Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

She’s more culturally aligned

The Daily Blast podcast with Greg Sargent introduces findings by the Harvard Youth Poll’s John Della Volpe:

An important new poll of young voters finds that Harris’ entry has dramatically shifted their preferences in her favor and against Trump. Which confirms a larger story: The Democratic-leaning constituencies who had drifted toward Trump now may be swinging to Harris, exposing a weakness in his previous support.

A new survey conducted for Won’t PAC Down in battleground states (AZ, GA, MI, NC, NH, NC, PA, WI) finds 18-29 year-old registered voters (that’s important; more later) favoring Kamala Harris over Donald Trump by 51-42, a 13-point shift from a previous poll showing support for Trump. The poll was conducted before the announcement of Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota as Democrats’ vice-presidential pick and the high-energy rallies that followed.

Della Volpe believes approval for Harris needs a margin somewhere in the mid-50s, as it was in the 2020 election among this cohort. A 20-point margin here in the battleground states helped bring Joe Biden victory in 2020.

Borrowing from Steve Jobs, Della Volpe says in politics some people don’t know what they want until we show it to them. These voters see what they like now.

These voters and the youngest among them see themselves more reflected in Harris than in Trump. They see someone willing to fight for their values. Culturally, her dancing and cooking and musical tastes more align with theirs, making them more open to her message. Biden lacked that cultural alignment. (His campaign’s attempt to use TikTok was cringeworthy.)

Della Volpe thinks the addition of Walz will only add to the Harris campaign’s image.

The youngest, males especially, now first-time voters, first encountered Trump as an antihero in middle school. They were not attending to his policy or ethics and took their cultural cues from online, right-wing echo chambers. But until now they did not see any alternative. Their actual values, Della Volpe found, align more with progressive Democrats. They simply did not see him reflected in the channels they frequent. They responded to a Biden : weak, Trump : strong dynamic. Now with Harris atop the Democratic ticket, she looks stronger, more confident, and more aligned with their values than Trump.

The poll finds Harris up not only in a head-to-head race against Trump but leading Trump 42-33 in a multi-candidate contest, a +10 point shift to Harris since early July.

I’d note that we are seeing in the Harris-Walz campaign the messaging framework laid out in July at the Netroots panel Amplify: Getting Louder to Win in 2024. Listen for “our freedoms, our families, our futures” referenced in speeches at Harris-Walz rallies. It’s a winner.

Now, the press goes all aflutter when younger voter turnout is up a few percentage points. The persistent problem is a few percent above what? Registration is one thing. Turnout is another. The greatest area for improving voter turnout is 45 and under (see below; your state similar). And the largest 45-and-under registration cohort is independent/unaffiliated. That’s why my personal effort here aims to boost turnout among 45-and-under unaffiliated voters Democrats tend to ignore. They tend to lean Democrat. Turning them out is the trick.

Chicken or egg? Are these lower-propensity voters not turning out like their voting independent neighbors because they are less-engaged? Or because Democrats are not engaging them?

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A little fun for a Monday evening…

Is it the lawyer or the conman for you, y’all? Allow me to set the stage for Act 2 while you decide… #TheLawyerOrTheConman #NewVideo #parody #vote 💚🤠🎶🗳️ pic.twitter.com/QouzCgvSuQ

— Randy Rainbow (@RandyRainbow) August 12, 2024

Oh how the wingnuts hate him.

You’ve probably heard about the nefarious plot in Georgia to challenge the election by now and I’m sure you’re familiar with Trump’s shenanigans in other states in 2020. This article in the Guardian takes a look at the current national effort led by Trump insider Cleta Mitchell. Read the whole thing, but I thought this was a worthy excerpt:

Since 2020, there have been at least 20 instances in eight states of election officials refusing to certify election results.

The first red flag came in 2022, when county commissioners in Otero county, New Mexico, refused to certify the results of a primary election, citing vague concerns about voting equipment. The secretary of state eventually went to court to force the commissioners to certify the election.

In July of this year, two Republicans on the county commission in Washoe county, Nevada – a key county in a battleground state – refused to certify its primary vote, setting off alarms. The commissioners who refused to certify eventually reversed themselves. Nevada’s secretary of state, Cisco Aguilar, has since asked the state supreme court to clarify that county commissioners have an obligation to certify votes.

Sometimes election officials who refuse to certify have pointed to mistakes that happened during the election, even though they did not affect the outcome. In other cases, like Adams’s in Georgia, officials have refused to certify to protest about what they view as unfair laws.

While courts would probably force recalcitrant officials to certify the vote, significant damage could still be caused.

“You can force certification through legal mechanisms, [but] those events tend to be like rocket fuel for conspiracy theories and misinformation and undermining confidence in the election. So there’s damage done even where certification is eventually forced,” said Berwick, the Protect Democracy lawyer.

The timeline for certifying the vote is important because, under federal law, states must have an official election result by 11 December, six days before the electoral college meets. Delaying certification efforts at the local level could put states at risk of missing that deadline.

“If we get past that deadline, it opens up a lot of questions, like tricky legal questions and room for shenanigans,” Berwick said.

The experts are counting on the state courts but who knows? And there has been some action at the federal level to [revent a re-run of 2020:

A new law, the Electoral Count Reform Act, should provide a significant new layer of protection against election subversion. The bipartisan bill passed Congress at the end of 2022.

The law makes it so that Trump and his allies cannot repeat what they did in 2020 and submit false slates of electors from key swing states. Significantly, it says that the slate of electors submitted by a state’s executive is the legitimate slate and raises the threshold in both houses of Congress to object to the electoral result.

While the law controls what Congress must do once it receives certificates from electors, it doesn’t have much to say about what must happen in the lead-up to the electoral college vote. That could leave a lot of wriggle room for Trump and allies to try to slow down certification and go to court to try to force states to miss their certification deadline.

And they will. You know they will.

Are we any better off than we were in 2020?

Lawyers and other activists say they are ready, having spent the last four years studying and understanding the vulnerabilities that Trump and allies targeted in 2020. Any effort to block certification is likely to be swiftly challenged in courts, where Trump has already been unsuccessful dozens of times.

The new Electoral Count Reform Act should offer additional safeguards should there be an effort such as there was in 2020 to get Congress to stop its certification of the vote

Yet it would be a mistake to dismiss the threat altogether. The same pressure points that existed in 2020 exist in 2024, and in some places election deniers have been elevated to positions of power.

“This has started earlier in the cycle and is louder and is more consistent,” said Morales-Doyle of the Brennan Center. “That is all just at a different level than it was before 2020.”

It is going to happen and he is going to come unglued as will some number of his followers. If I had to guess, most of them are probably pretty tired of all this and will actually feel some relief that it’s over. They’ll whine, of course, but I doubt he’ll get the crowd he got in 2020 (which he will certainly call for.)

But there will be a few who want to take some action and I would expect them to be very reckless. I hope everyone is prepared for that too.

This is the quote right-wingers are using now in their echo chamber to pretend Walz was doing stolen valor

In the actual video, there is literally two minutes of audio at the part where I put the arrow where Walz makes it clear that he went to Bagram years later as a congressman pic.twitter.com/srAlh7FEjo

— Swann Marcus (@SwannMarcus89) August 12, 2024

Here’s the video:

Walz does not say in your quote below that he went to Bagram as a soldier.

Walz went to Afghanistan and Iraq as a member of congress specifically to study the process of how wounded soldiers were treated and as part of that trip witnessed a military ramp ceremony.

The… https://t.co/deMNl1lDZo pic.twitter.com/1QtEyKhFRm

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) August 12, 2024

Trump is suing the FBI for $100 million over the Mar-a-lago search. It’s very stupid:

Former President Trump informed the Department of Justice that he intends to sue them over the Mar-a-Lago raid.@lawofruby joins @AnaCabrera to break down the legal analysis and to explain what's next. pic.twitter.com/nnoMoHsPW0

— MSNBC Reports (@MSNBC_reports) August 12, 2024

MSNBC’s Lisa Rubin tweeted:

@JoyceWhiteVance notes, a civil suit like this would allow discovery on both sides. And one thing DOJ would get to find out is whether Trump himself (or any business he owns) paid his alleged $15 million in legal fees incurred in defending against the Mar-a-Lago case, or whether, for example, his leadership PAC, Save America, actually assumed those costs for him through the generosity of his donors.

Good luck with this. The FBI found hundreds of classified documents strewn around his public beach club which he refused to give back, hid from them and then lied about it repeatedly, But sure. Go for it, Don. Make some more lawyers happy. After all, your sad, deluded cult is paying for it.

Trump’s been rambling incoherently about energy prices, drill, drill drill and the oil reserve for a while now. None of what he says makes any sense but his claim that Biden drained the strategic oil reserve for his own purposes is particularly rich considering this:

The Biden administration says it has replenished the 180 million barrels of oil it withdrew from the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve in response to high prices following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. 

The Energy Department on Friday announced a 4.65 million barrel purchase, bringing the total purchased since the 2022 drawdown up to more than 40 million barrels.

In addition, the administration has worked with Congress to cancel 140 million barrels in planned sales — accounting for the rest of the 180 million. 

“This milestone is a proof point that when the Biden-Harris Administration makes and implements a plan, we deliver for the American people,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said in a written statement. 

“As promised, we have secured the 180 million barrels back to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve released in response to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s war in Ukraine – and we accomplished this while getting a good deal for taxpayers and maintaining the readiness of the world’s largest Strategic Petroleum Reserve,” she added. 

The department said that the 43.25 million barrels it purchased were procured at an average price of $77 per barrel, while the oil it sold in 2022 averaged $95 per barrel. 

The other 140 million barrels were essentially bought at $74 per barrel, a senior Energy Department official said. 

So they sold high and bought low? Is that how this works? Who knew?

Trump is making the oil reserve a big part of his campaign and it’s based on 100% nonsense:

Former President Donald Trump is vowing to refill the nation’s strategic oil stockpile if he returns to the White House next year, seeking to elevate the issue ahead of the November elections.

During a Fox News interview Wednesday, Trump said the Biden administration’s gambit to lower gasoline prices by conducting several reserve drawdowns in recent years has hurt the nation’s energy security.

“[Biden is] using the strategic reserves, which is meant for military, which is meant for war, and very important things, he’s using it to try and keep gasoline prices down,” Trump said. “We can’t allow that to happen.”

[…]

Trump claimed that the reserve was being “filled up at levels never seen before” during his administration. In reality, the reserve’s levels were at their most recent peak in 2011 and dropped around 57 million barrels during Trump’s tenure.

Trump is pretty much on auto-pilot these days rerunning the glory days of his 2016 campaign. It’s pretty clear he has not learned a thing in the 8 years since then. One would hope the media would be kind enough to give Biden some credit for what he accomplished on this front, unlike Trump. He did some pretty amazing things for a supposedly pathetic, decrepit old man.

This has got to be a joke:

Don’t buy the public bravado. Former President Trump’s advisers are deeply rattled by his meandering, mean and often middling public performances since the failed assassination attempt.

What? Meandering, mean and middling is his fucking brand. Are they just noticing? Sure, he’s obviously upset, but it’s hardly the first time. Remember the months after the 2020 election? Were they out of the country? And yes, he’s aged quite a bit and is losing his train of thought more often. But that’s been going on for the last couple of years. It’s ridiculous. Trump is an unbalanced, unfit, imbecile and always has been.

They’re pleading with him to adopt a new “hard-hitting” stump speech to define Vice President Harris as liberal and weak, advisers tell us. And praying he’ll stop the recidivistic pull to simply improvise haphazardly.

Trump, who looked and felt like a clear front-runner heading into last month’s Republican convention, has fumed, stewed and stumbled in private and public ever since.

Advisers are telling him Harris will grow her lead coming out of the Democratic convention, which begins a week from tomorrow — especially if they don’t define her better, faster. Then just a week after the convention, it’s already Labor Day.

Republican sources close to Trump tell us he realizes he needs to bring new focus to a message that can be meandering and self-indulgent. But it’s Trump. So a new script is often fictional wishfulness.

Trump “is struggling to get past his anger,” a top Republican source tells us.

Trump’s aides know he won’t change. So they’re focusing “not on the need for him to change but on the need to adapt his message to win,” the source said. “But he has to convince himself to leave the other garbage behind.”

“President Trump knows he’s the only one who can end the media’s honeymoon with Kamala Harris,” a top Trump ally tells us, “and he sees a significant opening to do so with Harris’ inability to defend her record on inflation and the border.”

“To get past the media force field protecting Harris, however, he knows he needs to be very specific with his policy contrasts and is planning on debuting a hard-hitting stump speech very soon.”

I’d guess it will be in two weeks when he unveils his health care plan his infrastructure bill, his mifepristone policy, his decision on how to vote on the abortion ballot measure.

 In addition to the new speech, look for a Trump ad blitz. Trump’s campaign and the biggest Trump-aligned super PAC spent four times as much on TV ads in Georgia in the two weeks after Biden left the race than in the rest of 2024 combined, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.

On Friday, the Trump campaign placed $37 million in new ad buys (nearly two-thirds of it in Georgia) — the most he’s reserved on TV ads in a single day this cycle, the tracking firm AdImpact found.

Then there’s the hacking story, the “rattled” donors, some of whom he’s  yelling at for failing him and reports about him calling Harris a bitch (and no doubt worse.)

The Village princes Mike Allen and Jim Vamdehei say:

Put the Times piece and this column in a time capsule. If Trump loses, you’ll understand why.

I guess I should be grateful they aren’t licking his boots. But really? Trump is losing because he’s a loser and always has been. He barely won in 2016 with the help of his Russian buddies and lost in 2020. In fact, the Republicans have lost or radically underperformed every election since he came on the scene. There’s nothing new about any of this except that he was riding a wave that had him very slightly ahead in the swing states after Biden performed disastrously in the debate. The alleged Trump juggernaut was always overrated. Now that Harris has breathed life into the Democrats it’s just more obvious.

And melting down too

William Irwin Thompson once critiqued the emptiness of a modern culture in which we’ve learned to crave (and pay for) the synthetic as a substitute for the real. Cheez Whiz and Cool Whip. Fake wrestling substituting for real wrestling, etc.

“If Americans would rather tour a fake Europe at EPCOT Center in Disney World,” Thompson wrote, “they can go to ‘foreign’ restaurants, but still speak English.” Thompson described the Disneyfication of everything long before we elected Donald Trump, a ratings-obsessed, reality-TV president in place of a real one.

“Harris’ large crowds are a pivotal part of her strategy to defeat Trump,” reads CNN’s landing page just now. Hers are bigger. Trump’s manhood as well as his freedom is threatened.

Marcy Wheeler this morning speaks of how central spectacle is to Donald Trump’s sense of himself, and how threatened he is by the spectacle of a Harris-Walz rally:

The second I saw video of Vice President Harris rolling up to a hangar at Detroit’s airport on Air Force Two, then alighting with Tim Walz in front of cheering crowds, I knew it would break Donald Trump’s brain.

This is the kind of spectacle Donald Trump excels at creating.

This is the kind of spectacle on which Trump has built slavering loyalty from millions of MAGAts who see power in such spectacle.

And a Black woman created it.

Or rather, a Black woman and her campaign team, a campaign team which has already demonstrated they know exactly how to trigger Donald Trump, created it.

And sure enough, it did melt his brain.

Yesterday, he adopted the hysterical claims of some of his followers, posting that Vice President Harris was cheating because (he falsely claimed) she had used AI to sub in a crowd of people who weren’t there.

The rest is largely a critique of the news coverage’s misread (or ignore) of the timelines involved.

More a measure of his insecurity and need to pleasure himself, Trump’s boasts about crowd size are an essential feature of sustaining the Big Lie from 2020 (he believes crowd size equates to vote counts) and the one he’s updating for 2024 to explain his loss and to foment another coup attempt. Team Harris knows this and goads him at every opportunity with how her crowds translate into volunteers.

This is actually the purpose rallies are supposed to serve at this point of a campaign, even one launched a mere three weeks ago. These crowds are important not (just) because they lead Trump to melt down, but because they’re a necessary way to catch up on volunteer recruitment Biden hadn’t been doing. This is why Walz, especially, makes an ask at every one of these rallies. This is why Kamala always talks about the hard work ahead.

This is about recruiting bodies to do voter identification, persuasion, and ultimately GOTV. This is about basic campaign work.

Trump, meanwhile, has sent JD out to speak to empty parking lots.

Pro-Trump trolls like Cheong see this. But full time campaign journalists are slow to catch on. They’re slow to understand that Trump’s own insecurities can be — and were, deliberately — triggered, with predictable results.

Especially when someone can mobilize the kind of spectacle that Trump himself relies on.

Want to compare ratings now, Donny?

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Like nobody’s ever seen

Shitposting is a way of life for the former president. He has been doing it since long before the internet, PCs and cell phones. As Maureen Dowd noted (not in so many words), everything’s a dick-measuring contest for Donald Trump. He never loses.

To hear him tell it, as Cole Porter might put it in lyrics: He’s the top | He’s the Colosseum | He’s the top | He’s the Louvre Museum

Everything and everyone else is crap. Trump’s first speech as president trashed the country as American carnage, a wasteland of rusted out factories and a depleted military, a nation awash in drugs and gangs and crime. Long before Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota applied the term weird to MAGA Republicans, former president George W. Bush on the platform that day described Trump’s inauguration speech as “some weird shit.”

Trump and Republicans still trash the country as awash in crime, victimized by Democratic permissiveness. They’re really not going to like the latest crime data describing the Biden era (Axios):

New preliminary data from major U.S. cities shows a sharp drop in violent crime in the first half of the year — more than 25% in some communities — as the COVID-era crime wave recedes.

Why it matters: The drop in violent crime puts a serious dent in one of the most frequently used lines of attack by former President Trump and his allies, who have sought to tie Democrats to the issue since 2020.

• It also gives Vice President Kamala Harris, a former prosecutor in San Francisco and California attorney general, a potent defense against attacks from the right on crime.

By the numbers: An Axios analysis of data from the Major Cities Chiefs Association found an overall 6% decline in violent crime among 69 cities during the first six months of 2024 compared to the same period last year.

• 54 of the 69 major cities in the report saw drops in violent crime — defined as homicide, rape, robbery and aggravated assault — in the first half of 2024, according to the Axios review.

“Americans are safer today than when Vice President Harris and I took office,” Biden said in a statement.

Axios has more positive data Trump will ignore or smear as fake news. The world Trump inhabits in his own mind bears little resemblance to the real one. He claims falsely that countries south of the border are emptying prisons and mental institutions to send migrants to the U.S., bringing violent crimes and drugs and diseases of unspecified nature with them.

Axios continues:

Reality check: An Axios review of crime data along the U.S.-Mexico border found that those cities have some of the nation’s lowest violent crime rates.

The bottom line: Facts and data about crime are important, but history shows political campaigns can ignore the facts to exploit people’s fears about crime to change the narrative.

If there’s one thing Trump is superlative at, it’s that.

Yesterday's false claim by Trump that Harris is generating fake big crowds with AI was a true Captain Queeg moment, maybe the most bat-guano crazy thing I've seen in 40 years of covering presidential elections

Neither NYT nor Washington Post is promoting it on their home page

— Will Bunch (@Will_Bunch) August 12, 2024

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Celebrities actually do help

I have to admit that this surprised me. Not that I don’t think celebrities should be able to support whomever and whatever they choose.They’re citizens too. But I’ve never been sure that it makes any difference. Apparently, it does, which means the left has a huge advantage. The right has far less support among artists, athletes and celebrities in general.

Former president and Republican nominee Donald Trump brought out Hulk Hogan and Kid Rock to the RNC last month, while Megan Thee Stallion, George Clooney and Jennifer Aniston are among the star-powered artists who have voiced support for Vice President Kamala Harris in her White House bid.

But do election efforts by celebrities move the needle? Or is it all just hype?

A new study by Harvard University’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, shared first by CNN, found that celebrities do play an influential role in promoting civic participation.

“While some polling shows that people claim they aren’t influenced by celebrity voices when it comes to politics, more rigorous evidence indicates that these voices are incredibly powerful,” according to the Harvard study.

When celebrities promote calls to action, the study found that nonprofits report higher rates of online voter registration and poll worker sign-ups.

“Celebrities are uniquely positioned to empower everyday Americans to use their voices and exercise their civic rights,” the report states. “Celebrities are an unparalleled force in American culture, informing what we buy, what we wear, and what we talk about. With their significant influence and reach, they are powerful advocates for social and political causes.”

The study didn’t track partisan activities but rather looked at voter registrations and issue advocacy and the results are pretty profound. I’m guessing the same dynamic is at work in partisan politics as well.

[…]

“This study focused on nonpartisan civic engagement and the ways to help empower young people to make their voice heard at the ballot box,” Ashley Spillane, the study’s author and co-founder of the Civic Responsibility Project, told CNN, adding that celebrities can help create “a culture around participation, making it fun and making it something you should care about doing.”

That’s a message that could prove critical in turning out first-time or younger voters, who “face barriers to their participation, largely due to a dearth of easily available information about the basic mechanics of casting a ballot in their state,” the study found.

“Celebrities have a unique ability to connect with younger generations in ways that mainstream media and other get-out-the-vote efforts may not be able to,” the study states. “Their control of and presence on social media positions them as centralized sources of information to be tapped into and utilized by those looking to increase voter participation.”

This campaign season has exploded across social media, with younger voters sharing cat memes (a nod to Trump’s running mate, JD Vance) and coconut tree emojis (a calling card for Harris supporters). British pop star Charli XCX boosted Harris’ Gen Z appeal with one single tweet that read, “Kamala Is Brat.” Trump sat down earlier this week with 23-year-old online streamer, Adin Ross, for an interview on the social platform, Kick, after his teenage son, Barron Trump, said he was a fan of the influencer.

Gen Z and Millennials, who will comprise the largest US voting block by 2028, spend an average of 180 minutes and 157 minutes daily on social media, respectively, which is their primary source of news, per the study.

The pro-Harris TikToks are fun and engaging. They aren’t pulling any punches about Trump and Vance. They could be a very potent element of this election,