Just say no Hello. My name is digby and I am a poll addict. I really wish I wasn’t because I’m not equipped to deal with commentary like that above from the person who runs 538. I am an ordinary person caught in the vortex of a close election and I may just end up losing my mind over it. Don’t go there if you value your sanity. Historian Rick Perlstein has a great column on polls today that you really should read. (And then go read some fiction or watch the game or do some phone banking. Anything but look at those damned polling averages.) W. Joseph Campbell’s Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in U.S. Presidential Elections demonstrates—for the first time, strangely enough, given the robust persuasiveness of its conclusions—that presidential polls are almost always wrong, consistently, in deeply patterned ways. Unusual for any historical narrative, the pattern is almost unchanged for a good hundred years. First, someone comes forth with some new means of measuring how people will vote for president, and gets it so right it feels like magic.
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Oh right. She’s a woman. How could I forget? You just can’t underestimate misogyny. And, by the way, a lot of people wearing these degenerate t-shirts and carrying these signs happen to be MAGA women. As depressing as this is, the subtext of this election is that Donald Trump is a real man and Kamala Harris is a dumb whore.
JD Vance and Project 2025 are all over his latest “I am your protector” rhetoric As a politician, Donald Trump has always exhibited a very creepy form of paternalism. He often says things like “No one has done as much for the Black community as I did” or “I’ve been better for Jews than anyone in history.” It’s as if he’s bestowing on the people a special gift from the king and they should be grateful to him personally. Of course his boasts are always lies so they tend to fall on deaf ears, but it reveals how he sees himself as president. Although he’s long exhibited this rhetorical tic, in recent days he’s really outdone himself. Sounding much more like a cult leader than a politician in a modern democracy, the passages in his speeches about women are downright disturbing. It started with a weird Truth Social post on September 20th: The womenfolk are depressed but Big Daddy Trump is going to fix all that and they’ll be so happy they won’t even think about abortion. “THEY WILL FINALLY BE HEALTHY, HOPEFUL, SAFE AND SECURE.
If you haven’t seen this in a while…
“so-called sexual crimes…” This was out there. North Carolina Republicans made him their Lt. Governor because of it, not in spite of it. “Child-like Oppositional Disorder” describes so many people on the right. And yes, a fair number on the left as well, but fewer than there used to be.
I know you don’t want to watch a whole Trump speech. It’s very, very hard. But he’s escalating and you should probably hear a little bit of it: There’s more of the same. He was all amped up this morning, obviously drank a six pack of diet coke already or Dr. Ronny gave him a little pick-me-up. He’s getting worse. Politico reports: Donald Trump was meeting privately in mid-September with one of his oldest friends, Steve Wynn, when the casino mogul and Republican mega-donor delivered the former president a blunt warning: You’re off message, and it isn’t helping. Trump had been distracted, in Wynn’s view. The former president at the time was promoting a conspiracy theory that Haitian immigrants were eating people’s cats and dogs in Ohio, among other things. To drive home his point, Wynn showed Trump polling and suggested the former president would be better off focusing on policy issues where Republicans see his opponent, Kamala Harris, as vulnerable, according to two people briefed on the meeting and granted anonymity to describe it. The meeting underscored a key point of tension inside the Trump campaign.
Mark Robinson’s sinking campaign N.C. Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, Republican candidate for governor, had a pretty lousy weekend. He’s looking at a blue Monday too (CNN): Several top operatives on Republican Mark Robinson’s campaign for North Carolina governor have stepped down, just days after a CNN report uncovered inflammatory comments the candidate made on a porn website. Robinson’s campaign announced Sunday evening that general consultant and senior adviser Conrad Pogorzelski III, campaign manager Chris Rodriguez, finance director Heather Whillier and deputy campaign manager Jason Rizk have stepped down from the campaign. Pogorzelski confirmed the news when reached by CNN. “The reports are true that I, along with others from the campaign have left of our own accord,” he told CNN in a statement. Republicans expect Robinson to lose. Reports suggest he is persona non grata at Trump-Vance rallies in the state. Trump frets that Robinson’s drag on the slate will cost him North Carolina’s 16 electoral votes and the presidency (and in due course, his freedom).
At least until Trump does JV Last reminisces about America’s halcyon days when winning the popular vote meant that you’d also win the electoral college, something we all took for granted until 2000 when we learned otherwise. (Ye, it happened once before in the 1870s but nobody gave it much of a thought after that.) He talks about all the variables, including the impact of late-breaking news about one side or the other,and how these variables have changed over the years and concludes: Unless Harris expands her lead over Trump to greater than a +5 margin on Election Day, we’re in coin-flip territory for the next 42 days. Yeah. This is one of the reasons I really wish the news media would be careful about how they frame the polling. Here’s the bad news we can definitely count on: Not being able to see over the electoral horizon is a problem because we know what Trump is going to do on Election Day: He’s going to claim victory. His voters will believe him, and this in turn will cause Republican elites to support his claims, irrespective of evidence.
You betcha In her newsletter today, Margaret Sullivan discusses the astonishing fact that media organizations are sitting on a trove of hacked emails from the Trump campaign and refusing to publish them, in stark contrast to their behavior in 2016 when they eagerly pounced on similarly hacked emails from the Clinton campaign. She asks herself, what if it these were hacked emails from the Biden or Harris campaign. Would they be similarly protected? A group of well-known journalists got together last week to kick this topic around at the behest of Steve Adler, the former top editor of Reuters who now runs an ethics initiative at NYU. Adler moderated a panel including Ben Smith of Semafor who — when he was the editor of BuzzFeed News — famously published the so-called Steele dossier. That dossier was full of unverified and in some cases salacious information about Trump, much of which has turned out to be untrue. The other panelists were Sewell Chan, the new editor of Columbia Journalism Review, and Kathleen Carroll, the former executive editor of the Associated Press.
It’s good knowin’ she’s out there Sam Elliot has had lots of memorable film roles, but perhaps none more memorable than the The Stranger in The Big Lebowski (1998). The Lincoln Project recruited the voice of that icon of manliness to pitch Kamala Harris to the dudes out there who need to hear it. “I can’t believe we’re having this conversation again,” Elliot begins. “Are we really going back down that same fucking, broken road? Or are we moving forward? Towards hope? Towards freedom? Towards change?” “It’s time to be a man and vote for a woman,” made me burst out laughing. That’s pretty damned unsubtle. Hope it has an impact with the target audience.