#Swing Voter Alienation

[netscapenavigator-official]

From what I've garnered online, the debate was rather lukewarm.

Trump was derranged, as expected. "I got involved with the taliban," "transgender operations on illegal aliens in prison," and "[immigrants are] eating the dogs…they’re eating the cats," are three very real things that he uttered tonight.

Harris was said to be rather moderate compared to her previous appearances, as (apparently) she's trying to appeal to potential Republican swing voters since she has the left pretty well secured.

However!

None of that matters (apparently), because immediately after the debate, Taylor Swift announced she will be voting for Harris, and signed off her endorsement by referring to herself as a "Childless Cat Lady," adding yet another inch to the grave JD Vance dug himself with that comment.

I wish I was kidding, but when I went to the Reddit homepage to see if Democrats dive-bombed their months of good PR, I could barely find anything relating to the debate because every single posts was a 40K upvote post about Taylor Swift endorsing Harris.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

You are, I’m sure, familiar with Occam’s razor. It’s the old philosophical theorem that holds that the simplest explanation for an event, the one requiring the fewest assumptions, is probably the best explanation. If you wake up in the morning and there’s snow on the lawn, there are any number of possible explanations. Maybe some friends played a practical joke on you and dumped snow in your yard. Maybe space aliens visited during your slumber and dusted your lawn with the white stuff. Or—maybe it snowed last night.

Republicans keep asking, completely dishonestly, why so much criminal suspicion surrounds Donald Trump. They say it’s all being orchestrated by Joe Biden and Merrick Garland. They insist it’s an effort to interfere with his election campaign. They say a lot of things, but if ever there was a case where Occam’s razor applied, it’s this one. Trump is surrounded by criminal suspicion because he’s a criminal.

He’s been doing criminal things for decades. He just finally got cornered and caught on something. I’ve been writing recently that Democrats have to make sure every voter in the country remembers by Election Day, having heard it said thousands of times, that Donald Trump is a convicted felon. That’s true, and so far, Democrats and affiliated groups aren’t doing a terrible job of this. It’s a little sad that the best expression I’ve seen of this so far comes from a Republican—fiercely anti-Trump Republican Sarah Longwell’s group, Republican Voters Against Trump, has put up some blunt billboards around the country featuring photos of voters, with their names, under the statement: “I won’t vote for a convicted felon.”

But Democrats need to do more. Trump’s criminality, both past and future, should be central to the campaign. There’s a story to tell here, and it’s all true. No matter what the pollsters and the messaging gurus say, it’s impossible that all of this, taken together, doesn’t matter to swing voters.

To tell the story, you go through Trump’s record:

• convicted on 34 felony counts • determined by a court to have raped a woman and ordered to pay her $83 million • found by a court to have overvalued his assets and ordered to pay $364 million • ordered to pay a $2 million settlement after admitting that he misused his charity, which the state of New York shut down • found by the Justice Department to have refused to rent apartments to Black applicants; settled out of court • sued by the Justice Department for violating proper procedures in the purchase of stock; paid $750,000 in civil fines • charged by the New York State Lobbying Commission with violating state lobbying laws while purchasing a casino; paid $250,000 to settle fines • found by the courts to have grossly defrauded students at the so-called Trump University and ordered to pay them $25 million in restitution

This list isn’t even the tip of the iceberg. It’s the tip of the tip. Trump has spent four decades being sued for something or other, typically not paying his bills, like those famous cases where he stiffed the poor vendors for his casinos, filing his own ridiculous countersuits and libel suits, and paying fines to make things go away. If indeed he actually paid the fines. I wonder if anyone has ever really gotten to the bottom of that. And I haven’t even mentioned the current charges around January 6 and the stolen classified documents because, so far, they’re just charges. But whatever the courts end up saying on those two matters, we’ve all seen with our own eyes the insurrection that he obviously incited (as of this January, 718 rioters had pleaded guilty to various federal charges, and 139 had been found guilty in court) and the photos of the boxes of documents at Mar-a-Lago that he refused for months to turn over to the FBI.

Another important point: The criminality around Trump isn’t limited to Trump. Eight Trump associates were sentenced to prison time: Steve Bannon, Michael Cohen (joined the good side but still served time), Rick Gates, Paul Manafort, Peter Navarro, George Papadopoulos, Roger Stone, and Allen Weisselberg. Others copped pleas: Michael Flynn, Sidney Powell, Kenneth Cheseboro, and Scott Hall, another Georgia defendant.

This is not a coincidence. As GOP strategist Rick Wilson said, “Everything Trump touches dies”; he corrupts everything and everyone around him. And does anyone seriously think that if he gets back to the Oval Office, the same thing isn’t going to happen again? It’s going to be worse.

It’s going to be far worse. First, he’s going to start, on that dictatorial day one, by pardoning himself. Joe Biden and the Democrats need to try to get voters focused on this. If it happens, people will be completely outraged. Yes, the 38% or so who are MAGA world will be fine with it, but majorities will be flabbergasted at such an act. Is it possible to get voters pre-outraged about something that hasn’t happened? The polls will say no. But as I’ve written over and over lately, polls can either be accepted—or they can be changed.

Right now, what’s most terrifying to me about the polls is that they tell us emphatically that people forget. They forget all the horrible things Trump did. That includes presidential actions, like his lies to the American people about the pandemic, but it also includes his history of criminality and the way that history guarantees he’ll keep behaving that way.

In sum: Trump’s criminal record hardly begins and ends with Stormy Daniels. Somebody needs to make sure that, by November 5, voters know the entire, sordid history.

[gothicprep]

jd vance, in case anybody missed this, was on tucker carlson in 2021 and made a comment about how america is being run by childless cat ladies who are miserable and hate their lives and want everyone else to be as miserable as they are. he's walked this back and said he didn't mean it Like That. but as it turns out, a lot of republican women are childless cat ladies for reasons having nothing to do with being socially liberal. turns out, they're not thrilled with it.

there are two pieces to this. there are the specific politicians he mentions as representative of the cat lady phenomenon and it's interesting who he picks – harris, aoc, and buttigieg. put a pin in that. there's also the comment itself, which strikes me as worse. this isn't something that was or could be misinterpreted. it's very clear what he meant. this seems like a way of offending a lot of people among his potential base. it's not commentary on abortion or even a pro-natalist, positive towards children stance. it's just insulting and the type of thing you'd expect to see right wing internet trolls say about taylor swift. in that context, you can say, "okay, this is a provocateur or a troll or a bot or whatever". it's much more alienating coming from a politician. it's very on par with hillary clinton's "basket of deplorables" or obama's "bitter clingers".

why a basket? i've always wondered about that.

anyway, you're expressing this sort of snide contempt for your perceived political enemies in a way that ends up alienating people who might have actually been gettable voters for you. he had a certain archetype in mind. he's not thinking about the swing voter who desperately wanted kids, couldn't for whatever reason, and now has pets instead. she still overheard. and the thing is, in social situations, you don't know which person is which.

i'll let you in on a little secret: when someone who's in their 30s or older says "i chose not to have kids" it's a coin toss whether that person is being sincere or telling you a polite social fiction. people don't say to an acquaintance that they desperately tried to have children, but had fertility struggles or couldn't find a stable relationship. these things are incredibly personal.

the other thing is, like a month after this interview, buttigieg and his husband adopted a kid, so get wrecked james

[kineticpenguin]

Honestly just in awe of how incredibly bad Biden is as a president. We spent 2 and a half years watching him go back on his word, fail to deliver, fake deliver, or even in the areas he did deliver, his administration made you have to dig to find out about it on your own. Just a hapless old corpse barely keeping the chair warm. Two and a half years thinking "yeah this is about as stupid as I expected it to be, what with them shoehorning the conservative ticket-balancer to Obama in as president."

Then all of a sudden Biden wakes up and decides he's gonna be a shooter after all, finally, on just one issue. He's gonna pull out all the stops and swing his presidential stick around and get shit done. And that issue is that the "nice old man with some decency" is an absolutely psychotic fanboy for the state of Israel, an enthusiastic supporter of any genocide they might wish to wage and then some. No political cost is too great to bear, not even alienating his own voters.

And if you bring this up to liberals, at best you get the Empathetic :| Face of It Is What It Is, a sigh and a shrug. Or when you mention that this makes people not want to vote for Biden again, they start ranting and raving about how those idealistic children are gonna let Trump win again.

It's just so bizarre.

[collapsedsquid]

Senator McConnell never allowed anyone to get to his right on substance, although he maintained more tactical flexibility in negotiating deals than many other congressional Republicans.  Assertions that the next Senate Republican Leader will be more conservative are therefore absurd.  The next Senate Republican Leader likely will be much weaker than Senator McConnell, far less able to make commitments on behalf of their party and hence far less able to secure concessions from Democrats.  The MAGA element of the Conference seldom meets a deal it likes or a fight it dislikes, no matter how bad the long-term consequences might be.       Thus, the new leader will fight more and, lacking Senator McConnell’s political and procedural skills, lose more.  When they commit their conference to positions out of step with the electorate, their subsequent collapses will give Democrats more room to dictate terms on key legislation.       The new leader also will have more difficulty getting rid of disastrous nominees for winnable seats and will be less adept at protecting Republicans in swing states from political embarrassment.  This could cost Republicans control of the Senate some years.         On substance, therefore, Democrats will likely gain from Senator McConnell’s departure from the leadership.  The increasing contentious, combative tone that will result, on the other hand, will alienate more voters from politics.  Reduced voter turn-out likely helps Republicans, particularly MAGA Republicans.  And the further degradation of our public life will contribute to the normalization of ruthless, anti-republican behavior like that of former President Trump.  That is not good for our future at all. 

[truth-has-a-liberal-bias]

From the article...

Spite can be fun, but it isn’t a policy. A global economic crisis is never good, but what’s potentially in the hopper amid the debt ceiling standoff would be a fiscal doomsday, with one analysis of the still-forming GOP debt plan agreement predicting it could cost more than 700,000 jobs. 

The policies put forward by McCarthy—no raised taxes, no touching of Social Security or Medicare—would demand a whopping 52% cut from everything else on the federal books to meet the goal of a balanced budget within a decade.

...

But the tone-deaf messaging is not exclusive to the House. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis—perhaps the most serious potential challenger to Trump’s re-nomination at the moment—signed a six-week ban on abortions in his state during a private ceremony last week, and followed that days later by threatening to build a prison next to the spot many families regard as the happiest place on Earth.

Florida’s abortion ban comes in the immediate wake of a stunning upset in Wisconsin, where voters showed that tightening access to abortion is a political loser, and a year after voters in Kansas did the same. [...]

[mightyflamethrower]

As Trump continues to show leads in critical swing states, as various lawfare-inspired cases against him seem to the public to be more persecutions than prosecutions, and as Joe Biden appears daily more incoherent and lost, the left on spec has resorted to warning the nation about all the supposedly catastrophic consequences of a future Trump presidency.

Ironically, the left seems oblivious to the reality that one reason Trump leads Biden in the polls is precisely because voters can compare the four-year record of the prior Trump presidency to Biden’s last 40 months.

Recently, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez warned that Trump will conspire with oil executives to spike gasoline prices. But even after Biden drained the strategic petroleum reserve before the 2022 midterms and is now again doing the same as the 2024 election approaches, gas prices have averaged only one-third cheaper than under Trump.

Trump tried to top off the reserve but was blocked by Democrats in Congress. Nevertheless, he left Biden a nearly full reservoir of 638 million barrels (about 90 percent full), which Biden has now drained by some 270 million barrels to the present 51 percent full—and the levels are falling further as voting nears.

We are warned that 77-year-old Trump looks haggard after his long hours in court. He seems sleepy, we are told. He has aged terribly, the media tell us. But polls show that concern over Biden’s dementia greatly outweighs normal worry over septuagenarian candidate Trump.

Why would any sane pro-Biden handler bring up Trump’s supposed gait or occasional forgotten word when that only reminds the public of the contrast with Biden, whose speeches seem delivered in something other than English and whose transcripts must be heavily edited to airbrush away his incoherence?

We are told that Trump will increase racial tensions. Almost daily, blacks and Hispanics are warned that Trump is a racist—even as polls show that he may well receive the highest percentage of minority votes by any Republican in modern history and has some chance of winning outright the Hispanic vote. Oddly, the media is now attacking minorities on the Marxist principle of false consciousness, as if they are deluded into voting against themselves rather than being perceptive critics of the Biden disaster of high inflation, green mania, a deluge of illegal aliens, and loss of deterrence abroad.

It was not Trump, but Biden, who, during the last election cycles, called one African-American journalist a “junkie” and warned another podcaster, “You ain’t black,” if he voted for Trump. And during his presidency, on occasion, Biden has referred to black subordinates as “boy,” uses the ossified term “Negro,” and has a long history of racist drivel and smears, from “put y’all back in chains” to referencing Barack Obama as the first “clean” and “articulate” presidential candidate to proudly reminding us that his home state of Delaware was once a “slave state.”

As Trump’s polls climbed and the Fani Willis persecution was sidetracked by her own false testimonies, conflicts of interest, and the hiring of her unqualified clandestine paramour, hysterical cries mounted that a reelected Trump would use the powers of government to go after his enemies.

As Jack Smith’s federal indictment became calcified over issues of presidential immunity, his failed efforts to ram through the prosecution before the election, and his office lying over tampering with evidence seized at Mar-A-Lago, tired warnings of Trump’s weaponization to come of the bureaucracy mounted even more.

Now that the jury is out in the Alvin Bragg fiasco and his star witness, Michael Cohen, a convicted liar, has likely again perjured himself and admitted to stealing $60,000 from the Trump organization, Trumpophobia has further peaked.

In other words, the more evidence mounts that Trump’s enemies have manipulated the court system in the manner that they previously impeached him twice, tried him as a private citizen in the Senate, sought to remove him from state ballots, rounded up ex-intelligence officers to lie about the authentic Hunter Biden laptop on the eve of the 2020 presidential debate, and were exposed concocting the Russian collusion yarn by hiring a foreign national in the 2016 campaign, paradoxically, the more the left-wing media warns America that a President Trump would do exactly what they have been doing by emulating their weaponization of the courts, the bureaucracy, and the Congress.

It gets stranger still.

The left warns the country that Trump will deport some or many of the 10 million illegal aliens that Joe Biden and his impeached Homeland Security director Alejandro Mayorkas have deliberately welcomed in.

Consider the logic: the current president destroyed a once-secure border and, for political purposes, illegally rendered immigration law enforcement null and void. But we are still supposed to fear his successor, who would resecure the border, return millions of recently crossed illegal aliens to their countries of origin, and restore the sanctity of federal law. In Orwellian fashion, the Biden administration is now suing exasperated states that are doing their part to help enforce immigration laws that Biden has deliberately shredded.

The absurdity extends to foreign policy. Team Biden and the media are issuing warnings here and abroad that another Trump presidency would tear apart the global order.

Really? Vladimir Putin has invaded neighboring nations in three of the last four administrations, but did not only during the Trump 2017-2020 years. Why?

Before October 7, even Biden National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan preened that his Middle East portfolio was “quieter than in two decades”—but only after Trump’s destroyed ISIS, took out the terrorist Iranian general Soleimani, ended the disastrous Iran deal, cut off aid to Hamas, designated the Houthi terrorists, crafted the Abraham Accords, pledged full support for Israel, our only democratic ally in the Middle East, and achieved U.S. oil independence.

In contrast, Putin invaded Ukraine and may well absorb much of its eastern half. The U.S. suffered its greatest military humiliation of the last half century in fleeing from Kabul and handing over billions of dollars in weapons to the terrorist Taliban, abandoning our NATO-allied forces, sympathetic Afghans, and American contractors.

Hamas killed more Jews in a single day than any since the Holocaust. A full-scale war rages in Gaza. Hezbollah has displaced thousands of Israelis with its daily attacks. And for the first time in history, Iran has attacked in force the Israeli homeland.

China, with impunity, sent a spy balloon across the continental US. Some 25,000 Chinese male illegal aliens mysteriously barged into the U.S. And China has helped kill 100,000 Americans a year through its fentanyl exports to the Mexican cartels.

Given all that, are we supposed to worry that “sharp as a knife” Biden’s disastrous foreign policy will be ruined by a return to the peaceful record of the earlier Trump presidency?

So, what is Trumpophobia? The syndrome displays a number of symptoms.

One, the left always projects its sins onto its opponents. It accuses Trump of doing precisely what it has done, as a way of avoiding blame for its self-inflicted disasters. And the left so vehemently projects because it knows what it would do if it were Trump and was treated as he has been by them.

Two, desperate Democrats are scrambling to find some bizarre way to depose both Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, especially should Biden have a disastrous, historic preconvention June presidential debate. As a result, the 2024 campaign has never been about comparison of 2017-2020 to 2021-2024. But rather, it has already descended into the Democratic de facto smear that “Trump is even worse than Biden.” And that fixation instills fears of what Trump might do rather than what he actually has done.

Three, the left feels Biden may do more than just lose the Democrats the presidency, Senate, and its close margin in the House. His hyperinflation seriously damaged the middle class. He turns them off with his arrogance, screaming speeches, loud, obnoxious gibberish, compulsive lying, and generally impotent appearance.

His racial condescension and pandering fool no one. As a result, Biden may well redefine the two parties as race is replaced by shared class concerns. Wealthy blacks may vote for Biden because they are black and wealthy, but more and more middle-class blacks may vote for Trump because they feel his policies benefit the middle class like themselves.

The public increasingly agrees that the Democrat Party is the party of the very rich, the bicoastal privileged, and the subsidized poor, while the lower and middle classes feel far more confident and secure with Republicans.

Four, the left fears a more organized, savvier Trump second term might hit the ground running‚ and thus rapidly and professionally instill a conservative agenda to stop the current neo-socialist revolution.

Given all that, 2024 for the left is little more than “Fear Trump or Bust.”

[1americanconservative]

Is the Biden regime weaponizing the Social Security Administration to hand out fake/temporary Social Security numbers to illegals and automatically register them to vote in key swing states?

Over 2 million in TX, AZ, and PA alone in just the past 3 months - that’s insanity

There needs to be a national injunction to stop this takeover before it’s too late

All of these voter registrations need to be removed if they are illegal aliens

Red state attorneys general need to be all over this

[kittyinshadows]

guys, as a queer from a rural area in a swing state, you NEED to push your representatives to switch presidential candidates. There is no fucking shot biden wins this after yesterday. listen, i get that he has our vote, we're captives here, we dont have a choice. but my friends, my family, my neighbors? there is no way in the world they will be convinced to vote for a man who, truthful or not, is perceived as senile. Not to mention the fact that he goes along with every talking point republicans have like theyre actually saying something reasonable, and the supporting a genocide. Biden has alienated so many voter pops. if this guy is the nominee we are fucking cooked.

i can convince my parents, my friends, my family, to vote harris or newsom. i wouldnt even have to ask them to vote whitmer or someone else slightly popular. the die hard blue votes are not enough. we need the independents, the swing voters, the aunt who just wont go because she doesnt feel like it would matter anyways.

so please, please, as devoted dems or otherwise progressive voters, tell your concerns. we cannot afford to sunk cost fallacy this!

[rjzimmerman]

Harris Goes Light on Climate Policy. Green Leaders Are OK With That. (New York Times)

Excerpt from this New York Times story:

In the 2020 presidential election, climate activists demanded that Democratic candidates explain, in detail, how they planned to tackle the planet’s greatest environmental threat.

But in the weeks since Vice President Kamala Harris ascended the 2024 Democratic ticket, she has mentioned climate change only in passing, and offered no specifics on how she would curb dangerous levels of warming. Climate leaders say they are fine with that.

“I am not concerned,” said Jay Inslee, the Democratic governor of Washington, who made climate change the centerpiece of his own 2019 bid for the presidency. Mr. Inslee said he believes it is more important for Ms. Harris to draw a distinction between her and her Republican rival, former President Donald J. Trump, than to drill down on policy nitty-gritty.

“I am totally confident that when she is in a position to effect positive change, she will,” Gov. Inslee said.

As Ms. Harris prepares to address the nation on Thursday at the Democratic National Convention, she faces the challenge of energizing party loyalists while also reaching out to disaffected Republicans and moderate voters. So far Ms. Harris and her running mate Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, have embraced a pragmatic agenda, calling for things like a minimum-wage increase and child-care funding.

While President Biden has made climate change a signature issue, signing into law the largest clean energy investments in American history, Ms. Harris has yet to detail for voters her climate or clean-energy positions. Some analysts chalked that up to strategy and said new promises to slash greenhouse gas emissions or rein in fossil fuels could alienate voters particularly in the energy-rich swing state of Pennsylvania.

“This doesn’t look accidental, it looks like a deliberate choice,” said Kevin Book, managing director of ClearView Energy Partners, a Washington-based research firm, referring to the sparse mentions of climate change in the speeches of Ms. Harris and Mr. Walz.

“I think they are worried if she takes a strong position on climate, even it fits the same position that Biden took, it will make her look too progressive,” Mr. Book said, adding, “It’s a divisive issue and they need both sides as much as possible to win Pennsylvania.”

Others said Ms. Harris already has voters who care about climate change locked up and doesn’t need to court them. Climate groups this week announced a $55 million advertising campaign to support the Harris ticket.

[daughterofsarenrae]

I can’t bring myself to do any deep dives into political podcasts or discussions, would you summarize the latest? What are the reactions post debate? Most of my coworkers are going to vote trump but they treat me (an obviously queer person) so kindly. It’s dispiriting.

hiya! preferencing everything i say here with a "this is an extremely close race and will be until the very end" disclaimer but! we are not in doom and gloom mode we are in determined hope mode imo

post debate: fox news anchors were saying on air immediately after the debate that trump lost. like straight up they COULD not spin it in a way that he won. harris challenged him to another debate like hours after and i think it was today where he was like "no i totally won 100% so im not doing another" which. makes him look like a coward running away from facing her again bc he and everyone else knows he lost. so that's fun! of course he could go back on that bc he switched between he would/wouldnt do this debate like 8 times leading up to it. u cant trust anything out of his mouth! who knew?

ANYWAYS so that post i rb'd earlier was true: about 1/4 trump voters said the debate made them reconsider their vote, and i thiiiink wapo cited 6% of trump voters DID change their vote post debate. debates dont traditionally have anything to do with election results but it might be a good indicator in this one. most undecided voters' stance is "we dont know enough about harris's positions/policies" bc her campaign is like. 1.5? 2? (i forget) months old. the debate was her chance to lay her policy out for a HUGE audience- i think it was 67 million people watching? whereas trump: everyone knows who he is and what his views are. he is a known figure and people have made decisions. she is not known. and her core message that debate was "i am not trump or biden, i'm a new way forward" which for all of the people who were not wanting to vote for either trump/biden (bc of policies or age or WHATEVER) is important. national polls are close with harris trending up basically since her campaign started, but the important polls are the swing state ones, which typically are either tied or harris up by a tinyyyy bit.

the important thing here is: trump has his base. they will vote for him no matter what. generally he's kind of capped off how many voters he can get. people who are undecided/abstaining wouldve committed to him by now. harris is the unknown here, which means she has the greatest potential for growth, esp among undecideds and abstaining voters. the general view is they want to know more and are open to learning more. she's only done the one big mainstream news media interview so far bc she's been uh. a little busy! between constant rallies and the dnc and debate prep and such, but she's also been doing (almost?) daily local radio interviews. extremely grassroots campaign stuff. but also she's gotten fuckin. liz and dick cheney's endorsements. and a lot of other republicans. AND ALSO one piece of extremely good post debate news: taylor swift's endorsement. i think i saw a number today where in the 24 hours since her post, over 400,000 people clicked the link to the voter registration website so. extremely encouraging

the maga push to make harris/walz seem super extremist is very funny and also not sticking at all bc walz is literally the most normal guy ever. and every time jd vance shows his face he says something even more self-incriminating. trump distances himself SO much from vance it's so funny. clown show party over there. trump keeps flip-flopping on signing an abortion ban bc the evangelicals will hate him if he doesnt but it's also an extremely extremely unpopular position so he can't really say anything about it without alienating part of his voters

ANYWAYS this is. i guess kind of a summary? i didn't link sources bc im lazy and just got back from work but i will find them if u want me to. and also if u have any other things u wanna know this was extremely general

keep donating keep talking to people keep volunteering! the more voters we get out the better chance we have. esp if you're in the south check your voter registrations. block anyone who encourages you not to vote. most importantly dont give in to the fear. it's ok and normal to be anxious and afraid of this election, but don't let it shut you down. seek news that doesn't just talk about trump, elevate news that talks about harris. remember- people know enough about him that they're committed to him already. letting people know about harris' policies is going to do much more for bringing undecideds into the fold than talking about whatever insane shit trump is on about on any given day. AND ALSO campaign and donate for every other democrat on the ballot. vote blue up and down. let's set harris up for success with a congress that'll actually let her do shit

[learnwithmearticles]

Harris and Climate Change

Storms in recent decades have escalated in frequency and severity, causing billions of dollars in damage and leaving people homeless and vulnerable. We can expect this trend to continue if we do not globally mitigate climate change.

This is an examination of Kamala Harris’ environmental policies.

Continuation, Doubling Down

We can expect many policies introduced during Biden’s presidency to continue during Harris’. For example, Biden re-committed the U.S.A. to the Paris Agreement, a treaty that binds nations together in efforts to keep the global temperature increase under 2°C. This entails vast decreases in greenhouse gas emissions, and thus turning to more energy efficient products as well as clean energy alternatives.

In 2022, Biden’s administration passed the Inflation Reduction Act. This climate bill, among the biggest in history, provided billions of dollars to pull us away from the fossil fuel-dependant economy.

In addition to perpetuating these policies, Kamala Harris will be able to push further towards clean energy. 

During her campaign, Harris has brought up the environmental justice unit she created to hold polluters accountable, implying that she would continue to enforce ramifications for pollution-heavy companies.

In 2023, Harris announced the work she had been doing with EPA administrator Michael Regan. In this speech, she acknowledged the need to invest in communities to help those who don’t have the means themselves to move towards clean energy. She also acknowledged that we need to make up for lost time in these initiatives, sticking to the intent to meet the nation’s goal of net-zero emissions by 2050.

Intersectionality

Harris has specifically acknowledged the fact that climate change disproportionately affects certain communities, such as lower-income and communities of color. She stated her intention to make sure pollution effects are addressed with attention to equity and equality. Her work with the EPA administrator was an example of putting these ideas into action, by funding communities who need help.

Before and throughout Biden’s presidency, Kamala Harris has spoken about and followed through with efforts to address current environmental crises. She has pushed to hold companies accountable for their pollution and advocated for policies that reduce the U.S.A.’s emissions and increase renewable energy.

Despite these previous statements, climate change has not been a popular focus of Harris’ 2024 campaign. The Washington Post believes that this is an effort to alienate as few voters as possible while focusing on other major issues. Specifically, Pennsylvania as a swing state depends strongly on a natural gas economy, and domestic oil production has decreased gas prices. Discussing any certain intentions of affecting those areas might discourage undecided voters.

We can see in these tactics and in Harris’ pull back from a full-on fracking ban that she does listen to the public. She pays attention to these concerns and is able to adapt in order to do what seems best for the nation. While many, including myself, do not completely agree with all of her policies, she is a candidate who will make a difference in the environmental sector.

Additional Resources

1. The Paris Agreement

2. Inflation Reduction Act

3. Harris not discussing Climate Change

4. 2023 Speech

5. Intersectionality

[tomorrowusa]

Not everybody is a highly informed political junkie. And with the decline of legit news outlets, it's increasingly difficult for average citizens to keep up.

On top of that, people have surprisingly short memories. There are actually some who regard the Trump era as an era of prosperity; they have apparently forgotten that his incompetence botched the pandemic response and sent the economy into almost instant recession.

This lack of credible information along with sketchy memories have given Trump a boost - for now.

Celinda Lake, one of President Biden’s top pollsters on his 2020 campaign, was recently conducting a focus group with swing voters for another client when a response stopped her cold. Lake had asked how the voters felt about former president Donald Trump’s pending criminal court cases related to the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot. “They go, ‘What court case around January 6?’” she recalled. “These were swing voters, and about half of them weren’t sure what we were talking about. And I said, ‘Well, you know, the insurrection and that he was the one that provoked it.’ They go, ‘Oh, yeah. I kind of forgot about that.’” For journalists and the types of highly engaged voters who watch the news every night, Trump’s lock on renomination has been near-certain for at least six months, and his various transgressions and incendiary comments are well known. But it’s easy for political obsessives to lose sight of how little attention many normal people pay to day-to-day politics.

We've all heard the expression "low information voter". This is a problem we need to address.

The New York Times’ Jennifer Medina and Reid Epstein tackled this question earlier this week with a piece aptly headlined “Do Americans Have a ‘Collective Amnesia’ About Donald Trump?”  It’s very much worth a read. They write: “More than three years of distance from the daily onslaught has faded, changed—and in some cases, warped—Americans’ memories of events that at the time felt searing. Polling suggests voters’ views on Mr. Trump’s policies and his presidency have improved in the rearview mirror. In interviews, voters often have a hazy recall of one of the most tumultuous periods in modern politics.”

Another group to take into consideration are younger voters. An average graduating high school senior this year was in the 8th grade when Trump was telling Americans to drink bleach and take quack medicines for COVID-19 in the early months of the pandemic.

Part of the problem is that many voters, especially the crucial bloc of younger ones, simply don’t remember Trump that well. Those turning eighteen and eligible to vote for the first time this fall were just ten years old and in grade school when Trump won the presidency, in 2016; the January 6 Capitol riots happened back when most of them were just starting high school. The rest of us don’t have memories that are as sharp and reliable as we’d like to think—it’s not just Joe Biden and Donald Trump who regularly get names wrong or forget in what year things occurred.

And if this cohort was just 13/14 in early 2020, then they would have been 8 or 9 when Trump started running for president in 2015 when he was calling Mexicans "rapists" and "murderers".

Case in point: When Trump launched his 2016 campaign by calling Mexican immigrants “rapists” and “murderers,” it dominated the news and became one of the most-remembered lines of the campaign. His recent claim that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” generated headlines but didn’t dominate coverage. On Thursday, he declared in his State of the Union “prebuttal” that Biden is “keeping the hordes of illegal migrants and illegal aliens pouring into the country,” and claimed that “many come from mental institutions, many come from prisons, they’re terrorists.” Few major news organizations wrote stories focusing on the comments.

We can't assume that people may be as informed as we are. We need to patiently explain, while providing sources, how Trump is not normal and is a danger to the country's future.

Of course journalists have to compete with the upcoming tsunami of ads and even disinformation.

Potential voters who don’t read the news won’t be able to escape what could be a combined $1 billion in campaign spending in the swing states. It’s been a lot easier to avoid Trump since he left the White House and Twitter. That won’t be so true in the heat of a presidential general election. Journalists have to keep in mind that voters in swing states may not be thinking of all the details now, but they’re likely to be much more attuned by the time they vote. 

When we run across articles or news vids about MAGA Republicans which are well produced and don't require a lot of background information to understand, we should share them with low information voters we know. If there's a good cartoon which amplifies the points made in the article, send it along. There's no rule which says you can't be informative and entertaining at the same time.

This applies to current stuff as well as the disastrous Trump presidency. Reminding people that Trump sabotaged immigration reform and improved border security through his House flunky Speaker "MAGA Mike" Johnson is essential.

A sure way to lose the election is to assume that we don't need to do anything. As I've said before, the era of slackerism is over; being politically and civically engaged is the price of democracy.

[plethoraworldatlas]

In the weeks leading up to President Biden's withdrawal from the presidential race, most of the editorial boards, party activists, and elected officials calling for him to end his reelection campaign focused on only one issue: age.

But there was another reason President Biden needed to drop out: Gaza.

Long before President Biden's debate meltdown sparked panic in the Democratic establishment, his support for the Israeli government's war in Gaza sparked outrage in the Democratic base, where 56 percent of the party's supporters have described the war as a genocide.

At least half a million Democratic voters protested President Biden's support for the Gaza genocide by voting uncommitted or submitting blank ballots during the presidential primaries earlier this year, including over 100,000 people in Michigan, 88,000 in North Carolina and 46,000 in Minnesota.

Over 1 in 5 Democrats or independents in key swing states said they were less likely to vote for President Biden due to the war, according to a YouGov-AJP-Action poll in May. Over a quarter of those voters said that an immediate and lasting ceasefire, full entry of humanitarian aid to Gaza, and conditions on military aid for Israel’s war were the minimum policy changes needed to secure or solidify their votes for Biden.

Many Democratic voters were alienated even more by President Biden's failure to call out reports of anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobic violence with the same fervor he uses to call out reports of antisemitic rhetoric, as well as his criticism of the diverse, overwhelmingly peaceful student protests on college campuses.

Frustrated voters included Muslim Americans, Arab Americans, Black Americans, young people and others who helped carry him to victory in 2020. If those voters ended up supporting third party candidates or boycotting the presidential race altogether in November—as some promised to do if Biden remained on the ticket and did not change course—they could have easily tipped the results in Michigan and other key swing states.

Now that President Biden has withdrawn from the presidential race, Vice President Kamala Harris has a chance to turn the page, chart a new course, and win back those voters, including American Muslims.

That's what our coalition of American Muslim political organizations is calling on her to do.

Vice President Harris has already neutralized the concerns of voters worried about President Biden's age. Now she must address the concerns of voters who opposed his support for the war on Gaza.

Many American Muslims are open to supporting Vice President Harris if she distances herself from President Biden's Gaza policy, respectfully engages with all of our community leaders, picks a vice presidential nominee who does not have a history of explicit hostility towards our community like Governor Josh Shapiro, and commits to concrete policy proposals that would stop the genocide, end the broader occupation of the Palestinian people, and establish a just peace.

Taking these steps will set her apart from not only President Biden, but also from President Trump.

Most American Muslims do not want Donald Trump to return to office for perhaps obvious reasons. The former president has made it clear that he plans to round up undocumented immigrants as part of the largest mass deportation in American history, reinstate the Muslim Ban, stack the federal civil service with political loyalists, and pursue a foreign policy just as or even more, immoral than President Biden’s foreign policy.

...

Vice President Harris now has the opportunity to contrast herself with Trump on this issue in ways President Biden could not. She has already built up some goodwill in the American Muslim community by using a noticeably more humane tone when discussing Palestinian suffering compared to others in the administration.

[beeseverywhen]

A small but very noisy section of the British news media seems to have come close to losing its collective sanity. The election campaign is maybe not quite what the people concerned would have wanted: the Tories are locked into an ever-deepening crisis, now crystallised by a gambling scandal, Labour is capably holding itself together, and the limited fireworks let off by Reform UK do not threaten the election’s seemingly inevitable result. So, for want of any other excitement, they have turned to another source of fun: opinion polls.

Has there ever been a campaign so dominated by them? For seven or eight years now, the most powerful polling companies have been developing so-called – and yes, I had to look this up – multilevel regression with poststratification (or MRP) surveys, which contact tens of thousands of voters, calculate results based on a range of granular demographic details, and result in findings that can be sifted constituency by constituency. The fact that YouGov used this method to unexpectedly predict 2017’s hung parliament has given it an air of quasi-scientific magic; now, the publication of one such poll after another is greeted in some quarters with a huge level of expectation.

The result is postmodern news that a certain kind of 20th-century social theorist would have loved. The Conservatives, the Telegraph screamed last week, are on track to “slump to just 53 seats”. The Labour party, it said, was predicted to win a mind-boggling 516. Here, it seemed, was full-blown Starmergeddon, and the advent of a one-party state. But no one had voted and nothing had actually happened. Nor, by definition, could anyone be certain that the predictions were in any way accurate. “‘We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning,” said Jean Baudrillard in his 1981 masterpiece Simulacra and Simulation. In this election, that distinction hardly seems to matter.

Clearly, the whole ritual – new poll shock coming at 5pm! – suits the dopamine-driven world of social media. And entirely predictably, along with the bog-standard polling that echoes most MRP predictions of a Labour landslide, all this is now feeding into the contest itself. Predictions of a red “supermajority” offer the Tories one last hope of shoring up their vote, which explains why the rightwing papers have gone MRP bonkers. Meanwhile, there are two dangers for Labour. One is centred on people who want a change of government assuming it is written in the stars and so staying at home. The other lies in an election discourse that might view anything other than an imagined megavictory as an anticlimax – or, even more absurdly, a failure.

The problem is that the deafening din generated by poll after poll threatens to drown that stuff out – and thereby debase the democratic process. Elections ought to represent potential moments of reckoning, when we all talk about the state of the country and its future, the struggles and travails people go through, and the different visions of the future they have. If the people meant to lead that conversation are hyperventilating about uniform swings, representative samples and which polling company is going to be proved right, those things get lost.

There is also an even bigger risk. As the uneasy public mood proves, this is an age of profound political alienation, when nasty populists can too easily accuse the mainstream media and Westminster politicians of being part of a remote elite whose members are all the same. Because it robs politics of meaningful substance, polling hysteria gives that kind of talk the ring of truth. So does the banal framing of the election as a wholly foregone conclusion.

Other countries ban polling during election campaigns, which is one way of dealing with the problem – though that seems a very clunky response to an issue that may have a more stereotypically British solution. We should treat all those polls with deep scepticism; the best thing, in fact, may be to marvel at their arcane machinations, occasionally recognise their prescience, and laugh. The election, just to remind everyone, happens on 4 July. The rest is noise.

It's not a sure thing that Labour will win. For the love of God don't let complacency deliver us right back to the Tories. Go out and vote.

[nodynasty4us]

I suspect the verdict won't matter much in the presidential race, but I wonder if I'll be wrong about that because of the apparent Trump strategy, which is to pitch the post-verdict message only to MAGA loyalists. Trump can't win solely with cult voters -- he needs the swing voters who are gravitating toward him because there seems to be more war these days and groceries cost more. A few of them might be alienated by this verdict, unless he keeps them on his side. Or maybe he doesn't need to try -- they just want change, and they'll vote for him anyway. But if there's a chance they're wavering, he's not doing much to try to win them back. It's an all-base strategy. I hope that's a huge mistake.

Steve M., No More Mister Nice Blog: OF COURSE TRUMP AND HIS FOLLOWERS ARE LINKING THE VERDICT TO IMMIGRATION