Social Cohesion – Page 2 – The Wrongologist

The Crypto Bro Vote

The Daily Escape:

When Trump pivoted to being pro-crypto, everyone thought it was just another scam to make a few extra shekels in advance of election. From The Atlantic:

“…more than 1 million people tuned in for the launch of World Liberty Financial, a new crypto project promoted by Trump and his family. The former president has been posting about it on social media for several weeks.”

“Trump wasn’t always this pro-crypto. He once referred to bitcoin as a scam….This summer, he appeared at a bitcoin conference and declared that the United States ‘will be the crypto capital of the planet’”

But his embrace may be more calculated than that. You shouldn’t be surprised to learn that crypto companies are bankrolling Republican campaigns this election. The New Yorker has a detailed story about how Silicon Valley’s crypto boys went all in on Sen. Adam Schiff in part by crushing Rep. Katie Porter’s attempt to become the Democratic nominee for the California Senate race:

“…Katie Porter was…futzing around on her computer when she learned that she was the target of a vast techno-political conspiracy….Now she was in a highly competitive race to replace the California senator Dianne Feinstein, who had died a few months earlier. The primary was in three weeks.

A text from a campaign staffer popped up on Porter’s screen. The staffer had just learned that a group named Fairshake was buying airtime in order to mount a last-minute blitz to oppose her candidacy. Indeed, the group was planning to spend roughly ten million dollars.”

“Porter…had raised thirty million dollars to bankroll her entire campaign, and that had taken years. The idea that some unknown group would swoop in and spend a fortune attacking her…seemed ludicrous: “I was, like, ‘What the heck is Fairshake?’ ”

Fairshake is a super PAC funded primarily by three tech firms involved in the cryptocurrency industry. The pro-crypto PAC has raised more than $200 million for 2024’s election cycles, per OpenSecrets, with tens of millions of dollars flooding in from crypto giants Coinbase and Ripple, as well as the Menlo Park CA venture firm Andreessen Horowitz.

Fairshake’s thinking was: If Porter lost and other politicians saw how much money the industry had available to spend on elections, they’d be more likely to become pro-crypto. The stakes, for the big donors, are existential — regulatory acceptance would boost the value of their companies’ assets and the use of their services.

The PAC dumped about $10 million into the race, a third of the $30 million Porter had for her campaign. She hadn’t ever heard of the group, but its attack ads called her “a fake,” a “liar” and a “bully.” Fairshake selected Porter from a list of high-profile options, hoping to make an example. She lost and will be out of Congress when it convenes in January.

An unnamed political operative told the New Yorker:

“Porter was a perfect choice because she let crypto declare, ‘If you are even slightly critical of us, we won’t just kill you…we’ll end your career.’ From a political perspective, it was a masterpiece.”

Fairshake’s scare campaign appears to have worked. The House of Representatives passed a pro-crypto bill, with bipartisan support, in May. Candidates with Fairshake’s support won their primaries in 85% of the cases.

This has made its way into the presidential campaign: Trump backs crypto and Harris has signaled her support for it as well.

Trump may be on to something, since this could be a bigger factor in the election than we realize. The New Yorker quotes Coinbase as saying that fifty-two million Americans own cryptocurrencies. Those polls indicated that 60% of crypto owners were millennials or Gen Z-ers, and 41% were people of color, key demographics for each Party.

Coinbase also launched an advocacy organization, Stand with Crypto, which is advertised to Coinbase’s millions of US customers every time they log in, and which urges cryptocurrency owners to contact their lawmakers.

Sherrod Brown (D-OH) is running for reelection, where Fairshake has directed forty million dollars to ads in support of his opponent.

In total, Fairshake and affiliated PACs have already spent more than a hundred million dollars on political races in 2024, including $43 million on Senate races in Ohio and West Virginia, and $7 million on four congressional races in North Carolina, Colorado, Alaska, and Iowa.

The big question is whether the bro vote is overhyped? Will these crypto bros turn out to vote?

Trump’s best chance at success in November requires minimizing his losses among women and suburbanites while building a coalition that includes a historic number of male and working-class voters in his corner. As a result, we’re seeing both campaigns and their allies attempt to reach men in unprecedented and unconventional ways online. (A reminder: Young men historically vote at lower rates than young women.)

For Trump, it seems this targeted outreach to the tech bros segment of the electorate is essential. If he can’t win record numbers of men, it’s unlikely he can win the White House.

For the Harris campaign, the male-focused outreach efforts are happening in addition to major campaigns and organizing programs designed to reach more dependable parts of their coalition who turn out more dependably.

In a way, this is proof that American governance and legislation have become so perverted by money that it is nearly impossible for people other than billionaires to further their agendas. It’s particularly dangerous given that the US economy has bestowed lavish riches on a tiny group of disaffected, unaccountable technologists.

Today’s startup founders and venture capitalists are, like the nouveaux riches of previous eras, using their wealth for selfish aims. In doing so, they have revealed themselves to be as ruthless as the robber barons and industrial tyrants of a century ago—not coincidentally, the last time that income inequality was as extreme as it is today.

Political Advertising: How Effective Is It?

The Daily Escape:

Wrongo’s calendar says there’s just 29 days to go until Election Day. The campaigns are in high gear, but what are they saying? And is what they’re saying getting through to both their base voters as well as to those who are “persuadable” enough for them to get out to the polls and vote? Time is running out.

Timing is a point raised in this NBC story, which describes that, after having taken the last 76 days to introduce the Vice President to voters, the campaign now plans to ratchet up negative advertising about how unfit Trump is to be President (emphasis by Wrongo).

“Leaning more heavily into negative campaigning is a strategic shift for Harris. While she has routinely been critical of Trump since becoming a candidate in July….Harris campaign officials said they intend to continue laying out her policy positions, background and plans…But emphasizing what Harris campaign officials view as Trump’s major vulnerabilities is seen as possibly one of the only ways to finally win over some voters who haven’t made up their mind in a static race that Democrats want to push in their direction.”

A recent poll by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs suggests that Harris’ attacks on Trump’s brand of hyper-masculinity appear to be working. As the Daily Beast summarized the findings, respondents:

“…chose Harris 59% over Trump’s 57% when it came to which candidate they felt was tough enough to be president…and favored Harris 55 to 46 % on “which candidate would change the country for the better,” and by 54 to 43% on who “was more likely to fight for them.”

Harris also is micro targeting the message of Trump’s weakness. From the WaPo:

“For the millions of football fans who tuned in from home for Saturday night’s much anticipated matchup between the University of Georgia and the University of Alabama, she also ran a new ad nationally on ABC that hammers home her point.”

The ad says:

“’Winners never back down from a challenge. Champions know it’s anytime, anyplace. But losers, they whine and waffle and take their ball home,’ the narrator says at the start of the spot, over images of a football game and washed-out footage of Trump missing a golf putt. The 30-second ad ends with footage of Harris challenging him to another debate, with the words “When we fight, we win” hanging on a sign in the background.”

The money quote:

“Well, Donald, I do hope you’ll reconsider to meet me on the debate stage. If you’ve got something to say, say it to my face,…

Harris also posted the ad on Trump’s Truth Social media platform.

Marcy Wheeler quotes CNN’s David Wright who tracks political spending by the candidates about where the money is headed in this final month as the ad wars intensify:

“You can see how each side is placing bets on their best path to 270 electoral votes. In the first week of October, the Harris campaign is spending the most in the critical trio of “Blue Wall” states – they’ve got more than $5 million booked in Pennsylvania, about $4 million booked in Michigan, plus about $2.7 million booked in Wisconsin. And that makes sense – if Harris wins all three of those states, plus Nebraska’s up-for-grabs electoral vote in the swingy second congressional district (where the campaign also has more than $300,000 in ad time this week), she’s the next president.”

Turning to Trump:

“…he’ s looking to the Sun Belt. This week, Trump’s campaign is spending the most on ads in Pennsylvania, $3.8 million – it’s really the linchpin to both sides’ strategies. But in addition to that, the campaign is also spending $3.4 million in North Carolina and nearly $3 million in Georgia, its other top targets, and if he wins those two states plus Pennsylvania, he’s heading back to the White House.”

The Electoral College will come down to which of the two campaigns potential voters consider more trustable, probably mostly on their personal economic situation and where that’s heading with each potential president. From the WaPo:

“Americans are finally starting to feel better about the economy, invigorating Vice President Kamala Harris’s pitch for the presidency as she narrows her Republican opponent’s longtime lead on an issue that is foremost on voters’ minds.”

“Although voters still favor former president Trump over Harris on handling the economy, his advantage has dropped dramatically in recent weeks. Trump now averages a six-percentage-point edge on the economy…”

But Trump’s only answers for the economy are lower taxes on the rich and more tariffs. Yet, like everything else, Trump has no idea what tariffs actually do.

However, a new survey by Data For Progress’s top line finds Harris leading Trump by 3 points among likely voters nationwide. Nearly half of voters (49%), including a plurality of Independents (46%), choose Harris, while 46% choose Trump.

On the all-important economy, Harris has a trust advantage on most of the economic measures tested, including: supporting small businesses (+10 points), taxes on middle class Americans (+9), increasing wages (+5), lowering housing costs (+5), handling labor union policy (5%), improving our infrastructure (+3), lowering grocery costs (+2), creating jobs (+1), and protecting domestic manufacturing jobs (+1).

That says her campaign messaging is getting through.

Also the survey finds Trump with just a +1-point trust advantage over Harris on “reducing inflation,” an issue that voters have consistently ranked as their most important when deciding whom to vote for. Here’s their chart:

They also surveyed candidate favorability, which now tilts towards Harris. Harris’ rating is +2, while Trump’s is -12:

Is this poll on the money? Difficult to tell. A shorter election season makes it harder for campaigns to assess where to place their bets. And which of their cohorts in the electorate demand the most attention. We’ve focused on Gen Z and younger voters as being primarily swayed by economics. Messaging to women is another important element. Harris can run ads attacking Trump’s hyper-masculinity, (which will help with women).

From The Economist: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“And Harris needs to focus there. In the Obama years the gap between young men and women identifying as liberals was just five percentage points, during the Trump-Biden years this has tripled to 15 points, according to Gallup. This change has been caused almost entirely by young women moving to the left, rather than young men tacking to the right. The fact that this generation’s formative years were during the #MeToo movement, the Trump years and the decision to overturn Roe v Wade helps explain it.”

In 2020 a majority of white women voted for Trump. He will be in the minority in 2024. Leading among women is a real advantage. Since the 1980s a greater share of women than men has turned out to vote. In 2020 women made up 54% of the electorate. A final indicator that Democrats might be winning this battle of the sexes: in battleground states, according to Target Smart, a data firm, between July and September, twice as many young Democratic women registered to vote than young Republican men.

Trump’s bet is that Harris is the one with the turnout problem. They think their base is more committed to their candidate than is Harris’s. But Marcy Wheeler points to Harris’s investment in the Dem ground game:

“The Harris campaign claimed in late September to have 330 offices and more than 2,400 staff. They completed 25,000 weekend volunteer shifts on the final weekend of last month, contacting over 1 million voters over three days and completed the 100,000th event of the campaign.”

BTW: Ms. Oh So Right got a postcard from Harris to vote early this week.

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.’”

“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.”

“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.

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.

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.”

“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.

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.

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!

The Biden Dilemma Continues

The Daily Escape:

Grand Tetons with balsamroot, Grand Teton NP, WY – July 2024 photo by Paul Lally Fine Arts Nature Photography

We’re still in the doom loop regarding whether Biden should step down as the Democrats candidate for president in November. A large proportion of pundits and Hollywood types are demanding that the Democrats take the easy way out, and thus, go on to lose this fall.

The dilemma that Wrongo wrote about last week is still with us, and very little has changed.

Except that Biden held a press conference on Thursday that, like the first presidential debate, was designed to quell the chorus calling for him to step aside. Or it was designed to offer red meat to the supposed journalists who asked the questions? The media has been treating Biden like a treasonous convicted felon that should be dropped like a hot rock, and treating the actual treasonous convicted felon like he’s an acceptable candidate.

The press conference turned out to be respectful, and largely concentrated on foreign policy. Biden showed great command of the subject matter, and with the exception of his usual verbal tics, gave long and well-reasoned answers. Some of the most hostile press members didn’t get to ask questions, but most of the areas of concern regarding his health, mental acuity and his commitment to staying in the race were covered in at least some depth.

What’s next? Wrongo has no idea if Biden is going to stay in the race, or what he will do if the chorus of calls for him to step aside continue to grow over the next week.

Wrongo has a huge concern should Biden decide to keep running. Usually presidential debates don’t matter, but in this election cycle, the two debates are more like health and wellness check-in events for both candidates, and that’s Wrongo’s biggest worry should Biden stay in the race: The election will ride entirely on how he performs in the second debate that is scheduled for September 10. By then, the convention will be over and all of the other possible options to head the ticket that are available today will be in the rear view mirror.

The decision about Biden is whether he’s electable. The way we talk about that is: Does he give the Democratic Party the best chance to win in November? We know that there are no guarantees: Biden could stay in and win. Biden could stand down and the new nominee could lose. Nothing is “safe.” The problem for the Democrats is that as of today, given the electoral map, the options of Biden either on or off the ticket both have less than a 50% chance of success. The Party probably feels it has to choose the least-dangerous pathway, and humans are rarely good at doing that. We’ve evolved to believe that if one option is risky, then the other option is likely to be less risky.

Has Wrongo seen enough? Maybe Biden can’t win this one for us. Maybe we have to win it for ourselves.

In a better world, Biden wouldn’t be the candidate in 2024. In that world, Hillary Clinton would just be finishing her second term. There would be a liberal majority on the Supreme Court, and Trump would just be a footnote to the history of presidential politics. But that’s not the reality we’re in. So Dems must decide whether Biden is the best option we’ve got. Regardless of who emerges when the smoke clears:

If we all agree to back the candidate, they will win.

If we all can’t agree to back the candidate, they will lose.

This was the big lesson that came out of the French election. They sluffed off candidates and parties in order to present a united front to the electorate that would prevent their right wing from taking over.

It’s important to remember that in America, the number of voters on the side of democracy easily outnumbers those on the authoritarian side. America’s challenge with beating Trump is how to unite the voters, not divide them. And division comes from the sort of narrative being sown by the media and the pundits. That guy’s “unelectable,” so don’t vote for him.

Despite the press conference, Biden still has yet to prove that he can be a vigorous, effective presence. He has done a number of events, and while all of them have been better than the debate, none of them until this one, has risen to the level “very good.”

This time around may be different. It is true that no incumbent president has lost re-election during a time of economic expansion and low unemployment. It is also true that no 80-year-old has ever been elected president. And that no felon has ever been elected president.

We are presently on course to make history with at least one of these improbabilities.

There are other firsts in this election: Never before has an aspiring president said out loud that he wanted to be “a dictator.” Never before has a sitting president attempted a coup. Never before has the general election featured two men who have served as president. Never before has the general election matchup been settled so early. Never before has a presidential general election debate taken place in June.

A lot of never-before things are happening all around us, right now.

Another historical precedent is that Trump has never won the popular vote. We should not assume that just because it hasn’t happened before, it can’t happen.

Dems need to choose to support Biden or overthrow him, and the sooner the better.

We Must Resist This Extreme Court

The Daily Escape:

Broad-tailed hummingbirds mating, northern CO – June 2024 photo by Hilary Bralove. This is what John Roberts and his radical Conservative associates are doing to American democracy.

“What is the essence of America? Finding and maintaining that perfect, delicate balance between freedom ‘to’ and freedom ‘from’” –Marilyn Vos Savant

The American colonies fought to get free from a king who ruled with absolute power. And on Monday, once again in America, the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) in substance overthrew the American Revolution by saying that any US president could have the rights of a modern-day king, broadly immune from prosecution under the law for his/her acts.

This betrayal of the American revolutionaries, Founders and Framers was delivered in an opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts on behalf of the Conservative radicals who make up the majority of the SCOTUS. It hurts even more because it is designed to protect the most corrupt and dangerous person to ever hold the office of President of the US. Looking at the opinion, it becomes clear that the Conservative majority is more concerned with concentrating power in the hands of the president than in how a president might abuse that power.

This usurping of power is not implied anywhere in the Constitution, nor implied by the centuries of precedent in opinions by the SCOTUS. For you fans of Originalism, remember this, written by historian Joseph Ellis in 2018: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“Most members of America’s founding generation would have regarded this situation as strange. If you read the debates among the delegates at the Constitutional Convention of 1787, and then read their prescriptions for judicial power in Article III of the Constitution, it becomes clear that the last thing the 39 signers of the document wanted was for the Supreme Court to become supreme.”

Bu real power in this country no longer lies in the People. It now resides at the Supreme Court.

For generations, doomsayers have warned us about the imminent collapse of the American republic, not by outside forces, but by inside elements gnawing at the nation’s gut like a cancer. Watch out for the Communists. Watch out for the foreigners swarming our borders. Watch out for leftists. Watch out for the Jews. Watch out for the Muslims. Watch out for rock and roll. Watch out for Disney.

Now the US as we knew it is tottering. But the collapse wasn’t caused by any of those things. It was caused by radical ideologues who knew how to pervert the very mechanism that was supposed to ensure the stability of American democracy: Its system of checks and balances. You know, the three branches of the federal government empowered to crack the whip on each other, and all of them answerable to The People. But for all their wisdom, the Founders were unable to foresee that two centuries on, there would be plotters and schemers who found a means to exploit the chinks in the wall. And possibly to bring the whole thing tumbling down.

We’re talking about the fallout from the SCOTUS 6-3 decision in Trump vs. US. As Heather Cox Richardson (HCR) noted:

“This is a profound change to our fundamental law—an amendment to the Constitution…”

Here’s a brief summary by Robert Hubbell: (Emphasis by Hubbell)

“Today, the Supreme Court invented a rule (found nowhere in the Constitution) granting presidents immunity from criminal prosecution as follows:

Core presidential functions are absolutely immune (“conclusive and preclusive”), for example, when granting pardons.

Official acts are preemptively immune from criminal prosecution for a president’s acts within the outer perimeter of his official responsibility—which is almost anything tangentially related to the president’s enumerated powers

Evidentiary rules. The Court also imposed two evidentiary rules on prosecutors seeking to navigate the above two rules:

A prosecutor may not use official acts as evidence in a prosecution of unofficial acts.

A prosecutor may not examine a president’s motives in attempting to distinguish between official and unofficial acts.”

HCR reminds us that at his confirmation hearing in 2005, now–Chief Justice John Roberts said:

“I believe that no one is above the law under our system and that includes the president. The president is fully bound by the law, the Constitution, and statutes.”

But he’s now changed his mind. Roberts’ opinion went even further than Trump had requested. And instead of reciting what the SCOTUS has now allowed the president to do without fear, let’s take a look at how we got here:

A jury found that Trump committed 34 felonies to help win in 2016.
After committing those crimes, once he took office, Trump then appointed three Supreme Court justices.
Those justices then delayed efforts to hold Trump accountable for allegedly committing more crimes to hold onto power after losing the 2020 election.
Now, those same justices support the idea that Trump enjoys absolute immunity for “official acts”—thereby drastically weakening efforts to hold Trump accountable.

One Constitutional flaw the founders left us is the Electoral College (EC). Its original purpose was to advance the interests of slaveholders. And while we no longer have slaveholders, their spiritual descendants now control the Supreme Court.

While the EC was supposed to safeguard against the “tyranny of the majority”, it has instead promoted the tyranny of the minority. The EC allowed the Supreme Court to be hijacked by authoritarians. Five of its current members were appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote, and another who helped one of those popular vote losers, GW Bush, ascend to the Oval Office. That is Clarence Thomas, also married to a conspirator in the Jan. 6 insurrectionist plot.

This has cost us control of our politics and our courts. Control is now held by a minority, supported by some technocrats in the middle, and enabled by the apathy of most of the rest of us.

Worse, those in the current minority are extremists. The Supreme Court is now no different from the Senate: An explicitly partisan, supra-legislative body that, because of the EC, has a built-in bias for the rural party.

It took just eight years for a game show host who was unable to win a plurality of the vote to expose our entire political order as rotten and decayed. He demonstrated that the impeachment mechanism was a dead letter and then got the Supreme Court to declare that the president was, by definition, above the law.

How do we now save our Constitutional republic?

During this Fourth of July week, let’s remember that our common enemy is the partisan power of a partisan minority. This weekend is our opportunity to set a battle plan against that common enemy. That would be a plan to maintain control of Congress for the next two years. The Democrats are just five seats away from having majority control of the House of Representatives. It is a heavier lift to retain control of the Senate, but it isn’t beyond possibility. As Wrongo said the other day, focus on these seats may also help push Biden over the goal line. And even if it doesn’t, the incoming president Trump would be effectively blocked from implementing much of his agenda.

Ultimately, we need political power to dilute the power of this Extreme Court that has taken control of the duties of the other branches of government. If there’s a better argument for voting for Biden (or anyone else who’s not Trump) Wrongo doesn’t know what it is.

There is no option, we have to resist, no matter what. We have to fight.

At this difficult, traumatic time, we must convert the shock of this latest extreme judicial overreach into action, to achieve an overwhelming victory in November. Just as Dobbs fueled a massive turnout, so too should Trump v. US.

(This is Wrongo’s last column before the Independence Day holiday. The next column will be published on Monday, 7/8)

Cartoons Of The Week – June 30, 2024

It’s no surprise that all of the cartoonists arose from their slumbers to draw various scenes of
the Biden and Trump debate and its aftermath. In most cases they magnified Joe’s decrepitude or show streams flowing from Trump’s mouth. Few are genuinely funny.

But before cartoons, a few more words about the debate and where we are going. The NYT has an editorial saying that Biden should stand down for the good of the country. Even though the idea has been rejected by Biden, that thought is alive and will play out over the next few weeks. And for better or for worse, it will largely gain or lose traction based on poll results, by those same people who we’ve been saying for months that we shouldn’t trust their numbers.

That’s the dilemma facing Democrats. Interestingly, Biden’s poll numbers went into positive territory in a post-debate poll yesterday and he had his best fundraising day ever. The viewing numbers show that only about 30% of those likely to vote this fall watched or streamed the debate on Thursday night.

That historically small audience was likely comprised mostly of partisans on both sides, particularly given that CNN allowed Fox to run a simulcast of the debate on its network, giving Trump supporters a safe space to watch.

That so few undecided or persuadable voters checked into the debate could explain why a new 538/Ipsos poll taken entirely after the debate, found little movement from a previous poll of the very same people. Note: Biden leads today by 2.7 points, 46.2%-43.9%:

Why is it that Democrats collapse in terror when their guy gets a cold? Republicans rally around their guy when he’s found civilly liable for sexual assault; when he tries to overthrow the government and loses more than 60 lawsuits before doing so; and when he’s convicted of a felony based on his desire to conceal paying off a porn star that he had at least somewhat coerced sex with, while his wife was recovering from childbirth.

The pundits would have you believe that Democrats have to “acknowledge reality.” Instead, that says Democrats are cowards looking for a place to hide from the big, bad NYT. It doesn’t matter if the Dems replace Biden or not, the media is going to harp on the shortcomings of whoever it is, no matter what.

So circle the wagons and not the firing squad. The administrations of both of these two men have track records that are easily predictive of future performance. Make this a choice between one or the other of them rather than the media’s default position of it being a referendum on Biden. Discipline yourselves and focus on what is really at stake. This election isn’t a casting call for a reality TV show. It’s an election where the candidates represent fundamentally different visions of the American future. And those visions are the only thing that matters. On to cartoons.

Contrasting platforms 2024: