The Wrongologist – Geopolitics, Power and Political Economy

Hunter’s Pardon

The Daily Escape:

Eastham, MA mirror image, October 2024 photo by Bo Ericsson

Why are the media and the GOP so shocked and appalled at Hunter Biden’s pardon? It’s been called “the most consequential since Nixon”. Hunter was set to be sentenced and (probably) jailed this week. The seriousness of his likely sentence was disproportionately severe, largely because he was Joe Biden’s son.

Hunter lied on a form about being on drugs and he paid his taxes late. He entered into a plea deal in which he would admit guilt and get probation, a fair sentence. But the judge and the prosecution blew it up in court. He could have faced years in jail for crimes that someone not named Biden and who hadn’t also committed more serious crimes, would have ever been prosecuted.

On June 6, President Biden announced he would not pardon Hunter or commute any sentence he might receive for his gun-related conviction.

The President’s announcement in June was disappointing. While it was clear that felonies had been committed, the prosecution of Biden seemed motivated by something other than the pursuit of justice. And Hunter Biden was a recovering addict. His crimes, by his own admission, were the byproduct of his drug and alcohol abuse.

Biden has now pardoned Hunter and that was the right thing to do, because they brought the charges against Hunter to break Biden. As Biden said in the pardon statement:

“No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son – and that is wrong. There has been an effort to break Hunter – who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me – and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough.”

The media and the GOP have reacted strongly.

On the one hand, people are concerned about a president issuing an unprecedented pardon for his child. But against the orgy of Trump pardons of family, friends, and advisers, Biden’s pardon of his son on minor charges pursued for political purposes seems like small potatoes to Wrongo. Biden’s reasons for pardoning his son are understandable. But Biden’s decision could be a precedent for future pardons—by presidents with flimsy or corrupt reasons for pardoning family members.

On the other hand, people have expressed the belief the Joe Biden did the right thing. Wrongo comes down closer to that side of that equation. The pardon process is supposed to be used to do justice. And this is justice. Hunter Biden would likely not have been charged on the facts if he was anyone else.

Biden exercised the pardon power; he hasn’t tried to pardon himself. He issued a pardon he was entitled to give. But it is a departure since he’s been so careful to avoid even the appearance of impropriety and said he would not pardon his son, to reverse course. That is reason to pause and reflect on this pardon.

Bill Clinton pardoned his brother, Roger, after he completed a sentence for trafficking cocaine.

Will pardoning Hunter “embolden” Trump to break more norms? No, he will break them anyway. Trump didn’t need any excuse to pardon his henchmen. He’s already pardoned Steve Bannon, Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Roger Stone and Jared Kushner’s father whom he just named to be the Ambassador to France! He’s pardoned Dinesh D’Souza and Joe Arpaio! A list of friends, allies and family.

It’s nonsense to think that pardoning Hunter changes anything when it comes to Trump.

Until the media uses the same yardstick to measure the actions by Biden against the actions by Trump, Wrongo is cheering for Joe. Trump’s actions are treated as somehow acceptable while incumbent GOP-ers clutch their pearls, or taking umbrage, at Biden. Democrats are being held to a totally different standard. It’s journalistic hypocrisy at its finest. And it does not serve democracy or America.

This ISN’T a two wrongs make a right situation. That Hunter Biden is not an admirable person in general has exactly nothing to do with any of this.

Let’s compare and contrast:

Hunter Biden was prosecuted mostly because his father is POTUS, and for actions that nobody else is ever been criminally prosecuted for. His plea bargain was rejected only because his father is POTUS. That is the very definition of political persecution.
OTOH, Trump was charged with extremely serious crimes: theft of secret documents and a failed coup d’etat are the most serious crimes anybody can commit against the body politic. And he is the only person to have been so charged, because no one else has ever committed such crimes.
Charging him wasn’t political persecution, despite Trump’s moaning that it was. While the Republicans spent the last six years trying to make Hunter a political albatross for Biden.

While Trump “whataboutism” is an exhausting game, the hypocrisy of the Republicans and the double standard of the media is galling. Those who supported Trump’s pardons of his political cronies for crimes that involved his own campaign, should have no critique of Biden’s pardon.

The Dems have to stop being the pearl clutching Party. Most voters do not care about Hunter Biden. We should remain on the high moral ground, and firmly assert and argue that the Biden pardon of his son was the moral thing to do despite the hand wringing from the press and others.

Happy Thanksgiving!

The Daily Escape:

Turkeys on the fields of Wrong – November 2018 photo by Wrongo

(Wrongo and Ms. Right are taking a break. He’s completed eight rounds of chemo with at least two more to go. Most days, he feels happy to be here and engaged in the task that is the Wrongologist. His deepest gratitude is for Ms. Right who’s been by his side throughout his fight. Regular readers will know that much of what follows has appeared on the blog before.)

“I am grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual” — Thoreau

Thanksgiving is Wrongo’s favorite because as a secular holiday, no one commands you to do or say anything. Celebration is subdued, and at least around here, it focuses on gratitude. Wrongo always thinks that despite America’s current problems, we should be grateful that we live in this wonderful country of ours, and how grateful we are for all of our country’s gifts.

We’re lucky to live in a land of plenty: Most of us have employment, most have access to healthcare. Most of us have a warm place to sleep at night, most have hope, at least until now, for their kids’ futures. While this is true for “most”, the fight continues for the rest of us to see such fundamental security in our lives.

Here’s Wrongo’s thanks to the readers of the Wrongologist. Special thanks go to everyone who reads this crummy blog, particularly those who have stuck around since the beginning: Monty, Fred, David, Marguerite, Pat, JES, Kelly, and Terry. Thanks to those who comment and send me private emails saying the equivalent of “What’s wrong with Wrongo?”.

I am grateful that you all stick with it, and with me.

We started this adventure in 2011, without a real plan. Wrongo knew he wanted to write and talk about politics and government, but wasn’t sure if people would read it. Since then, this is the 2,864^th post. The company that hosts the Wrongologist says that in the past 12 months, we’ve had 1.2 million page views. Most readers (43.7%) use a desktop machine, and Chrome (48.2%) is the preferred browser.

Wrongo is grateful every day for this journey he’s on with you. Sometimes, it seems like cynicism and despair is all we have left, that we will have to fight for everything we want. But resistance isn’t futile, and we will make gains up to and through the 2026 midterm elections.

On the big day, we’ll have a kitchen filled with good smells, “Alice’s Restaurant” playing in a semi-continuous loop, along with good thoughts about the great country that we’re privileged to live in.

We’re thankful to those who came before us, and to our family members and friends who can’t be with us today. We’re thankful to those who are on the front lines in military service, or here at home in our hospitals, schools, firehouses, and police stations.

P.S. Don’t fight with your MAGA uncle. You’re only giving him what he wants.

Here’s a seasonal tune Wrongo had never heard. “The Thanksgiving Song” from 2020 by Ben Rector. Schmaltzy and nice. Try it you’ll like it:

The Youth Vote Is Reached By Influencers

The Daily Escape:

Wrongo’s writing about how to Resist the Trump administration has focused on how in 2024 we didn’t target our messaging at the family or at workers. Those lessons give insight into how to persuade voters in 2026 and beyond when Trump promises to be deeply unpopular. A third lesson is how Harris failed to hold on to the youth vote after a promising start.

One of the biggest stories of the 2024 election was Trump’s gains with young voters, particularly young men. To understand the youth vote, we turn to John Della Volpe (JDV), the director of polling at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and one of the leading experts on the youth vote in America.

From JDV in the NYT: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“Democratic Party leaders did not listen deeply to and earn the trust of young voters, who could have helped her prevail in Michigan and other swing states. As a pollster who focuses on the hopes and worries of these Americans, losing to Donald Trump — not once but twice — represents a profound failure. Ms. Harris’s campaign needed to shift about one percentage point of voters across Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin to secure the presidency, but instead struggled in college towns like Ann Arbor, Mich., and other blue places. Think about that: Flipping just one in every hundred voters would have stopped the likelihood of mass deportations, tax cuts for the wealthy, rollbacks of L.G.B.T.Q. protections and the reversal of climate regulations.”

The story from the last six presidential elections is simple: When Democrats capture 60% of the youth vote, like Biden did in 2020 and Obama in 2008 and 2012, they win the White House. Harris garnered just 54%. Looking at CNN’s exit polls, Biden’s 24-point average margin among young voters in the seven battleground states collapsed to just 13 points under Harris, failing to hold 2020 margins among both young men and women.

The most dramatic shift came among the youngest voters (18-24), who swung 22 points to the Right from 2020, while their slightly older peers (25-29) showed more stability.

Wrongo has written before about how to reach the young voter. Reaching them required using different media than reaching the older generations. The young are largely on social media.

From NBC:

“…a new Pew Research Center survey reveals just how impactful so-called news influencers are in the current information ecosystem. About 21% of U.S. adults are turning to news influencers for information, with most saying creators “helped them better understand current events and civic issues,…”

Here’s a chart that breaks down how many people get news from influencers:

The number was highest among young adults, with 37% of people ages 18 to 29 saying they turn to influencers for news.

(Pew surveyed 10,000 adults and analyzed 500 news influencers, which it defined as individuals who regularly post about current events and have over 100,000 followers on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X or YouTube).

The gap in Harris’s youth strategy was a failure to address the 37% where they get their news. And to provide persuasive messaging that resonated with their interests.

At the end of the 2024 campaign, nearly all of Trump’s media interactions were with Right-leaning podcasters with massive social media followings. The GOP has actively tried to support their influencers with interviews and attention. While Kamala Harris did appear on the popular Call Her Daddy podcast, most Democrats kept podcasters and news influencers at arm’s length.

From JDV:

“The youth vote that emerged in 2024 defied every partisan prediction and stereotype – it was something entirely new. Generation Z maintained progressive positions on social issues while showing deep skepticism of foreign intervention. They combined concerns about economic inequality with support for free trade. They rated Trump higher on pure leadership while backing Harris overall.”

The vote shift from blue to red in college towns like Ann Arbor was staggering; in some University of Michigan precincts, the vote shifted 20 points toward Mr. Trump in just four years.

From Dan Peiffer:

“Democrats must radically reshape how we think about reaching the public. During the careers of powerful Democratic Party members (especially President Biden and some folks in the Senate), the press was the best way to reach the public….That world is gone, but too many folks in our party still run to CNN or the New York Times when they have news to make.’

More: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“We need to widen the aperture when we think of the media. We must include folks who don’t have a White House press pass. We must learn to reach the voters who don’t pay attention to traditional news. We have to aggressively support the nascent progressive media ecosystem. Most importantly, we have to recognize that politics in 2024 is information warfare, and we are getting our asses kicked.”

In the campaign’s final weeks, Trump pulled out of interviews with CNBC and NBC News. He turned down a prime-time CNN town hall. In fact, Trump didn’t do a single interview with a traditional news outlet in the campaign’s final stretch. No national broadcast interviews, no sit-downs with local TV anchors or newspapers journalists.

The winning candidate ignored the traditional media, focusing instead on partisan media outlets and politics-adjacent podcasts. While this change isn’t new, it seems clear that 2024 was a pivot point for the role of the legacy media in politics.

The biggest lesson is that the youth vote is reached by influencers. Our older-than-dirt politicians need to give way to the younger pols who can survive on social media. We need a generational shift in who communicates. A younger generation of elected Democrats who prefer to fight back instead of curling into a ball and hope Republicans leave them alone.

Think Josh Shapiro, AOC, Fetterman, Katie Porter, Gretchen Whitmer, Abigail Spanberger and Chris Murphy. There are a hundred others but Harris wasn’t one of them.

Where 2024 Went Wrong

The Daily Escape:

If you’re planning on being a part of the resistance, you need to start from having a few ideas about what went wrong and why in 2024.

Plenty of people have ideas about what we should be doing next. Rachael Bitecofer’s latest “Identity Politics and Microtargeting Killed The Party’s Brand” raises a great concern expressed by many Democrats, that the Party no longer identifies with the working class, and the working class isn’t who it used to be. It’s much bigger and much more diverse.

Bitecofer’s big idea is that the culture wars were the prime driver of the 2024 election. The culture wars were created after the era of Individual Freedom that arose in the 1950s and 1960s. The Democratic Party had morphed into an alliance, merging a Party of liberal Whites and racist White Southerners into one big coalition that by staying together, dominated Congress for decades.

By the 1960s, the activism of MLK. Jr and thousands of other civil rights activists forced the Democratic Party to choose: Either preserve their large coalition or end segregation. After the assassination of JFK, LBJ sided with civil rights for Blacks signing both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Acts of 1965. In doing so, this set off the realignment that would lead to total domination of the South by the Republican Party a few decades later.

Nixon’s Southern Strategy recognized that white Southern conservatives were there for the taking, and they took them. Meanwhile, the Democrats began to absorb liberal Republicans, predominantly in the North East and West Coast. Ideological liberals became Democrats and ideological conservatives became Republicans. And the today’s 270 Electoral College map dominated by the handful of swing states became the norm for success in American presidential elections.

From Bitecofer:

“In building their new multi-racial coalition Democrats…turned to something called identity politics. Identity politics is…based on a particular identity, such as ethnicity, race, nationality, religion, denomination, gender, sexual orientation, social background, caste, and social class….as the new Democratic Party became a multi-racial coalition hyper-focused on gaining civil rights for marginalized groups…”

This chart represents the outcome of Democrats following a microtargeting strategy for the past 30+ years:

This one graph tells us exactly why Democrats lost. First and foremost, it tells us that the Democratic Party is a brand “that stands up for marginalized groups.”

Let’s focus on the time window on the graph. As you can see, the Democrats used to have a massive advantage with the working class which began to erode around the time of the Reagan Revolution and round two of Nixon’s Southern strategy. Please keep in mind, the erosion also corresponds with the diversification of America both in terms of ethnicity and gender and reflects in part the backlash to civil rights.

From Bitecofer about the working class:

“Donald Trump just accomplished the same thing by focusing most of his ads on scary trans people and the data don’t lie, millions of ads repeating the sex changes for prisoners broke through.”

More: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“Now, that’s a great brand to have if you’re…an ideological liberal who cares deeply about the rights of the powerless!! The issue is just about a quarter of the electorate is liberal and psychologically predisposed to care about marginalized groups. The rest of the electorate doesn’t get the warm fuzzies we get from marginalized groups, because most humans are hardwired to prefer in groups over out groups and Republican strategists have exploited this expertly.”

Bitecofer argues that what matters for marginalized groups is policy, and that policy only comes from power. The way to represent marginalized groups is by wielding the power to represent them in majorities, not by identity politics in campaigns.

Bitecofer’s central point is that working class voters no longer primarily vote on economics. They did at one time, but those days were done as soon as cultural issues emerged and segregation was ended by the federal government. Here’s how the working class has grown and diversified over the last few decades:

Can the GOP, a Party financed by industry and bankers, permanently “represent the working class”? Maybe so, if the GOP can keep them distracted enough from the economic warfare they are conducting against them by leveraging grievance politics as a backlash to the Dem’s identity politics strategy.

Bitecofer closes with this:

“If we are lucky enough to get another election in this country, the messaging must focus on telling America the story of what happened to all their money, their rural communities, their paychecks, and their health under Republican Party governance.”

A prime part of the coming resistance is to return the GOP Party back to being at war with working America.

Resist, No Matter What

The Daily Escape:

We’ve got to stop awfulizing. That is, reacting to every Trump move as if it is the worst thing he’s come up with yet and then jumping on social media to scream about it. We need to take a step back and remind ourselves that it has only been 12 days since the election, even though it feels like a lifetime. People have zero patience: their reserves are running low and it’s easy to lash out at the latest Trump outrage. We need to continue to take some time to process what’s happened.

We need to plan our resistance carefully. Not all battles are winnable or even worth the many calories it takes to pursue the fight.

America is different now than it was in 2015 at the dawn of the Trump era. Trump didn’t just win politically; he’s won culturally. We need to reckon with that. There’s no way around it: the results of this presidential election sucked. But when you look at some the other races and questions that were on voters’ ballots, the picture looks at least a little brighter. There were some good things that Democrats scored on Election Day:

Voters protected abortion access via ballot measures in seven states. And in Florida, it won a majority of the vote but just fell short of the 60% needed for passage.
Alaska and Missouri raised the minimum wage via ballot measure, while Missouri also implemented paid sick leave. Pro-worker policies are popular across the country, and Democrats who run on them can win even in red areas.
Swing state Democrats performed well. In North Carolina, Democrats won five statewide races and broke the GOP’s supermajority in the legislature. In Pennsylvania, Democrats retained their majorities.

But we should also take note of the apathy of the American public. Approximately 245 million people were eligible to vote this year; approximately 90 million of them didn’t. That is a plurality of Americans who didn’t vote.

In five of the last seven presidential elections, the change candidate has won. At least one Congressional chamber has flipped in the last four elections. We need to think deeply about what went wrong in the last election:

Democrats rarely talked about a vision for improving family life. Instead we ceded that to Republicans.
We rarely talked about how poor the economy was for the average person.
We couldn’t make inroads into the male voting population. In fact, we lost ground with Black and Hispanic men.

According to the AP, Harris had an advantage among women, winning 53% to Trump’s 46%, but that margin was narrower than Biden’s in 2020. In 2020, Biden won 55% of women, while 43% went for Trump. Women under 30 voted for Harris over Trump, but it was a somewhat smaller majority supporting her, at 58%, than Biden in 2020, at 65%. About 9 in 10 Black women and 6 in 10 Latina women backed Harris.

Just under half of white women supported the vice president.

Wrongo’s having a hard time figuring out why women voters did not turn out in bigger numbers in this election for Harris. That women’s rights were part of the stakes this year made it seem obvious that women voters would drive this election. And yet, 46% of women cast a vote for Trump.

We elect women governors, for both Parties, currently the ratio is 8 Dem to 4 GOP. But why not elect them to the presidency, when in many other western countries it’s considered completely routine to elect both women or men to the top spot? What is different about the US?

We’ve tried twice to elect a woman without success. There’s no one reason why Harris did not win. But inflation, which was as big a problem of this magnitude when Jimmy Carter was President, had a lot to do with it. Along with deeply ingrained racism and the framing of our elections as just another form of consumerism, i.e. who you would rather have a beer with.

Republicans now control all three branches of government. They’ve become responsible for everything people hate about politics. Our top political priority is to try to become credible change agents. It’s the first step to winning back the voters we’ve lost.

Wrongo’s late brother Kevin always signed off his emails with “Resist, no matter what”. He was a libertarian, but it works for liberals as well.

David Remnick in the New Yorker spoke about Vaclav Havel and how he resisted:

“During the long Soviet domination of his country, Havel fought valiantly for liberal democracy, inspiring in others acts of resilience and protest. He was imprisoned for that. Then came a time when things changed, when Havel was elected President….Together with a people challenged by years of autocracy, he helped lead his country out of a long, dark time. Our time is now dark, but that, too, can change. It happened elsewhere. It can happen here.

The key question is can we resist like Havel?

Podcasts Turned The Tide

The Daily Escape:

Bear Trap Gap, Blue Ridge Parkway, NC – November 2024 photo by Mandy Gallimore

Wrongo had not heard of the Manosphere until the last weeks of the election. It’s an emerging term for disaffected young men who make up one of the voting blocks that carried Trump into office. From Wired:

”You’re going to hear a lot of people attribute Trump’s win to all kinds of reasons: inflation fatigue, immigration fearmongering, President Biden’s doomed determination to have one last rodeo. But he owes at least part of his victory to the manosphere, that amorphous assortment of influencers who are mostly young, exclusively male, and increasingly the drivers of whatever monoculture remains in an online society that’s long since been fragmented all to hell.”

From Professor Galloway:

“…this election gave us the opposite of the expected referendum on bodily autonomy; it was the Testosterone Election. The only thing I’m (fairly) certain of is what medium played a pivotal role, for the first time, in young people’s decision to violently pivot to Trump: podcasts.”

And that’s what this post is about. How Trump used the podcasting marketplace in a way that Harris didn’t. When a presidential candidate wins, their campaign staff, strategy, and tactics are paraded in the political press as genius. From Kyle Tharp:

“Despite billions of dollars spent each cycle, specific campaign tactics can only make a difference at the margins and in key moments. In such a noisy information environment, it’s difficult to say what, if any, tactics or strategies made the difference for Trump’s win. Politics isn’t science, and insidery persuasion ad testing can sometimes be just as useful as well, vibes.”

Trump

The Daily Escape:

Bobbing for Cranberries? Or just beaks under water? Wellfleet, MA – October 2024 photo by Greg Anderson

Like it or not, Trump is set to become one of the US’s most consequential leaders. Wrongo understands that for many Americans, including he and Ms. Right, the guy is repulsive beyond any need to speak about it. But unfortunately, that isn’t the case for most of our countrymen, who find him acceptable and preferable to a Democrat, despite all the criminality and the coarseness.

How did Wrongo and the Democrats get it so wrong? What about Trump’s skill set and capabilities did he and the Dems miss that 51+% of the voters clearly perceived as strengths? As important, how will Democrats get through the next four years? That’s hard to say. What have Democrats learned that they can carry forward to a better day down the road?

In a way, time will pass quickly. It surprised Wrongo that Trump’s first term passed by as quickly as it did. That was in part because of Covid and the myriad other problems that kept us distracted, from debating the next outrage that Trump laid on the table.

That is how the next four years will go by too. But the question is, does the country survive as a unified entity? Wrongo isn’t optimistic about the next four years. In fact, he’s filled with sadness about what might have been. Sitting here today, he’s unable to see a way forward.

But we have to start by admitting that the Dems have a huge marketing problem. Our ideas were rejected, our view of the future was rejected and our candidates were rejected as well. It’s a bit like the board of directors of the now mostly defunct Howard Johnson restaurant chain, looking out of the board room window across the street at a new McDonald’s and saying, “those golden arches will never replace our orange roofs.”

But they did. Quickly.

We have to admit that whatever Trump is, that’s what the American people want; even if it comes with his personal dominance of whatever the issue, the specific person, or the rest of us.

So Dems have a marketing problem. Too few people want what we have on offer. Here’s an illustration of how bad it really is: This chart from the Financial Times shows how Trump improved his margin from 2020 to 2024 in all US states but 2:

The data are preliminary, but unlikely to change. Yes, you are reading that right: Trump improved on his 2020 showing in 48 of the 50 states. And in many strongly Democratic states: In California, New York, and Illinois, Trump improved by very large numbers.

New Jersey is the most shocking: In 2020, Trump lost the Garden State by 16 points (57%-41%) to Joe Biden. On Tuesday Trump came within 5 points of beating Harris (51.5%-46.5%). An 11-point improvement in four years!

The hot takes about the election including mine, aren’t worth much today. This election seems so inexplicable that maybe there’s something bigger behind this than normal politics.

It remains to be seen whether or not reports of this country’s demise are greatly exaggerated. On the demise side, a majority of Americans on Tuesday chose Trump. They handed unchecked power to a narcissistic criminal demagogue because the price of bacon and milk increased.

They may also, in fact, have surrendered their sovereignty without firing a shot.

Democrats need time to make sense of what happened and to try to figure out what it will take to offer people what they need in four years. And 2024 was going to be a very difficult election to win no matter what. And in 2024 so far, nobody across the ideological spectrum has been able to crack the “voters hate inflation” code. At least, that’s one sure takeaway from the election results. No matter what policies and promises were made, lies told, or insults and threats, people couldn’t get over paying $7.00 for a gallon of milk when it cost $3.50 five years ago.

It didn’t matter that wages kept pace with inflation. It didn’t matter…And what will matter over the next four years?

This is a difficult time, and many may not want to hear about the future. Stop for a breath and take your time in returning to the fight.

Women Hold The Key To The Future

The Daily Escape:

If you’re looking for some hope going into the weekend, The Bulwark’s Dan McGraw has an incisive piece about how important the gender gap is for the 2024 election. He thinks as in 2022, there’s a strong case that women could give Harris a significant turnout advantage:

“More women than men have voted in every presidential election going back to 1964 and the current gap between them (between 5 million and 10 million votes per election) has been stable since 2004.”

Here’s a chart demonstrating the difference:

Trump has not historically done well with women voters. In 2016, Trump was -15 with women. He gained ground in 2020, losing women by -11. These losses were partially offset by his poorer margins with men: He was +11 in 2016 and +2 in 2020.

So that’s his baseline. Here’s one big question about 2024: Will the difference in turnout between women and men be higher, lower, or the same as it was in 2016 and 2020?

From McGraw:

“If I had to bet, I’d guess that the delta increases. Why? Because the vote gap has been fairly stable going back to 2004 and Trump has intentionally antagonized women this cycle. Negative polarity is currently the greatest motivating force in our politics… I do not expect increases in men’s turnout to keep pace with increases in women’s turnout.”

In 2016 Trump only got 39% of the women’s vote. It is not inconceivable that he could go lower. Indeed, for the last few days it’s looked like he’s trying to go lower. Starting in October, Trump thought it’d be a good idea to present himself as a “protector” who would save women from fear and unhappiness. As October ends, he said the following which probably won’t do his campaign any favors. From NBC News : (emphasis by Wrongo)

“Former President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he would “protect” women “whether the women like it or not,” a comment the Harris campaign immediately pounced on. Trump said at his rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin, that his “people” previously told him they did not think he should say that he wanted to “protect the women of our country,” comments he has previously made on the campaign trail.”

That’s some creepy paternalism right there.

This election looks very close, making either outcome relatively high-probability. It’s possible that everything will be too close to call and we’ll end the week with six different states at Florida’s 2000 contested level:

And there are signs in the polling that Harris has more support among women than Trump has among men this cycle. A recent ABC News/Ipsos poll has Trump winning men by 51-45%, (+6) while Harris is at 56-42% (+14) with women (all likely voters).

And the Harris margin is being repeated in swing states:

“A CNN poll released showed similar trends. It had Harris +8 with women and running even with men in Michigan. It had her running +19 with women with Trump +12 with men in Wisconsin. In Pennsylvania a Quinnipiac University poll of the commonwealth released the same day showed men backing Trump by 57-37%, while women backed Harris 55-39%.”

Off topic, but Trump seems to also be having issues with Seniors (+65) in PA. According to a Fox News poll of Pennsylvania, Trump is running 5 percentage points behind Harris among voters ages 65 and over, down from the previous month, when he and Harris were tied with Seniors. It’s a major shift from 2020, when Trump carried 53 percent of the senior vote in Pennsylvania and lost the state.

This could be big since the senior vote is particularly important in five of the seven battleground states — Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, and North Carolina. According to US Census data, these states have more residents over the age of 65 than the national average. According to modeling data across the Blue Wall states, Democratic voters over the age of 65 are running 10 to 20% ahead of their Republican counterparts with respect to registered turnout.

The conclusion? Nothing is definitive:

If women are more likely to vote than men, and if women are more supportive of Harris than men are of Trump—especially in key swing states—then Harris should win.
It’s possible that Harris will underperform, Trump will overperform, and he’ll get a solid, clean Electoral College win.
But it is also possible that Harris blows the doors off with women voters. That she both (1) increases that 10-million-vote advantage in women’s turnout and (2) explodes the gender gap. If that happens, she wins comfortably. Maybe even comfortably enough that we know it by late Tuesday night.

One way this could go is that Harris picks up a handful of points with white women, the single largest demographic group in the election. She could also boost the overall turnout of black and Hispanic women.

Try to get into a relaxing head space for the weekend. This may be Wrongo’s last column before Tuesday, so the battle is on hold until we see results.

Give any spare change to your local Congressional candidate. That’s where the hope is. It’s not quite a heat wave in Connecticut, but sitting outdoors and watching the leaves fall while listening to the Telemann’s “Concerto for 4 Violins No.2 in D Major” performed live by Hoing Kim in 2023 will tie the hopium for Harris together with the beautiful weather:

Taking Out The Garbage

The Daily Escape:

We’ve said since 2015 that some epithet or statement by Trump would eventually be the last straw disqualifying him from holding political office. But none qualified as “disqualifying” enough. In fact, the sum of all of them wasn’t sufficient to send him to the sidelines.

But, a noxious statement about Puerto Rico by a comedian no one has ever hear of may do the trick that “rapists” and “shithole countries” and/or “grab them by the pussy” couldn’t do: Deny Trump just enough votes that Harris wins in Pennsylvania.

That comedian called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage”. He talked about black people carving watermelons for Halloween. He made a ribald joke about Hispanic fertility. His act became the dominant news story about the rally, obscuring whatever message Trump might have hoped to close with.

Now, Puerto Rican activists in Pennsylvania (the state with the third-largest Puerto Rican population, after Florida and New York) seem convinced the flap is going to do real damage to Trump there. This would be a real problem for him since his strategy to flip Biden 2020 states relies heavily on improving his performance with non-white voters.

This is proof why candidates don’t close out their campaigns with edgy insult comics.

The racism and fascism Trump’s MAGA Republicans displayed at Madison Square Garden (MSG) is usually restricted to their media bubble, where it’s just normal conversation. The backlash against it among people in the real world appears to have shocked the Trump campaign so much that the candidate is running away from his own closing argument. That happened on Monday when Trump told an audience in Georgia, “I’m not a Nazi.”

Harris’s closing argument was different: She delivered an address on the Ellipse at the National Mall on Tuesday—the site of Trump’s speech inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection. By choosing the Ellipse as the location for her “closing argument,” Harris helped to reclaim it as a sacred ground of our democracy.

Much of her speech was familiar to those of us who have followed the campaign. Her indictment of Donald Trump was crisp and direct, and her list of policy objectives was meticulous and thorough. But she was also obviously making a pitch to any swing voters who are still on the fence. A sample of her speech:

“On day one, if elected, Donald Trump would walk into that office with an enemies list. When elected, I will walk in with a to-do list full of priorities on what I will get done for the American people.
We have to stop pointing fingers and start locking arms. It is time to turn the page on the drama and the conflict, the fear and division. It is time for a new generation of leadership in America.
Look, we know who Donald Trump is: He is the person who stood at this very spot, nearly four years ago, and sent an armed mob to the United States Capitol to overturn the will of the people in a free and fair election. An election that he knew he lost.
Unlike Donald Trump, I don’t believe people who disagree with me are the enemy. He wants to put them in jail. I’ll give them a seat at the table.
I’ll be honest with you, I’m not perfect. I make mistakes. But here’s what I promise you: I will always listen to you, even if you don’t vote for me.
I will fight to restore what Donald Trump and his hand-selected Supreme Court justices took away from the women of America.
So, America, let us reach for that future. Let us fight for this beautiful country we love. And in 7 days, we have the power to turn the page, and start writing the next chapter in the most extraordinary story ever told.”

As Harris was rising to the occasion for her closing argument, Trump was reprising the greatest hits from his MSG hate-fest closing argument during a Monday speech at Mar-a-Lago:

“The love in that room, it was breathtaking. There’s never been an event that beautiful. It was a love fest. It was love for our country.”

He said MSG held 100,000 when it holds 20,000. He then repeated all of his usual lies. So much for his closing argument.

Let’s talk about how we get through the next few days: You should avoid screens to the extent possible as we’ve entered peak Psychological Warfare time. There are Right Wing malign actors attempting to influence you and others. Their advertising money is flowing to the seven states like via a firehose. Avoid it if you can.

You should accept that so far, you’ve done all that you can do to see good triumph over evil in the 2024 elections. That with one week to go, the outcome should be very nearly sealed, but it isn’t.

The question is how to accept the outcome if it doesn’t go the way you’re hoping it will go. For that Wrongo has no answer. Many are wrongly saying that at least it will be all over next Tuesday, and we’ll “know”. But we won’t, the final battle will be fought for at least the two months after that.

So we need to prepare ourselves for an ongoing fight. Trump is already claiming the vote in Pennsylvania is fraudulent (That he’s already crying foul is good news for Harris). It could not be more obvious that he won’t accept a loss next Tuesday, no matter what the final margin looks like. Although of course his claims will be much harder to deal with if the election actually is as close as the polls suggest it is today.

The hard reality is that one of the two major Parties will never accept defeat in the presidential election.

This in turn means that in the wake of a Trump defeat on November 5, another battle is going to have to be fought, between then and when the outcome is certified by Congress on January 6.

This is a fight that won’t end Tuesday night. So we need to be financially and emotionally prepared to continue funding the fight to win the Electoral College post-November. That means giving money to Mark E. Elias who is taking on Republicans across the country that are attempting to enforce anti-democratic voting laws, along with his firm, Democracy Docket.

Here’s a bonus cartoon:

Harris’s Closing Argument

The Daily Escape:

Wrongo has no idea if Harris’s campaigning on a “Constitution over Party” pitch with Liz Cheney to Niki Haley voters is working, but he doubts it’ll be enough to win the election. Wrongo doesn’t know if Harris would have been better served by engaging with Muslim and Arab voters, assuming that she couldn’t have done both, and chose not to.

As I’ve spoken to friends who support Harris, the big question is when does she take the focus off Trump and begin her “closing argument”? Wrongo thinks she should focus on the “cost of living”. There’s no getting around that it’s high, that it’s higher than it should be, and that it’s a primary concern for most Americans.

In an NBC News poll, three in 10 voters under 30 years old said that inflation and the cost of living is the most important problem currently facing the country, three times more than the share calling “threats to democracy” their most important issue, which was the next highest issue among young voters. Abortion is the third most selected issue at 9%, followed by the Israel-Hamas war and “crime and safety” — both of which were selected by only 8% of young voters.

At the same time, new polling by AARP shows Harris leads Trump with women over the age of 50 by more than any presidential candidate since 2016. The survey shows that 54% favor Harris vs. just 42% for Trump (+12 points). It’s a huge improvement from Biden, who in January, led Trump by three points with women over 50. Harris’s numbers are also better than Clinton’s numbers in 2016, when she polled 48%-40% over Trump: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“Overwhelmingly, women over 50 say that the economy and affordability are their biggest issue. Only a third of those surveyed say the economy is working well for them on a personal level, with 62% saying it isn’t. Another 41% of older women have confidence that in one year, they will be financially better off, as opposed to 49% saying they’re not confident of that.

Cost of living is the most important issue to 46% of those surveyed, with immigration in second at 30%…”

AARP believes that women over 50 can potentially sway the election, so Harris should take heed. Showing empathy with Gen Z and older women should be at the top of Harris’s closing argument. Speaking generally about some of her policies and contrasting with Trump’s “all tariffs all the time” tax on Americans should be an easy sell.

In a sense, the campaigns disagree on who the final persuadable voters are:

Trump is after low-propensity Republicans who don’t mind his crassness and authoritarian personality.
Democrats see small pockets of persuadables grouped by issues across the political spectrum, anchored by the idea that the next president has to ensure that prices come down.

Ultimately, this campaign is likely to come down to whether Trump’s character is too distasteful to GOP-leaning suburban women and to enough Latino and Black voters that they hold their noses and support Harris. Harris is clearly putting a ton of effort into these voting subgroups.

If you want insight into what Harris is delivering every day out on the campaign trail, read this transcription by Marcy Wheeler of Harris’s session with Maria Shriver. She asked Harris how she copes with the stress. After admitting she wakes up most nights these days, she gave this impromptu speech against despair:

“Let me just speak to what people are feeling. We cannot despair. We cannot despair. You know, the nature of a democracy is such that I think there’s a duality. On the one hand, there’s an incredible strength when our democracy is intact. An incredible strength in what it does to protect the freedoms and rights of its people.

Oh there’s great strength in that.

And, it is very fragile. It is only as strong as our willingness to fight for it. And so that’s the moment we’re in. And I say do not despair because in a democracy, as long as we can keep it, in our democracy, the people — every individual — has the power to make a decision about what this will be.

And so let’s not feel powerless.

Let’s not let the — and I get it, overwhelming nature of this all make us feel powerless. Because then we have been defeated. And that’s not our character as the American people. We are not one to be defeated. We rise to a moment. And we stand on broad shoulders of people who have fought this fight before for our country. And in many ways then, let us look at the challenge that we have been presented and not be overwhelmed by it.

The baton is now in our hands, to fight for, not against, but for this country that we love. That’s what we have the power to do.

So let’s own that? Dare I say be joyful in what we will do in the process of owning that which is knowing that we can and will build community and coalitions and remind people that we’re all in this together.

Let’s not let the overwhelming nature of this strip us of our strength.”

Everyone should read that.

Wrongo thinks that there are legions of enraged women who are not being polled but ARE heading to the polls. That there are legions of young people who see Trump and the GOP for what they are and want none of it.

As someone who supported Harris in 2020 and was extremely disappointed in her at the time, I was pretty worried about how strong a campaigner she would be, and how well organized a campaign she was going to run. So far, so good.

Most Dems are doing more than they ever have to try and help win this.

And yes, hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things.