31 October 2024
30 October 2024
Jimmy Kimmel's pre-election monologue
Please go back and watch Harris's "closing argument" speech if you didn't see it.
29 October 2024
A few thoughts about dynamic kinetic systems (DKS's) and persistence
28 October 2024
Fwd: October 27, 2024
I stand corrected. I thought this year's October surprise was the reality that Trump's mental state had slipped so badly he could not campaign in any coherent way. It turns out that the 2024 October surprise was the Trump campaign's fascist rally at Madison Square Garden, a rally so extreme that Republicans running for office have been denouncing it all over social media tonight. There was never any question that this rally was going to be anything but an attempt to inflame Trump's base. The plan for a rally at Madison Square Garden itself deliberately evoked its predecessor: a Nazi rally at the old Madison Square Garden on February 20, 1939. About 18,000 people showed up for that "true Americanism" event, held on a stage that featured a huge portrait of George Washington in his Continental Army uniform flanked by swastikas. Like that earlier event, Trump's rally was supposed to demonstrate power and inspire his base to violence. Apparently in anticipation of the rally, Trump on Friday night replaced his signature blue suit and red tie with the black and gold of the neofascist Proud Boys. That extremist group was central to the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and has been rebuilding to support Trump again in 2024. On Saturday the Trump campaign released a list of 29 people set to be on the stage at the rally. Notably, the list was all MAGA Republicans, including vice presidential nominee Ohio senator J.D. Vance, House speaker Mike Johnson (LA), Representative Elise Stefanik (NY), Representative Byron Donalds (FL), Trump backer Elon Musk, Trump ally Rudy Giuliani, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., right-wing host Tucker Carlson, Trump sons Don Jr. and Eric, and Eric's wife, Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump. Libbey Dean of NewsNation noted that none of the seven Republicans running in New York's competitive House races were on the list. When asked why not, according to Dean, Trump senior advisor Jason Miller said: "The demand, the request for people to speak, is quite extensive." Asked if the campaign had turned down anyone who asked to speak, Miller said no. Meanwhile, the decision of the owners of the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post not to endorse Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris seems to have sparked a backlash. As Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer noted, "in a strange way the papers did perform a public service: showing American voters what life under a dictator would feel like." Early on October 26, the Washington Post itself went after Trump backer billionaire Elon Musk with a major story highlighting the information that Musk, an immigrant from South Africa, had worked illegally when he started his career in the U.S. Musk "did not have the legal right to work" in the U.S. when he started his first successful company. As part of the Trump campaign, Musk has emphasized his opposition to undocumented immigrants. The New York Times has tended to downplay Trump's outrageous statements, but on Saturday it ran a round-up of Trump's threats in the center of the front page, above the fold. It noted that Trump has vowed to expand presidential power, prosecute his political opponents, and crack down on immigration with mass deportations and detention camps. It went on to list his determination to undermine the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), use the U.S. military against Mexican drug cartels "in potential violation of international law," and use federal troops against U.S. citizens. It added that he plans to "upend trade" with sweeping new tariffs that will raise consumer prices, and to rein in regulatory agencies. "To help achieve these and other goals," the paper concluded, "his advisers are vetting lawyers seen as more likely to embrace aggressive legal theories about the scope of his power." On Sunday the front page of the New York Times opinion section read, in giant capital letters: "DONALD TRUMP/ SAYS HE WILL PROSECUTE HIS ENEMIES/ ORDER MASS DEPORTATIONS/ USE SOLDIERS AGAINST CITIZENS/ ABANDON ALLIES/ PLAY POLITICS WITH DISASTERS/ BELIEVE HIM." And then, inside the section, the paper provided the receipts: Trump's own words outlining his fascist plans. "BELIEVE HIM," the paper said. On CNN's State of the Union this morning, host Jake Tapper refused to permit Trump's running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, to gaslight viewers. Vance angrily denied that Trump has repeatedly called for using the U.S. military against Americans, but Tapper came with receipts that proved the very things Vance denied. Trump's rally at Madison Square Garden began in the early afternoon. The hateful performances of the early participants set the tone for the rally. Early on, comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who goes by Kill Tony, delivered a steamingly racist set. He said, for example: "There's literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it's called Puerto Rico." He went on: "And these Latinos, they love making babies too. Just know that. They do. They do. There's no pulling out. They don't do that. They come inside. Just like they did to our country." Hinchcliffe also talked about Black people carving watermelons instead of pumpkins. The speakers who followed Hinchcliffe called Vice President Kamala Harris "the Antichrist" and "the devil." They called former secretary of state Hillary Clinton "a sick son of a b*tch," and they railed against "f*cking illegals." They insulted Latinos generally, Black Americans, Palestinians and Jews. Trump advisor Stephen Miller's claim that "America is for Americans and Americans only" directly echoed the statement of Adolf Hitler that "Germany is for Germans and Germans only." Trump took the stage about two hours late, prompting people to stream toward the exits before he finished speaking. He hit his usual highlights, notably undermining Vance's argument from earlier in the day by saying that, indeed, he believes fellow Americans are "the enemy within." But Trump perhaps gave away the game with his inflammatory language and with an aside, seemingly aimed at House speaker Johnson. "I think with our little secret we are gonna do really well with the House, right? Our little secret is having a big impact, he and I have a secret, we will tell you what it is when the race is over," Trump said. It seems possible—probable, even—that Trump was alluding to putting in play the plan his people tried in 2020. That plan was to create enough chaos over the certification of electoral votes in the states to throw the election into the House of Representatives. There, each state delegation gets a single vote, so if the Republicans have control of more states than the Democrats, Trump could pull out a victory even if he had dramatically lost the popular vote. Since he has made virtually no effort to win votes in 2024, this seems his likely plan. But to do that, he needs at least a plausibly close election, or at least to convince his supporters that the election has been stolen from him. Tonight's rally badly hurt that plan. As Hinchcliffe was talking about Puerto Rico as a floating island of garbage, Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris was at a Puerto Rican restaurant in Philadelphia talking about her plan to spread her opportunity economy to Puerto Rico. She has called for strengthening Puerto Rico's energy grid and making it easier to get permits to build there. After the "floating island of garbage" comment, Puerto Rican superstar musician Bad Bunny, who has more than 45 million followers on Instagram, posted Harris's plan for Puerto Rico, and his spokesperson said he is endorsing Harris. Puerto Rican singer and actor Ricky Martin shared a clip from Hinchcliffe's set with his 16 million followers. His caption read: "This is what they think of us." Singer and actress Jennifer Lopez, who has 250 million Instagram followers, posted Harris's plan. Later, singer-songwriter and actress Ariana Grande posted that she had voted for Harris. Grande has 376 million followers on Instagram. Singer Luis Fonsi, who has 16 million followers, also called out the "constant hate." The headlines were brutal. "MAGA speakers unleash ugly rhetoric at Trump's MSG rally," read Axios. Politico wrote: "Trump's New York homecoming sparks backlash over racist and vulgar remarks." "Racist Remarks and Insults Mark Trump's Madison Square Garden Rally," the New York Times announced. "Speakers at Trump rally make racist comments, hurl insults," read CNN. But the biggest sign of the damage the rally did was the frantic backpedaling from Republicans in tight elections, who distanced themselves as fast as they could from the insults against Puerto Ricans, especially. The Trump campaign itself tried to distance itself from the "floating island of garbage" quotation, only to be met with comments pointing out that Hinchcliffe's set had been vetted and uploaded to the teleprompters. As the clips spread like wildfire, political writer Charlotte Clymer pointed out that almost 6 million Puerto Ricans live in the states—about a million in Florida, half a million in Pennsylvania, 100,000 in Georgia, 100,000 in Michigan, 100,000 in North Carolina, 45,000 in Arizona, and 40,000 in Nevada—and that over half of them voted in 2020. In 1939, as about 18,000 American Nazis rallied inside Madison Square Garden, newspapers reported that a crowd of about 100,000 anti-Nazis gathered outside to protest. It took 1,700 police officers, the largest number of officers ever before detailed for a single event, to hold them back from storming the venue. — Notes: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-election-proudboys/ https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/27/us/politics/kamala-harris-philadelphia-voters.html New York Times, October 26, 2024, p. 1. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/10/25/opinion/what-trump-says.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/10/26/elon-musk-immigration-status/ https://kamalaharris.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Fact-Sheet_Puerto-Rico_EN.pdf https://www.axios.com/2024/10/27/trump-madison-square-garden-rally https://www.politico.com/news/2024/10/27/trumps-madison-square-garden-racist-00185770 https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/10/27/us/harris-trump-election Imperial Valley Press, February 21, 1939, p. 4. X: TeaPainUSA/status/1850277855135183022 LibbeyDean_/status/1850225746310320291 lifesafeast/status/1850541530685067715 AOC/status/1850649252642591209 juliettekayyem/status/1850545726423450102 MaxwellFrostFL/status/1850649928202375183 KamalaHQ/status/1850636070137762225 letsgomathias/status/1850612734347411953 shannonrwatts/status/1850628929113174477 Carrasquillo/status/1850643405971263796 cmclymer/status/1850647657662013587 yashar/status/1850656835575169145 AndrewLSeidel/status/1850702535159398527 DJJudd/status/1850692868265910436 Acyn/status/1850687521593962881 KateSullivanDC/status/1850650641640948181 Victorshi2020/status/1850701734706020556 BMeiselas/status/1850683055385534531 jason_kint/status/1850677514005336323 brianstelter/status/1850667210987241569 maddenifico/status/1850653571206811979 alecahernandez/status/1850701880730476895 You're currently a paid subscriber to Letters from an American. 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© 2024 Heather Cox Richardson |
27 October 2024
We must do away with the Electoral College
26 October 2024
Jaime Raskin on Democracy in America
Newspapers: no excuse for not endorsing Harris
25 October 2024
Fwd: Working Hard And Closing Strong, Putin's Many MAGA Puppies, Some Notes On The Early Vote
Working Hard And Closing Strong, Putin's Many MAGA Puppies, Some Notes On The Early VoteNew Episode Of Closing Strong Is Out!/Welcome New Subscribers!
Happy Friday all. And a good Friday it is! Let's make this a big weekend for Harris-Walz and Democrats across the country. The VP is out there leaving it all out there on the playing field for us. We need to be there for her and make every day of these remaining days a good day! I start today with the campaign's enormous rally last night in Atlanta. 20,000 people, Barack, the Boss and the next President of the United States. Enjoy as much of it as you can watch. These events are inspiring, wonderful, joyous and what a winning campaign looks like: I strongly recommend making the campaign's daily events - live, recorded or those lucky enough to see them in person - part of your information diet in the home stretch. No better way to understand what voters in the swing states are seeing. Here are the main events today, from the campaign: Vice President Harris will travel to Houston, Texas where she will give remarks on the serious consequences of Trump's abortion bans to women's lives, and will be joined by women who have faced the direct impacts of these extreme laws, as well as by Rep. Colin Allred. Vice President Harris will also record an interview with podcaster Brené Brown. Governor Walz will campaign throughout Pennsylvania, including in Philadelphia for a political stop and campaign reception before traveling to Allentown for a campaign engagement. In the evening, Governor Walz will deliver remarks at a Harris-Walz campaign rally in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Following the rally, Governor Walz will travel to Las Vegas, Nevada. Mrs. Walz will deliver remarks at campaign events in Green Bay and Marinette County, Wisconsin and hold an evening rally in Marquette, Michigan with actress and singer Mandy Moore. The 2024 Election - I Would Much Rather Be Us Than Them - Got a lot of stuff for you to read, watch and listen to this weekend:
My latest 2024 election toplines:
Here's my rough calculation of national polls released since Monday, October 14th:
I am not going to comment too much on today's NYT poll (tied 48% to 48%) as I don't like to do deep dives into any one poll, but the electorate they found is much more Republican than is likely to be the case; Trump's favs were way too high (too R again); and their youth numbers again 17 points more Republican than the most recent Harvard IOP youth poll. I want to reiterate how much of a stretch it would be for Trump to be competitive in the popular vote this year. In the last 4 Presidential elections we've averaged 51% of the vote, Rs 46.5%. A Republican has only won the popular vote once in the last 8 Presidential elections, twenty years ago. Polls showing Trump tied or ahead, or Party ID tied (as the NYT does in this poll) are way, way out there on a statistical limb. It may happen but Trump making a go of the popular vote is running up against an unbelievable amount of history, our strong performances in recent elections, his bleeding of Republican voters this year and his historic and deeply evident ugliness. Moving on….. Here is today's Washington Post battleground state polling average (more highly curated to exclude junky and right wing polls). We win this election. OK, I am ready to start doing more granular analysis on the early vote. It has been hard to analyze the early vote this time for 1) 2020 was a COVID election, and thus not a great baseline to make comparisons 2) States have changed their voting rules, and the variance in how people vote early state to state makes comparisons a bit challenging 3) Republicans have made the early vote a priority this time (they did not in 2020 or 2022) so the early vote patterns are very different than the last two elections 4) Some of our core Democratic vote, young Dems, will be showing up in the unaffiliated column this election. 5) Wisconsin's voter file does provide enough information this year to make apples to apples comparisons to either 2020 or 2022 6) given all this we just needed more vote to come in. So, with all these caveats, here we go. Using TargetEarly's modeled party feature, we now know the national early vote has been running 5-6-7 more points more Republican than 2020. We expected this, but just didn't know how much more Republican the early vote would be. So what I am going to share now is how each of the 7 battleground states, plus NE-2, are performing against both 2020 and a new stat I've developed - performance against 2020 compared to the early vote nationally. This morning the early vote is running 6.9 points more Republican than on this day in 2020. Here is what I have for 1) compared to 2020 at this time 2) performance against the national early vote. In the aggregate of the 7 battleground states we are running just 0.6 behind 2020, and 6.3 points above the national early vote. Friends this is very good. The power of the Harris-Walz campaign and the Democratic grassroots is driving the early vote, and helping us perform before above the national baseline. This is what we would have expected to see given the superiority of our campaign. This is the 7 state battleground aggregate: Here's how the states break down:
A few additional notes: 1) We've seen meaningful gains in AZ, GA, NC, NE-02 and NV this week. You can see the power of our campaigns/grassroots kicking in. 2) We don't know how many Rs are voting for us in any of these states, though it is likely it will be more than 2020 3) It is also likely that the unaffiliated vote is more D than last time. This means the actual vote so far is slightly more Dem than these numbers suggest, something we are seeing in polling of those who have voted so far. To sum up - in the battlegrounds we are running at 2020 levels and overperforming the national baseline. Over the past few days the vote has gotten bluer for us in the battlegrounds, as we would have expected given our campaign superiority. It is likely that the current vote is a bit more Democratic than the raw D/R/U split, which means all this is actually a little bit better than the raw data. Taken together it is now very likely that Democrats are outperforming 2020 in the battlegrounds despite the national early vote being 7 points more Republican this year; and these early vote "leads" Rs have been crowing about are evaporating. It appears they got an early boost in some of these states, something they have been unable to maintain, as our campaign superiority and all of you keep making the early vote bluer. Finally, I think we should feel good about where we are right now. We have a modest lead in the national and battleground state polls. The early vote is good and is getting better. Our more muscular and energetic campaign has a far greater capacity to keep moving that vote towards us in these final days. And perhaps most importantly, I think how this election is closing - with a focus on Trump's fitness. madness, extremism, misogny and fealty to Putin - is how we want this election to be closing. For fear and opposition to MAGA has been the most powerful force in our politics since 2018, and is now likely to be the most powerful force in this election too. Here's a new ad from the Harris campaign: Folks as I keep saying I think we are winning this election but have not won it yet. Winning it is up to us and the work we do in the home stretch. Let's get to work!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Doing More And Worrying Less/Working Hard And Closing Strong In The Home Stretch - Mark Hamill joined us last night for our phonebank!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And we got an incredible amount of calls done for CA-45 and Harris-Walz in North Carolina and Wisconsin. Thank you to all who came. We have one more night of calling left. Sign up today!
My one big ask today - donate to or volunteer for Harris-Walz and let's keep makign the early vote bluer!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I want to thank all of you who are self-reporting in on all your remarkable work across the country. Postcards, canvassing, back yard phonebank parties - you all are doing the work we need to do to win. Thank you all. Let's get to it! Harris-Walz, Our Presidential Checkmate States and Wisconsin - Learn more about our "checkmate" strategy, and support Ruben Gallego and these three front-line state parties:
Winning The House - Keeping getting very good vibes from our candidates and House Democratic leadership about flipping the House this year. We need to keep working it peeps!
Keeping The Senate Blue - this is a brawl my friends, and we just have to keep working it:
Growing The Hopium Community - We've set some goals for the growth of our community so more of us can be doing more and worrying less in the home stretch:
Great work everyone. We are making good progress here. Hopium paid subscribers get access to a weekly live home stretch political briefing and Founding Members will have their own small gathering on Fridays. You can become a paid subscriber and help us hit our goals by clicking on the link below or following this link. The subscription tab includes options for gift and group subscriptions, all 10% off through Election Day! Keep working hard all. Proud to be in this fight with all of you. Let's bring it home!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Simon
© 2024 Simon Rosenberg |