Uncategorized

Campaign business as usual won’t cut it in 2024 If you live in a blue county, you probably think independents lean your way. And maybe they do. Inside city limits. But outside? Nationwide, independent voters lean red, and did in November 2022 even if the split looked closer in December 2023. Plus, the segment of the electorate that identifies as independent is growing steadily (below). There are more of them than there are Democrats or Republicans. Over half of voters roughly 45 and younger identify as independents. Not all states register by party (including some key swing states), so there this is harder to parse out. But here are two 2024 swing states that do. In North Carolina (16 electoral votes), for example, the current registration breakdown is: Independents: 36% Democrats: 33% Republicans: 30% In Arizona (11 electoral votes), the registration breakdown is: Independents: 35% Republicans: 34%Democrats: 30% Good News, Bad News Democrats cannot win without earning the votes of a sufficient number of independents and that could be a challenge, especially for candidates running statewide.

Joe Biden will be giving a big speech on the anniversary of January 6th. Its themes could not be more important. And yet, we have every reason to anticipate the media covering it by discussion whether or not it actually helps Trump in the opinion polls for Biden to lay out the stakes in this campaign. It’s what they do. They’ll poll the speech and then spend hours and hours and spill buckets of pixels on whether or not “it works.” Margaret Sullivan explains why that’s wrong and what they should do instead: When Joe Biden talks on Friday about US democracy on the brink, there’s no doubt that it will be a campaign speech. Maybe the most important one of his life. But the speech will be more than that. It’s intended as a warning and a red alert, delivered on the anniversary of the violent January 6 insurrection at the Capitol. The date was chosen for good reason – to make the point that more mayhem and more flagrant disregard for the rule of law and fair elections, are just around the corner if Donald Trump is re-elected. Can the political media in America get that reality across?

Only 13% say Joe Biden is. And yet: Meanwhile, here’s the very pious Donald Trump: From the outset of his brief political career, Trump has viewed right-wing evangelical leaders as a kind of special-interest group to be schmoozed, conned, or bought off, former aides told me. Though he faced Republican primary opponents in 2016 with deeper religious roots—Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee—Trump was confident that his wealth and celebrity would attract high-profile Christian surrogates to vouch for him. “His view was ‘I’ve been talking to these people for years; I’ve let them stay at my hotels—they’re gonna endorse me. I played the game,’” said a former campaign adviser to Trump, who, like others quoted in this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. It helped that Trump seemed to feel a kinship with prosperity preachers—often evincing a game-recognizes-game appreciation for their hustle.

Such profiles in courage. There hasn’t even been one primary and they’re already crawling on their bellies to lick Donald Trump’s boots. It’s sickening. Scalise is predictable. He’s the guy who said he was running as “David Duke without the baggage.” Of course he’s with Trump. Hard core Christian theocrat Mike Johnson is backing Trump despite the fact that Trump is a Jeffrey Epstein pal recently found liable for sexual assault (among dozens of other “ungodly” behaviors.) He’s quite the moral man of faith. I listened to the Bulwark podcast last night while cooking dinner and Tim Miller reminded me about Emmer. This happened just 10 weeks ago: Just hours after Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) won the Republican Conference’s nomination to be House speaker on Tuesday, former President Donald Trump took to Truth Social to deride the congressman as “totally out-of-touch with Republican Voters” and a “Globalist RINO.” He then got on the phone with members to express his aversion for Emmer and his bid for speaker.

The Anti Vaxxers are no longer on the fringe I guess this figures. We can only hope that he doesn’t manage to get on the ballots in the swing states or if he does that he’ll only appeal to the right wing anti-vaxxers: Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Tuesday unveiled his new campaign communications director: Del Bigtree, one of the country’s leading anti-vaxxers. Bigtree, who serves as the executive director of the Informed Consent Action Network—one of the nation’s largest anti-vaccine organizations—announced his new role in a letter that blasted presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden for their roles in distributing the COVID-19 vaccine. “In January 2020, we witnessed what the dark forces of medical tyranny are capable of when they launched the greatest psychological operation the world has ever experienced,” Bigtree wrote. “we watched in sick astonishment as both President Trump and President Biden put the fate of our nation into Dr. Anthony Fauci’s hands.” This is so outrageous.

Lately I’m just seeing very little coverage at all which still benefits Trump. There are exceptions thank goodness:

You have to watch this retrograde con woman to fully appreciate the caliber of “lawyers” Trump still has around him even after Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell were flushed down the drain: I look forward to reading the memoirs of the semi-serious lawyers who are defending Trump to hear more about the legal services Alina Habba provides him. I’d imagine they will be much like this: A Florida-based federal judge has ordered nearly $1 million in sanctions against Donald Trump and his attorney Alina Habba, calling the former president a “mastermind of strategic abuse of the judicial process.” In a blistering 46-page order, U.S. District Court Judge Donald Middlebrooks said Trump’s sprawling lawsuit against Hillary Clinton and dozens of former Justice Department and FBI officials was an almost cartoonish abuse of the legal system. “Here, we are confronted with a lawsuit that should never have been filed, which was completely frivolous, both factually and legally, and which was brought in bad faith for an improper purpose,” Middlebrooks wrote. “Mr.

I’ve written about Donald Tusk’s victory in the recent Polish elections and its momentous consequences — for Poland, the EU and NATO. Long story short: it’s clearly a big win for pro-EU forces, but attempts to use the result to justify a new integrationist power grab will backfire. 

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the signing of the Oslo Accords, a landmark moment in the pursuit of peace between Israel and the Palestinians. And yet peace in the region has never been more elusive, as events in Gaza makes dramatically clear. Why have all attempts to bring an end to one of …

Continue reading

As Israel continues to mourn and Gaza continues to be turned into rubble, many in the Middle East are coming to a grim realisation: that things could soon become much, much worse. Huge tectonic shifts now threaten to rupture the status quo — and even spark a global war. Continue reading here.