#Trump makes play for Michigan’s

[trendbuzze]

"Trump's Vision for American Industry: A Game-Changing Address to UAW Members 🚀 Don't Miss Out on the Insights!"

Trump makes play for Michigan’s : In a pivotal moment on September 27, 2023, former President Donald J. Trump addressed the United Auto Workers (UAW) at an event that captured the essence of American industry and its relationship with labor unions. The speech, held in Michigan, marked a significant juncture in the political landscape, as Trump delved into critical issues impacting the automotive…

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Kamala Harris herself has now borrowed Walz’s lingo and is also calling her opponents “weird”, while Walz is all over our television screens, bolstering the vice-president’s candidacy and playing “attack dog” against the Trump/Vance Republican ticket. I’ll be honest: last month, I would have struggled to pick Walz out of a lineup. This month? I’m Walz-pilled. I have watched dozens of his interviews and clips. And I’m far from alone. He has an army of new fans across the liberal-left: from former Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign co-chair Nina Turner, to one-time Democratic congressman Beto O’Rourke, to gun-control activist David Hogg. “In less than 6 days, I went from not knowing who Tim Walz is,” joked writer Travis Helwig on X, “to deep down believing that if he doesn’t get the VP nod I will storm the capitol.” According to Bloomberg, the Harris campaign has narrowed down its “top tier” of potential running mates to three “white guy” candidates: Walz (hurrah!), plus the Arizona senator Mark Kelly and Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro. Both Kelly and Shapiro have their strengths – and both represent must-win states for the Dems. Allow me, however, to make the clear case for Walz. First, there’s his personality. The 60-year-old governor would bring energy, humor and some much-needed bite to the Democratic presidential ticket. There’s a reason why his videos have been going viral in recent days. Tim Kaine he ain’t. Pick the charismatic and eloquent Walz and you have America’s Fun Uncle ready to go. Then, there’s his résumé. A popular midwest governor from a rural town. A 24-year veteran of the army national guard. A high school teacher who coached the football team to its first state championship. It’s almost too perfect! Finally, there’s his governing record. You will struggle to find a Democratic governor who has achieved more than Walz in the space of a single legislative session. Not Shapiro. Not JB Pritzker of Illinois. Not even Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan. [...] Think about it. Democrats can have Tim Walz on the ticket, who called the anti-war, pro-Palestinian ‘uncommitted’ movement “civically engaged” and praised them for “asking for a change in course” and “for more pressure to be put on” the White House, or they can have Josh Shapiro, who called for a crackdown on anti-war, pro-Palestinian college protesters and even compared them to the KKK. They can have Walz on the ticket, who has reportedly “emerged among labor unions as a popular pick” after signing “into law a series of measures viewed as pro-worker” including banning non-compete agreements and expanding protections for Amazon warehouse workers, or they can have Mark Kelly, who opposed the pro-labor Pro Act in the Senate (but has since touted support for it). They can have Walz, who guaranteed students in Minnesota not just free breakfasts but free lunches, or Shapiro, who has courted controversy in Pennsylvania with his support for school vouchers. They can have Walz, who calls his Republican opponents “weird” and extreme, or Kelly, who calls his Republican opponents “good people” who are “working really hard”. This isn’t rocket science. Walz is the obvious choice. Not only is he the ideal “white guy” running mate for Harris, against both Trump and Vance, but he is already doing the job on television and online, lambasting Vance in particular over IVF treatment and insisting he mind his “own damn business”.

Zeteo News founder Mehdi Hasan for The Guardian on why picking Tim Walz as Kamala Harris's running mate is the best option (07.29.2024).

Zeteo News founder Mehdi Hasan wrote in The Guardian why Tim Walz should be Kamala Harris’s running mate. Hasan’s opinion piece is worth reading.

[unsuitablepet]

What Can Canada Do About It?

Alright ya hosers, buckle up. I am not usually one to make huge text posts but this is going to be long and goddam irate. There will, however, be things in this that will be actionable, so if you're a fellow Canuck, give ‘er a read, and feel free to share, reblog, print it off and staple it to a moose—whatever gets the word out. And to just to make sure our ol' neighbours can't look in on us too easily, I'm gonna lace this thing with enough Canadianisms to make your toque spin.

To any of our neighbours who are up for the challenge of deciphering this maple-syrup-coded manifesto: keep in mind that we don't have anything against regular Americans. The guy who's threatening our country and screwing us over is the same guy who's threatening and screwing yours. Fuckin' buddy's downstairs thinking we wouldn't say boo to a goose, and we're just tryin' to remind him who exactly those gooses are named after, eh? I hope at least some of you will get that.

OK, beauts. Let's get into it.

I've got mes yeux dans la graisse de bines seeing Canadians act like we don't have a good hand in this absolute gong-show of a trade war. Of course we do. We’ve got a lot of leverage, and we can get 'er done. And it starts with the ol’ classic: buying Canadian. But we know that one already and that’s just the warm-up. There are also other things our government can leverage that would be deeply felt - to the point of makin' sure their economy falls arse over kettle along with us.

We are the US's largest trading partner. Last year we exported roughly $450b fuckin' piasse (CAD) to the US in electricity alone. That’s an awful lot of hydro, folks. So, let’s say we just... cut that off. Flip the breaker. Not forever, but just long enough for them to know we're serious. And when we bring it back? Buddies, we do it at an absolute piss-show of a mark-up.

Canada supplies over half of U.S. crude oil imports—4.3 million barrels per day. That's a couple-three too many to just replace overnight. That means if we turn off the taps, they can kiss those gas prices goodbye, ‘cause they’d be skyrocketing to $5–$7 per gallon, roundabaouts. And higher energy costs would increase inflation, worsening the cost-of-living crisis faster than a deer on the 1A.

Canada also supplies about 10% of total U.S. natural gas consumption. Minnesota, Michigan, Illinois, and the Northeast rely heavily on Canadian gas, especially in the winter to keep the wind from cutting 'em in half. A sudden loss would lead to shortages and insane heating costs, particularly when it's colder than a witches' tit in a brass bra out and a bunny hug alone won't save ya... which is now, conveniently! Factories would also see costs rise by a significant percentage (though not as much as regular folks would because America).

That said, Industries that rely on fuel from the Great White North are still going to start seeing prices that cost more than a Leafs ticket in the playoffs, with oil refineries, agriculture, and manufacturing industries bein' especially kicked in the mitts.

Trump's all full of piss and vinegar, swearin' up and down that the U.S. can produce all its own energy. Okay, bud. Giv'r. In the meantime, we could be slick as a smelts and sell some of that oil to Mexico instead (we already do a bit but there's room to almost double how much), which would have the added bonus of helping them dodge some of these tariffs that are about as useful as tits on a bull while we’re at it. Sure, it’s a little spicy CUSMA-wise, but you know what else is a bit spicy for CUSMA? Trump’s goddamn tariffs. So in for a loonie, in for a toonie, my friends. Let him challenge it - that would trigger NATO oversight and I'm pretty sure that dog won't hunt.

The great thing about this is, should Fürher von Cheeto realize he fucked up but not want to admit it, his only other play would be to increase imports from OPEC. Last I checked, OPEC was made up of countries who's hackles he's already gotten up by supporting Israel (Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the UAE), as well as countries who he referred to as "shit hole countries" and/or accused of just being criminals and rapists (Venezuela, Libya, Algeria, Nigeria, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, and Congo). I'm sure the screeching in would go super well.

Cutting off our energy would knock down the U.S. GDP by almost 1%, and could raise inflation by up to 2% very quickly. This is just the energy sector and we're already havin' a time, folks!

Now, let's talk about critical minerals!

We are sitting on a goddam goldmine. Or, well, a lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite, copper, rare earth elements (REEs) and uranium mine—but you get the idea. If we cut off mineral exports to the U.S., this whole hootenanny would turn into a real tire fire real quick. Canada is the lead dog in the sled when it comes to supplying most of these materials to the U.S., and they're essential for defense, technology, and green energy (though we know the leafs will make the playoffs before he ever gives a hoot about that last one).

Let's see what that would look like: right off the hop, the EV, and Battery Industries would be totally hooped. Canada supplies 88% of U.S. nickel imports, which is a necessary material in EV batteries. We're also a top supplier of cobalt and lithium, and we're almost 100% of the US' graphite supply, all of which are essential for Tesla, Ford, GM, and others to make their cars. And the icing on your timbit? All of Elon Musk's companies right now rely almost exclusively on us hosers for cobalt. Without this, EV production could plummet, resulting in thousands of jobs lost, increased prices, and tardy adoption timelines. It would also cause Musk's stock and net worth to drop faster than a puck onto fresh ice, just sayin'.

(Note: he'd still be stupid rich because the world is a terrible place, but he'd be slightly less stupid rich)

Sort of on that note, say goodbye to American-made smartphones, laptops, and semiconductors. Most of the materials the tech industry needs for that come from us. That supply chain will be colder than a banker's heart when chip production in the U.S. freezes over.

Oh, and this one's my favourite... DEFENSE. Guess who the big cheese is when it comes to supplying uranium, the thing the US needs to keep making nukes, submarines, and reactors? Canada! Not that we should be especially proud of this one. We are also a major supplier of Rare Earth Elements (REEs), that they use for fighter jets, guided missiles, and satellites. This would not only mean delays in the manufacturing of all this military equipment, but would leave the US with no option but to turn to China for the REEs. Both those things are - you guessed it - actual threats to national security. Guess the DoD is about to get redder than a Mountie in a blizzard... maybe in more ways than one.

Being so fucking for real, though: trade war or no trade war, we need to stop providing critical military materials to a nation that is actively threatening not only our sovereignty, but that of our allies. Seriously, what are we doing?

To add more curds to this poutine, this cutoff could lead to the offing of nuclear power plants relying on Canadian uranium. Add that to the fact that we also supply critical minerals for wind turbines, solar panels, and energy storage, and not only is almost the entire green energy sector getting dragged to the back forty, but the energy crisis we talked about earlier would get rougher than a badger's backside, particularly in nuclear-dependent states.

It would take years for the U.S. to find someone else to help 'em fill their boots, which means critical minerals are probably Canada’s biggest geopolitical asset in this. And it's not like we'd be sitting around waiting for America to come crawling back. The EU---Sweden and Germany specifically---are looking to find more reliable ethically sourced minerals. Would they ever be able to bring in the kind of Muskoka money that the US does for us now? No. But it might make the hit more tolerable on our end, while also opening the door for more future cellies with the EU.

And these are just the things we could cut off completely. But why keep all our eggs in the basket of a country led by a man who couldn't empty his boots if the instructions were on the heel? Trade diversification in general is an effective tool to leverage our power here and stabilize our economy on a long-term basis. And when it comes to opportunities for that, the world is our prairie oyster:

We could ramp up our Agricultural trade with the EU. We already have CETA in place and our goods meet and exceed their quality regulation.

We could parter with EU countries on sustainable energy projects (we already have a lot of groundwork done for that, so we could put it into place faster than most Canadian learn to say "je suis un ananas").

Japan’s craving high-quality beef and pork, and our farmers could absolutely dominate that market.

We could virtually flood the global dairy market (or at least the US' share of it). We literally produce more dairy than we consume right now because of a stupid clause in CUSMA (which, again, seems to be going out the window) where we're not allowed to export our excess dairy in order to protect the US dairy industry that would be completely priced out of the game if they had to compete with Canadian prices. So much for free market, eh? Canada’s dairy industry is also just more regulated and stable, meaning it could present itself as a more reliable dairy exporter to regions where the U.S. dominates, like Latin America and Asia.

We could get corn products (and other produce, but especially corn) exclusively from Mexico, a country that actually determines US corn prices because they're a government subsidized industry, and the government deliberately subsidizes to just under Mexican corn prices in order to stay competitive.

We could invest in establishing Agricultural Infrastructure Development projects with Brazil and Argentina, which would streamline their distribution and solve a lot of their supply chain logistics needs, strengthening all our economies and reducing American dependencies on all sides

I don't really love this one, but we could expand our aerospace and defense sector. The U.S. is currently the world’s largest exporter of aircraft and defense technology, but Canada has a really strong aerospace sector too, with Bombardier, CAE, Pratt & Whitney Canada, etc. There are lots of countries (including some neutral/allied countries) wanting to reduce reliance on U.S. military exports due to political reasons, which could open opening opportunities for Canada.

We could - and should, even for just internal reasons - expand our pharmaceutical industry. The U.S. dominates global pharmaceutical exports, but Canada produces many high-quality generic drugs at lower costs, and our public healthcare system, flawed as it may be, ensures strict quality control, making our pharmaceuticals appealing to countries with emerging healthcare systems. Also, a lot of countries would just like to reduce reliance on U.S. pharma giants like Pfizer, Merck, and J&J simply due to costs. If we expand generic drug exports to Latin America, Africa, and Asia, compete with U.S. companies on vaccine and biotech exports, and sell cheaper insulin & prescription drugs to Mexico and Europe, we'd seriously undercut a massive sector in the US. We'd also have more accessible drugs for us, and we could partner with a variety of allied countries on manufacturing and R&D investments that would result in great deals for them and a faster implementation and expansion timeline for us.

We could revisit the CANZUK agreement - ideally not from a colonialist tradionalist lens this time (fucking conservatives) - and establish a proper free trade and free movement agreement between Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK, focused on growing the tourism, services, business, banking, and tech sectors rather than import/export of agricultre and raw materials, which would let us circumvent some of the logisitcal issues initially brought up with establishing long-distance supply chains, while strengthening each country's economy and trading power and encouraging shared cross border investment and economic shares in R&D and manufacturing.

And finally, my favourite but the absolute most longshot option, we could join the EU. It's a very very very long shot (no one should hold their breath), but it's not like those discussions haven't happened. If not fully join, we could angle at becoming an associate member, or expand CETA or establish some other such agreement to allow free movement, industrial development incentives, and further free trade opportunities.

And if we absolutely must trade with the U.S., we can be tighter than bark on a tree and process our goods through third-party countries. By setting up subsidiaries in Latin America, Asia, or the EU, we could reclassify our exports under different tariff rates. Sure, our allies would get a cut, but it might still be less than the tariffs in some cases. Example? Shipping goods through Saint-Pierre and Miquelon (yep, that tiny island just up the line from Newfoundland) technically counts as shipping through France. Would it be feasible for everything? No. But it’d be just feasible enough to piss off the right people and let 'em know that the deerflies are out. Buddy might retaliate with tariffs on the EU, but the US economy would go straight in the fishin' hole if he tariffed himself out of trade deals with ALL of us.

Finally, on that subject, we are not exactly in a canoe without a paddle. We've got friends in NATO and we've got friends in the Commonwealth, one of who's core pillars is to "help grow economies and boost trade." We can find ways to come together so we're all laughin' by the end of it. We can also put pressure on our NATO allies to impose tariffs and sanctions on the US if this carries on down the road a ways, or to turn over some of the US' share of their spending to our industries whenever possible. And we should be after doin' that with Mexico already.

Is this all feasible and would this all work? No, of course not! I'm not an economist or an international trade specialist or any kind of top lobster when it comes to this stuff... In fact, I'm willing to bet there's nuance behind a lot of what I say that would make things worse! I'm just someone who did too much reading while losing sleep and taking notes on all of this. I would encourage you to do your own research as well and not just trust an anonymous stranger from the internet! But once you do and you have a sense of what you think would be a good idea, fuckin' give'r!!! Quit chirpin’ and start workin’, buds.

We are still lucky enough to live in a democracy where our elected officials do - for the most part - respond to their constituents, and are obligated to at minimum receive a compiled briefings on all correspondence that comes in for them. Right now, this is the most I've ever seen Canadians come together, as the vast majority of our representatives recognize this for the threat that it is, and are unwilling to get smoked like a cheap pack of darts. Flawed as our system might be, it is still functioning and it is still our right to participate in it and make our voices heard. So, write your MPs and your MPPs and ask them to expedite the cutoff of electricity and critical minerals to the US.... or whatever demand you land on after looking in to things yourself! While you're at it, write to every provincial premier, and to every cabinet minister, and to all the major party leaders. Hell, write to your mayor, to Industry Groups, to Cross-Border Coalitions... quelqu'un qu'y a du poids dans l’arène!

These are rights we can and SHOULD be exploiting, and more than that it is our duty as citizens who care about our democracy to exert political pressure on our leaders to move in the direction we want them to. But you gotta be in the canoe to paddle the river! Go exercise that right and make some demands. Nicely, but firmly. And repeatedly when it comes to the elected officials. This day and age, you can even schedule and automate the writing, tailoring, and sending of these messages (though be responsible with that). Basically, don't sit down and shut up until we get what we want.

Be a nuisance, but be polite about it. Be fuckin' Canadian... eh?

[politicalprof]

The polling conundrum

So we are there. Less than 36 hours until campaign ads (basically) end. We can make it!

For those who are poll-obsessed (Politcalprof is NOT), this is the time of tea leaves. Every detail, every hint, every turn is parsed and participled and probed beyond the tensile strength of titanium.

And yet no one really knows anything.

I want to suggest we are in of two basic situations, but we can't know which one until the event is over. (Paging Dr. Heisenberg!)

--1): Things are indeed as tight as they seem. The pollsters have figured out how to build representative pools in a time when no one answers their phones, and they've figured out to massage the data into a representative mix that accurately reflects who will vote on election day. Thus, their predictions are roughly accurate, and while there is always a margin of error, the election is a nail-biter that will come down to seven swing states and a couple of hundred thousand votes.

--2): There's an anomaly in this year's voting pool that the pollsters haven't caught. In other words, there's a surprise distribution of voters in 2024 that pollsters haven't accounted for in their predictions. So their models are wrong. This surprise distribution could, of course, be a mobilized right OR a mobilized left; there is no scientific reason to assume one "surprise" group is going to be mobilized while another isn't. In either case, the election is not actually that close, and one side or the other is heading for a decent-sized win.

If you're Elon Musk, you're convinced that the second path is true, and that the mobilized force is aggrieved white men and their allies who are going to go to the polls to "save" America. (Hence the heavy reliance on anti-immigrant and anti-trans messaging.) He certainly has been promoting this line heavily.

But I'd guess that IF there is a "secret" force out there whose voting percentage is higher than normal and whose force the pollsters' models haven't accounted for, it's women. Most of whom will have been mobilized by Dobbs and its aftermath.

Beyond the anecdotal, one piece of evidence suggests this may be the case: the Selzer poll from Iowa that has Kamala Harris leading in that state. Even if the poll is wrong, and Harris loses Iowa anyway, if the size of Harris' loss is unexpectedly small, that suggests that women have mobilized to a greater extent than pollsters have realized. It may also suggest that fewer men are voting Trump than predicted. In either case, it suggests the polls have been leaning Trump as an artifact of the pollsters' algorithms, not political reality.

Of course we won't know which, if either, of these situations is real until *after* the election. Perhaps not even by tomorrow. But if Iowa is close I'd expect the blue wall of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin to hold, and several states like Arizona and Georgia to be in play. If Iowa reverts to type and the Selzer poll is just wrong, then Trump's chances are pretty good.

How's that for reading tea leaves?

[mariacallous]

The nomination of Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic presidential candidate has shaken up the race in ways that have yet to fully play out. However, given the fact that she could become the first woman U.S. president, it is surely worthwhile to consider the role of the women’s vote in November’s election.

One need only look back to the 2022 midterm election, where the women’s vote was arguably instrumental in rebuffing a predicted “red wave,” leading Democrats to exceed electoral expectations. That election occurred less than five months after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, allowing states to greatly restrict access to abortion. This led to a greater-than-expected Democratic vote among women, especially young women, for House of Representatives and other state candidates.

Now, just weeks after most polls had President Joe Biden trailing his Republican rival Donald Trump, the emergence of Vice President Harris as the Democratic candidate has already injected enthusiasm among many Democrats, especially women. As my Brookings colleague Elaine Kamarck has argued, women’s health, abortion, and reproductive freedom—issues Harris has championed—will once again be leading issues for this election. Harris has also voiced support for issues important to women including paid parental leave, child care, and the economy, as well as other policies that have the support of many younger and minority women. Indeed, the broader support of women’s groups for Harris’s candidacy has already been evident in funding and outreach.

With Harris’s nomination, will new enthusiasm and a voting surge among women be enough to power her to victory in November? To address this question, this analysis first reviews the role of women’s votes in recent presidential elections and which women’s demographic groups were most favorable to Democratic candidates. It next shows how gender differences in voter turnout have provided women with a numerical electoral advantage over men. The analysis proceeds to look at changes in the demographic make-up of women voters, from 2012 through the present, showing the rise of Democratic-favorable groups within their ranks. It concludes with a voter simulation of 2024 election results showing what recent polls imply, if we assume that the new enthusiasm for Harris translates into higher voter turnout and increased Democratic support among women, both dynamics that could help increase her chances for victory in November.

Women have a history of backing Democratic candidates in presidential elections

Examining gender differences in presidential voting preferences shows that women have voted for Democrats over Republicans in every presidential election since 1984.1

This is evident for recent elections, as seen in Figure 1, which shows the D-R (Democratic minus Republican) vote margins by gender for presidential elections between 2000 and 2020. In each case, the D-R margins are positive for women and generally (though not always) negative for men, and women voted more strongly Democratic than men, regardless of whether a Democrat or Republican ultimately won the presidency.

Election year 2020 showed sharp gender disparities for the seven battleground states, displayed in Figure 2. In each of these states, only one of which (North Carolina) Trump carried, women registered positive D-R margins compared with negative margins for men. The widest gender disparities were in the three “blue wall” states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, as well the southern state of Georgia.

Gender differences also pervaded demographic groups in the 2020 presidential election (see figure 3), as was the case in earlier elections. D-R margins are higher for women than for men in groups where women voted strongly Democratic: Black voters, Hispanic voters, and voters aged 18 to 29. Even for non-college white women voters—who favored Republicans—the negative D-R margins are not as large as those of men. Only among Asian American voters were men’s D-R margins higher than women’s.

Women’s turnout rates are higher

Perhaps even more important than partisan preferences, turnout rates—the share of eligible voters who vote—will help dictate women’s influence in the coming election. Turnout rates for women have exceeded those for men in presidential elections dating back to 1980. Figure 4 depicts gender differences in turnout for presidential elections since 2000. The 2020 election showed the highest overall turnout rates in decades. Because of their higher turnout rates, and the fact that women live longer than men, the 2020 election had 9.7 million more female than male voters.

Largely because of their higher turnout rates, women comprised more than half of all voters (53%) in 2020. Yet their shares vary across demographic groups (see Figure 5).  Women comprised 58% of all Black voters, 55% of Asian voters and 54% of Hispanic voters. Fifty-four percent (54%) of voters aged 65 and older were also women. And among white non-college graduate voters, a group that tends to vote Republican, women still comprised a majority (52%).

The female electorate is becoming more diverse and highly educated

As the size of the female electorate increases, its demographic makeup is changing. Figure 6 shows the shifts in the profile of eligible women voters between 2012 and 2024 by race and education. Notably, there are gains in women’s groups that tend to vote Democratic—white college graduates and people of color—and a decline in the women’s group that tends to vote Republican—white non-college graduates. For the first time in a presidential election, the latter group will make up less than 40% of the women’s electorate.

The seven battleground states, shown in Figure 7, also display similar shifts in the demographic profiles of their female electorates. In each, there is a decline in the share of white non-college graduate women, and an increase in the share of women of color. This is occurring in the “whiter” states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, as well as the more diverse states of Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and North Carolina. In Nevada, for example, the share of women who identify as white non-college graduates declined from 48% in 2012 to 35% in 2024, while at the same time the share of women who identify as Black, Hispanic, Asian or other nonwhite races rose from 36% in 2012 to 47% in 2024. Thus, with respect to demographic attributes, the female electorates in each state have become more Democratic-leaning in their voter profiles.

Simulating the 2024 election after Harris announcement

Polls taken both before and after the shift from Biden to Harris as the likely Democratic nominee offer crude indications of what the 2024 election might hold. Three polls of likely voters conducted by the New York Times/Siena College on June 26, July 3, and July 25—after Biden bowed out of the race and endorsed Harris—reveal the changes that took place in men’s and women’s D-R voting margins (see Figure 8).

The D-R margins for women–at 14% for Harris vs. Trump on July 25, were especially high, though countered by a still-high negative D-R margin of 17% for men.

Still, the high women’s D-R margin favoring Harris greatly reduced the overall D-R margin compared with the earlier two Biden vs. Trump margins shown in Table 1. That is, in the two polls taken while Biden was still the assumed Democratic nominee, the negative D-R margins of -4% and -6% (44%  Biden vs. 48% Trump on June 26; and 43% Biden vs. 49% Trump on July 3) strongly favored Trump. Yet, the July 25 poll for Harris vs. Trump reduced the D-R margin to just -0.6% (47.5 for Harris vs. 48.1 for Trump) when we applied this to a simulation model discussed below.

Of course, the July 25 poll was taken just after Biden withdrew and endorsed Harris as the likely Democratic nominee. Clearly, Harris’s campaign had not yet fully begun and the immediate support from many women’s groups suggests that both female turnout and voting preference could increase on Harris’s behalf in the weeks and months ahead. To estimate these likely effects, we conducted simulations of national D-R margins—a base simulation—and two additional simulations based on assumptions of greater women’s turnout and a stronger voter preference for Harris (see Table 1).

All three simulations begin with the 2024 national female and male eligible voter populations reported in the Census Bureau’s monthly Current Population Survey. The “base” simulation applies the 2020 election female and male voter turnout rates, presented above, and the Harris vs. Trump voter margins from the July 25 poll shown in Figure 8. The second simulation alters the base simulation by increasing women’s turnout rate by 10%, from 68.4% to 75.2%, larger than the 5.1% rise in female turnout which occurred between 2016 and 2020. The third simulation alters the second simulation by also increasing the female D-R voting margin by 5 percentage points.

The results in Table 1 show that while the base simulation yields a small Trump advantage, a 10% rise in women’s turnout would bring a small Harris advantage. Moreover, both increasing women’s turnout by 10% and the women’s D-R vote advantage by 5 percentage points would yield a clear Harris win (49.2% Harris vs. 46.3% Trump). These assumptions, reflecting a rise in women’s enthusiasm for Harris between now and Election Day, could put a popular vote win for her well within reach. It is also possible that the strong Trump voter preference for men, reported in the New York Times/Siena College poll, could shift as more male voters become familiar with her campaign.

The impact of an energized women’s voting base

The simulations conducted here make plain that rising women’s enthusiasm for Kamala Harris’s candidacy could lead to consequential shifts in the 2024 election through increases in voter turnout and voter preference. This is especially notable given the recent history of women’s support of Democratic candidates in national and congressional elections. Beyond looking at polls alone, simulations such as these show how taking into account the eligible voter base and rising voter turnout rates can affect election results.

These simulations should not be viewed as predictions; much will depend on how well Harris can continue to energize an already favorable female voter base. It also depends on her performance in crucial battleground states, which will determine how she fares in the Electoral College. What these simulations do show is how an enthusiastic voting bloc, when translated into voter turnout and voting preferences, could impact the final election result this coming November.

[beardedmrbean]

A Michigan man used an an all-terrain vehicle to run over and critically injure an 80-year-old man who was putting a Trump sign in his yard, in what police have described as a politically motivated attack.

The 22-year-old suspect in Sunday’s vehicle-ramming in the city of Hancock called police to confess before apparently taking his own life, authorities say.

Before targeting the elderly man, police say, the suspect vandalised two parked vehicles, smashing the windows of one that displayed a Trump sticker, and damaging the tyres of another that had a sticker supporting police.

The rampage took place just over a week after a 20-year-old would-be assassin attempted to kill Donald Trump at a political rally in Pennsylvania.

"The crimes reported in the city of Hancock appeared to be politically motivated, involving victims who displayed Trump election signs as well as law enforcement appreciated stickers and flags commonly referred to as 'thin blue line' paraphernalia," the Houghton County Sheriff's Office said in a statement.

The 80-year-old man was taken to hospital with critical injuries after being struck from behind by the suspect's ATV.

On Monday, police went to a nearby home after receiving a call from a person who said he wanted to "confess a crime involving an ATV driver within the last 24 hours" and asking police to come pick him up.

When officers arrived at the home, they found the suspect dead from what they believe was a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

"What this has done to this community is pretty upsetting," Hancock Police Chief Tami Sleeman told the Detroit News. "Our concern is the safety of everybody here. Politics should not bring violence."

The police chief added that nobody else is believed to have played a role in the attack. Electronics have been seized from the man's home.

The FBI is involved in the investigation.

A spokesman for Donald Trump's likely Democratic opponent in November, Kamala Harris, as well as Michigan's Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer, each released statements condemning political violence, according to the New York Times.

The shooting of the Republican White House candidate spurred bipartisan calls to lower the temperature of political rhetoric in the run-up to November's election, but the results have been mixed.

Last Friday police in Jupiter, Florida, arrested Michael Wiseman, 68, on suspicion of making online threats towards Trump and his running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance, and their families.

[qqueenofhades]

-Quickly skitters into the inbox, with a boom box and an increasingly bass boosted version-

🎶I PUT MY HANDS UP THEY’RE PLAYING MY SONG THE BUTTERFLIES FLY AWAY-🎶

- Party In The USA anon, on the recent glorious news

Look. LOOK. I know we've had technically bigger fish, but the Georgia case is a Big Fucking Deal. Because:

It is a MAJOR indictment both in terms of scope and seriousness of charges. Not just Trump, but *eighteen* of his allies and cronies got charged with RICO (anti-racketeering, often used against mob bosses) felonies, including Rudy Giuliani (I repeat, HAHAHAHAHHAHAHA), Jeff Clark, Mark Meadows, and other high-profile Trumpworld enablers

No Lindsey Graham (at least yet) but I guess we can't have everything

It encompasses both in Georgia and other states where Trump illegally tried to alter election results (Michigan, Arizona, and Pennsylvania), as those activities related to a conspiracy centered on Georgia/Fulton County

This is the big whopper: TRUMP CANNOT CANCEL THIS INVESTIGATION EVEN IF HE GETS RE-ELECTED. He can shut down the federal Special Counsel investigations run through the DoJ, but this? Bupkis. And Georgia governor Brian Kemp, another of the Republicans who dutifully continues to defend Trump even as Trump slanders him up and down, CAN'T PARDON HIM.

That drives the Republicans NUTS. So nuts that they were, you guessed it, already on Faux News whining about how they should make Georgia change that law.

Boo-fucking-hoo, you absolute fucking wankers.

Also: we need to remember that Trump rose to political prominence by being wildly racist and xenophobic about America's first Black president. He has coddled and exalted white supremacists and white supremacist rhetoric at every turn, it has been the central defining feature of his campaign, and his election subversion efforts were chiefly aimed at canceling the votes of heavily Black cities (Atlanta, Philly, Detroit, etc.)

Trump also won in 2016 thanks to the Electoral College, itself designed as an element of structural racism, by defeating probably the most qualified and beyond any doubt most historic candidate there has ever been, after it was revealed that he was a serial sexual assaulter and after he screamed for months about LOCK HER UP (every Republican accusation is a confession, etc)

All that said, with Trump's vile, derogatory bile spewed at everyone, but especially a) Black people, b) women, and c) powerful Black women, it is a Big Fucking Deal that a powerful Black woman, aka his worst nightmare, pulled this trigger on him.

Don't get me wrong. I deeply appreciate me some Jack Smith. But he is also a white male special counsel appointed by the Department of Justice, and who used to work for the Hague prosecuting war crimes (true story). It's in his brief to do this.

Fani Willis is a county district attorney AND a Black woman, as Trump's nonstop shitgibbering on Truth Social just can't help himself from pointing out. This kind of sprawling, country-wide investigation against a wildly corrupt ex-president and his cohort of equally corrupt cronies is not something she is, in the normal course of things, ever expected to do, but she did it.

NINETEEN DEFENDANTS, Y'ALL. Including Trump. On 41 different charges. That's a hell of an indictment, and she knows it puts a target on her back, while (as noted) she doesn't have the resources and protections of the federal government/DOJ to do it.

Let's hear it for Fani Willis (and Judge Chutkan, who informed Trump the other day the more he runs his mouth, the faster she will proceed to trial) y'all.

Black Women Get Shit Done.

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from Canary Media:

The Grain Belt Express, a $7 billion transmission line project that’s been more than a decade in development, has won conditional approval for a $4.9 billion federal loan guarantee.

The Grain Belt Express could enable 5 gigawatts’ worth of affordable, clean power to be developed on the windswept and sun-soaked Kansas plains and then delivered to customers in Missouri, Illinois, and broader eastern U.S. power markets. If finalized, the federal backing would help push the sorely needed transmission project over the finish line.

The proposed loan guarantee is the latest in a string of Biden administration actions aimed at bolstering the U.S. power grid. The country needs to rapidly build high-voltage transmission lines in order to accommodate new solar and wind power, reduce grid congestion that’s driving up electricity rates, and improve power system reliability in the face of extreme weather events.

Whether the Grain Belt Express will be able to make use of this financial support is unclear, however. Last week’s conditional commitment from the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office (LPO) may ultimately depend on whether the Trump administration decides to follow through with it.

The LPO has played a major role in the Biden administration’s clean energy agenda, announcing about $37 billion in loans and loan guarantees over the past four years. Recipients include electric vehicle and battery factories; battery mineral mining, processing, and recycling facilities; distributed solar and battery deployments; EV charging projects; makers of alternative aviation fuels; clean-hydrogen production plants;and the owner of a shuttered nuclear power plant in Michigan that hopes to restart it.

Roughly $25 billion of those commitments have yet to be finalized and contracted by the DOE, according to a late November tally from Politico. The LPO has been sprinting to complete these contracts in case the incoming Trump administration opts to freeze any in-progress loan agreements.

Many of the projects backed by the LPO are in Republican congressional districts, Politico reported. That includes the Grain Belt Express, which plans to use its conditional loan guarantee to finance the first phase of its 5-gigawatt high-voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission line — a 578-mile stretch from southwestern Kansas to Missouri. 

[modern-politics111]

Jill Stein & her voters are self-aggrandizing

These fools are going to help Trump more than they are going to help Palestine. Looking at polls in Michigan, the state is essentially in a tie and Stein and Co. are actively trying to take votes from Kamala because of the genocide in Gaza/Palestine. There's even videos of Stein's surrogates bragging about this goal (another video). Even Republicans are supporting Stein's push because they know that it will help them in the General. 

Stein has a no chance of winning and she is playing her voters as fool for saying that she does. Why believe her? She has never won a race - no matter how many times that she has tried at any level. But sure she'll win the presidency. She polls - at best - around two percent. That two percent would be enough to push Trump over the top in Michigan and Nationally.

They blame Kamala for Israel's actions in Gaza even though, as VP, she has little to no control over the military. They think that if they vote for Stein/against Kamala that the Dem party will start listening..? (How did that work out in 2016?) That is if we have any more elections following a Trump victory.

Have they heard that Trump wants to deport protestors? All these college protests will no longer be allowed if Trump has his way. We heard how Trump/Vance talk about the Haitian immigrants in Ohio and their disregard for their legal status and will move to deport them anyhow. I have sympathy for these Muslim and Arab voters that want justice for Palestine but under a Trump presidency, what's stopping him from deporting or jailing these voters? This is after all the man that implemented the Muslim ban but this time, he'll have the Supreme Court in his pocket.

Do they not realize that with Trump, Israel will be more embolden and Trump may even push them to be even more aggressive and spread the war across the region. 

Stein's petty strategy of going after Kamala voters will not push the Green Party's goals further. If Kamala wins, Kamala might consider them politically hostile. If she loses, all the Green Party policy goals would be destroyed, our democracy would could end, and Stein's voters could be arrested and/or deported. 

If Stein had any political sense she would endorse Kamala on the condition that Kamala calls for an arms embargo however that doesn't help the grift. 

I could go on but this whole thing just makes me so frustrated. You should watch Mehdi Hasan's interview with Jill Stein and her VP. He does a better job than I ever could.

[kineticpenguin]

I thought about this as I read a piece that Brian Beutler wrote on Friday titled, “Biden’s Critics on the Left Should Rethink the Concept of ‘Leverage.’” (I am not here to attack Beutler, who is often very thoughtful, but rather to discuss this entire genre of argument.) The essay is an extended critique of the “lazy thinking” of progressive activists who threaten not to vote for Biden as some sort of leverage in the struggle against his horrific policy on Israel and Gaza. This is a bad idea because Trump is worse, he says. “[For] at least as long as the GOP is a fascist formation, we should rethink the concept,” he writes. “[The] idea that boycotting politics amounts to savvy bargaining is wrong.” The first point I’d like to make about this is: Duh. Biden’s policies are better than Trump’s and if Biden loses and Trump wins politics would get worse. Do progressive activists, who are as a group deeply engaged in the issues, need thousands of words to understand this? To put a finer point on it: Who is this for? Setting aside the small number of accelerationists, who as I mentioned above are foolish, where exactly is this enormous group of left wing activists who are unable to understand that Trump is worse than Biden? For one thing, I am on the left and I know a lot of people on the left who go out in the streets and protest Israel, and in November, most of those people who are politically engaged will vote for Biden, because he is not as bad as Trump. Some portion of them will refuse to vote for Biden out of sheer disgust at the direct role he has played in the murder of thousands of civilians. In the context of 150 million voters across America, the number of those people is small. To the extent that there are places like Michigan where there are significant pockets of people who, you know, have had direct relatives blown up in Gaza and who therefore might not be able to bring themselves to pull the lever for the guy who sent the bombs, any electoral damage is 100% the fault of the Biden administration itself. Look in the mirror.

[slipstreamborne]

Do you not like Jill Stein? I saw a tag complaining about her numbers or something.

My formative election was the 2000 race where Bush "won" Florida and thus the presidency by less than 600 votes, and that "won" is in quotation marks because thanks to Republican shenanigans like the staged Brooks Brothers "riot" of Republican staffers demanding that the recount be shut down and a partisan supreme court ruling, we'll never know what the actual total was, and have had to live in the long, grim shadow of that election ever since.

Remembering the role Ralph Nader (who got 97,488 votes in Florida in 2000) played in all of that and the Green party's lackluster efforts to make inroads and change at the state and local levels makes it hard for me to take the party's objectives in the presidential race seriously.

Given everything that happened in 2020 and the GOP's/Trump's continued EVERYTHING, seeing 29k+ votes effectively tossed out of the electoral decision for even a "safe" state is nerve wracking (is any state really safe, with everything done to disenfranchise voters and sew distrust and violence?), let alone seeing 11k+ go her way in swing states like Michigan given that Biden won Georgia last time by just 11,779 votes.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Billboard

* * * *

NPR reports on Trump's 162 lies during last Thursday’s press conference.

The journalists in attendance at Trump's staged press-event last Thursday failed to challenge him when he spouted lie after lie. Some organizations did “fact checks” of the most egregious lies. But only one news organization has published a comprehensive analysis of every lie Trump told during the 90-minute press conference. See NPR, 162 lies and distortions in a news conference. NPR fact-checks former President Trump.

The report by NPR is exhaustive. It required a substantial amount of work and attention to detail. NPR and the reporters who researched the article deserve to be commended for their work. The article begins by noting that Trump told two lies per minute during the press conference!

A team of NPR reporters and editors reviewed the transcript of his news conference and found at least 162 misstatements, exaggerations and outright lies in 64 minutes. That’s more than two a minute. It’s a stunning number for anyone – and even more problematic for a person running to lead the free world. Politicians spin. They fib. They misspeak. They make honest mistakes like the rest of us. And, yes, they even sometimes exaggerate their biographies. The expectation, though, is that they will treat the truth as something important and correct any errors. But what former President Trump did this past Thursday went well beyond the bounds of what most politicians would do.

The byline on the article is Domenico Montanaro, but the text says it was written by a team of reporters and editors. I urge readers to provide feedback to NPR on its editorial decision to invest the time and resources to catalog Trump's lies. We must not allow Trump to exhaust us through the sheer volume of his lies. NPR didn’t let that happen for last Thursday’s staged press event. Kudos to NPR!

An article by Tom Nichols in The Atlantic also deserves attention. See The Truth About Trump’s Press Conference. (This article is accessible to all.) Nichols reviews the headlines in the NYTimes, WaPo, CNN and other media outlets, all of which focused on the impact of the news conference on the horse-race aspect of the election.

Nichols writes,

All of these headlines are technically true, but they miss the point: The Republican nominee, the man who could return to office and regain the sole authority to use American nuclear weapons, is a serial liar and can’t tell the difference between reality and fantasy. Donald Trump is not well. He is not stable. There’s something deeply wrong with him. Any of those would have been important—and accurate—headlines.

Sunday presented another opportunity for major media to redeem themselves and finally—finally—acknowledge that Trump is not well. Will they do so in their Monday editions? We can always hope. Read on!

Trump descends further into conspiracy, delusion, and deceit over the weekend.

Last week, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz visited Michigan in Air Force 2. They disembarked the plane and walked into a hangar that held an overflow crowd that spilled onto the tarmac. Estimates put the crowd size at about 12,000.

On Saturday, MAGA internet trolls began analyzing the “reflections” on the body and engines of Air Force 2 and could not see reflected images of the crowd. The trolls could not see the reflected images because they were examining curved surfaces that reflected light and images from directly beneath the plane—where no one was standing. The trolls should have spent more time in high school science classes than playing multi-player fantasy games online. But I digress.

The trolls immediately concluded that the images of the crowds were generated by AI autofill in Photoshop. That claim was immediately and unequivocally rebutted when video from major media outlets panned the crowd and Air Force 2 in a single shot, proving the crowds were real—not AI-generated images. That should have been the end of the story, right?

Wrong! On Sunday, Trump posted a rant on Truth Social in which he claimed that Harris and Walz were resorting to AI to make it appear that their crowd sizes were larger than Trump's. With apologies, I am going to reprint Trump's rant in full. Read as much as you can, and then meet me on the other side:

Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport? There was nobody at the plane, and she "A.l'd" it, and showed a massive "crowd" of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN'T EXIST! She was turned in by a maintenance worker at the airport when he noticed the fake crowd picture, but there was nobody there, later confirmed by the reflection of the mirror-like finish on the Vice Presidential Plane. She's a CHEATER. She had NOBODY waiting, and the "crowd" looked like 10,000 people! Same thing is happening with her fake "crowds" at her speeches. This is the way the Democrats win Elections, by CHEATING - And they're even worse at the Ballot Box. She should be disqualified because the creation of a fake image is ELECTION INTERFERENCE. Anyone who does that will cheat at ANYTHING!

One of two things is true: Trump believes that the images are faked (despite video by major new organizations) or he does not.

If Trump has fallen into delusion and conspiracy, that fact deserves front page treatment from every news outlet in America.

If Trump knows the images of the crowd are true, then he is setting up a claim that Democrats can only win the 2024 election by cheating, and that fact deserves front page treatment from every news outlet in America.

As I said, we shall see if the Monday editions of major news outlets say (a) Trump is descending into delusion, or (b) Trump is setting up an attack on integrity of presidential election for the second time!

[Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter]

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Sahil Kapur and Sarah Dean at NBC News:

ERIE, Pa. — Vice President Kamala Harris rallied a packed crowd Monday night in Erie County, a bellwether that has a knack for predicting who carries Pennsylvania, having mirrored the outcome of this crucial battleground state in the last four elections. Harris sharpened her attacks on Donald Trump, using a big screen to play clips of the former president calling for outlawing dissent and criticisms among “the enemy within.”

“A second Trump term would be a huge risk for America. And dangerous,” said Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee. “Donald Trump is increasingly unstable and unhinged. And he is out for unchecked power. He wants to send the military after American citizens. He has worked to prevent women from making their own health care decisions.” Harris’ trip kicks off a campaign blitz this week in a trio of Northern battlegrounds — Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — that could make or break her hopes of defeating Trump next month. Former President Barack Obama won Erie County comfortably when Pennsylvania was on a blue streak in 2008 and 2012; then Trump won it by about under 2 points in his successful 2016 campaign, before Joe Biden flipped it back by just 1 point in 2020 as he ousted Trump. “Erie County, you are a pivot county!” Harris told the crowd, urging them to vote. “How you all vote in presidential elections often ends up predicting the national result.”

The county is along Lake Erie in northwest Pennsylvania, sandwiched between eastern Ohio and upstate New York. Its median income is lower than the national average, as is its share of college-educated people, according to the Census Bureau.  “You pick the president!” Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., who carried this county by 9 percentage points in his successful campaign for the Senate in 2022, told the crowd here before Harris spoke. In 2020, he said, “Joe Biden showed up; he smoked that clown and sent him home!” Fetterman won the state by maximizing votes in the metropolitan areas and limiting his margins of defeat in the red-trending rural areas. Now, he’s trying to help Harris do the same. While Obama and Gov. Josh Shapiro rallied Thursday in Pittsburgh, Fetterman toured the red counties to make the case for her.

In an interview before the rally, Fetterman emphasized that defeating Trump in Pennsylvania won’t be easy. “Trump has a very unique and special connection there [in rural Pennsylvania], and that’s why he’s going to be incredibly difficult,” Fetterman said, noting that rural counties are packed with pro-Trump insignia. “It’s kind of like a Taylor Swift concert where you have so much swag it goes beyond a typical kind of politics.”

At Monday’s rally in Erie, PA, Kamala Harris told the audience that Donald Trump “is increasingly unstable and unhinged. And he is out for unchecked power.” Harris is right: We cannot afford to put this unstable fascist back in office.

[potatoes83]

Dailywire Article

How the hell can you sit there and blast people for spreading "misinformation", that is to say things exactly like this, when things exactly like this are happening? If you can't trace a ballot back to a voter, then why the hell do they write the ballot number on your little application slip?

And just to be clear, what if he had voted Trump doesn't even come to play in this. No that wouldn't make it better, no I wouldn't be less pissed off. Fraud is fraud no matter what side of the political aisle you're standing on. You're telling me it doesn't happen despite it happening, and you're telling me there's all kinds of safeguards in place to protect the system while at the same time telling me there's nothing that can be done when the fraud that doesn't happen actually occurs. 🤡

Our legislature in this state is an absolute fucking joke. 🥔

[mariacallous]

Ahead of the US elections, Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X, has used the platform as his own personal political bullhorn.

On July 26, Musk posted a video of vice president and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris in which a deepfake of her voice appears to make her say that she is the “ultimate DEI hire” and a “deep-state puppet.” The post now bears a community note indicating that it is a parody. But many alleged that, shared without appropriate context, the video could have violated X’s policies on synthetic, or AI-altered, media.

This was the culmination of Musk’s recent political rhetoric. Over the past month, Musk, after officially endorsing former president Donald Trump, has also boosted baseless conspiracies of a “coup” following Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race, and insinuated that the Trump assassination attempt might have been the result of an intentional failure on the part of the Secret Service. After endorsing Trump, Musk announced that he was starting a pro-Trump political action committee (PAC), and initially committed to donate $45 million a month, before backtracking.

Former Twitter trust and safety employees say that Musk’s increasingly partisan behavior around the US elections and other major events is a sign that he is doing exactly what he accused the company’s former leadership of doing: playing politics.

“It’s staggering hypocrisy,” says one former Twitter employee. “Musk is smart enough to know social media is media, and it’s a way to control the narrative.”

Three former employees, who spoke to WIRED on condition of anonymity due to fear of retaliation, expressed concern that Musk presents a new kind of actor—someone who seeks to actively use a platform to reshape politics in both the US and abroad, and is willing to endure regulatory fines and declining advertising revenue to do so.

“He is consolidating power and has systematically dismantled all markers of credibility at the company,” the former employee says. “However, I think it takes on additional significance when the person he is targeting is a presidential candidate.”

Authorities appear to agree. Earlier this week, secretaries of state from Minnesota, Washington, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and New Mexico sent a letter to X demanding changes to Grok, the platform’s generative AI search tool, after it returned false information claiming Harris had missed the deadline to be on the presidential ballot in nine states.

Musk and X did not respond to a request for comment.

Musk has been ramping up to this moment for years. When he purchased Twitter in 2022, he promised free-speech absolutism. After taking over, Musk immediately fired the majority of the company’s policy and trust and safety staff, who were responsible for keeping hateful and misinformative content off the platform. This included those responsible for guiding the platform through contentious elections. As the former employees noted, there is now no one at the company to deal with a flood of election-related misinformation, let alone what Musk himself might spread.

“There’s almost no one left,” the former employee says.

Disinformation and hate speech on X have ballooned on the site, and a recent Pew Research study found that X has taken on a partisan tilt. Since Musk’s takeover, it’s become more popular with Republican users and less popular with Democrats, who are less likely than Republicans to say their views are welcomed at the site.

The actual composition of the site’s user base has changed, with people who had been kicked off the platform for violating Twitter’s community standards being let back on under Musk. Trump himself was famously unbanned, but a wide array of avowed white supremacists, conspiracists, and neo-Nazis also flooded back onto the platform, including far-right pundit Nick Fuentes, QAnon proponent Liz Crokin, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and election denier Mike Lindell.

The platform’s new blue check system, which allows anyone willing to purchase a subscription to get a marker that previously confirmed they were who they claimed to be next to their name, has also contributed to the growing misinformation problem. While the system used to be free and reserved for verified public figures, politicians, and journalists, anonymous accounts like @Sprinter99800 and @ShadowofEzra are now able to use the algorithmic boost offered by the subscription model to spread misinformation about the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, respectively. Blue check accounts are, further, incentivized to spread outrageous claims because they can be paid based on how much engagement their posts get.

“He has a very obvious political agenda,” says one former member of Twitter’s policy team. Looking back at the last few years, they referred to Musk’s release of what he dubbed the “Twitter Files,” a cache of internal documents. The documents, according to Musk, revealed the political biases of the platform’s previous leaders—according to others, they showed mundane interactions with researchers and government employees—but also led to the doxing and harassment of former trust and safety employees and misinformation researchers.

Musk has also used the platform to put his thumb on the scale of politics outside the United States.

Last year, after Brazil’s far-right president Jair Bolsonaro lost his bid for reelection, his supporters stormed the country’s legislature, in an echo of January 6, 2021. In April, Musk defied an order from Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court to remove the accounts of far-right actors who, the court said, violated the country’s laws by undermining confidence in the country’s electoral processes. X then released the court’s confidential orders to the Congressional Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, which then made them public. Experts and government officials at the time said the move was a deliberate attempt by a foreign billionaire to undermine the country’s democratic institutions.

While Musk has repeatedly asserted that he took over Twitter to preserve its commitment to free speech, the company has complied with censorship from right-leaning governments. Last year, the company complied with an order from Turkey’s authoritarian government to censor content ahead of the country’s elections and blocked a BBC documentary about India’s right-wing Hindu nationalist prime minister Narendra Modi.

Instances like this, the first former employee tells WIRED, show that Musk is an entirely different actor than other tech CEOs, unbothered by the kinds of laws or norms that could be used to reign in another company. Musk doesn’t appear to be cowed by penalties like fines for spreading misinformation that are meant to keep billionaires and companies in check to protect the public interest.

“Regulation is not written for overtly malicious actors,” says the first former employee. “We don't have good regulation anywhere in the world that thinks about corporate entities like that … and it’s certainly not how we are used to treating a man who owns multiple companies.”

Because Musk’s own politics and priorities appear so clear, even decisions made seemingly without a political agenda can be interpreted as part of one. Last week, the X account for White Dudes for Harris was booted from the platform, causing many supporters of the vice president to wonder if this was Musk’s own political preferences playing out on X in real time. But a third former Twitter trust and safety employee who spoke with WIRED says it appears to be a pretty standard suspension that can happen when someone who has been banned from the platform in the past makes a new account. “Whoever set up the account most likely had an email address, IP address, or phone number that matched an account that had previously been banned on the platform. That would automatically be a penalty.”

The former employee says that the fact that people could not be sure if it was the result of Musk’s politics, or just a good old-fashioned moderation snafu is the real problem: “The fact that we have to ask those questions just shows the trust is gone. The misinformation has won.”

In an interview with the Atlantic, Musk said he would accept the results of the election should Harris win. But whether that will hold true in November is still cause for concern. Last week, after the Venezuelan elections wrapped in what experts said appeared to be a stolen victory for the country’s current president Nicolás Maduro, Musk railed against Maduro on X, even challenging him to a physical fight.

“What does it look like if this same sort of advocacy happens come November or December, in which he really believes that the election has been stolen or the vote counts aren't there?” the former employee says. It’s the same type of question that the former trust and safety teams were asking themselves about Trump during the 2020 presidential election. “It's very eerily kind of the same situation, except it’s the CEO and owner of the platform making those decisions, who also has the final say in content moderation decisions.”

[readingsquotes]

...Biden’s failures in the Middle East predated and in many ways made possible the October 7 Hamas attacks that set off Israel’s brutal campaign. The bar was already in hell, but compared to almost any of his predecessors other than Trump in his first term, Biden did not even make a token effort to bring about a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (yes, even George W. Bush tried harder—look it up). After Trump shifted U.S. policy in the region well to the right—moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing Israel’s authority over the Golan Heights, and negotiating the “Abraham Accords” that normalized Israel’s relationships with several Arab countries without any nod toward Palestinians—there was near-total continuity in policy going into the Biden administration, with Trump’s moves treated as fait accompli.

...The Harris campaign’s contempt for Palestinians was so palpable that a pro-Trump PAC funded by Elon Musk capitalized on it, targeting ads at Arab Americans in swing states that claimed Harris would “ALWAYS stand with Israel.” It was a cynical play—the same PAC also targeted Jews in swing states with the exact opposite message—but Harris left a wide opening for it, and the thing is, it worked: many Arab Americans in Michigan and other swing states actually did switch from Biden to Trump.

...In the same week that the ceasefire deal was tentatively announced, two other stories broke that spotlighted the extent of Biden’s moral and political failure in Palestine. One was The Lancet’s publication, subsequently covered in the New York Times, of a peer-reviewed study of traumatic injury deaths in the Gaza Strip from October 7, 2023 through June 30, 2024. The study estimated that the Palestinian Ministry of Health underreported such deaths by 41 percent during that period, and that over 64,000 Palestinians, many of them women and children, had died from traumatic injury, a figure that does not include the untold thousands more who died of starvation or disease resulting from Israel’s bombardment of Gaza’s infrastructure (a previous analysis published by The Lancet estimated total Palestinian deaths to that point at over 186,000). Another six months of nonstop devastation in Gaza have passed since the data for The Lancet study was collected.

...Taken together, the Lancet study and the IMEU survey capture Biden’s decision to prioritize the slaughter of countless Palestinians over what he himself described as the core mission of his presidency: saving American democracy and preventing Trump from returning to power. As Trump sets about dismantling his predecessor’s fragile domestic accomplishments, the mass killing in Gaza is the one aspect of Biden’s legacy that can never be erased. When Trump rounds up migrants and refugees and forces them into camps, or guts the federal regulatory state, or ushers in the next mass-casualty pandemic—it will all be downstream of an addled Biden’s stubborn refusal to apply meaningful pressure on Netanyahu for fifteen months. After a decades-long and profoundly mediocre political career, it’s what Biden deserves to be remembered for.