Democratic primary. “She was one of 22 people that ran. She was the first one to quit,” he said at a Pennsylvania rally in late August.

Not even close.

In fact, 13 other Democratic candidates dropped out of the race before Harris did – including the sitting or former governors of Washington, Montana and Colorado; the sitting mayor of New York City; and sitting or former members of the House of Representatives and Senate.

Opinions of Roe v. Wade

Facing heavy criticism from Harris and others for appointing three of the Supreme Court justices who overturned the Roe v. Wade abortion rights decision in 2022, Trump concocted a tale that this unpopular decision fulfilled the wishes of “everybody” – including “every Democrat.”

“Every Democrat, every Republican, everybody wanted Roe v. Wade terminated and brought back to the states,” Trump said on Fox News in late August.

This is not even remotely accurate.

Roe was consistently supported by a majority of the American public, and it was overwhelmingly popular among Democrats – with 80% support or better among Democrats in many polls.

Elections in California

At a September press conference in California, Trump claimed that “if I ran with an honest vote counter in California I would win California, but the votes are not counted honestly.” He had delivered an even more colorful version of the claim in an interview in late August, saying, “If Jesus came down and was the vote counter, I would win California, okay?”

More rubbish.

The votes are counted honestly in California, as they are in every other state; Trump loses California because it is an overwhelmingly Democratic state that has not chosen a Republican presidential candidate since 1988. He lost the state in 2020, fair and square, by more five million votes and more than 29 percentage points.

Migrants, prisons and ‘the Congo’

For months, Trump has told a story about how “the Congo” has deliberately emptied prisons to somehow get its criminals to come to the United States as migrants. “Many prisoners let go from the Congo in Africa, rough prisoners,” he said at an August event in Arizona. At an August rally in Pennsylvania the week after, he said, “In the Congo, in Africa: 22 people deposited into our country. ‘Where do you come from?’ ‘The Congo.’ ‘Where in the Congo?’ ‘Jail.’”

But Trump has presented zero evidence that “the Congo” has actually emptied any prisons for migration purposes. Representatives for the governments of both the Democratic Republic of Congo and the neighboring Republic of Congo have told CNN on the record that the claim is fiction, experts on the two countries say they have seen no evidence it is true, and Trump’s campaign has ignored requests to offer any substantiation.

The jobs revision

After the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics announced in August that its annual revision of jobs data found that the economy added about 818,000 fewer jobs than initially reported for the 12 months ending in March, Trump told a story about how the government had been planning to announce this downward revision “after November 5th,” Election Day, but was forced to do so before the election because of “a whistleblower” – “a patriot leaker.”

Another fabrication. The Bureau of Labor Statistics regularly releases the preliminary revised data in August, and it had disclosed the precise date of this particular data release – August 21 – weeks in advance.

William Beach, a conservative economist who was appointed by Trump to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics, wrote on social media: “For those who think the big revision to the BLS jobs numbers ‘leaked’ and was meant to come out after the election, remember that BLS always announces its draft revisions in August and announced this year’s date, August 21, many months ago. It is important to check your facts.”

There are a few more. He’s just making shit up on the fly.

ICYMI Wednesday

I took a little license in the title. Here’s what you may have missed (NYT):

More than 100 former national security officials from Republican administrations and former Republican members of Congress endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris on Wednesday after concluding that their party’s nominee, Donald J. Trump, is “unfit to serve again as president.”

[…]

The 111 signatories included former officials who served under Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush or George W. Bush. Many of them had previously broken with Mr. Trump, including two former defense secretaries, Chuck Hagel and William S. Cohen; Robert B. Zoellick, a former president of the World Bank; the former C.I.A. directors Michael V. Hayden and William H. Webster; a former director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte; and former Gov. William F. Weld of Massachusetts. Miles Taylor and Olivia Troye, two Trump administration officials who became vocal critics, also signed.

Here’s the link.

We believe that the President of the United States must be a principled, serious, and steady leader who can advance and defend American security and values, strengthen our alliances, and protect our democracy. We expect to disagree with Kamala Harris on many domestic and foreign policy issues, but we believe that she possesses the essential qualities to serve as President and Donald Trump does not. We therefore support her election to be President.

Then they address the sick elephant in the room:

We firmly oppose the election of Donald Trump. As President, he promoted daily chaos in government, praised our enemies and undermined our allies, politicized the military and disparaged our veterans, prioritized his personal interest above American interests, and betrayed our values, democracy, and this country’s founding documents. In our view, by inciting the violent attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021 and defending those who committed it, he has violated his oath of office and brought danger to our country. As former Vice President Pence has said “anyone who puts himself over the Constitution should never be President of the United States.”

Bottom line: “He is unfit to serve again as President, or indeed in any office of public trust.”

Harris, on the other hand, displays characteristics these former officials deem worthy of their support. They write that she has, “Consistently championed the rule of law, democracy, and our constitutional principles” as well as aligning with a list of their foreign policy imperatives.

“[A]ny any potential concerns” the group has about Harris “pale in comparison to Donald Trump’s demonstrated chaotic and unethical behavior and disregard for our Republic’s time-tested principles of constitutional governance.”

“Traitorous fucking moron” appears nowhere in the letter. I looked.

In a sane world

Board of elections officials and supervisors take oaths before starting their public service jobs, both in my state and in Georgia.

Here’s Georgia Code § 21-2-70:

(B) In the case of a board of elections, each member of the board shall take an oath in the following form upon becoming a member of the board which shall apply to all primaries and elections conducted by the board throughout such person’s tenure on the board:

I, __________________, do swear (or affirm) that I will as a member of the board of elections duly attend all ensuing primaries and elections during the continuance thereof, that I will to the best of my ability prevent any fraud, deceit, or abuse in carrying on the same, that I will make a true and perfect return of such primaries and elections, and that I will at all times truly, impartially, and faithfully perform my duties in accordance with Georgia laws to the best of my judgment and ability.

Now, like the presidential oath (Article II, Section 1, Clause 8) and the Foreign Emoluments Clause (Article I, Section 9, Clause 8), try enforcing it.

Because it seems like this kind of activity between election officials would be … wrong, if not illegal or a fireable offense in the private sector (The Guardian):

Emails obtained by the Guardian reveal a behind-the-scenes network of county election officials throughout Georgia coordinating on policy and messaging to both call the results of November’s election into question before a single vote is cast, and push rules and procedures favored by the election denial movement.

The emails were obtained by the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew) as a result of a public records request sent to David Hancock, an election denier and member of the Gwinnett county board of elections. Crew shared the emails with the Guardian.

Spanning a period beginning in January, the communications expose the inner workings of a group that includes some of the most ardent supporters of the former president Donald Trump’s election lies as well as ongoing efforts to portray the coming election as beset with fraud. Included in the communications are agendas for meetings and efforts to coordinate on policies and messaging as the swing state has once again become a focal point of the presidential campaign.

The communications include correspondence from a who’s who of Georgia election denialists, including officials with ties to prominent national groups such as the Tea Party Patriots and the Election Integrity Network, a group run by Cleta Mitchell, a former attorney who acted as an informal adviser to the Trump White House during its attempts to overturn the 2020 election.

The group – which includes elections officials from at least five counties – calls itself the Georgia Election Integrity Coalition.

If it were me, I’d be calling for the dismissal of these election officials. But given GOP conservatives run Georgia according to Frank Wilhoit’s formulation for bad faith politics, it’s not likely.

Receiving the email were a handful of county election officials who have expressed belief in Donald Trump’s false claims of a stolen election in 2020, and have continued to implement policies and push for rules based on the belief that widespread election fraud threatens to result in a Trump loss in Georgia in November. They include Michael Heekin, a Republican member of the Fulton county board of elections who refused to certify results this year; his colleague Julie Adams, who has twice refused to certify results this year and works for the prominent national election denier groups Tea Party Patriots and the Election Integrity Network; and Debbie Fisher of Cobb county, Nancy Jester of DeKalb county and Roy McClain of Spalding county – all of whom refused to certify results last November and who received the letter Hancock took issue with.

And aside from little Spalding County (pop. 67k) about 35 miles south of Atlanta, Fulton, Cobb, and DeKalb counties conveniently represent, along with (Hancock’s Gwinnett) the four largest counties in Georgia and a third of its population.

In this environment, and in this state, and with its recent history, this story should be attracting more attention than it has.

Joyce Vance, former U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama, writes at Civil Discourse that these election officials must be “gifted fortune tellers” if they’re already discovered that Georgia’s 2024 election will involve massive fraud before a single vote has been cast:

“The goal of their plan is to hamper certification of the election results if Trump loses,” Vance writes:

This news is not a surprise. As we’ve discussed previously, there are some efforts underway to pretend the purely ministerial obligation election officials have to certify completed counts is something else, a process whose outcome these officials have the discretion to challenge. If this sounds familiar, it’s roughly akin to the idea of delaying certification of the Electoral College vote on January 6, 2020, to throw the election into chaos amidst claims of (nonexistent) fraud. It’s a recipe for a coup.

… You don’t have to be an expert in election law to see what’s happening: Trump is trying to create a legal path to do what he failed to accomplish in 2020, overturning the will of the voters if he loses.

This election will be a fight for every vote, Vance reminds readers. On the positive side, she’s seeing signs for Harris-Walz in Alabama neighborhoods she normally thinks of as Republican:

Occasionally down here in Alabama you see a smattering of signs supporting Democratic candidates. But I don’t remember seeing this many, in such a wide variety of places and with so much variety and creativity, ever before. Is it joy? I’m not sure what it is, but these signs make me smile and feel hopeful every time I see one, and I hope they do for you too!

Go ahead. As Mitch McConnell said yesterday:

Trump is making sure they will get the blame. He seems to think immigration is the magic bullet and that people will rush to his side if the Democrats refuse to pass this sill SAVE act which is an unnecessary, redundant bill. I really doubt that people will see it that way. Much more likely they’ll just see more Trumpian chaos and be reminded that the GOP majority is a clown show there will be even more of it if he’s elected president again.

Speaker Johnson was kissing the ring at Mar-a-lago last weekend so we know where he’s going to wind up. He certainly isn’t going to defy Dear Leader. Stay tuned. This is going to get interesting.