US Politics, September 2024 -- “I’m Not Going to Apologize For Posting a Joke”

hahaha it's almost like something significant happened in July ;)

oh wait

"Et tu, Brute?"

interesting result out of AZ - it has Trump up by 3, but Gallego is beating Lake by 14

ultimately I feel like the final results never show vote splitting to that degree so maybe this is good for Harris

more good polls:

New Swing States Polling by Morning Consult for Bloomberg

Nevada - 🔵 Harris 52-45%
Pennsylvania - 🔵 Harris 51-46%
Wisconsin - 🔵 Harris 51-48%
Michigan - 🔵 Harris 50-47%
Arizona - 🔵 Harris 50-47%
North Carolina - 🔵 Harris 50-48%
Georgia - 🟡 TIE 49-49%… pic.twitter.com/JJydAr6hCO

— InteractivePolls (@IAPolls2022) September 27, 2024

ultimately I feel like the final results never show vote splitting to that degree so maybe this is good for Harris

Or bad for Gallego!

Well yeah he’s not gonna win by 14

It would be weird if there were a huge amount of people who hated Kari Lake but were cool with Trump

Aren't we seeing lots of weird poll results from places like Florida and, yeah, Arizona, where the voters overwhelmingly favor abortion rights but also at least equally favor Trump?

I live in Arizona and people don’t like Kari Lake at all, she’s way less popular than Trump. It’s not going to be +14 for Gallego but he’s going to win

Gallego’s out-fundraising her 3-to-1, she made comments supporting the total abortion ban that she tried to walk back, everyone is exhausted by her attempts to overturn her loss, even trump isn’t showing up for her like he used to

It would be weird if there were a huge amount of people who hated Kari Lake but were cool with Trump

Not saying it’s the case here but “such a misogynist I hate even diehard MAGA women” wouldn’t be the most shocking trait in a Trump supporter.

and yeah, people overwhlemingly support abortion rights, even trumpers. kansas voted down their anti-abortion amendment easily and trump is probably going to win there by 15 points if not more

xps

xp that's definitely part of it, but lake is also one of many pols who've tried to run the trump playbook, but it doesn't work because they're just not trump

at this point, even trump isn't trump, but he still stands in the long shadow of the previous trump, which occludes his current state from the view of his supporters

Someone's leaked the JD Vance Dossier from the Iranian election docs leak.

https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/read-the-jd-vance-dossier

Apparently people are getting banned on Twitter for posting the link? Love that free speech, Elon

oops I see it was posted above, yesterday! Don't ban me!

lol just tried to post it on Twitter and it says you can't

Apparently there's not much there beyond Vance ripping on Trump. Thought parallel to that there was another Vance message leak from 2020 of him ... ripping on Trump.

Vice-presidential nominee JD Vance has a go-to explanation for his evolution from outspoken critic to impassioned defender of Donald Trump: He says he was converted by Trump’s achievements in the White House.

Vance has said watching the former president enact his populist agenda for left-behind Americans transformed him from a “Never Trump” conservative in 2016 to a Trump supporter in 2020.

But Vance privately expressed a very different verdict on Trump as the former president’s first term was nearing its end, previously unreported messages obtained by The Washington Post show.

In the direct messages — sent during Trump’s final year in office to an acquaintance over the social media platform then known as Twitter — Vance harshly criticized his future running mate’s record of governance and said Trump had not fulfilled his economic agenda.

“Trump has just so thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism (excepting a disjointed China policy),” Vance wrote in February 2020.

He also offered a prediction: Joe Biden, he believed, was going to win the 2020 election.

“I think Trump will probably lose,” he wrote in a message in June 2020, a few months before ballots were cast in an election that Vance would later claim, falsely and repeatedly, was stolen by the Democrats.

I agree it's not that big of a story but Elon explicitly putting his thumb on the scale to censor this citing a rule he personally removed so people could post Hunter Biden porn does seem like a story people should know about

Unrelated, I saw a great suggestion that Harris/Walz should hammer Trump on all the shit he keeps selling his supporters as proof the economy is strong. $40 hats? $1000 sneakers that sell out? $10,000 NFTs that sell out? Business is booming!!!

I think one of the things he polling about the economy has found is that many people say the economy is bad while at the same time saying their own economic situation is good.

They're worried about getting yelled at.

don't threaten me with a good time etc
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/4903252-mitch-mcconnell-kamala-harris-abortion/

You'll never find a dance floor empty

xxpost I also saw someone prominent online deride many voters like they're watching America as some sort of reality show, at a remove, just voting people on and off the island (or pick your metaphor), without a true grasp of how their decisions affect other people. Voting based on personality, who you'd have a beer with, who tells it like it is, never mind actual policy. It's always someone else out of sight getting helped or hurt, never your family, or your friend, or your neighbor. Someone like Trump embodies that ad extremis. What a tell it was during the debate when they told him nobody was eating cats and dogs, and his response was basically, well, I saw it on TV! (Of course as a tremendous asshole and racist, Trump is cool with people actually getting hurt.)

JIC if there’s an article articulating that idea (which is probably valid, it feels valid) that you know of, please share it

the question is who wants more Trump in their life? he is one of the most unpleasant and whiniest people on the planet

"one of"

“What they want to do is break the institution in order to achieve what they want to achieve,” McConnell told Politico.

Literally what his own party wants to do, and have done already with the Supreme Court. Projection all the way down as usual

Like Project 2025 is essentially a "break the institution" manual

Tonight there's gonna be an institution break/ Somewhere in this town

Do the institution breakdown
Motor City shakedown

JIC if there’s an article articulating that idea (which is probably valid, it feels valid) that you know of, please share it

I don't think it was an article, I think it was this Jamelle Bouie post:

https://bsky.app/profile/jamellebouie.net/post/3l4x3p46frx25

on those days when i am feeling blackpilled it is because i am dwelling on the fact that a lot of americans — and, potentially, a critical number of american voters — experience political life with a high degree of ironic detachment, as if it’s all just a television show

a lot of americans just seem to believe, to their bones, that nothing truly bad could ever happen to them, and so their choices don’t really matter

it’s not even about entertainment, it’s that seeing a guy running for president promise to round up people and throw them into camps doesn’t register as “real.” it’s interpreted as performance.

There was a strain of this in that conversation a few months back about whether people were "really" scared that Trump was going to bring about fascism. Like, sure, he's going to do a bunch of bad shit to people who aren't like you, but your life isn't going to change much, is it?

that was what made the pandemic so surreal, not just that we were living through this major historical event but what the person leading us was someone who'd been voted in as a joke, one of the most uniquely terrible and unqualified people to ever hold public office

I do fear that Trump's shit really has become normalized, as a few articles have pointed out people who are coming of voting age this election don't really remember anything before the Trump era, politics has always been stupid and insane to them

Yeah, "change" can mean lots of things, including waking up every day now with a pit of dread in your stomach.

just utterly spineless

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/4899774-filibuster-reform-democrats-alarm/

Great interview about how the GOP turned into the white Christian theocrat party https://www.salon.com/2019/07/01/the-long-southern-strategy-how-southern-white-women-drove-the-gop-to-donald-trum/

Great interview about how the GOP turned into the white Christian theocrat party https://www.salon.com/2019/07/01/the-long-southern-strategy-how-southern-white-women-drove-the-gop-to-donald-trum/

Won’t someone think of the precious traditions that were made up a few decades ago and are abandoned by the other party when it suits them.

"Some Democratic senators say that while they support the goal of passing legislation to protect abortion rights, they’re leery of doing anything that might actually accomplish that."

Pushback against a call for filibuster reform underscores how formally offering policy and plan specifics can do more harm than good to a candidate, giving fuel to feckless critics and enemies alike. At the rate we're going we're soon going to have a race where neither candidate does interviews, offers specifics, or maybe even bothers campaigning at all*. For sure the current Trump campaign seems to be an experiment to see how much traction a candidate can get with minimum effort or attention to detail.

*I concede I do not live in a place where either candidate *would* campaign, and it's to Kamala's credit that she is apparently making a real effort in WI, PA and GA, among other places, to woo voters, which is more than Trump can claim.

I'm not totally sure-- I think making bold proposals works with voters, even if the ideas are bad. Trump is doing well with his tariff pledge. Harris is at least making it look like she will fight for abortion rights.

It works with voters if you can make a credible case that you can actually turn those proposals into reality.

Bill Clinton's line about the potency of being strong-but-wrong is truer than ever.

Yeah, I dunno, I think most people are turned off by details, unfortunately, which are the equivalent of asking someone to eat their veggies. Like, his tariff "pledge," it's really just another magic wand wave, isn't it? It's almost like saying you're going to outlaw wildfires or make rainbows brighter or give everyone a puppy that poops gold. Just words devoid of real meaning or specifics, like Trump's infamous child care rant, where he (incoherently) claimed tariffs would bring in trillions.

I guess Harris gave a pretty comprehensive policy speech yesterday or so, and what happened? The papers buried it.

Dan Froomkin has some conclusions.

By contrast, Trump, by any normal standard, has lost it, mentally and emotionally. His speech – at rallies, and most noticeably at the debate – consists of rambling, apocalyptic, nonsensical, hate-filled rhetoric and lies.

He’s saying crazier and crazier things in order to get attention – which the media is giving him – but it’s hard to see that any of it is winning over more voters.

It would be nice if this were true.

i don't think it's a tossup at the moment, and i think she's solidly ahead, but i am skeptical of any conclusion that harris is running away with the election. there isn't any hard evidence supporting that.