Author: wrongologist

Cartoons of the Week Plus Commentary – October 6, 2024

Cartoons this week were mostly about Vance failing to answer the “Who Won?” question. Here’s one Wrongo liked:

There’s always something in October:

Wrongo wants to update his last column about why Harris needs to speak with more empathy to Gen Z and younger voters. Friend of the Blog John S. left this comment:

“I believe Harris is speaking but perhaps not loud enough or Gen Z isn’t listening. Her plans do include downpayment money for new housing, tax incentives for builders to sell to first time home buyers, 3 million new homes constructed, business startup credits, earned income credits for low wage earners, newborn tax credits, food price regulations, and reduction of medical debt. Maybe you can say it won’t be enough or that some of these things can’t be implemented but nonetheless they are in “the plan”. Perhaps if her message was stronger on social media, as you mentioned in another column, the “Z’ers” would listen.”

He’ s right but Harris like most Dem politicians, isn’t offering sufficient “feel your pain” context to get people to listen. Obama was one of the few Democrats to place policy in a human context, but most of the time, the Democrats are relying on a laundry list of policies that may or may not ever be enacted.

America had good economic news yesterday, but no Republican was willing to cede that to Biden or the Democrats. Sen. Rubio (R-FL) claimed in a post on Twitter/X that the great jobs numbers were “fake” because past months had to be revised (most jobs reports are revised in subsequent months).

It’s true that the economy added jobs. But most were low-income service jobs. Meanwhile, the pathways to the middle class, manufacturing and white collar jobs, actually shrank. The Gen Z and younger workers suspect that the American Dream is fading because middle class jobs are going away, and they’re precisely correct in that intuition.

The GenZ’ers can’t square their lived reality with the commentary that comes from on high, particularly regarding the economy. Over time, they’ve come to distrust institutions. That’s true at a social level—levels of trust have cratered over time. And this is a key reason why this gulf between what young people live, experience, feel, and the skin-deep recitation of the miracle of the “Booming Economy”. It doesn’t reach deeply enough into their lives.

Harris shouldn’t cede any of this ground to Trump. Wrongo quoted Vance during the VP debate:

  • People are struggling to pay the bills. Times are tough.
  • The American Dream is fading, and feels unattainable.
  • We should stop shipping jobs offshore.

And Republicans understand the task at hand is to peel younger voters in swing states away from Harris. FWIW reports that a constellation of Right-wing groups are spending millions online to get their messaging in front of swing state voters. Probably the biggest line of attack being used against Harris has to do with inflation and the state of the economy: (brackets by Wrongo)

“For example, Duty to America is specifically targeting Gen Z and Millennial men in battleground states with ads bemoaning the state of the economy, saying: ‘According to…Harris, the economy is fixed [repaired]
at our age, our parents owned a home, had kids, saved for retirement, and we can barely buy groceries, gas, or pay our rent.’”

More:

“This ad is running across platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Google, but also on Roku devices and streaming services where young people actually watch TV shows. Duty to America has spent the majority of its ad dollars targeting Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia and North Carolina.”

More:

“Similarly, Preserve America is running direct-to-camera video ads on Facebook and Instagram from a trio of white women who are complaining about high inflation and grocery prices, sometimes tying the issue to illegal immigration. You can browse through some of those ads here.”

FWIW adds a chart about ad spending: (note that the red and blue here are 100% pro-Trump spending)

A few other groups have also emphasized economic attacks among younger members of the electorate. One from Our American Century says “Kamala Harris thinks young people are stupid” when it comes to the economy, and Right for America is also running with the “stupid” line.

FWIW notes that Harris is outspending Trump on Facebook and Instagram: Harris spent $8.1 million to Trump’s $1.1 million between September 21 to 28. Meanwhile, political campaigns spent $40.3 million on Google and YouTube ads last week, with Harris and affiliates spent $10.8 million to Trump’s $2.8 million.

Here’s a recap of spending by both campaigns:

The Democrats instead should invest more money where the young people are. They should challenge the Republicans by admitting that things look pretty dire for Gen Z and younger people. That over time, the American Dream’s faded. That times are rough. That people are struggling.

They should use exactly those words like Vance did, because they’re the ones that count. They resonate. You have to hope that the Harris brain trust will match Trump’s initiative by spending some of this money targeting Gen Z and younger voters with empathetic messaging like the Republicans are already doing.

The policy details can come once they’re listening.

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Harris Needs To Speak To Gen Z’s Reality

The Daily Escape:

Before tackling the major subject for today, Wrongo wants to briefly cover something you probably missed. There was an abortion ruling in Georgia that overturned the state’s anti-abortion law. The judge plowed new ground with his reasoning: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“While the State’s interest in protecting ‘unborn’ life is compelling, until that life can be sustained by the State — and not solely by the woman compelled by the Act to do the State’s work — the balance of rights favors the woman….Women are not some piece of collectively owned community property the disposition of which is decided by majority vote. Forcing a woman to carry an unwanted, not-yet-viable fetus to term violates her constitutional rights to liberty and privacy, even taking into consideration whatever bundle of rights the not-yet-viable fetus may have….It is not for a legislator, a judge, or a Commander from The Handmaid’s Tale to tell these women what to do with their bodies during this period when the fetus cannot survive outside the womb any more so than society could — or should — force them to serve as a human tissue bank or to give up a kidney for the benefit of another….When someone other than the pregnant woman is able to sustain the fetus, then — and only then — should those other voices have a say in the discussion about the decisions the pregnant woman makes concerning her body and what is growing within it.”

The ruling is unlikely to be the final word on abortion access in Georgia, since the case will ultimately be decided by the Georgia Supreme Court.

The judge has a solid argument: Why does society have an interest in a viable fetus when we know society won’t lift a finger to financially and medically support the newborn? Why allow the government to intervene at a time when the costs involved for the mother to continue with the pregnancy increase substantially?

Let’s move to a powerful idea that emerged in the VP debate. Wrongo thinks the key to winning the election will be how Harris reaches out to Gen Z (those born between 1997 and 2012). PBS Newshour interviewed Kyla Scanlon, who reminds us that Gen Z now has more people in the workforce than the Boomer generation, but they aren’t faring as well. Scanlon says that Gen Z has had a tough go of it, being essentially born into the tech bubble, growing up during the Great Recession and then graduating or being in college during the pandemic.

From Scanlon: (brackets by Wrongo)

“…I think for a lot of Gen Z’ers, rent is definitely not as affordable as it used to be. Real wages have increased, so [have] wages adjusted for inflation, but rent has increased much more. And that’s sort of the foundation of how everyone experiences the economy. It’s where you live and how you have to pay for where you live….people look at the price of rent, they look at the price of gas, they look at the price of food, they just look at the inflation that we have experienced over the past few years, and it’s sometimes just not enough to even make those real wage gains worth it.”

More:

“It’s also the cost of childcare, eldercare, these things that are economically quite painful, but don’t necessarily show up in traditional economic measurements like GDP….They’re things that are… hidden costs that people experience.”

Scanlon also talked about the negative bias in the media that’s driving how people feel about their economic circumstances. Media sentiment on the economy has trended either skeptical or negative for a very long time, so people are reading negative headlines despite the economists and pundits saying the economy is OK. This is a big disconnect for the younger generations who get most of their news from social media.

In the debate, Vance said a few things that certainly resonate with Gen Z and others. He noted three things in particular:

  • People are struggling to pay the bills. Times are tough.
  • The American Dream is fading, and feels unattainable.
  • We should stop shipping jobs offshore.

It’s hard to disagree with any of that, and Harris shouldn’t cede any of this ground to Trump. How hard is it to build this into your stump speech? She could easily acknowledge that we’re in the midst of a global cost of living crisis. The biggest one in half a century.

But it was left to Vance and Scanlon to say the things that most Americans feel.

Gen Z and their younger cohorts mistakenly think that the economy is a zero sum game, meaning that if China is doing well or immigrants are coming here and finding work, that regular Americans must be doing worse, even though the economic statistics say otherwise.

Harris needs to deliver an economic message that’s grounded in the reality that Gen Z and others are experiencing. It can be as simple as acknowledging what Vance or Scanlon called out as problems for many younger Americans.

All she needs to do is “Just Say It”.

Many of Wrongo’s 12 grandchildren (17-32 years-old) largely feel that the American Dream is beyond their reach. They’re certain Social Security won’t be there for them. Most think that they’ll never own a home.

Why can’t Harris speak to this? Harris and the Dems talk vaguely about “the opportunity economy” but a more emotional and empathetic call out is required. People with economic problems need to trust the head of the ticket, and that trust starts with acknowledging their reality: That things aren’t as good for the younger generations as the economic statistics say they are.

The Dems have an actual track record: Investing in infrastructure and encouraging domestic production of strategic goods. Investment in manufacturing is at an all time high. We’re starting to produce advanced chips in Arizona. Unions are stronger than in recent years.

Harris needs to show empathy for those in Gen Z (and younger) who are not fully participating in the opportunity economy.

It will help her win in November.

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Random Election Season Thoughts

The Daily Escape:

Camden Public Library, Camden, ME – September 2024 photo by Daniel F. Dishner Photography

When projecting economic outcomes, economists always caution about “Black Swan” events. While the term has been around hundreds of years, today it means an unforeseen but consequential event. Two potential Black Swan events occurred last week.

The assassination of Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah and Israel’s seeming willingness to keep expanding operations against Lebanon seems very risky. Biden seems incapable of stopping Netanyahu from widening the war against Hamas and Hezbollah, and it’s clear that Netanyahu has never been a good faith negotiator regarding a cease fire. Harris now has to worry about how this impacts her campaign in Michigan.

The floods caused by the remnants of Hurricane Helene could be another “Black Swan”, although it’s difficult to see which candidate it will impact more severely. The flooding disproportionately affected the rural areas that Trump needs to win to keep North Carolina in the red column. Although heavily blue areas like Asheville also will still be recovering in early November. Here’s a map of power outages as of 9/28:

That said, the response to Helene may also highlight to voters the importance of FEMA and NOAA, both of which Project 2025 aims to defund. There are plenty of ads now running that emphasize that Project 2025 would defund NOAA. If the Feds can respond to the damage on I-40 like they did to I-95 in PA or Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge disaster, it may convince people in North Carolina that the government actually can be helpful.

Trump’s growing increasingly unhinged in public appearances is difficult to overlook. He’s adopted fascist language. Overall, he looks both weak and violent, but the mainstream press isn’t persistently covering him in that way. Its clear on Twitter that his crowds are smaller and are increasingly disengaged.

Lets turn to Elon Musk who tweeted this to his tech bros:

Let’s deconstruct this almost impossibly stupid thought:

  • People who enter illegally are not eligible for citizenship and non-citizens cannot and do not vote in federal elections.
  • People who are granted asylum can’t vote unless they become citizens, which takes ~5 years.
  • Even the most generous immigration reform proposal (which is unlikely to pass both Houses of Congress) would only apply to undocumented immigrants who’ve been here for years. And citizenship would require paying a fine, extensive background check, and going to the back of the line behind legal immigrant applicants – a process that could take a decade.
  • Currently, most of the undocumented population is of Hispanic origin – a demographic whose voting patterns have been moving to the right, not the left.

This is the same guy who after the second Trump assassin was arrested posted on Twitter:

“And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala.”

And this guy has a top security clearance! Musk’s companies, including SpaceX and its subsidiary Starlink, have a $4 billion contract with NASA and multimillion-dollar contracts with the Defense Department.

But there’s a bigger picture in play with a few wealthy South Africans who have joined the tech bros world: Elon Musk lived in apartheid South Africa until he was 17. David Sacks, the venture capitalist who has become a fundraiser for Trump and a troll of Ukraine, left at age five, and grew up in a South African diaspora family in Tennessee. Peter Thiel spent his childhood in South Africa and Namibia, where his father was involved in uranium mining as part of the apartheid regime’s clandestine drive to acquire nuclear weapons.

And Paul Furber, an obscure South African software developer and tech journalist living near Johannesburg, has been identified by two teams of forensic linguists as the originator of the QAnon conspiracy, which helped drive Trump’s Maga movement.

In short, four of Maga’s most influential voices are fifty-something white men who grew up in apartheid South Africa.

And what connects these men’s South African backgrounds with Maga? South Africa under apartheid offered an extreme version of some of what are now important themes of what Republicans want American life to look like today: Income inequality as the natural order of things and a contempt for government.

This is what the rich guys who support Trump want, and a few of the most influential rich guys grew up under apartheid.

Finally, Rachel Bitecofer, a political analyst who in July 2019 predicted that Trump would lose the 2020 election, with the Democratic candidate winning at least 278 electoral votes, has comments on polling that Wrongo hasn’t seen elsewhere about how older people are turning towards Harris:

If true, it will be helpful.

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More Data That Supports A Harris Win

The Daily Escape:

Wrongologist readers know that Wrongo thinks the presidential election isn’t quite as close or scary for Democrats as the polls would have you believe. They show Harris with a narrow lead, with some showing the battleground states as tied. Well, most polls aren’t truly reliable these days. And the pollsters, who make arbitrary weightings after the questions are asked, seem to travel in packs. They’re terrified of underestimating Trump support (as they have in the past). So maybe this time they have a thumb on the scales just like they did in 2022.

Wrongo has been saying that it’s possible to make a vibes-and-momentum argument that Harris has sprinted ahead of Trump who seems to be shrinking right before the public’s eyes whenever he speaks. By any normal standard, Trump has lost it mentally and emotionally. His speeches at rallies consist of rambling, often apocalyptic, hate-filled rhetoric and lies.

In order to get attention he’s saying crazier and crazier things, but it’s hard to see that any of that is winning over more voters. His efforts seem to be to directed at keeping his most fervent supporters energized while extracting as many dollars as he can from their wallets.

Harris on the other hand has effectively undermined the image of Trump as some sort of inevitable strongman. Instead has cast him as a failed rich-kid with no plan beyond turning Americans against each other.

There are some interesting survey data points that are encouraging for Harris: A new survey suggests that pollsters may be underestimating Harris’s support with young people. The large Harvard IOP youth poll suggests there is now a serious youth surge towards Harris.

  • She is up 61%-30% with likely 18-29 year-old voters. In 2020 Biden won 18-29 year-olds by just 24 points.

The Harvard IOP youth poll is a very large sample poll of a narrow slice of the electorate, and thus far, more reliable than 70-person sub-samples of groups in national polls. We’re also seeing surges in young people registering to vote.

And this Harris margin hasn’t been getting captured in most polling so far.

Compare the Harvard poll to this week’s Quinnipiac poll, that had Trump up a point. Quinnipiac’s 18-34 year old vote was Harris 48, Trump 45. But if Harvard’s poll is closer to correct, that number probably should be more like Harris +25 to +27. Adjusting for the youth surge in the Harvard poll to the Quinnipiac poll would put Harris up by a lot, not behind.

Another point is that many young people register as unaffiliated, not as Democrats. So analysts may not be seeing  a youth surge towards Harris.

Howard University just completed a large sample poll of black voters in the battleground states. It showed that likely Black American voters in battleground states show strong support for Harris over Trump. Harris leads Trump, 82% to 12% among this population. The same voters report having supported President Biden over Trump 81% to 9% in the 2020 election. Support for Harris was even higher among voters who say they are “almost certain” to vote 85% to 10%.

The Howard poll has a ±3.1 margin of error, and 96% of the sample indicate they are likely to vote in the 2024 presidential election.

Finally, some readers wanted Wrongo to keep them updated on Thomas Miller’s model that forecasts the Electoral College vote based on investor closing prices in the PredictIt market for the Party that will win the 2024 presidential election. For September 26, the closing prices indicated that Harris wins the Electoral College 312- 226.

Remember that political polls are snapshots of the recent past and have limited predictive power.

Prediction markets, OTOH, are forward-looking. Investors anticipate what will happen on election day and place their bets accordingly. Just as the stock market is a leading indicator of what is expected to happen with the economy, a political prediction market is a leading indicator of what will happen with an election.

Time for a Saturday Soother. Just forget about the election for a few moments while you watch and listen to Luigi Boccherini’s  (1743-1805) “String Quintet in E major” (1st Movement) performed in 2015 at the Chester Music Festival and played by the Ensemble Diva:

Boccherini was a virtuoso cellist who is credited with modifying Hayden’s model of the string quartet by bringing the cello to prominence.

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The Young Now Drive How We Win Elections

The Daily Escape:

First up, Wrongo discovered since his column about Thomas Miller, that AP/NORC, a respected mainstream polling organization is also asking the revolutionary question “Who do you think will win the election” rather than “Who are you going to vote for?”

It turns out that the answers were directionally similar to Miller’s:

“With two months remaining until the general election, a larger share of registered voters believe Kamala Harris will win compared to Donald Trump.”

The result was Harris, 38% vs. Trump 28%. The rest was split 34% between Don’t Know (14%) and Can’t choose (20%). The results aren’t earth-shaking, but It’s useful to see another organization ask the question.

Second, readers of the Wrongologist primarily skew older, so it is relatively easy for us to be oblivious to what’s going on in social media and the impact it has on our politics. Take for example, TikTok (“TT”). Despite what we think we know, TikTok is becoming the new TV.

Last month, Pew published a new report showing that:

“…about half of TikTok users under 30 say they use the app to keep up with politics and news.”

Here’s a chart:

 

In fact, the Harris campaign’s TikTok account, @kamalahq, has officially passed one billion views! It may sound absurd to crusty old political operatives, but if you want to reach the younger voter, TT seems to have surpassed TV as a place to look for them. From the FWIW Newsletter:

“Gen-Z media consumers use their phones to watch content exactly like it’s TV. These Americans aren’t ‘cord cutters.’ They never had a cord in the first place. Gen-Z spends less time watching traditional TV than any other age group, while Gen-Z TikTok users spend an average of 77 minutes per day on the app.”

More:

“TikTok’s growing…share of Gen-Z attention is even coming for the big streamers like Netflix – more than 50% of Gen-Z have canceled a streaming service in the past 6 months, and 66% would prefer watching TikTok over streaming.”

So TikTok should be the preferred landing spot for political advertising if the candidate is trying to reach Gen-Z.  Harris and Walz have gone on two of the most prominent TikTok shows, Subway Takes and Track Star. (Which we may not have heard of before.)

And the format was much like when they appear with Colbert or Kimmel.

Most Gen-Z consumers watch Colbert or Kimmel in the form of a clip on their phones or tablets, so TikToks function in the same way. The only differences are that TikTok shows are very short, averaging between 90 – 120 seconds of run time. They are optimized to play to the strength of the TT algorithm and go viral, and are produced at a fraction of the budget of traditional TV.

And there’s a huge difference between the Republicans, who in the most competitive Senate races, have made the decision to exclusively focus on old-school television ads, instead of online platforms where a majority of voters spend their time. FWIW found that in Michigan:

“…one prominent GOP Senate candidate had spent [less than] $10,000 online compared to his Democratic rival’s $2 million.”

There’s been a big shift to TikTok after Biden withdrew: Trump content was dominating TT, and had started accumulating many more views, likes, and followers than Biden. FWIW reports that using the social analytics platform Zelf to track sentiment of TikTok posts, pro-Harris content is now the norm on the app.

The growing disparity means that the Democrats are connecting with Gen-Z where they are, in a way that Republicans aren’t able to do by using traditional cable and television ads. While we know that TT has serious legal jeopardy, that won’t become a factor until after the election is decided.

So we’re seeing more about how social media and technology are eclipsing the old school ways of running presidential campaigns. Let’s hope we’re on the right side of this story!

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New Methodology In Presidential Polling

The Daily Escape:

Today let’s take a look at an election prediction technology that may help explain the Harris/Trump polling disparities better than conventional polling. Wrongo, and he’s sure very few of you have ever heard of Thomas Miller, a data scientist at Northwestern University and his innovative election forecasting model. From Northwestern Now:

“For the second U.S. presidential election in a row, a Northwestern University data scientist is running a novel forecasting platform that updates the odds of a win by former President Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris each day.

With this level of precision, followers can see how single events — such as a debate, campaign activities or legal rulings — might affect the potential outcome of the U.S. presidential election.”

Miller’s system uses data from PredictIt, the largest private political betting exchange in which users bet real money in real time on political races. He then uses that betting data as input to his models for how the Electoral College will vote. Fortune Magazine picked up on Miller’s work:

“I was intrigued by the highly original methodology Miller deployed in calling the trends, and outcomes, first in the presidential race, then for the two Georgia senatorial contests, where the surprise twin victories gave Democrats control of the upper chamber.”

More:

“In all three 2020 contests, Miller beat virtually every pollster, and modeler parsing multiple voter surveys. He missed the size of Biden’s win in the electoral college by just 12 votes, tagging every state for the correct column save Georgia.”

Here’s Miller’s innovative methodology: (brackets and emphasis by Wrongo)

“For the 2020 Biden-Trump face-off, Miller deployed the pricing posted on the largest US political betting site, Predictit. He took the Predictit odds in…56 individual voting jurisdictions, tracked the hourly changes, and used his proprietary model to roll the data into daily odds that were extremely current given that folks were posting bets for one candidate or the other 24-7 on the site.

For the [Georgia] Senate races, Miller took a different tack. He assembled a group of about 1,200 Georgians whom he lured by agreeing to pay them a few dollars to participate, and extra dollars if they named the contender most likely to win—not the necessarily one they planned to vote for, as well as predict the margin for victory. The method he developed, called a “prediction survey” taking the best parts of the polling and the betting market guided Miller to a near-perfect reading of the voting shares.”

Now you know who Miller is and maybe why we should listen to him.

Miller doesn’t rely on polls he primarily uses the betting markets. He points out that the right question isn’t “who are you voting for” but “who do you expect to win.” He says that while polls tell you about the past, the odds on the betting sites map the future. The traditional method builds in a four to five day lag in data. It also focuses on an opinion today that can be changed by tomorrow.

And while the pollsters don’t pose that query, it’s exactly how the participating bettors are making the presidential election into a market. This kind of analysis is dismissed by mainstream outlets.

But think about it: Miller relies on prediction markets that have tens of thousands of investors, with thousands of shares traded each day. Typical opinion polls involve between one and two thousand respondents.

As of the article, (9/16/24) Predictit is showing a price of 55 cents for Harris, and 45 cents for Trump. Once again, those odds translate in 55% of the popular vote for the Democrat according to Miller’s model. Miller then maps the votes to the Electoral College. So if the “market” situation persists, Trump faces an absolute rout.

From Miller:

“It would be somewhere between the defeats of Barry Goldwater by Lyndon Johnson in 1964, and Bob Dole by Bill Clinton in 1996….We’re talking about a blowout where Harris gets over 400 electoral votes and wins Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and every other swing state.”

From his lips.

Of course there are caveats. America’s never witnessed a reversal of fortune remotely as dramatic as this one:

“It’s gone from a drastic landslide in Trump’s direction to a drastic landslide for Harris,”

Before the debate, the numbers were reversed with Trump holding 400 Electoral College votes.

What does it all mean? Time is short. Early voting has started in several states. The distance between Harris and Trump is now so great that only another epic swing would bring Trump back into contention. So Miller predicts that as of right now, it Harris will win big on November 5.

Is this bullshit soothsaying? Maybe. A polling phenom emerges with very election cycle by being the most accurate. We should also remember wild swings can happen. We know the late swing against Clinton in 2016 from the Comey letter precipitated her loss.

Who knows what might happen in the next month and a half? Whatever the outcome Trump will say it was stolen. There’s no scenario in which he won’t.

And there will no doubt be post-election shenanigans with the electoral vote and the courts, and maybe even violence. But if Miller’s work holds up, it would really be hard to see another protracted slow rolling coup attempt.

Some upbeat music for a Saturday. Watch and listen to Telemann’s  “Recorder Concerto in C major, TWV 51:C1, II. Allegro” played in 2020 by the Bremer Barockorchester:

Telemann is always a joy.

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Will The Protagonist Win?

The Daily Escape:

Let’s start with some definitions. According to Proofed, a writing tips blog:

“The protagonist is often (though not necessarily) referred to as the story’s “hero” or central character. At the other end of the spectrum is the antagonist, the character responsible for opposing the protagonist’s objectives.”

Marcy Wheeler, who writes as Emptywheel, had one of the most perceptive columns of the election cycle last week. Speaking about the debate and its aftermath Wheeler said: (brackets by Wrongo)

“…[what] the Vice President did with her animated, often mocking facial expressions….She kept the camera on her the entire time. And more often than not, even her facial expressions conveyed far more than Trump’s rants did.”

The media were surprised, since they had conceived of the debate almost exclusively about how Harris would react to whatever Trump would do. That’s the way they’ve treated Trump since 2015: As the protagonist in a global political drama.

But since the debate, something important happened to the media. Back to Wheeler: (brackets by Wrongo)

“And they left [ the debate] with the certainty that Vice President Kamala Harris was the protagonist of that story.”

Harris the protagonist. Harris, the main character, who’s actions drive the story forward. It wasn’t Trump giving the orders that got the press scurrying. They were marveling at Harris’s crowds, at her command of the issues, at her looking and sounding presidential. At the big energy in the big crowds at her rallies.

But a second possible assassination attempt could have delivered the role of protagonist up for grabs again. Does Wrongo have this right? The guy who was apprehended never had a line of sight on Trump and never shot his weapon. But somehow, Trump has become the victim of another assassination in the Mainstream Media.

It’s most probable that the second assassin is just another mentally ill person looking to give his life meaning. But regardless, Trump worked hard to get the protagonist role back. He tried to use the second attempt to return to being the protagonist. He’s alleged that Democrats have inspired the recent up tick of political violence by characterizing him as a risk to American democracy, as truthfully, he is.

There’s zero evidence that the would-be assassins were motivated or radicalized by Democrats.

The Springfield story is Trump’s second effort to return to being the protagonist. Since it’s predicated on a lie, he can run with it. If the tale of Haitian immigrants stealing people’s pets and eating them were true, then it would only have been a one-day affair. We’d see the police reports. Local and state governments would take some sort of action. The Harris campaign would formulate a response. The story would have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

But then? We’d be back to talking about Harris.

But because it’s a lie, the story doesn’t end. It swirls and gathers strength. The media and local governments try to debunk it. Lots of people believe it anyway. The narrative progresses, trying to get Trump and Vance to admit that they’re lying. They refuse; or equivocate.

And there is no advantageous angle for the Harris campaign to take. If she engages, then it gets even better for Trump, because she becomes a supporting character in his story. And we go from having a conflict between Trump and objective truth to a conflict between Trump and Harris.

And Harris would be no longer talking about the future. She’d be stuck litigating the (obvious) lies of a madman. Just like everyone else has for the last nine years.

But a big lie doesn’t have to change things, no matter how many times Trump plays that card.

Since becoming the protagonist, Harris has leaped in the polls. The New Yorker’s Philip Gourevitch reported on the Morning Consult’s polling of 11,022 likely voters with a margin of error of +/-1 percentage point, taken Sept. 13-15 2024. They summarize:

“Harris leads Trump by a record-high 6 percentage points among likely voters, 51% to 45%, up from a 3-point advantage before their debate last week. Her 51% of support among likely voters, which is also at a record high, is driven largely by her best figures to date among Democrats, Biden 2020 voters, liberals, women, 18- to 34-year-olds and millennials.”

Here’s their chart:

And her image is better than ever: 53% of likely voters have a favorable view of Harris, the largest share they’ve measured this cycle. By comparison, just 44% of voters view Trump favorably.

So one big challenge is for Harris to hold on as the protagonist in the political brawl of 2024. Something that Biden never did, nor have large groups of Trump wanna-be’s over the past nine years.

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What Comes After Trump?

The Daily Escape:

“A leader without followers is simply a guy taking a walk.” – John Boehner

Trump will lose in November and he will lose in January when the Electoral College has its say. Wrongo hasn’t concluded this via his mad polling skills, but Trump has jumped the shark. He needs to exceed 46.5% of the national vote to get near an Electoral College win. But even his most dedicated followers now routinely are walking out of his rallies, so he can forget about 47%.

From Politico:

“Trump will never concede defeat, no matter how thorough his loss. Yet the more decisively Vice President Kamala Harris wins the popular vote and electoral college the less political oxygen he’ll have to reprise his 2020 antics; and, importantly, the faster Republicans can begin building a post-Trump party.”

He won’t go quietly, he may go violently, but he’s going. So the question becomes who or what replaces Trump as head of the MAGA movement? Let me make the answer clear: JD Vance comes next.

Why? He’s quick witted, articulate, greedy for power, and completely shameless. Hypocrisy won’t stick since he has endless bullshit to spin without blinking his eyeliner.  All this makes him incredibly appealing to MAGAts. Vance is far more dangerous than Trump because he is exactly what the Silicon Valley tech bro Nazis and the extreme white Christian nationalists want.

Wrongo and Ms. Right were persuaded by Liberal friends to read Vance’s 2016 memoir. The pitch was that Vance explained why White Trump voters from southeastern Ohio and West Virginia wouldn’t vote for Hillary, or lean progressive in their politics.

The book is simply Vance pushing propaganda that fits the policy preferences of leading Republican policy groups. Vance’s stereotypes were shark bait for conservative policymakers who feed the mythology that the undeserving poor make bad choices and are personally to blame for their own poverty. So why waste taxpayer money on programs to help lift people out of poverty? After all, Vance got out of hillbilly Ohio without them.

It is depressing that liberals didn’t notice that Vance places so much blame on welfare rather than, on say, neoliberalism economics and corporatism. Those are the ideologies that moved jobs offshore, that got their companies leveraged, and later bankrupted while the jobs were never to come back.

Vance’s buddies are among the people who precipitated the economic holocaust in Middle America. He’s worked for money men Peter Thiel, Ted Leonsis, and Steve Case. In 2016, the gods of greed and hate had given him a mission.

So the question among Republicans is how best to push Trump’s exit to Mar-a-Lagos 19th Hole. That will be unquestionably assisted by Trump’s legal woes. If Harris is president, all of the cases go forward, and several result in convictions, accelerating Trump’s exit from the stage.

And who’s the leader in the club house? Sadly, the GOP is a Party driven by its base voters. That means the demands of the base will, at least for the foreseeable future, drive the leadership of the Party. That means the person who is shameless enough to feed them racist lies, someone shameless enough to admit they’re lies on CNN on Sunday. Ladies and gentlemen I give you JD Vance!

From CNN:

“Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance on Sunday defended false claims about Haitian immigrants eating the pets of residents in Springfield, Ohio in an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union.”

To support his claims, Vance pointed to what he said are firsthand accounts from constituents who have told him this is happening, though he didn’t provide evidence:

“The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,”

CNN’s Dana Bash replied, “You just said that this is a story that you created.”

JD Vance clearly isn’t ready for prime time, but as the leader of the ever-dwindling MAGA spud of the 2024’s GOP, he’ll do. Try to remember that this is a guy who went to Yale. Who’s gotten by on his resume rather than much of his actual achievements.

In the pantheon of shitty GOP politicians reflect on this:

“Dems: I can’t imagine a worse politician than Richard Nixon.
Ronald Reagan: Hold my beer.
Dems: I can’t imagine a worse politician than Ronald Reagan.
Newt Gingrich: Hold my beer.
Dems: I can’t imagine a worse politician than Newt Gingrich.
George W Bush: Hold my beer.
Dems: I can’t imagine a worse politician than George W Bush.
Sarah Palin: Hold my beer.
Dems: I can’t imagine a worse politician than Sarah Palin.
Donald Trump: Hold my beer.
Dems: I can’t imagine a worse politician than Donald Trump.
JD Vance: Hold my beer.
Dems today: I can’t imagine a worse politician than JD Vance.”

Ask Vance: Whose suffering does your lie draw attention to? The two plausible answers are “our country’s poor refugee population”, or “American pet owners, somehow.”

What a shameless, stupid, dangerous shit pile of a human.

The true successor to the GOP leadership will turn out to be yet another scary Ivy scholar (Harvard) with service in the US military, Sen. Tom Cotton  (R-AK). Unlike Vance, Cotton is ready for political prime time.

For the next few years, we will watch these two scary Republicans duke it out to see if either is the flavor for the MAGA base. We will also watch to see whether the GOP can once again become a Party led by its senior leadership or simply by its rabble.

OK, that’s Wrongo’s opus for this week. Let’s leave you to ponder a piece of soothing music to start the week. Here is “Solveig’s Song” from Edvard Greig’s “Peer Gynt Suite Op 2 No 55” played by the by Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra:

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State Of The Race: What Polling Tells Us And What It Does Not

(Welcome to another of Wrongo’s occasional thoughts about the election. He wants to thank you for your concern as he travels through Chemo land.)

The Daily Escape:

Polling isn’t all that we want it to be or think it can be. But the recent trends support growing confidence that Harris is succeeding Biden. For example, a recent USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll (highly rated in the 538’s curation of polls), shows an eight or nine-point swing in favor of Harris, relative to the survey it took at the end of June, after the disastrous Biden debate:

“Democrat Kamala Harris has surged ahead of Republican Donald Trump, 48%-43%, a new USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll found….The findings reflect an eight-point turnaround in the presidential race from late June, when Trump had led President Joe Biden in the survey by nearly four points.

The vice president’s small lead was fueled by big shifts among some key demographic groups traditionally crucial for Democrats, including Hispanic and Black voters and young people. Among those with annual incomes of less than $20,000, in the biggest change, a three-point Trump edge over Biden in June has become a 23-point Harris advantage over Trump in August.”

The poll of 1,000 likely voters, taken by landline and cell phone Sunday through Wednesday, has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points. With the election approaching, the survey is now measuring likely voters; previous polls were of registered voters.”

It’s a tiny sample that needs more supportive data. Sunday’s ABC News/Ipsos poll showed Harris leading 52%-46% among likely voters, a six-point lead. But the race is much closer in swing states. This means that the whole ball game is going to come down to turnout and enthusiasm. There are very few real swing voters left in America today, because the kind of person who has trouble choosing between the Democrats and the Republicans is somebody who probably couldn’t decide which country is directly north of the USA.

Two factors in turnout are the changes in voter enthusiasm and spending by the Parties. Here’s Gallup on changes in enthusiasm:

We should remember that enthusiasm for Harris is driven by hope, while enthusiasm for Trump is driven by fear. One is easier to stoke than the other.

Second, Ad Impact Politics, a firm that tracks political spending, says that between Labor Day and Election Day, 96 different markets are set to see at least $1M in political ad spending on TV. Twenty- eight markets are set to see over $20M, and Philadelphia, Phoenix, and Las Vegas are all set to see over $110M! Here’s how that breaks down by TV time slot reservations:

The Trump campaign is only going to be competitive in Pennsylvania and Georgia. The other swing states are apparently being left to their own devices. Their strategy seems to be if they can hold all their 2020 states they can put all their money on picking up those two states which will bring them to exactly 270. If they lose either one (or NC) that’s the ballgame.

A subtext is that their real strategy is the coming post-election legal challenge in any or all of those states, claiming that the Democrats stole the election. They’re clearly doing that in Pennsylvania and Georgia where they are already plotting with local officials.

Overall, Harris is now in a far better position than Biden was in late July. Harris, by contrast, has probably become a slight favorite.

Second, Harris’s improved position has essentially nothing to do with peeling off persuadable Trump voters. What has changed is that people who would vote for the Democrat if they were to vote at all are now much more likely to vote than they were when Biden was the candidate. This is reflected in the responses of potential voters in key Democratic constituencies — especially young people, and blacks and Latinos — to Harris’s entry into the race.

Third, motivating supporters to actually vote is going to be far more important than persuading swing voters. Swing voters remain important because the race is so close, and likely to remain so. Such voters might represent only one or two percent of the electorate in the seven states that will almost certainly decide the election — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — and one or two percent could easily be the decisive margin in all of these places. This is where the enthusiasm for Harris in the Democratic base has proven to be so critical to this point.

Pundits say “It all comes down to PA”. That may be true if your only concern is the presidential race. But control of the Senate and the House are just as important. That means hacking a path to at least 50 Senate seats in a world where MT and OH could both flip to the GOP. It means flipping the House. Neither path runs through PA. And reproductive liberty is on the ballot in 11 states and indirectly on the ballot in all fifty states via Project 2025’s plan to ban abortion nationally. How does that factor into polling? It doesn’t.

Another example: the Boston Globe published a leaked email from a top Trump volunteer with the Trump campaign telling other volunteers that the Trump campaign “no longer thinks New Hampshire is winnable” and is “pulling back”.

Not all is bright. Dan Pfeiffer notes Harris isn’t doing well with GEN Z men:

Peiffer notes that what’s alarming is that Harris’s entry into race excited young women, but not men. When Biden was the nominee, Trump was up with young men by 11. In national polling, the gap still exists, but Trump does less well with men under 30. Trump’s campaign is targeting these younger men. That’s why his convention featured a wife beating MMA fighter introducing him and he entered the stage to the tune of “It’s a man’s world.”

Peiffer says that if Trump maintains these numbers with Gen Z men, he might win the election:

“To put a finer point on it, Biden won voters under 30 by 24 points. According to the NBC News poll, Harris is up only 16 points with this cohort.”

So many bros…so few brains!

To deal with the rapid changes, polling organization 538 has changed its presidential prediction model from one based on “fundamentals” to one based on changes to polls. Which acknowledges that the old “fundamentals” no longer work.

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State Of Play In Our Politics

Wrongo apologizes for not writing in so long.  As some of you know, he’s fighting a desperate health challenge that will surely limit the columns going forward. Here are a few thoughts about the political state of play in America after the Democrats’ political revolution. Can it get any clearer?

This time, unlike what Gil Scott Heron prophesied, the revolution in America was televised. It was bloodless for Democrats anyway, and it was joyful. That Democrat Boomers tried desperately to hold on to power was understandable. But once they recognized the inevitable, they signed on for the transition. And it’s now a totally different Party. It’s a total cultural and demographic shift, and it will be a winner. From Umir Haque: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“There’s something special happening in America. It’s a moment of transformation. Americans are embracing Kamala’s politics of joy, and Coach Tim’s strength in vulnerability. It feels different, all of this, because it is. It’s not just remarkable for that reason, though—a moment that’s different for America.”

America’s rewriting the rules of its politics.

This election isn’t 2016. Trump wasn’t invincible then but Democrats didn’t know how to run a cultural war and got hosed. They’ve figured it out now. It’s Republicans who haven’t adjusted. They have no plan to grow their base, other than to fire their nominee. Republicans are trying to figure out what to do. They don’t understand today’s politics are not founded on grievance and division.

The Dems are serving notice that they aren’t satisfied with their coalition of African Americans, Hispanics, progressives, urbanites, suburbanites, union workers, and educated professionals. They’re making a play for rural white voters, too. It suggests that Kamala Harris is not trying to win a narrow, blue-wall victory.  She’s making a play to realign our politics.

Hillary Clinton made Wrongo sick when she called Trump supporters “deplorable”. Behavior is deplorable, not people. Eight years later, we’re finally talking about the collective American experience/dream again, And it is really resonating with people. The proposition Democrats are offering is that Trump voters are good people who have been led astray by corrupt leaders. Instead of criticizing them, on Day 3 of the convention Walz welcomed them as friends and called them home.

These are two very different theories of the election. Trump is running to get to 47%. His ceiling is in the neighborhood of 46.5% of the national vote. The Electoral College begins to favor him at 47+%. That is possible, while Harris is playing to get to 52%.

Turning to polling, it’s become an entirely different race. The idea that anything like this would have happened had Biden not stepped down is ridiculous. The other takeaway here, is that it’s still a very close election, particularly given that Trump will not accept a loss. The transformation of the polls is reason for optimism, not complacency:

And energy favors the Dems. Tom Bonier summarizes voter registration changes since the Harris revolution:

He means the same time period in 2022. Democratic registration has increased by over 50%, as compared to only 7% for Republicans. These new registrants are modeled as +20 points Dem, as compared to +6. What’s “wild,” Bonier adds, is that this voter registration spike “even surpasses the post-Dobbs surge.” It’s important to note that new registrants overall have a high propensity to vote the first time after they register.

This means that a number of states will be in play: Democrats stand to benefit in swing states like Georgia and North Carolina with their large populations of Black voters. Expanded registration by Hispanic women will not only help keep Arizona in Kamala Harris’ column, but play a larger role in Georgia and North Carolina as well.

And Trumpworld is shrinking. The Daily Beast reported that the Trump campaign is about to run ads in the area around Mar-a-Lago. Trump insiders say the campaign has paid almost $50,000 to run ads to make Trump and local donors feel good.

It isn’t time for a victory lap. Trump’s wounded, but dangerous. Work the down ballot elections as hard as you can. Oh, and pass the ±70-day /supply of popcorn!

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