The Wrongologist – Page 2 – Geopolitics, Power and Political Economy

Taking Out The Garbage

The Daily Escape:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s a bonus cartoon:

Harris’s Closing Argument

The Daily Escape:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh there’s great strength in that.

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

And so let’s not feel powerless.

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

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

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

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

Everyone should read that.

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

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

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

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

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 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.

Trump’s Blue State Rallies

The Daily Escape:

We’re now in the homestretch of the presidential campaign, but in an unorthodox move, Trump plans on holding rallies in New York, Illinois, Colorado, and California, all of which are locks to vote for Harris. Biden won those states by an average of 20 points in 2020, with his 13-point Colorado win the closest margin. Colorado is the only one of those states to vote for a Republican nominee for president this millennium, backing George W. Bush in 2004.

Trump will still be spending most of his political advertising funds in the handful of battleground states where the races appear extremely tight, but the expectation is that the media will dutifully cover these rallies, giving him free publicity since it’s unusual to campaign where you don’t expect to win.

In the case of New York, Trump apparently will hold a rally in Madison Square Garden (MSG). The New York Post first reported that the event will take place Oct. 27, a little more than a week before Election Day. Why rallies in Blue states? Trump’s idea is to campaign in places where Democrats have near-complete control of government, and to take the opportunity of free media to highlight their supposed failures. Another consideration is that control of the House could be decided by a few close races in New York and California.

But with the battleground state races seemingly so tight, it seems like a bit of a luxury for Trump to be focused on helping down-ticket candidates. Think about it: None of the states where Trump is holding rallies has a competitive Senate race, although there are a handful of competitive House races in a year where the House will likely be decided by a razor-thin margin. From NBC: (brackets by Wrongo)

“In California, House District 40 is represented by Republican Young Kim, and House District 41 is represented by Republican Ken Calvert, both of whom are in contested races in the Los Angeles media market along with Coachella [CA], where Trump will be holding his rally.

In New York, Rep. Anthony D’Esposito won Nassau County’s 4th district in 2022, but it is a seat that leans Democratic and was won by Joe Biden by 15 points in 2020. Flipping the seat played a big role in helping Republicans take the House majority in 2022.”

Will the rallies be useful? People are already voting, and the primary value of rallies is to energize your base to help get out the vote. The more people they can get to vote early, the easier the Get Out The Vote (GOTV) effort on Election Day becomes. So little boosts of enthusiasm and local press coverage can help drive your people to the polls.

Is a rally in Madison Square Garden really a good idea? NBC quotes Republican operative Matthew Bartlett:

“This does not seem like a campaign putting their candidate in critical vote rich or swing vote locations — it seems more like a candidate who wants his campaign to put on rallies for optics and vibes…”

Two of his stops, Coachella, CA and Aurora, CO seem to be simply for optics about immigration and crimes committed by immigrants. Coachella Mayor Steven Hernandez, a Democrat, issued a statement blasting Trump:

“Trump’s attacks on immigrants, women, the LGBTQ community and the most vulnerable among us don’t align with the values of our community….He has consistently expressed disdain for the type of diversity that helps define Coachella.”

At Trump’s stop in Aurora earlier this year, he spread debunked rumors about Venezuelan gangs overrunning the city, including taking over an apartment complex. Trump’s claims have been refuted by local police, and the Republican Mayor Mike Coffman, who called them “not accurate.”

The Chicago stop will feature both Trump and his VP candidate JD Vance, at a Bloomberg-hosted event at the Economic Club of Chicago.

But let’s focus on MSG. Holding a rally at MSG has long been on Trump’s wish list. For some Conservatives, it harkens back to when the “America First” rally was conducted at MSG in 1939. On its surface, it was simply a rally held by the German-American Bund at the old Madison Square Garden in Manhattan at a time when pro-Nazi feeling was high in the US.

The Bund (bund is German for “organization”), was founded by German immigrant Fritz Kuhn in Buffalo in 1936. His vision was to create a pro-Nazi ideology within the US. Kuhn and his people used patriotic images of George Washington and the American flag to attract Americans of German descent as members. But the organization’s goals were wider: To create a “socially just, white gentile-ruled United States” and a “gentile-controlled labor union free from Jewish Moscow-directed domination.”

He sounds nice.

Tom Nichols, a Never Trump conservative who writes for the Atlantic, quotes from a Trump talk in Claremont, NH:

“We will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the communists, Marxists, fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country….On Veterans Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections and will do anything possible…legally or illegally to destroy America and to destroy the American dream.”

The parallelism between a fascist speaking in MSG in 1939 and a would-be fascist speaking there 85 years later shouldn’t be lost on anyone who is sitting up and taking nourishment.

Time to face up to the truth. Trump is a wanna-be fascist, even if he’s too ignorant to label what he is. Others on the extreme Right have noticed and see the potential of using him for fascistic purposes.

Trump’s bringing fascism back to America one rally at a time, whether we call it by its name or not.

Will Helene’s Damage Keep North Carolina From Turning Blue?

The Daily Escape:

One of November’s big uncertainties will be how the two hurricanes are going to impact voting in the southeast. We know that the North Carolina’s Electoral Vote was clearly in play before Helene washed away the western part of the state, but has the devastating flooding changed that picture?

Democrats’ hopes to see North Carolina go Blue could turn on who has access to voting in the west part of the state and on which voters can or can’t access voting by Nov. 5

Time Magazine quotes Jason Roberts, a political science professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“It’s going to be…difficult for people to vote…And, quite frankly, given the challenges these people are facing, voting is probably going to be much farther down on the list of priorities than it otherwise would be.”

Local officials fear that the aftermath of Helene could reduce voter turnout, disrupt ballot delivery, or hamper accurate polling, all of this in a state where the margin of victory was going to be slim under ideal conditions.

Tom Sullivan, a blogger who lives in Asheville, NC, observed:

“Hurricane Helene has upset many residents’ fall plans in western North Carolina, among which are plans for early voting set to begin on October 17. Gov. Roy Cooper (D) is urging the annual migration of fall “leaf peepers” to stay home and away from the disaster area. Local businesses who count on that trade may not have beds or power or water for them anyway. Hotels are filled with relief workers or people whose homes are unlivable or gone.

“Local election boards will have to alter election plans that under normal circumstances are unalterable once submitted and approved by the state’s Board of Elections in August.”

The indispensable Democracy Docket reports that:

“State officials passed emergency measures on Monday to make it easier for disaster victims to cast their ballots….The bipartisan North Carolina State Board of Elections unanimously approved changes in 13 counties where infrastructure, access to polling places, and postal services are likely to continue to be disrupted through the election, the board’s Executive Director Karen Brinson Bell said in a press conference. Some of the changes include allowing county boards of elections to change early voting and Election Day voting locations with a bipartisan majority vote, recruiting more poll workers, and allowing voters to drop off their completed absentee ballots at any county board of elections office by 7:30 p.m. on Election Day.”

Sullivan says that only two of those 13 are “Blue counties” (Buncombe and Watauga). The rest are pretty solidly Red, and their combined populations are over 100,000 more than the Blues:

”Fourteen early voting sites were planned in Buncombe County. How many remain in operational condition and accessible after the flooding is under review. Some of the 80 Election Day precincts may have to be moved or combined. Giving advance notice to voters (given that informational literature is already printed) will prove a challenge, but there are still weeks to tackle that problem. Buncombe’s local Board will meet today to draft Plan B.”

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.

Harris Needs To Speak To Gen Z’s Reality

The Daily Escape:

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

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

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

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

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

From Scanlon: (brackets by Wrongo)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All she needs to do is “Just Say It”.

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

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

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

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

It will help her win in November.