Should Kamala Harris Stay As VP?

The Daily Escape:

Cosmic Ashtray, Harris Wash, Escalante, UT – September 2023 photo by Michelle Strong. The rock that looks like a bird in the center sits in sand, not water.

There’s the whispering campaign among Democrats saying that Biden is too old to run, and there’s the whispering  campaign that says Kamala Harris should be replaced on the ticket to help out ol’ Joe. Like the Biden whispers, when Wrongo speaks with Democrats about Harris, the vast majority are wishing that someone else would be the VP candidate on the Democratic 2024 presidential ticket.

Those two thoughts can be viewed as one, or independently of each other. Wrongo addressed the issue of Biden’s age here:

“Biden has slowed down, that’s objectively true. But he is worlds better than Trump. And if those are the choices for president in 2024, be thankful that the old guy is on the right side of history.”

Barring a Biden health catastrophe before the summer of 2024, no Democrat will challenge Biden’s running for a second term. But the same can’t be said for Harris. Some think Biden could inject new enthusiasm into his campaign by picking a new running mate for 2024.

These two whispering campaigns are linked because many Americans think that it’s crucial to have a vice president who is seen as a capable successor to a president, in this case, Biden. After all, he will be 86 when his second term ends in 2029. Even for a relatively healthy 80 year-old about to be 81, the odds of something going wrong increases steadily between 81 and 86.

Poll numbers indicate that the public doesn’t support Harris to that extent. She’s less popular than a relatively unpopular Biden. That’s not a good situation. OTOH, as the Niskanen Center says, VPs generally have little to no impact on a presidential race and almost no direct effect on voter decision-making.

Where they can make a slight difference is in targeted demographics. A candidate can pick up (or retain) support among certain groups of voters. This is where dropping Harris from the ticket would cause more problems than it would solve:

“…it is hard to imagine a core Democratic constituency that Biden can less afford to deliberately alienate than Black women, who gave the president an 81-point margin in 2020…especially at a time when pollsters keep warning that turnout among voters of color is one of the president’s worst potential problems.”

More:

“It is…impossible to deny that Harris has liabilities or deny that she has disappointed as both a presidential candidate and now as vice president. She’s been caught flat-footed too many times by what seemed like simple queries, and she has failed to stake out a clear policy space for herself inside the party. But Biden has done her no favors, either. He put her in charge of the southern border, an effectively impossible task given that Congress has shown zero interest in addressing the many problems there.”

Yet, according to Gallup, Harris had far better approval numbers at the time of her inauguration than Pence did when he became VP.

Booting Harris from the ticket would be a self-inflicted wound. Biden’s brand (and one of the keys to a 2024 victory) is that he’s a no-drama politician (in contrast to Trump). There’d be no better way to shatter that image than for Biden to dump his VP a year before the election.

Some Dems are worried that in a second Biden term, Harris will become the Party’s de facto 2028 nominee. It’s true that current or former VPs who seriously seek their Party’s nomination often get nominated. But Harris is at well under 50% in polls that asked who Democratic primary voters would support if Biden didn’t run again. One survey from Ipsos/Reuters had her at just 20%.

But, after eight years of seasoning as VP at the national level, it might be that Harris would be a much better candidate than she was in 2020. And there is no telling how governors like Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Shapiro or Gavin Newsome might handle the national spotlight. Think how Ron DeSantis withered once everyone got to know him.

So Harris isn’t going anywhere in 2024.

But there are other troubling issues for Dems who feel less than enthusiastic about the 2024 ticket. NBC says that political ad spending is projected to reach $10 billion by the end of this election cycle, making it the most expensive two years in political history. But Michelle Goldberg wrote that:

“…panic is setting in among some progressive groups because the donors who buoyed them throughout the Trump years are disengaging…..As both big and small donors pull back, there have been layoffs across the progressive ecosystem, from behemoths like the Sierra Club to insurgent outfits like Justice Democrats, the group that first recruited Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez…”

Dem funding is falling just when they need money more than ever:

“It was probably inevitable that left-leaning fund-raising would fall once the immediate crisis of Donald Trump’s presidency ended. Activism, like electoral politics, is often thermostatic: There’s more energy on the right when Democrats are in power, and more on the left during Republican administrations.”

Goldberg also mentions the Dems’ never-ending funds raising via email, something that frosts Wrongo:

“If you’re on any progressive mailing lists, you surely know what I’m talking about: the endless appeals, sometimes in bold all caps, warning of imminent Democratic implosion.”

The relentless drumbeat in Wrongo’s inbox has caused him to cut off the Democratic Party completely in the past two years. If every email is “critical” then none are critical. If this month’s deadline is “crucial” then next month’s can’t be.

Small donors are punished every day for their giving to Democrats. Their information is sold and repackaged back to them from all across the political ecosystem. Wrongo won’t begin donating again until January 2024.

Finally, it seems to be in the DNA of Democrats to want a deus ex machina to deliver them from Trump and Republicans. It may be that some of the 91 counts put Trump in jail, but don’t count on the 14th Amendment malarkey to get him off the ballot, unless he’s convicted of “treasonous conspiracy” like some of the Jan. 6 defendants.

Consistent with that, Many Dems are hoping for a savior to ride up on a white horse and “save” the Party from Biden and Harris.

But Democrats came to the dance with Biden — and that’s who they’re leaving with.

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Thoughts On Warnock and The Midterms

The Daily Escape:

Mauna Loa erupting, Big Island, HI – December 5, 2022 photo by Deron Verbeck

You’ve heard this by now:

The 3,537.3 million votes cast on Tuesday represented a 45.2% turnout in Georgia. The record was set in the 2020 presidential election at 69.4%.

The Georgia Senate runoff election was uncomfortably close. Wrongo and Ms. Right tuned in to election results occasionally throughout the night and we were very concerned when the partial results often showed Hershel Walker ahead, at least until the Democratic-leaning counties around Atlanta reported results.

This raises a few questions: First, how (and why?) would so many Georgians vote for a completely unqualified candidate? OTOH, when we see how many people voted for Kari Lake and Blake Masters in AZ, or Dr. Oz and Mastriano in PA, there’s real reason to worry about what the US electorate thinks.

While Trump’s most visible candidates lost, many others won, and Trump still controls the Republican Party to a frightening extent. The WaPo estimated that 176 election deniers won statewide races, or seats in the House of Representatives.

If things go sideways in America (think a steep recession) there should be little doubt that a few thousand votes could easily swing back the other way and we could be stuck with a full-blown neo-fascist government led by Trump or by one of his clones. Michael Tomasky in the NY Review of Books analyzes the current state of political play:

“This is our new condition—tight races between two armies of voters, each marching to the polls with the conviction that victory for the other side would be not merely an unhappy result but calamitous for the republic.”

Wrongo has been harping on the importance of voter turnout to electoral success. The fact is that turnout is becoming more important as the nation has become more clearly divided.  More from Tomasky:

“In the eleven presidential elections from 1972 to 2012…turnout averaged 56.1%. In the eleven midterm elections from 1974 to 2014, the average turnout was just 39.4%.”

Tomasky says that all began to change with Trump:

“…presidential turnout in 2016 was a bit higher than average, at 60.1%. In the 2018 midterm, turnout was 50%, the highest for a midterm since 1914. Then turnout in the 2020 presidential race set a modern record at 66.8%, the highest since 1900.”

We learned three things from the 2022 midterms: First, candidate quality is crucial. Party primaries aren’t set up to necessarily select the best candidate. They often reward candidates who fire up their base, because turnout is usually very low in primaries. Second, turnout in the general election is key in most contested Congressional districts and states. Third, we learned that we could control our destiny despite the pro-GOP “red wave” narrative pushed by the national media.

Axios reports that 2022 is the first midterm election since 1934 when the Party in power successfully defended every one of their incumbent Senate seats.

There was bound to be more turnover in the House, if only because there were seven times as many seats being contested. But it was also the first election after the 2020 census and the follow-on redistricting process. Much of the reason for the change of control in the House is due to redistricting.

This year, some incumbents were pitted against each other, ensuring one would lose. Others were in districts they could no longer win, which caused a few retirements and defeats. Almost all the incumbents (95%) who survived primary challenges won re-election.

And despite so much stability on the surface, Americans are incredibly polarized, and there’s widespread discontent. Given that, we should give credit to Democrats who didn’t dissolve into political infighting and who worked to get the job done against big odds. Georgia in particular was once again a hard-fought contest in which every vote counted. That means every Get Out The Vote (GOTV) organization and every phone call, postcard, text, door knock, made by them also counted. As did your donations.

Georgia isn’t turning blue. It’s important to note that Georgia’s Republicans swept every other statewide race (7 of them) without going to a runoff.

And for this Senate runoff, we should recognize the sacrifice made by Georgia voters who stood in line to exercise a right that shouldn’t be contingent either on completing an endurance race, or an obstacle course. We owe Georgia voters a debt of gratitude for their efforts in the face of voter suppression.

The year of Republicans blowing it has ended, and we shouldn’t expect them to let Trump pick their candidates in 2024.

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Turnout Must Be the Democrats’ Election Strategy

The Daily Escape:

St. Louis Cathedral, New Orleans, LA – December 2019 iPhone photo by Wrongo

So, what’s the Democrats’ 2020 campaign strategy? As usual, they can’t decide. Should they run to the center, again following a “Blue Dog” strategy that will sound a lot like Republican-lite? Should they go big, calling for structural change that expands health care and grows the middle class? Or should they simply run against Trump?

Which of these, or which combination of these strategies, are winners?

Ask any pundit, and they will say that Trump won Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania by appealing to white, working class voters who abandoned the Democrats based on Trump’s economic populist messaging. This makes all Dem strategists say the Democratic presidential nominee must run as a centrist.

That was true in Ohio in 2016, where Trump managed to win 50% of the votes. In the others, he won with pluralities. Trump “won” Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan with 47.22%, 48.18%, and 47.5% of the vote, respectively. Why? Because five times the normal number in those states cast their ballots for someone other than Trump or Clinton. In this polarized era, the average vote that goes to a protest ballot is about 1.5%. In 2016, in Wisconsin, 6.2% of voters cast protest ballots.

Most of those third party voters should have been Democratic voters—they were disproportionately young, diverse and college educated—but the Clinton camp made no effort to activate them in the general election.

Instead, Hillary Clinton ran her campaign by trying to appeal to Republicans and the few Republican-leaning independents appalled by Trump. She chose a bland white man, Tim Kaine, as VP. Her messaging and ads were policy-lite. And in the end, most of those voters stuck with the GOP.

Rachel Bitecofer, a 42-year-old professor at Christopher Newport University Virginia, says that there are no swing voters, and that it’s useless to design a campaign to appeal to them. Crazy, right? We should take her seriously because she nailed, almost to the number, the size of the Democrats’ 2018 win in the House.

Bitecofer’s theory is that today’s elections are rarely shaped by voters changing their minds, but rather by shifts in who decides to vote. She says the real “swing” doesn’t come from voters who choose between two parties, but from people who choose to vote, or not. The actual percentage of swing voters in any given national election according to her analysis, is closer to 7% than the 20% most of the media thinks are out there.

Bitecofer’s view of the electorate is driven by Alan Abramowitz’s concept of “negative partisanship,” the idea that voters are more motivated to defeat the other side than any particular policy goals. Abramowitz says that American politics has become like bitter sports rivalries, where the parties hang together mainly out of sheer hatred of the other team, rather than a shared sense of purpose. Republicans might not love the president, but they absolutely loathe his Democratic adversaries.

Bitecofer says that negative partisanship makes the outcome of our elections highly predictable.

For what it’s worth, Bitecofer’s model has a yet-unnamed Democrat winning 278 electoral votes with 68 electoral votes still rated toss-up. From Bitecofer:

“In short, the 2020 presidential election is shaping up as a battle of the bases, and the Democrats’ base is simply bigger. When their demographic advantage combines with an enthusiasm advantage and heightened party loyalty fueled by negative partisanship, they hold a significant structural advantage. Turnout in 2018 was about 12 points higher than 2014 turnout and higher than any midterm in decades…. It is not infeasible that turnout in 2020 will exceed 65%.”

This means that Democrats have to harness the anger of Democrats, and that is more important than using policy to energize them, and then TURN THEM OUT.

Wrongo isn’t sure what to think about this. Intuitively, the “bitter sports rivalry” makes sense. But at the 30,000-foot level, hers may just be another plea for driving higher turnout.

As Bitecofer sees it, we shouldn’t be thinking about the Democratic or Republican “base.” Rather, there are Democratic and Republican coalitions, the first made of people of color, college-educated whites and people in metropolitan areas; the second, mostly noncollege whites, with a smattering of religious-minded voters, financiers and people in business, largely in rural and exurban counties.

She may be right accidentally, rather than because her model is great. But focusing voters’ anger at Trump is better than saying that “Trump voters are stupid” (or racist, or deplorable)and  seems smart.

Huge turnout is key. Voter turnout in 2016 was around 50%. If that can be increased by 10-15%, all things become possible for the Democrats.

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Vote for Democrats

The Daily Escape:

Autumn at Kaaterskill Falls, NY – October 2018 photo by mattmacphersonphoto

The agony will not end today, regardless of the outcome of the 2018 mid-term election. There are things about both the country and the Democratic Party that have to change. If the Party is to survive as a political force across America, it must be meaningfully different by 2020. We will talk much more about this in the next two years.

Today, whatever the results, the margins of victory will be very close in many places. With that in mind, if you’re even thinking about voting for a third party candidate, you need to think again.  A vote for a third party candidate is objectively, a vote that supports Trump and the Trumpistas.

Wrongo’s small CT town is a highly politicized place. Today the Republicans control all of the levers of government, although just a year ago, it was the Democrats pushing the levers. We’re in an off-year locally, but the governor’s race, and our seat in Congress are both in play. However, the biggest issue in the town relates to revising the town charter to add more oversight to the mayor’s and the town council’s spending authority by our town’s elected finance board.

To Wrongo, this is an overly politicized issue, and as a finance guy, he plans to vote with the Republicans on this highly specific local issue. He has in the past voted for a few local Republicans, but not this time.

This time, a vote for a Republican politician at any level is tacit support of Trump’s authoritarian tendencies, and for GOP voter suppression. Our local Republicans aren’t authoritarians, and at least some of them probably aren’t in favor of voter suppression.

But they knowingly and willingly associate themselves with a party that very definitely is all of these things, and we shouldn’t give any of them even the slightest level of support.

This time, NOT being Republican is the first bar you have to cross to get our votes. Yes, this is guilt by association, and it’s deserved, since they have come by it honestly.

Voting for Democrats is voting against Trump’s authoritarianism. You don’t have to like your local Democrat, or any Democrats for that matter. You just have to hate them less than you hate authoritarianism and voter suppression.

Vote against authoritarianism and voter suppression by voting for Democrats.

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Russia and Kavanaugh

The Daily Escape:

Moscow supermarket – October 2018 photo by Wrongo

The two topics in the headline are not related.

Wrongo and Ms. Right are back in the US, jet-lagged, and at home in the Mansion of Wrong. Our Russia trip was an eye-opener. In St. Petersburg and Moscow at least, Russia seems to be a wealthy country by global standards. People seem to be well-informed about their history, and about the current geopolitical climate in the west. They are consummate consumers.

We saw quite a few churches, but the Russians we spoke with didn’t seem to put much emphasis on their faith. Increasing their income and getting ahead in a career sense seemed to be the primary thing that interested them. “Pragmatic” best describes the people we met. They are strivers, and hope that their government won’t screw up what the citizens finally have going for them.

Mostly, we were struck by how similar the Russians we met are to the average American. We had lunch with a couple in Uglich, a poor town of about 30k residents that is about 125 miles north of Moscow. The town hasn’t benefited from the 18-year economic expansion in the Russian Federation, and has unemployment in the 25% range. It also has a declining population, and crumbling infrastructure.

The couple we met had both lost their jobs in the 1985 Perestroika period under Gorbachev. Thirty-three years later, the husband has a part-time government job, the wife is unemployed. They grow most of their food in their Πacre garden. Their refrigerator is covered with pictures of the grandkids, who visit every few weeks.

Their message to us was that people everywhere have the same hopes and dreams, but the politicians always want to demonize the outsiders.

We returned to American just in time to start calling Brett Kavanaugh “Mr. Justice Kavanaugh”.

It’s not worth dwelling on his confirmation process, or repeating stale arguments. It is time to gather ourselves, to register non-voters, and turn out all the votes we can on November 6.

It also isn’t the time to overthink the closing arguments for November, despite polls that show Republicans being energized by the Kavanaugh confirmation. But, it is important to understand GOP messaging for the midterms. From the WaPo’s article, ‘An angry mob’: Republicans work to recast Democratic protests as out-of-control anarchy:

Weeks ahead of the midterm elections, Republicans have cast the Trump resistance movement as “an angry mob,” a term used by many of them to describe a faceless amalgamation of forces that they say threaten the country’s order and, they hope, energize their voters.

Think back to the Tea Party protestors who disrupted town hall meetings in 2009. From today’s GOP viewpoint, they were just good citizens exercising their First Amendment rights. And all those people who chant “Lock her up!” at the encouragement of their dear leader? They really don’t mean anything by that, they’re also exercising their right to free speech.

But when a few liberals pound on the doors of the Supreme Court, that’s mob behavior, and it can’t be tolerated. In Trump World, crowds of marching alt-right men with tiki torches = some very fine people.

And crowds of protesting women in Washington = angry mob.

We should remember that the American Revolution wasn’t a polite discussion; it involved mobs making a point, too.

Democrats are on the edge of winning the House. Before Kavanaugh, they had a long-shot chance at taking the Senate. Right now, Dems need to be smart. Richard Nixon won because he scared Middle America with pictures of immoral hippies who were demonstrating against the Vietnam War.

Let’s assume that those of us who are already energized to vote can work to figure out how to reach those who are only half paying attention, or who plan to stay on the fence all the way until Election Day.

It is clear that accusations of the type made by Dr. Ford don’t resonate with GOP voters. Roy Moore’s near-pedophilia didn’t seem to change any Republican minds in Georgia. Whenever a Republican is under attack by the liberals, it’s always the time for the rest of them to circle the wagons.

There is no single, lock-step message that Dems should use to take both Houses in November. The best antidote for those “Energized by Kavanaugh” Republicans is for the rest of us to get, or stay, more energized.

There is zero to be complacent about. The Dems could remain in the minority in both Houses after the mid-terms if they fail to turn out their voters in November.

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Election Wrap-Up Linkage – Saturday Edition

“In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.” – George Orwell

Feeling blitzed by the election? Science has an answer. Research by neuroscientists have led to a list of 10 songs which reduce stress. According to Dr. David Lewis-Hodgson of Mindlab International, which conducted the research, “Weightless” has been named as the most relaxing song ever, which reduces a person’s stress by 65%. Your mileage may vary.

The most interesting thing so far in the analysis of who voted is the number of Democrats that didn’t vote:

popular-vote
While America hasn’t counted all the votes yet, Clinton’s total vote is down significantly from both Obama elections. On the margin, people apparently thought that they didn’t have sufficient reason to show up for Clinton. Everybody knew what Donald Trump’s top three issues were. Despite an issue-laden website, nobody knew what Hillary Clinton’s’ top three issues were, they just knew she was against DT.

Krystal Ball (yes her real name) was a candidate for Congress in Virginia a half dozen years ago and has been writing since. She has a column up at HuffPo: The Democratic Party Deserved To Die in which she says the following:

In 29 states, truck driving is the number one job and it is one of the few jobs left that can provide a middle class living for high school grads. What will happen to the 1.5 million families who get their daily bread from a truck driver when all of those jobs are eliminated by driverless trucks? It’s not a matter of if but when. Are we going to teach all those drivers to code or retrofit windows or whatever other pathetic nonsense we’ve held up as a solution? This new reality is upon us. The markets are not going to magically fix it.

“Stronger Together” meant nothing to all these people that felt that they were left behind by globalization, free trade agreements and technology. Democrats have been on an 8-year slide from electing a President with veto proof majorities in Congress to holding zero power in DC. Maybe this will reignite the revolt in the party to ditch its leadership and get back to its roots.

Orange County CA among the most Republican counties in CA, finally votes for a Democratic Presidential candidate, and the rest of the country pulls up the ladder. WTF?

On Election Day, most voters use electronic or optical-scan ballots. Nearly half of registered voters (47%) live in jurisdictions that use only optical-scan as their standard voting system, and about 28% live in DRE-only jurisdictions, according to Pew’s analysis of data from the Verified Voting Foundation, a nongovernmental organization concerned with the impact of new voting technologies on election integrity. Here is how votes are tallied in America:

type-of-voting-machine

 

 

 

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