I don’t know how much time you have to listen to podcasts but if you’re interested in the minutia of the electoral college vote and are worried about Pennsylvania, this one with Greg Sargent interviewing Gov. Josh Shapiro may be up your alley. An excerpt:
If Kamala Harris can defeat Donald Trump in Pennsylvania, she almost certainly will win the presidency. It’s must-win for him. Yet the state remains a coin-flip—which is why both candidates campaigned in the state this week. So what is Harris’s path to victory? We talked to Governor Josh Shapiro, who explained why the race is so close—and why he thinks she’s “on her way” to winning there, in part due to concerted communications with non-college voters. Shapiro also responded at length to Trump’s lies about Haitian immigrants living in Pennsylvania, pronouncing them “utter bullshit.”
Here is the whole thing:
I know the polls show a very close race. But as I wrote in an earlier post,
Donald Trump is running for president. And he may just win. It’s that close. And this is what he’s doing 6 weeks before the election.
The watches sell for $499, which I’m sure is a bargain for the people who are suffering in this economy which Trump says is the worst in American history.
But get a load of this:
He is basically soliciting bribes at this point. He can raise a quick million and a half from rich buddies and it will go directly into his pocket before the election. As we’ve seen with his promises to everyone from the oil and gas industry to the vape industry in exchange for policy promises in the last few months, Trump is in a frenzy of corruption right now.
I wonder why this hasn’t really penetrated the media? We’re hearing lots of details about Eric Adams’ alleged crimes, some of which are worth big money and others which are penny ante graft. Meanwhile there’s virtually nothing about the recent reporting about Trump’s huge $10 million bribe from Egypt in 2016 or him selling Bibles, NFTs, Crypto, Picture Book, Shoes, and hundreds of other trinkets and now $100,000 watches to 147 lucky interested parties, in the middle of his presidential campaign!
We know the DOJ will not charge him for anything in the weeks before the election but considering what they did to Clinton when Comey re-opened the “butheremails” investigation 2 weeks ahead of the election, you’d think someone would find this to be a worthy story.
Trump: But if I were the president, I would inform the threatening country — in this case, Iran — that if you do anything to harm this person, we are going to blow your largest cities and the country itself to smithereens. We are going to blow it to smithereens. pic.twitter.com/Q8iMAjNsdz
President Truman followed through with the plan to use the bombs that ended World War II.
Truman could have stopped it. He didn’t, but right afterward he ordered that presidential permission was required for such action, and his administration made it official policy in a 1948 memo: U.S. presidents had the sole authority to launch nuclear weapons. If a president gives the word, the military must obey. That’s even if America has not been attacked, and even if a president is demonstrably unfit. A president, for instance, such as Trump, whose reckless, divisive term ended with his loyalists — at his urging — staging a deadly attack on the Capitol to try to keep him in power after he lost the 2020 election.
“President Trump’s last terrifying weeks in office have been a wake-up call. Never again should we allow a dangerous president to have unilateral control over nuclear launch,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren and former Defense Secretary William J. Perry wrote in USA Today shortly after the mob rioted at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Trump wasn’t the first president to raise such concerns, they said, nor would he be the last. They called for ending “this godlike power” for all presidents to come.
But presidents still have it. And Trump is now trying for a second term in a race most analysts consider too close to call — a prospect so disturbing that this week more than 700 current and former national security officials signed a bipartisan letter endorsing his opponent, asking Americans to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris because Trump is “impulsive and ill-informed.” Just days earlier, more than 100 former Republican national security officials warned in a similar Harris endorsement that Trump’s erratic nature “threatens reckless and dangerous global consequences.”
A volatile temperament is one of the many reasons Trump is a national security menace. As Hillary Clinton memorably noted in her 2016 convention speech accepting the Democratic nomination: “A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.”
He’s worse than he used to be and much, much angrier and resentful. And he won’t have people like Milley, Mattis, Esper and the like around him. Think more like Michael Flynn. Or General Buck Turgidson.
The key comparison is between the top blue line and the bottom green line. The green is what analysts projected in February 2021 without the Biden-Harris economic agenda. The blue is what we got instead: far more growth, even adjusted for inflation. https://t.co/TIl0yBZPT6
Yes, I know people are still suffering, an unfortunately common circumstance in our unequal society. There is more work to do, always. But Biden did something very smart and the Republicans did everything they could to stop it. I will be beyond disgusted if Trump ekes out another win and takes credit for all this and the media and MAGA happily give it to him. Which they will.
Donald Trump wants Americans to help in his lifelong struggle to work out his daddy issues. Mr. Insecurity has complained for decades that the world (pretty much everyone) has been laughing at us (him). If there is a greater malevolent bundle of psychological maldevelopment walking this earth, we’ve never heard of them because they were not born into $413 million and into the family of a prominent (and crooked) New York City land developer.
Just ten days ago, Trump reprised his soul-cry: “THE WORLD IS LAUGHING AT US AS FOOLS, THEY ARE STEALING OUR JOBS AND OUR WEALTH. WE CANNOT LET THEM LAUGH ANY LONGER.” That is, give him the White House and he’ll make THEM all pay. He’ll show you. He’ll get even. He’ll deport anyone he doesn’t execute or jail. Just you wait!
Take him at his word.
Upon reading that Nazi-adjacent grievance-spew, Salon’s Chauncey DeVega referenced historian Richard Frankel, author of “States of Exclusion: A New Wave of Fascism.” Frankel writes:
Trump and Vance and their MAGA allies and other neofascists are erasing the distinction between the idea of deporting undocumented immigrants and those who are here legally. In their hysterical stories about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio stealing and eating household pets, they were talking about a group of people who came to this country legally with temporary protected status. But neither Trump nor Vance made any effort to note that. In fact, JD Vance went even further. After reporters informed him that the Haitians in Springfield were here legally, he responded by telling them, “I’m still gonna call them an illegal alien,” unconsciously echoing Karl Lueger, the notorious antisemitic Mayor of Vienna around the turn of the twentieth century, who famously declared, “I decide who’s a Jew.”
All this is to say that the idea that Trump is focused solely on deporting undocumented immigrants is absurd. His stormtroopers will round up anyone they decide does not belong in this country, whether they’re citizens or not. This is also something the Nazis did even before the 1935 Nuremberg Laws stripped German Jews of their citizenship. Only months after coming to power, the Interior Ministry stopped naturalizing Jews arriving from Eastern Europe and soon after that, they began removing the citizenship of Eastern European Jews who were granted citizenship between 1918 and 1933. Whatever their status, Trump means to remove anyone who does not fit within his particular vision of the American national/racial community.
DeVega warns that Trump’s eliminationist rhetoric is only ramping up:
Trump is also promising to make it illegal for undocumented immigrants to own homes in America. Historian Timothy Ryback, who is one of the world’s leading experts on the rise of Hitler and Nazi Germany, highlights the historical precedent of such threats by Trump:
All this anti-foreigner, anti-immigrant foment by Trump and Vance, the doubling down on hate speech and outright lies, reminds me of Hitler’s election campaign rhetoric leading up to the November 6, 1932, Reichstag elections, inflammatory rhetoric that had already resulted in a foreign worker being bludgeoned to death by a group of rightwing vigilantes in the village of Potempa that August.
The sheer brutality of the Potempa murder stunned a nation already reeling from a summer of Nazi street violence that saw newspapers publishing “casualty lists” from the country’s ongoing “civil war.” When the “Potempa Five” were sentenced to death for “political murder,” Hitler sent the killers a telegram of support. He called them heroes. He vowed that once in office, no foreign life would ever be placed above that of a blood German. Indeed, one of Hitler’s early acts as chancellor was to pardon the five killers.
Most troubling to my mind are Trump’s repeated references to immigrants as “rapists” and “vermin” who are allegedly “poisoning the blood of our country.” Hitler had a shorthand term for such vile rhetoric: Rassenschande, or “bastardization” of the German race. He also had solutions: successive acts of legislation that curtailed their rights to employment, education, marriage, etc., and ultimately the creation of a vast government-funded infrastructure of homicidal machinery that led to the extermination of millions of human lives.
Papa Fred Trump may be gone, but Vladimir Putin and others are Donald’s stand-ins, and they know it. But it’s not just Trump promoting malevolent rhetoric. He’s turned the entire Republican Party into an engine of his sad, desperate hunger for the respect of brutal autocrats.
Behold how leading Republicans have chosen time and again to pursue the path of cowardice, says Sarah Longwell, publisher of The Bulwark and leader of other anti-Trump organizations. Longwell told “Deadline White House” that their actions in tolerating Donald Trump’s “repugnant, morally horrible” behavior should be studied forever.
Courage is contagious, she believes. But so is cowardice. Republicans time again over the last decade chose the latter.
“My most fervent hope is that Donald Trump loses this election and that he does it because women turn out in droves to vote against him, including center-right women. Because that is just the kind of justice that Donald Trump deserves.”
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Republicans have for years (in the fashion of Karl Lueger) appointed themselves deciders of who is a Real American™ deserving of civil rights and the protections of the law. Lately, Trump campaign staff pass out at his rallies “Mass Deportation Now!” signs aimed at neighbors they deem less American than themselves. Many have come to “love the smell of ethnic cleansing in the morning.” Malevolence is also contagious.
There are those historical moments etched in memory not just for the events themselves but for where we were and what we were doing when we heard the news. In my case, it was the JFK assassination, the first moon landing, the attempted Reagan assassination, the Challenger disaster, and of course September 11. And perhaps significantly, the first reports of the Rwandan genocide.
Streets in low-lying areas here are already flooded and Hurricane Helene isn’t even here yet. Public schools are closed preemtively. Emergency preparations are underway. But at least we had warnings as close as your TV or computer.
A writer some time back recounted an airplane conversation in which his seatmate remarked that the great thing about computers was that you could always turn them off. Considering that they and thousands of others were sitting in aluminum tubes in the air traffic pattern high above a major city, and that the only thing keeping them from colliding and dying was FAA air traffic computers, the writer was pretty sure he didn’t want them turned off. *
Project 2025 wants a lot of government turned off. Like the ones that warn us of impending weather disasters (Media Matters from May):
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency that predicts changes in climate, weather, oceans, and coastlines and provides data that informs lifesaving forecasts such as tracking hurricanes, is in the crosshairs of Project 2025, the conservative battle plan for a potential second Trump presidency which describes NOAA as a “colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.” But researchers have pushed back on these charges and defended NOAA’s climate data and meteorological work — while forecasters are predicting an “extremely active” Atlantic hurricane season and experts say this summer could rival last year’s record heat.
Project 2025’s call to dismantle NOAA by eliminating or privatizing key functions of the agency is the endgame of years of attempts by conservatives and right-wing media to attack the credibility of the agency and the veracity of the data it produces. It also illustrates that the conservative plan is not just to dismantle U.S. climate policy, but also to scrub the climate data that underpins it.
I live in one of those purple areas. I don’t want NOAA turned off, thank you very much.
* My father’s brother died in a midair collision over Manhattan in 1960.
I know you don’t want to watch a whole Trump speech. It’s very, very hard. But he’s escalating and you should probably hear a little bit of it:
Trump: We wouldn't have hostile takeovers of Springfield, Ohio, Aurora, Colorado, where they are actually going in with massive machine gun-type equipment. They are going in with guns that are beyond even military scope, and they are taking over… pic.twitter.com/EawkLfRd94
Trump: But if I were the president, I would inform the threatening country — in this case, Iran — that if you do anything to harm this person, we are going to blow your largest cities and the country itself to smithereens. We are going to blow it to smithereens. pic.twitter.com/Q8iMAjNsdz
Trump lies that migrants are "literally taking over those towns — hundreds of towns and cities throughout our country. Including the big ones. Look at New York." pic.twitter.com/Xau9kTqKNC
There’s more of the same. He was all amped up this morning, obviously drank a six pack of diet coke already or Dr. Ronny gave him a little pick-me-up. He’s getting worse.
Politico reports:
Donald Trump was meeting privately in mid-September with one of his oldest friends, Steve Wynn, when the casino mogul and Republican mega-donor delivered the former president a blunt warning: You’re off message, and it isn’t helping.
Trump had been distracted, in Wynn’s view. The former president at the time was promoting a conspiracy theory that Haitian immigrants were eating people’s cats and dogs in Ohio, among other things. To drive home his point, Wynn showed Trump polling and suggested the former president would be better off focusing on policy issues where Republicans see his opponent, Kamala Harris, as vulnerable, according to two people briefed on the meeting and granted anonymity to describe it.
The meeting underscored a key point of tension inside the Trump campaign. While polls show the race is incredibly close, some of Trump’s allies are concerned that his impulses and coarse approach to campaigning are undermining him against Harris, a rival who has proved far stronger than his previous opponent, Joe Biden.
In interviews, more than a dozen Trump allies described the former president as reaching a crossroads — faced with the choice of continuing with the missteps that have overtaken the past several weeks of his campaign or embracing a more calculated approach aimed at appealing to a small subset of undecided voters who are likely to sway the outcome of the election. In recent weeks, he has brought into his fold destabilizing forces like social media provocateur Laura Loomer and his controversial former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, plugged commemorative Trump coins, and asserted that if he loses, Jews would be partly to blame.
“It’s not that he’s going backwards,” said one Trump ally granted anonymity to speak freely. “But he should be doing better.”
He can’t change. He’s a 78 year old narcissistic megalomaniac who can’t admit that he’s wrong or that he’s ever lost. He believes his business and 2016 success were because he is a genius. Nobody can tell him anything.
Well, actually he does listen to some people. Like Laura Loomer:
That time Mark defended Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby because "everyone's got something in their past" sure makes sense now.
.@markrobinsonNC has always been like this: unapologetic and clownishly combative. A foolish man with a child-like oppositional defiance disorder. pic.twitter.com/1gpefGPAiF
Hello. My name is digby and I am a poll addict. I really wish I wasn’t because I’m not equipped to deal with commentary like that above from the person who runs 538. I am an ordinary person caught in the vortex of a close election and I may just end up losing my mind over it. Don’t go there if you value your sanity.
W. Joseph Campbell’s Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in U.S. Presidential Elections demonstrates—for the first time, strangely enough, given the robust persuasiveness of its conclusions—that presidential polls are almost always wrong, consistently, in deeply patterned ways.
Unusual for any historical narrative, the pattern is almost unchanged for a good hundred years. First, someone comes forth with some new means of measuring how people will vote for president, and gets it so right it feels like magic. That was the accomplishment of a magazine called The Literary Digest between 1924 and 1932. They sent as many sample ballots as existing technological infrastructure would allow—in 1932, some 20 million—on postcards that doubled as subscription ads. Then, with the greatest care, they counted the ones that came back. For three straight elections, they got it so right the Raleigh News and Observer half-joked that it “would save millions in money and time” to “quit holding elections and accept the Digest’s poll as final.”
In 2008, that was the accomplishment of Nate Silver, who called 49 out of 50 states; in 2012, he notched 50 for 50, scored a best-selling book, and reportedly accounted in the run-up to the election for 20 percent of the traffic for his new employer, TheNew York Times.
In part two of the cycle, yesterday’s miracle suffers a spectacular failure—as in the poll-crazy year of 1936, when modern political polling was invented by the triumvirate of George Gallup, Elmo Roper, and Archibald Crossley, who all called it for Roosevelt over Alf Landon, where the Digest only gave him 41 percent of the popular vote. Their technical revolution (directly querying a representative sample of the electorate) seemed so obvious in retrospect, you wonder how nobody thought of it before. The same with Silver’s model of aggregating, then evaluating and weighting for accuracy, existing state polls.
They’re cocky about it; that’s a pattern, too. That’s what tends to proceed their most spectacular failures.
In early September of 1948, Elmo Roper announced that he wouldn’t publish further results, because “the outcome is settled.” Archibald Crossley vowed to stop counting because “there had been little late shift in 1936, 1940, and 1944.” Just like in 1928, people asked why we should even bother having an election. So confident were the experts that the famous Chicago Daily Tribune early-edition headline “DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN” was only one of many. A German newspaper even described what it claimed was a raucous celebration of Dewey’s victory in Times Square.
Kind of like in 2016, when reporters saw Clinton associates popping champagne corks on Election Day in the campaign plane.
POLLSTERS NEXT DO WHAT ONE WOULD EXPECT: They adjust their methods—but to fight the last war. What else can they do?
Read the whole thing. It is fascinating and I had no idea. I particularly enjoyed his withering analysis of the Nate Silver phenomenon. It’s not the first time one of these guys has fallen from the heights but it’s the most recent and it’s very instructive.
They are all fighting the last war in this election season and we don’t even know which war it is! Most are re-fighting the last presidential campaign in 2020 but consider that it was one of the most unusual races in history with a global pandemic that had tons of people not working or working from home, glued to their TVs and computers and mass voting by mail. 2024 is nothing like that. Others are apparently using a method that combines 2020 results with 2022, which was not only a mid-term and therefore very different from today, but also one which came after the cataclysmic Supreme Court decision in Dobbs which may have actually realigned the electorate. (We’ll see about that.) Now we have the weird circumstances of a former president who was fired running again, against the first Black woman candidate who wasn’t even in the campaign until late July. It’s a little unusual!
You can see why fighting the last war might not be exactly accurate. Or it might. We just don’t know.
After reading Rick’s piece I became convinced that polling, especially in these days of daily updates and averages and non-stop coverage is really just a parlor game for political junkies. If you want to put yourself through it (or can’t help yourself like me) just be aware that nobody really knows nothin’.
We just have to hope our team knows what it’s doing and that more Americans do the right thing than the wrong thing this time. I soothe myself with the knowledge that they have done so in every election since 2016 — but then again, as these pollsters know but can’t admit, past elections can’t predict the future any more than your average carnival fortune teller can.
