I don’t actually think that’s hopium. The vibe I’m getting from everything I see and read is that the Harris campaign is feeling cautiously optimistic. That doesn’t mean that it’s in the bag but I think it certainly means they aren’t seeing anything that would lead us to believe that Trump has it in the bag, contrary to what the MAGA crowd is saying. Again, this feels like 2012 to me. Romney and his people were measuring the drapes at this point. The polls were very close and Karl Rove was strutting around telling everyone that it was over. On election night, we had this silly scene (which happened to make Megyn Kelly’s career.) They simply could not believe that Obama had won because the polls were close and they’d convinced themselves that they couldn’t lose. After Trump came along in 2016, many of them convinced themselves that they can never lose. Obviously, we have no idea if this will go our way. We got schooled in 2016 too, after all. I was certainly convinced that Clinton would win because I couldn’t imagine how anyone could vote for that miscreant. We all know what happened.
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In Trump opposite land, all of his hatefests are lovefests Trump held a hastily arranged “press conference” in which he took no questions and basically droned on for a while as per usual. Clearly, they felt they needed to address the raging scandal over his MSG rally but he couldn’t bring himself to apologize or even say that he didn’t agree with the comments. Instead he just lied and said it was a lovefest and told voters once again that they can believe him or they can believe their lying eyes. They are nervous. Their rally didn’t go as planned and now Harris is holding a huge event on the Ellipse where they expect about 50 thousand people. I doubt there’s going to be a bunch of speakers crudely insulting half the country.
This is a pretty good endorsement aimed at wavering Republicans: Apparently, Schwarzenneger is one of the most admired Republicans in the country (go figure) so maybe this will help? I dunno but I’ll take it.
The Trump campaign, of course Daniel Dale at CNN fact checks this piece of garbage: On Friday, we published an article about how former President Donald Trump’s campaign has made a habit of deceptively using quotations in television ads attacking Vice President Kamala Harris. Then, just days later, the campaign released perhaps the most egregious example yet. A new minute-long ad revives two of the quote distortions from previous Trump ads – and sprinkles in two more for good measure. Here is a fact check. Cutting out key words about Harris and taxes The new ad cuts out critical words from a news article about Harris’ tax proposals. The ad, like a previous Trump ad, features the following on-screen text attributed to an August article in The New York Times: “Harris is seeking to significantly raise taxes.” But as the Times itself has noted, this is a misleading snip. What the Times article actually said was this: “Harris is seeking to significantly raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans and large corporations.” That’s a big difference.
They rented the sphere: I'm insanely jealous of @KamalaHQ for renting the Vegas dome. I've pitched multiple clients on it. Came close once—so, so cool. pic.twitter.com/iXDfVcv3Ba — Mike Nellis (@MikeNellis) October 29, 2024 Lol. I love it. Of course Trump has his bedbug-riddled, shithole, hotel there too. But that ain’t much.
It’s ghosts, goblins and yahoos season Like Lewis Carroll’s oysters, election conspiracy theories are coming “thick and fast,” and “more, and more, and more.” A voter engagement group yet unnamed by Pennsylvania law enforcement submitted batches of voter registration applications suspected of being fraudulent both in York and Lancaster counties. Or about 60 percent of those examined in Lancaster. “It is not uncommon, especially in presidential election years, for paid workers of such groups to turn in fabricated applications,” explains Katie Bernard of The Philadelphia Inquirer. It won’t matter who is paying the group. Donald Trump will use the episode to declare the election invalid when he loses Pennsylvania next week. Bernard deconstructs Trump’s claims about what elections officials discovered: Lancaster County was not “caught with 2600 Fake Ballots and Forms, all written by the same person,” as former President Donald Trump claimed on Truth Social Monday night.
When I announced my intention to join Microsoft Research in 2008, my friends set up a betting pool over how long I would “last” there. No one thought that I’d be at MSR more than 7 years. And here we are, almost 16 years later. I still love MSR. I love my colleagues. I am […]
Donald Trump filmed one in Madison Scary Garden Digby last night featured just a few of the racist quotes. (They even played “Dixie” before Byron Donalds walked on.) But know this. Trump long ago stopped trying to win this election on Nov. 5. He plans to take it by force afterwards. Rick Wilson knows it. So should you. The only way to keep us from that is by making Nov. 5 “a real knockout.” Last night’s New York rally and Trump’s others in states he has no chance of winning are not about winning on Nov. 5. They are about keeping the spotlight on himself, about turning the volume up to 12, about signalling what he wants his followers to do when he loses. He’s doubling down on what he and his co-conspirators failed at in 2021. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tells “Morning Joe” they are “mini January 6 rallies … mini Stop the Steal rallies” meant to prime his base for more post-election violence. Trump’s campaign deliberately chose Madison Square Garden for the callback to the pro-Nazi German American Bund rally from 1939. Trump adviser Stephen Miller, of course, did not disappoint on that score.
Donald Trump/Tom Homan/Stephen Miller/Project 2025 dream I’m reposting this “60 Minutes” clip of Tom Homan again to make sure no one misses it amidst the Trump rally coverage. CBS News: Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, has said it would be reasonable to deport a million people a year. And Trump’s top immigration adviser, Stephen Miller, told the audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference earlier this year that deportees would be removed from the country in a massive military air operation. “You grab illegal immigrants and then you move them to the staging ground and that’s where the planes are waiting for federal law enforcement to then move those illegals home,” Miller said at the conference. “You deputize the National Guard to carry out immigration enforcement.” Homan said he doesn’t use the term “raids,” but immigration enforcement operations at worksites would be needed. Deeper into the realm of ethnic cleansing From the clip: Cecilia Vega asks: “Is there a way to carry out mass deportation without separating families?” “Of course there is.
After the 2016 election once everyone recovered from the shock, the analyses of what happened started to gel into a conventional wisdom that said Donald Trump won because a bunch of non-college educated white people were feeling “economic anxiety.” Thousands of stories and features followed with reporters being sent out to rural Pennsylvania diners and Iowa church socials to figure out what those voters really want. But the fact was that it was an extremely close electoral college victory that could have gone either way with just a handful of votes in a couple of swing states. The main data guru at the time, Nate Silver, did a post-election analysis which showed that whenever there was an event such as Hillary Clinton collapsing briefly at a 9/11 event or the Washington Post reporting of Donald Trump’s gross commentary on the Access Hollywood tape, there would be a slight drop in the polls for the affected candidate but they would rebound to the usual stasis within a couple of weeks. Trump was still struggling to recover from the Access Hollywood scandal at the end of October of that year and Clinton was ahead in the aggregated polling by about 6 points.