Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

This gold standard poll, which called the last two presidential election when everyone else had it wrong, in September had Trump 47 and Harris 43. This is all about women including independent women and women over 65 breaking hard for her in the last month. I wonder why?

The analysis from most of the strategists say that this portends victory, at the very least, in the Blue Wall states and could indicated a massive shift from women, particularly white women (Iowa is almost all white), elsewhere. Let’s just say that Democrats are pretty stoked right now.

Kamala Harris now leads Donald Trump in Iowa — a startling reversal for Democrats and Republicans who have all but written off the state’s presidential contest as a certain Trump victory.  

A new Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll shows Vice President Harris leading former President Trump 47% to 44% among likely voters just days before a high-stakes election that appears deadlocked in key battleground states.  

The results follow a September Iowa Poll that showed Trump with a 4-point lead over Harris and a June Iowa Poll showing him with an 18-point lead over Democratic President Joe Biden, who was the presumed Democratic nominee at the time.  

“It’s hard for anybody to say they saw this coming,” said pollster J. Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Co. “She has clearly leaped into a leading position.” https://e.infogram.com/_/5R6h9p5uFC073bQf1Rzy?src=embed#async_embed

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has abandoned his independent presidential campaign to support Trump but remains on the Iowa ballot, gets 3% of the vote. That’s down from 6% in September and 9% in June.  

Fewer than 1% say they would vote for Libertarian presidential candidate Chase Oliver, 1% would vote for someone else, 3% aren’t sure and 2% don’t want to say for whom they already cast a ballot.  

The poll of 808 likely Iowa voters, which include those who have already voted as well as those who say they definitely plan to vote, was conducted by Selzer & Co. from Oct. 28-31. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points. 

The results come as Trump and Harris have focused their attention almost exclusively on seven battleground states that are expected to shape the outcome of the election. Neither has campaigned in Iowa since the presidential primaries ended, and neither campaign has established a ground presence in the state.  

A victory for Harris would be a surprising development after Iowa has swung aggressively to the right in recent elections, delivering Trump solid victories in 2016 and 2020.  

The poll shows that women — particularly those who are older or who are politically independent — are driving the late shift toward Harris. 

“Age and gender are the two most dynamic factors that are explaining these numbers,” Selzer said.   

Independent voters, who had consistently supported Trump in the leadup to this election, now break for Harris. That’s driven by the strength of independent women, who back Harris by a 28-point margin, while independent men support Trump, but by a smaller margin. 

Similarly, senior voters who are 65 and older favor Harris. But senior women support her by a more than 2-to-1 margin, 63% to 28%, while senior men favor her by just 2 percentage points, 47% to 45%.  

Update: He’s not taking it well:

More internal chaos:

Allies of Kennedy were left displeased that Lutnick had stated on air that the Democratic presidential candidate-turned-MAGA disciple would not be getting a cabinet level post. Meanwhile, Trump allies felt that Lutnick had freelanced too much by suggesting the ex-president could be okay with banning long-approved vaccines. They were similarly dismayed that Lutnick had decided to casually discuss a presidential transition and appointees just six days before Election Day, worried that it sent the wrong message to the public.

Their displeasure morphed into pain when they saw the unflattering headlines the next day in the New York Post and the New York Times, which hold preeminent places in the mind of Trump and therefore the campaign. Now, the knives are coming out for Lutnick, a billionaire financier whose business acumen outmatches his Trump world emotional IQ.

“What the hell is a transition chair publicly talking about all this stuff before we even win?” huffed one Trump campaign adviser, one of five who spoke on condition of anonymity for this story to express their frustration and describe internal discussions.

“Lutnick cut Bobby’s legs out from under him. He’s talking about all this stuff,” the adviser said. “We need to be focused on the election. Period.”

The internal complaints about Lutnick, 63, haven’t yet reached a boiling point in Trump world, the sources say, noting that his position helping run the transition remains firm, as does a possible spot as Treasury secretary.

I hadn’t heard before that Lutnick was on tap for Treasury Secretary. That’s this guy:

Let’s Cut Straight To The Chase! 😳

Did you guys see this?!?👀

Talk about a game changer….WoW! 😲 Can you imagine the conversations around conference rooms this morning? 🔥🧨🔥

Is THIS our October Surprise? 😯😯😯#MakeAmericaGreatAgain #MAGA #tariffs #noincometax… pic.twitter.com/n2fhcU7Ciq

— Gabi🌻 (@GabiNga1) October 28, 2024

I think we might know where Trump’s getting his McKinley misinformation and the new “no income tax, only tariffs” junk from. Insane.

Here’s a picture of the good old days of the 1890s when the country was supposedly super rich and everyone was happy:

Those are tenement slums in New York City during the “gilded age.” When Trump and Lutkin think America was great.

Trump apologists are trying to say that his pantomimed blow job on stage last night is being “taken out of context.” No. Not this time. He complained about his “bad mic” for almost five minutes, particularly about how his throat was sore because of it. Then he did his little pantomime which the audience clearly understood as exactly what it was:

He is just letting his freak flag fly.

Tim Alberta has published a massive story about the inside of the Trump campaign, obviously fed by top operatives like campaign managers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles. Here’s the lede:

At the end of June, in the afterglow of a debate performance that would ultimately prompt President Joe Biden to end his campaign for reelection, Donald Trump startled his aides by announcing that he’d come up with a new nickname for his opponent.

“The guy’s a retard. He’s retarded. I think that’s what I’ll start calling him,” Trump declared aboard his campaign plane, en route to a rally that evening, according to three people who heard him make the remarks: “Retarded Joe Biden.”

The staffers present—and, within hours, others who’d heard about the epithet secondhand—pleaded with Trump not to say this publicly. They warned him that it would antagonize the moderate voters who’d been breaking in their direction, while engendering sympathy for a politician who, at that moment, was the subject of widespread ridicule. As Trump demurred, musing that he might debut the nickname at that night’s event, his staffers puzzled over the timing. Biden was on the ropes. Polls showed Trump jumping out to the biggest lead he’d enjoyed in any of his three campaigns for the presidency. Everything was going right for the Republican Party and its nominee. Why would he jeopardize that for the sake of slinging a juvenile insult? (A campaign spokesperson, Steven Cheung, said the nickname “was never discussed and this is materially false.”)

Over the next several days—as Trump’s aides held their breath, convinced he would debut this latest slur at any moment—they came to realize something about Trump: He was restless, unhappy, and, yes, tired of winning. For the previous 20 months, he’d been hemmed in by a campaign built on the principles of restraint and competence. The former president’s ugliest impulses were regularly curbed by his top advisers; his most obnoxious allies and most outlandish ideas were sidelined. These guardrails had produced a professional campaign—a campaign that was headed for victory. But now, like a predator toying with its wounded catch, Trump had become bored. It reminded some allies of his havoc-making decisions in the White House. Trump never had much use for calm and quiet. He didn’t appreciate normalcy. Above all, he couldn’t stand being babysat.

“People are calling this the most disciplined campaign they’ve ever seen,” Trump remarked to friends at a fundraiser this summer, according to someone who heard the conversation. He smirked at the compliment. “What’s discipline got to do with winning?”

There you go.

This article is a MUST READ. Here is a gift link. Grab a cup of tea or a stiff drink and read the whole thing.

He is actually much worse than before. Much worse. And his campaign is a dumpster fire.

Republicans sue to extend the early voting registrations in Pennsylvania (and prevail) but in Georgia they don’t think people should be allowed to hand deliver their absentee ballots on the weekend:

There is obviously going to be no principled consistency in their election lawsuits. They just want to cause chaos and spread the Big Lie that the election is rigged, by any means necessary. I hope the Democrats’ lawyers have plenty of strong coffee to keep them going over the next few weeks. They’re going to need it.

NEW >> Vice President Harris releases her closing 2-minute ad – “Brighter Future”

Centers the American people, not herself

WATCH: pic.twitter.com/gqN2yzv7xm

— Ian Sams (@IanSams) November 2, 2024

Pretty darned good, in my opinon.

Hey, he’s just talking to the bros…

Apparently, this isn’t a joke:

Alex Jones confirmed that Tucker Carlson told him about being mauled by demons in his sleep last year at his house, and they figured out it was connected to someone “laying hands” on him. Alex says he was also attacked by a poltergeist who threw him around and separated his shoulder.

Alex Jones says Tucker Carlson told him about being mauled by demons in his sleep last year at his house, and they figured out it was connected to someone “laying hands” on him. Alex says he was also attacked by a poltergeist who threw him around and separated his shoulder. pic.twitter.com/xkjJPrghwj

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) November 1, 2024

Okay….

Carlson is supposed to be the thnking man’s MAGA extremist. I guess this is what they mean by that.

The New Yorker followed Carlson on his tour. Just don’t call him weird:

Sometimes, when Tucker Carlson is in the shower, he takes a quiet moment to reflect on whether his haters may be right about him. I know this not firsthand but because he recently mentioned it to a few thousand fans in Rosenberg, Texas. He said, “I have been through this process for so many years, where they call you something”—in his case, a very incomplete list would include “venomous demagogue,” “crypto-Nazi blowhard,” “anti-science ignoramus,” and “a dick”—“and I actually do try to take stock. Like, am I that person?”

These reveries always lead him to the same conclusion: he’s clean. It is the haters who are wrong. That night, in Rosenberg, the epithet he lingered on was “extremist.” He drew out the syllables in a derisive growl, followed by his foppish hyena bark of a laugh—a familiar sequence to anyone who has watched Tucker Carlson heap scorn on his enemies, which is to say, anyone who has watched Tucker Carlson. “Whatever else I am, I’m the opposite of an extremist,” he continued. “My parents got divorced. I’m totally opposed to change.” He claims that his vision for the country’s future is actually a vision of the country’s past, one that strikes him as modest, even obvious: “I liked America in 1985.”

This was the ninth stop on the Tucker Carlson Live Tour—sixteen arenas, this fall, from Anaheim, California, to Sunrise, Florida, but mostly in the heartland. At each stop, before bringing out his special guest (Kid Rock in Grand Rapids; Donald Trump, Jr., in Jacksonville), Carlson delivered a semi-improvised monologue, usually starting with some geo-targeted pandering. In Michigan, he praised the local muskie fishing before slamming the state’s “brain-dead robot” of a governor. In Pennsylvania, he extolled the beauty of the Conestoga River before describing that state’s governor as “evil, actually.” In Texas, he said, “There’s something about being in a room full of people you agree with that is so great. It’s like a spa treatment.”

Trump was his guest on Thursday:

It’s very hard to believe that anyone would describe Trump or Carlson as “venomous demagogues” “crypto-Nazi blowhards” “anti-science ignoramuses” of “dicks.” So weird.

Pregnant and bleeding? Don’t mess with Texas.

Texas’ severe abortion laws notched another preventable death from a pregnancy gone wrong. ProPublica reported the death of Josseli Barnica, 28, in 2021 on Wednesday. She died days after the state’s S.B. 8 “heartbeat bill” took effect. Bloomberg Opinion asked: “Texas’ Abortion Ban Killed Josseli Barnica. Who Will Be Next?”

Nevaeh Crain, it seems. On Friday, ProPublica told the story of her tragic death in MAGAstan after the Dobbs decision in June 2022 triggered an effective abortion ban in Texas. Crain was an early victim:

Candace Fails screamed for someone in the Texas hospital to help her pregnant daughter. “Do something,” she pleaded, on the morning of Oct. 29, 2023.

Nevaeh Crain was crying in pain, too weak to walk, blood staining her thighs. Feverish and vomiting the day of her baby shower, the 18-year-old had gone to two different emergency rooms within 12 hours, returning home each time worse than before.

The first hospital diagnosed her with strep throat without investigating her sharp abdominal cramps. At the second, she screened positive for sepsis, a life-threatening and fast-moving reaction to an infection, medical records show. But doctors said her six-month fetus had a heartbeat and that Crain was fine to leave.

Now on Crain’s third hospital visit, an obstetrician insisted on two ultrasounds to “confirm fetal demise,” a nurse wrote, before moving her to intensive care.

By then, more than two hours after her arrival, Crain’s blood pressure had plummeted and a nurse had noted that her lips were “blue and dusky.” Her organs began failing.

Hours later, she was dead.

Read the rest at ProPublica.

Those of you headed to the polls (especially in Texas) might ask yourselves and your friends Bloomberg’s question. Who’s next?

NBC News reported in September:

The number of women in Texas who died while pregnant, during labor or soon after childbirth skyrocketed following the state’s 2021 ban on abortion care — far outpacing a slower rise in maternal mortality across the nation, a new investigation of federal public health data finds.

From 2019 to 2022, the rate of maternal mortality cases in Texas rose by 56%, compared with just 11% nationwide during the same time period, according to an analysis by the Gender Equity Policy Institute. The nonprofit research group scoured publicly available reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and shared the analysis exclusively with NBC News.

Furthermore:

Among Hispanic women, the rate of women dying while pregnant, during childbirth or soon after increased from 14.5 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births in 2019 to 18.9 in 2022. Rates among white women nearly doubled — from 20 per 100,000 to 39.1. 

Also: Johns Hopkins this summer estimated “that infant deaths in Texas increased more than expected in the year following the state’s 2021 ban on abortion in early pregnancy, especially among infants with congenital anomalies.”

This, after maternal mortality (deaths during or after childbirth) in the U.S. declined sharply after the mid-1930s:

In 2017, at a time when maternal mortality was declining worldwide, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported that the U.S. was one of only two countries (along with the Dominican Republic) to report a significant increase in its maternal mortality ratio (the proportion of pregnancies that result in death of the mother) since 2000. While U.S. maternal deaths have leveled in recent years, the ratio is still higher than in comparable countries, and significant racial disparities remain.

Donald Trump and his MAGA movement want to roll back the last century. It was a time when death in childbirth was a leading cause of death for women, along with (if vaccine skeptic RFK Jr. gets a job in a second Trump administration) tuberculosis, pneumonia, gastrointestinal infections, smallpox, and more.

Beware, sister, beware

So take care getting pregnant in Texas. Depending on the outcome of this election, it could get worse elsewhere soon. Amarillo’s Proposition A, ““Sanctuary City for the Unborn Ordinance,” is part of a larger strategy to ban abortion nationwide (The New Yorker):

Proposition A is alarming enough on its own. But it’s part of a bigger strategic play. At a time when Donald Trump is insisting that abortion should be left up to the states, a fervent group of anti-abortion activists are working behind the scenes to achieve a different goal. “The Dobbs decision really was a pro-choice decision, by leaving it up to the states instead of saying that abortion is a great social, moral, and political evil,” Mark Lee Dickson, a minister from East Texas, who is the driving force behind the sanctuary-city movement, told me, referring to the decision that overturned Roe. Dickson’s goal is nothing less than a nationwide ban on abortion, enacted by the courts. The path there may well lead through the Texas Panhandle—which means that the fight against it is happening here, too.

Amarillo became the second panhandle city in Texas (along with Clarendon) “to reject both the original and amended versions” of the ordinance in June. But Lubbock, Abilene, and San Angelo all said aye.

The Amarillo Tribune in October reported:

On June 11, 2019, Waskom, Texas, became the first city to pass the Sanctuary City for the Unborn Ordinance. Since then, the Amarillo Tribune has verified that 69 cities have passed a Sanctuary City Ordinance in states beyond Texas, including Illinois, New Mexico, Nebraska, Iowa, Louisiana and Ohio. Lubbock is the largest city that has adopted the ordinance. 

None of the 69 Sanctuary City for the Unborn Ordinances prohibit or ban contraceptives such as birth control. Mail-in pills that would induce an abortion and abortions performed within city limits are banned under the ordinances as well as under state law after the overturn of Roe v. Wade. No abortion clinics were in any of the cities that have adopted the Sanctuary City ordinance. 

Beware, sister, beware.

They ain’t foolin’ and if you fool around with them
You gonna get yourself a schooling

Vote accordingly. Tell your friends.