Political Power of Women – The Wrongologist

Democratic Party Messaging

The Daily Escape:

Pikes Peak, Colorado Springs, CO – December 2024 photo by Monica Breckenridge.

The Democrats are meeting this week to decide on who will lead them into the 2026 midterms and the 2028 general election. Wrongo thinks it’s time for a revolution.

The key question is how do Democrats go back to winning presidential elections? And it may not be the way you think. From Jon V. Last:

“Since Trump’s emergence in 2016 the opposition has responded by acting as if it were still 2015. The Biden administration pursued a vigorous, bipartisan agenda filled with popular legislation designed to promote economic growth across the board. Biden spent money on infrastructure and manufacturing—much of it in red states and rural areas where Democrats had little support.

The Biden administration’s theory was that by governing from the center and focusing on employment and economic growth, Democrats could retain the support of the majority….”

But that theory didn’t work, and Trump won, running on zero ideas about growth, prosperity, or progress. His campaign was posited on the infliction of pain to outsiders. Trump didn’t promise to improve the lives of his voters. He promised to punish the people his voters wanted to hurt. That was the entirety of his electoral proposition, and none of it was subtext. Instead it was bold-face, ALL CAPS text.

Last says it worked because America has changed and the majority of voters are no longer motivated by wanting progress for themselves. Instead they’re motivated primarily by anger that out-groups—the people they do not like—might be succeeding or getting benefits they’re not getting.

If this is true, and at least some evidence suggests it is, how do Democrats persuade voters not to be quite so angry and to vote for them? From Brian Beutler: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“…winning the next election will require Democrats to persuade some as-yet unpersuaded voters that they’re worth voting for. Whatever policies Democrats think are popular, whatever affects they associate with normalness and affability, if they can’t do the delicate work of changing a mind, they can’t get anywhere.”

“Democrats are about to have as little power as they’ve had at any time in the past two decades for a simple reason: Most Americans weren’t convinced that they’d be better off under Democratic rule. That’s it. And there’s no shortcut back to power that avoids the difficult task of convincing people to change their minds.”

More: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“The Democrats need more and better communicators, and, crucially, it needs the people who don’t understand their potential to influence conventional wisdom and public opinion to get with the times. Most persuasion doesn’t happen person to person, it is mediated. When it does happen person to person, it is most often between people who already know each other, and usually one of those people is regurgitating ideas they picked up….And the ripest targets are no longer classic swing voters who are happy to talk politics with strangers….”

Couple all of this with the problem of where people get their news, and you have Dems digging out of a ditch partially of their own making. What Democrats are missing more than anything is creative thinking about how to reach people who will never answer a telephone call from a number they don’t recognize, never answer the door for a canvasser, and never form lasting political beliefs by watching or reading professional newscasts (because they rarely, if ever do).

This time around, Democrats either need their leaders to adapt, or else they need new leaders.

Jon Last thinks what will win votes in this environment is a lefty demagogue akin to what Bernie Sanders has been selling for years with his “millionaires and billionaires” rants. Sanders’s pitches resonated with younger voters. He got quite a lot of traction in 2016, but Democratic Party primary voters were not ready for him.

Who should the Dems support to lead them into the next round of elections? It should be a group of people in the 30’s, 40’s and 50’s. And thank God there is at least some movement among “younger” Democrats on the Hill to challenge the party’s gerontocracy.

Billy Ray is a screenwriter. His Captain Phillips screenplay earned him an Oscar nomination. He thinks the Democrats’ storytelling ought to start with:

“Whoever is going to be our next presidential candidate needs to look to the American people and say, ‘You matter. Not me, not Trump. You matter. You matter to your family, you matter to your community, you matter to your country,’” he adds. “‘You matter to our collective future, and you matter to me. And what I’m going to do for the next four years is just work for working families. I’m going to do the things that made the Democratic Party your party for so long.’”

Working families. Who among the Democrats out there can build on and carry this message home?

Evolve or Die, Dems.

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.

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.”

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:

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.

Red, Wavy And Ridiculous

The Daily Escape:

Time is short, and we have little reason to think that we know who will win the presidency, or which Party will carry the House or the Senate. All we are working with now are “vibes”: We either grasp at the latest poll or reject it if it doesn’t conform to our thinking.

From Robert Hubbell:

“The MAGA disinformation machine is dropping low-quality polls at a hectic pace, Elon Musk is offering cash incentives to Pennsylvanians who have registered to vote (probably illegal), a Musk-funded PAC is sending texts claiming to be from the Harris-Walz campaign, Trump is staging mock campaign events that media outlets are reporting as real, and Trump is telling vulgar stories…that would terminate the bid of any other candidate.”

From Simon Rosenberg:

“As of last Wednesday 538’s national poll average was actually higher than for Harris than it been a week earlier. There were no signs of slippage or erosion…”

Then came the red wave of polls. More from Rosenberg:

“Then, last Wednesday, the Rs turned a switch on and dumped a lot of polls into the national polling averages. We saw polls form Emerson, Fox News, Quantas, RMG, and the right-wing firm TIPP launched a daily tracker, adding 4 more polls. Senate Republicans even joined the party, dropping a favorable national poll, as did ActiVote and Atlas….538 moved from 2.6 Harris on Wednesday to 1.8 Harris this morning, and many polling averages and forecasters tipped to Trump over the weekend.”

This has lots of Dems worried about a Trump victory despite all of our money and efforts to elect Harris. However, this should be seen as another “Red Wave” like in 2022 rather than an authentic movement in the race. As Rosenberg says, “Welcome to red wave 2024”.

Rosenberg provides some details. The red wave 2024 campaign is far bigger this time, and has started far earlier:

They’ve released 70+ polls into the averages, with 31 Republican-aligned groups having released polls since August. These polls are consistently 1-5 points more Republican than the independent polls, as was the case in 2022.
A majority of recent polls in NC and PA are Right-aligned.
While their focus has been on the states, last week they really leaned into the national polling average and moved it and other forecasts this weekend
The launching of a new daily national tracking poll by TIPP, a far right institution, is an escalation that will be putting downward pressure on the national average every day until the election.

TIPP is notable. It’s corporate slogan is “talent loaned from God” – Rush Limbaugh’s catchphrase. It offers a steady stream of commentary that would be at home at Fox News or the RNC site. Some recent examples:

Harris’s Fiery Campaign of Rage Exposes Her Unpresidential Temperament
The Left Is Still Obsessed With 2020 Election Deniers
S. Government Pushing Climate Lies On Schoolchildren
Night And Day: Trump’s Command Of Economy Exposes Harris’s Novice Approach

Clearly impartial, no?

Contrast that with the WaPo poll released yesterday that tends to support where the non-Red Wave polls had the race last week – Harris leading, and more likely to win. It was done in conjunction with the Schar School of George Mason University:

From the WaPo:

“Among these key-state voters, Harris runs strongest in Georgia, where she has an advantage of six percentage points among registered voters and four points among likely voters, which is within the margin of error of plus or minus 4.5 percentage points. Harris also is slightly stronger than Trump in the three most contested northern states — Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — but by percentages within the margin of error.

The seventh battleground state, Nevada, is tied among likely voters though Harris is three points stronger than Trump among registered voters.”

Looking at North Carolina, Harris needs help with rural voters. She hired Rural Organizing to help with that. From their substack:

“In one of the biggest developments this week, the Harris/Walz campaign unveiled their Plan for Rural Communities….the plan “marks a concerted effort by the Democratic campaign to make a dent in the historically Trump-leaning voting bloc in the closing three weeks before Election Day. Trump carried rural voters by a nearly two-to-one margin in 2020, according to AP VoteCast. In the closely contested race, both Democrats and Republicans are reaching out beyond their historic bases in hopes of winning over a sliver of voters that could ultimately prove decisive.”

Rural America is more diverse than the MAGA stereotype, and shaving GOP margins there can be margins of victory both for local and statewide candidates. “We are bigger than just agriculture issues….“Reverse coattails” or “closing the margins” or “lose less:” However it’s described, it’s an important strategy for Harris to be pushing right now.

The 2024 election is just a little over two weeks away, and most Democrats are down to chewing their last fingernail with worry. This is nothing new, of course. That’s just the way Dems roll.

Republicans meanwhile are ready to open the champagne saying they have no need to worry. That’s how they roll. Both of these phenomena are indicative of a certain kind of temperament but they are also real political strategies.

Bottom line: don’t overthink the polls. Just go and vote, and get your reluctant friends out to vote too.

The Times That Try Men’s Souls

The Daily Escape:

“THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.” – From The Crisis by Thomas Payne.

Everyone knows the bolded part of the comment above, but the rest is where we have to get to with 18± days left until Election Day. The pollster’s narrative is that the race has shifted and Trump has gotten stronger over the last few weeks. That Harris is lagging, not surging. At least some of that is caused by Republican Pollsters. Simon Rosenberg wrote: (emphasis and brackets by Wrongo)

“The red wavers [pollsters] stepped up their activity this past week, releasing at least 20 polls across the battlegrounds. It’s a sign that they are worried about the public polling in both the Presidential and the Senate, and have dramatically escalated their efforts to push the polling averages to the right and make the election look redder than it is.”

But this all has Democrats in disarray, thinking some or all of the following:

The polls are right and we’re doomed.
The polls are wrong. Some of them are skewed by these “Red Wave” polls.
Early voter data show that Harris is in good shape.
Harris going on Fox is a sign of strength or maybe weakness.

There’s a nub of truth in each of these. But on the whole, it’s whistling past the graveyard. The cake is pretty much baked. What we need in last18± days before Election Day: Vote. Donate. Pick a local candidate and support them with your money and time.

Let’s go from the macro in politics to the micro. The Intercept reported on a December 2022 drug bust in that bastion of democracy, Jackson, MS:

“It was a tip that brought a drug sniffing dog to the main post office in downtown Jackson, Mississippi. An employee there had reported seeing someone in the lobby putting pills into hot pink envelopes:

“…a police officer from the small city of Richland, just south of Jackson, walked into a back room at the post office where one of the envelopes had been set aside. Steed, a K-9 handler, arrived with Rip, his narcotics sniffer dog. Rip got to the pink envelope, sat down. According to records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, Steed said this meant the dog had smelled narcotics….This…was no ordinary drug bust. As it turned out, there were pills inside the package, but they were not the kind that Rip or other police K-9s are trained to detect. The envelope contained five pills labeled “AntiPreg Kit…their medical purpose is to induce abortion. Dwayne Martin, at the time the head of the U.S. Postal Inspection Service in Jackson, told me this was exactly what the initial tipster had suspected.”

It turns out that they were acting under a USPS procedure called mail cover: a little-known Postal Service method for collecting data about people suspected of committing crimes. From the WaPo:

“The US Postal Service has shared information from thousands of Americans’ letters and packages with law enforcement every year for the past decade, conveying the names, addresses and other details from the outside of boxes and envelopes without requiring a court order.”

More: (brackets by Wrongo)

“…postal inspectors, federal agencies, and state and local police forces made an average of about 6,700 requests [of the USPS] a year, and that inspectors additionally recorded data from about another 35,000 pieces of mail a year, on average.

Using an enormous database of images of the outside of envelopes and packages, postal inspectors can digitally compare names, addresses, and other information on one item to others. And the findings can be freely shared with almost any law enforcement agency that requests them.

This is bad enough: Imagine what could happen to abortion-pills-by-mail and the people who use them if Trump is elected? Since the accounts of the regional USPS head and The Intercept’s FOIA documents show a piecemeal crackdown is already underway during a Democratic administration?

Regardless of whomever is in power, the incident in Jackson provides a potential window into the future — one in which freelancing local Postal Service employees and officials call on the local cops who share their ideology to halt women from accessing reproductive care and potentially charge and arrest those providing or using abortion medication.

In the meantime, thanks to a Jackson-based postal worker, Rip the dog, and a federal agency that says it has no desire to police abortion, nearly 100 pregnant women did not receive little pink packages containing the medicine they requested.

Finally, Harris vs. Fox: She sat for the most confrontational interview of her campaign as she answered — and parried — questions from Fox News’ Bret Baier. The idea was to unmoor any loosely-affiliated Republican voters and show them she isn’t as scary as Trump and Fox News have portrayed her.

Baier thought he was prepared with enough “gotcha” questions. He showed a clip from a Fox town hall that conveniently edited out the section showing him saying “the enemy within”. But it was Harris who pounced:

“Bret, I’m sorry and with all due respect, that clip was not what he has been saying about ‘the enemy within’ that he has repeated when he is speaking about the American people. That’s not what you just showed…”

Baier insisted the clip was Trump’s response to a question about those statements, and Harris countered:

“You didn’t show that, and here’s the bottom line: He has repeated it many times, and you and I both know that. And you and I both know that he has talked about turning the American military on the American people.”

Baier absolutely knows that. Trump used the phrase on Maria Bartiromo’s Sunday morning program and at his rally in Aurora, CO., on Friday. Baier discussed and tried to sane-wash Trump’s usage of the phrase on his Oct. 15 show.

Go grab a napkin, Bret. You got served.

The Wrongologist

Geopolitics, Power and Political Economy

Category: Political Power of Women

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The Times That Try Men’s Souls