LISTEN TO THIS: His closing argument is: Vote for me. I’m batshit insane!
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That is not an overstatement: In a video obtained by CBS News, the leader of an “election protection” activist group of 1,800 volunteers in North Carolina is seen instructing attendees at a virtual meeting to flag voters with “Hispanic-sounding last names” as one way to identify potentially suspicious registrations as the group combs through voter rolls ahead of the 2024 election. “If you’ve got folks that you, that were registered, and they’re missing information… and they were registered in the last 90 days before the election, and they’ve got Hispanic-sounding last names, that probably is, is a suspicious voter,” said James Womack, the leader of the effort, who chairs the Republican Party in Lee County, North Carolina. “It doesn’t mean they’re illegal.
Kamala Harris held some Q&As with Liz Cheney today in an attempt to persuade Republican women to vote for Harris. When asked how she deals with the despair so many are feeling she said this: Let me just speak to what people are feeling. We cannot despair. We cannot despair. You know, the nature of a democracy is such that I think there’s a duality. On the one hand, there’s an incredible strength when our democracy is intact. An incredible strength in what it does to protect the freedoms and rights of its people. Oh there’s great strength in that. And, it is very fragile. It is only as strong as our willingness to fight for it. And so that’s the moment we’re in. And I say do not despair because in a democracy, as long as we can keep it, in our democracy, the people — every individual — has the power to make a decision about what this will be. And so let’s not feel powerless. Let’s not let the — and I get it, overwhelming nature of this all makes us feel powerless. Because then we have been defeated. And that’s not our character as the American people. We are not ones to be defeated. We rise to a moment.
Those of you who read this blog know about the Republicans’ affinity for the bandwagon effect — tell everyone you’re winning and in the end people will want to go with the winner. Trump is especially enamored of this because he brags about everything anyway. Dan Pfeiffer has a piece today explaining that it might not be the smartest move this time out. Believe it or not, there are strategic reasons why Republicans publicly assert they are winning no matter what the polls say, and Democrats always hypothesize that a stunning defeat is right around the corner. However, this election is unlike any other. The electoral coalitions have shifted, and the Trump campaign did not adjust its playbook to address the new reality. For the longest time, the Republican coalition was comprised of older, mostly college-educated voters who participated in every election. Democratic success, on the other hand, depended on turnout from lower-propensity voters who rarely voted in midterms.
Axios reports: In the heat of this historic election, educated elites who should know better — billionaires, elected officials, journalists — keep falling for fakes, conspiracy theories and outright lies… Each day on the digital campaign trail has brought a torrent of false or misleading claims, often courtesy of partisan accounts with massive audiences. In the last few weeks alone: -MAGA influencers breathlessly spread the false claim that Vice President Kamala Harris used a teleprompter during her Univision town hall, which the X algorithm then promoted in its trending topics as fact. -Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) posted a purported screenshot of a headline in The Atlantic that read: “To Save Democracy Harris May Need To Steal An Election.” It was fake, and Roy deleted the post. -Bill Ackman, a hedge fund billionaire with 1.4 million followers on X, obsessively promoted allegations from an ABC News “whistleblower” that the network had given Harris questions in advance of her debate with Trump.
What Michael Sokolove found in a tiny Pennsylvania town Comprehending what’s become of a large faction of Americans and a majority of the Republican Party will be the object of study for historians and psychologists for decades. Reporting from Riegelsville, Pa., a hamlet of 800 that voted in 2020 for Donald Trump by a mere two votes, Michael Sokolove found not one of the 60 Republican and Democrat voters he spoke with is changing sides this election. Just why will be the subject of doctoral dissertations (gift link): Most of the Harris supporters I spoke to in Riegelsville cited the vice president’s personal qualities — what they perceived as positivity and decency — along with a desire for a president who might somehow calm our rancorous political climate. Most of the Trump supporters were unconcerned with matters of character. If they ever had a hope that a U.S. president would be someone they admired, a person who might represent the best of us — a war hero, say, like Dwight Eisenhower; a straight arrow like Jimmy Carter; or a trailblazer like Barack Obama — they had abandoned it. Many said that was an outdated or even naïve notion.
To follow up on Tom’s post below, Democracy is great and all but … damn: “Trump is obviously insane, and then Harris, I don’t think she has a plan,” said Clayton Ewing, a 63-year-old retiree from Shelby Township, Mich. who has voted for Trump in prior elections. Ewing said he may wait until he gets to the polls to make a final decision. Regina Gallacher, a 58-year-old physical therapist from Rochester Hills, Mich., said she is looking for a third party candidate because Trump “really scares me” but and she doesn’t “get warm fuzzies” when she hears Harris talk and found her replacement of President Biden on the ballot “very slimy.” Her husband, a union Democrat, is voting for Trump for the first time but they don’t talk about it at home because Gallacher, who grows repulsed when Trump appears on television, would rather avoid a heated conversation with her husband, who is unlikely to change his mind. If she has to choose between the two, it will be Harris, she said. But she is unsure. “We’ll get through it” if Trump wins, she said.
She turns 60 today. She’s just the right age for the first woman president. She’s had enough time to gather the experience any woman would be required to have (unlike a man who vcan get away with none, apparently) and yet she’s young and vigorous enough to get the job done. This was nice: I don’t know if everyone knows that Kamala Harris has a rabid fan base that’s been with her ever since the 2020 primaries. It’s called the KHive and they are true believers of the kind only Obama and Trump can boast. This was their birthday present to her.
There’s a new ratfucker in town 404 media reports: An Elon Musk-funded group called Future Coalition PAC is targeting Muslim voters in Michigan and Jewish voters in Pennsylvania with diametrically opposed political advertisements about Kamala Harris.
Coming from the man who has demeaned and insulted every judge in every one of his cases except for Aileen Cannon in Florida who was clearly biased in his favor, that was pretty rich. Just yesterday he did it again: Trump called the release of the documents “election interference” during his podcast appearance and said it was “a terrible thing, what’s happening. And the judges, this judge is the most evil person.” “They all said, ‘Well, make sure you don’t get Chutkan.’ And who did I get? I got Chutkan. So, you know, they supposedly pick, they pick balls, right?” Trump continued, referring in lottery-like terms to the random selection system used to assign federal judges to cases. “It’s not— I don’t think it works that way, but that’s what they say. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. You pick out of a hat, and that’s the judge.” I guess it’s not very useful to point this stuff out because almost half the country doesn’t think his addled hypocrisy even matters. But it’s important, I think, to at least put it on the record.