#midterm elections 2021

[absmarchive]

Beto O'Rourke visits Dallas in campaign across the state after announcing his run for Texas governor

[batboyblog]

I've seen this meme and the pop wisdom idea behind it a lot, that if Democrats just manned up like the South Koreans they could stop Trump. SO! its now my job to explain BASIC FUCKING facts to people because they're talking nonsense about easily googlable information.

This is South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol of the center-right, conservative, People Power Party. He was elected President in 2022. Like in the United States, South Korea has mid-term elections, where South Korea's Congress, the National Assembly is up for elections while the President isn't. Unlike America South Korea's National Assembly has only one House. Any ways they had their midterm in 2024:

The opposition center-left, liberal Democratic Party won, overwhelmingly. The election was April 10th, they took office May 30th. Soon the opposition was doing what an opposition given power does, it was fighting President Yoon about his disastrous budget plans and trying to hold the First Lady Kim Keon-hee to account for alleged corruption. If this all sounds a bit like Trump, good job Yoon has been called "South Korea's Trump".

any ways 6 months into having an opposition run National Assembly Yoon declared martial law and sent soldiers to try to shut down the National Assembly. Everyone watched Democratic Assembly Members bravely climb fences and barricade the chamber doors to vote to end martial law. Here's what you have to understand about that vote

190 National Assembly members voted, 172 of them? We're Democrats and their allies. The President's People Power Party mostly stood by him. They keep standing by him in the days that followed. Four Days after President Yoon tried to use the Military to throw out the elected National Assembly and make himself dictator, the first try to impeach him, failed

105 out of the 108 the President's PPP party in the Assembly stood by him, after he tried to coup the country. Only 7 days later after overwhelming public pressure and the arrest of many key Presidential aids did an impeachment vote pass (he still hasn't been convicted)

only 12 PPP members broke with their Party and its President, 12 was enough, but the overwhelming majority? voted to protect the President who just tried to overthrow the country.

SO! Much like Donald Trump President Yoon didn't need to overthrow the country for the first 2 years of his term because he had a puppet Congress willing to go along with his corruption. With-in 6 months of dealing with a National Assembly that stood up to him the wheels came off and he imploded. But even after the most spectacular implosion on the International stage I've ever seen his party stood by him. If the Democratic Party didn't have a majority? and most important a BIG majority, a majority where even a small number of PPP defections was enough to get the 2/3rds they needed Yoon would still be President right now, if Democrats had a 2-3 seat majority in the National Assembly? they would have never gotten the votes to impeach.

We can see overlap in the American experience. In Trump's first term his own party in Congress never challenged him and largely stayed united behind him. In 2018 he lost the midterm elections which meant he was held to account and in fairly short order impeached, it took 8 months from Democrats taking office to an impeachment inquire to get underway. Like President Yoon Trump was not able to function under any kind of pushback. But unlike the South Korean Democrats the American Democrats didn't have an overwhelming majority in the Senate (Koreans don't even have a Senate) so Trump was not convicted. And the second time he was impeached after like Yoon trying to overthrow the Congress and become dictator, there were like in South Korea a handful of defectors from his own party, but unlike Korea The Democratic majority in the 2021 Senate wasn't large enough to have those Republican votes matter

So brave displays are good and important, but they don't mean much without the power, the votes to back it up. Elect Democrats in 2026 and they will, in less than a year of taking office, impeach Trump. Trump can't function with an opposition, he can't do it, he'll do something and they will HAVE TO vote to remove him. But the key is they need to votes to do it, because most Republicans? will go down with the ship, there's no red lines for them, if Democrats don't have big majorities, Trump hanging onto 90% of his party in the Senate will save his ass, again.

[theconstitutionisgayculture]

Many people are worried that the voter id being officially law and constitutional law in Wisconsin won’t change anything

but what do you think and how do we calm the fears of many

I’m happy they voted on it in Wisconsin and even though we lost the supreme court race we won more areas than the 2023 one

that’s something to look at and local elections don’t determine federal ones and 2023 and 2021 prove that to

but what do you think should this be looked at more brightly than it is

I don't think t he voter ID amendment matters because the person you guys just put on the supreme court is an activist against voter ID. I would expect the court to overturn that amendment before it can even come into play in an election.

And the reason her election doesn't bode well for the midterms isn't because of some tea leaf bellwether crap, it's because the court is in charge of redistricting and the liberal majority is going to redistrict probably 2 congressional districts so that there are more liberals in them, which means the Republicans will lose those seats.

[centrally-unplanned]

I wanna get this one out before the election since I think that is going to "cast in stone" some takes when it shouldn't given how much of a coinflip it is; Biden really fumbled the ball in the second half of his presidency. I was very pro-Biden at the beginning, I thought he did a great job. I don't think the stimulus was a huge source of inflation and meanwhile the economy came back roaring; obviously not mainly due to him but he did a good job on renewing Jerome Powell (a Trump appointee!) to the Fed, controlling the Strategic Oil Reserve, and "getting out of the way" on a bunch of issues from trade to Covid policy. His environmental policy around the energy transition was stellar, I approve of CHIPS, etc. And in foreign policy he is never going to get the credit he deserves for ending the Afghanistan debacle, and meanwhile the US response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine was about as good as you could possibly expect it to be out the gate.

He actually proved the haters wrong on his promise to "get things done in Congress" using his expertise - he did in fact get bipartisan bills passed and work with centrists like Manchin to get party bills over the line. It was a solid showing; I thought he was clearly better than Obama & Clinton.

But as time went on the wheels really came off. You can almost see the "ideas" running out, like once they had done the Covid drawdown and BBB/IRA, and the midterms made congress more unfavorable, "what's next?" left a void. There was a bunch of bad "party handout" stuff that is completely at odds with how things work today. Foolish moves like the student debt relief - unpopular, unwise in an inflationary environment, a handout to the wealthy, and dubiously legal - or all the kowtowing to the worst unions in the US that still resulting in declining labor vote share! A lack of follow-through on the bills showed the admin's lack of policy chops; the IRA is severely hampered by the lack of permitting reform for energy projects, but the admin applied virtually no pressure to making that happen because, eh, not their vibe I guess? The huge holes in procurement that Ukraine war exposed has been met with very tepid responses as well, just a sort of "throw money at it" default that has fixed little.

Israel is of course peak inertia. I am a realist, I understand fully that there is no world where the US responds to a terrorist attack on an ally by cutting them off - and I think the Biden admin has had its wins in this category, the amount of aid entering Gaza is certainly higher due to US pressure. But it is just embarrassing how obviously Biden himself treated Netanyahu and co as like, credible partners, when they just aren't? Again, Trump would just happily support them doing w/e no matter how many the killed, it wouldn't be embarrassing for him to watch that happen. For Biden, with his stated goals, it is weakness. He could have easily done better.

And we can't ignore the responsibility to the next generation - it is your job as President to set up your successor for victory. Immigration is a classic policy example of that dropped ball - a fear of seeming "Trump-like" in the face of an unsympathetic electorate and an admin itself not actually committed to massive increases in admitted asylum cases. It would be one thing if it was Biden's hill to die on, but it wasn't; just years of muddle before finally doing in ~2024 what they could have done in ~2021, too late to move the needle on the backlash.

Which leads us to the elephant in the room, as all things must. He did end his nomination in the end, again I don't think he is some awful president. But he took a lot of heavy pressure to get there. And the weirdest thing is...he is the one who scheduled a debate before the convention? That isn't normal! It was very obviously a test, to show he was fit - and he failed it. And then refused to admit it. What if George Clooney didn't aim for his head in the press at the 11th hour? What if Nancy Pelosi didn't bring out the big guns? Would he have not bowed down to reality?

And while I have been quite impressed by Harris's campaign so far, and not having a primary has been an advantage, it has still been very rushed. Orgs take time to emerge, you can't actually just snap your fingers and get 30 interviews booked or a docket of vetted VPs. I think Tim Walz a mistake, personally! Not a big one, but a weak choice when someone like Josh Shapiro is right there and "pivot to the center" is your stated strategy. But it is hard to blame her when she probably threw it together in a few weeks while also doing 20 stump speeches a month and debate prepping and all that! I can't say that specific decision would change, but others would. Hell, time could have helped - her favourables in a ton of categories have slowly been ticking up, if she was the candidate since January things could be different. We will never know of course, but the more distance from Biden the better.

I think in 2023 and 2024 it is in fact very hard to find any solid wins for the Biden administration. I can think of a few but they outnumbered handily by the missteps. And I think that, if Kamala wins, a lot of this is going to be papered over. All the political missteps will be like "eh, who cares! We won, right?" But that is not how effective strategy works. For one, if Kamala wins it is only because Trump is the opponent; a normie Republican would probably have trounced her. But more importantly your strategy should pretty much never be "eh whatever" to maximizing your electoral odds. Every action should either be A: this will keep us winning, or B: this won't but it will make the world a better place and so it is where we are spending our points. Biden has had a lot of "neither option" these past two years; too many, in my opinion, to be considered a good president anymore.

But I will give him decent at least, it is a tough job!

[beardedmrbean]

https://x.com/allenanalysis/status/1940954093037453524?t=vp_o-m7TpmKwhomxSYTViw&s=19

Might have something to do with the fiscal year starting dates, they can't actually do that unless the democrats take back congress at the mid terms, if they don't they set a landmine for themselves to step on.

If that's what the idea really is, but hey it's not like that would be unheard of for either side to do.

Covid eviction moratorium was going to time out, president couldn't extend it because they lacked the authority and the courts told congress that they can do it, because it part of their job, and then we had members of the house out protesting the moratorium running out instead of actually doing their job and trying to get some legislation through that would actually extend that whole thing.

Remember when nancy said flat out that the president lacks the authority to forgive student debt because that was something that only congress has the authority to do and then they sat on student loan forgiveness dangling it in front of the voters faces through the midterm elections, which ended with them losing control of congress then biden still tried to do it and the ruling from the supreme court quoted nancy saying that the president doesn't have the authority to do that saying she was right?

The Supreme Court struck down President Joe Biden's student loan forgiveness plan on Friday, and its conservative justices used former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's words to do so.

Quoting Pelosi during a 2021 press conference, the Court's majority opinion wrote, "People think that the President of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness. He does not. He can postpone. He can delay. But he does not have that power. That has to be an act of Congress."

The justices agreed with six Republican-led states, while disagreeing with two individual borrowers, in a pair of lawsuits that challenged the Biden administration's student debt relief program. Although the Court ruled that the private plaintiffs lacked standing in their challenge against Biden's plan in the Department of Education v. Brown, the justices ruled against Biden in a 6-3 vote in Biden v. Nebraska, effectively shutting the program down. ______________________________________

____________________

I'm not sure how anyone could be shocked that politicians are acting in anything other than self interest the lions share of the time.

all of them, regardless of party or ideology

[ausetkmt]

Where It’s Most Dangerous to Be Black in America

Black Americans made up 13.6% of the US population in 2022 and 54.1% of the victims of murder and non-negligent manslaughter, aka homicide. That works out, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, to a homicide rate of 29.8 per 100,000 Black Americans and four per 100,000 of everybody else.(1)

A homicide rate of four per 100,000 is still quite high by wealthy-nation standards. The most up-to-date statistics available from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development show a homicide of rate one per 100,000 in Canada as of 2019, 0.8 in Australia (2021), 0.4 in France (2017) and Germany (2020), 0.3 in the UK (2020) and 0.2 in Japan (2020).

But 29.8 per 100,000 is appalling, similar to or higher than the homicide rates of notoriously dangerous Brazil, Colombia and Mexico. It also represents a sharp increase from the early and mid-2010s, when the Black homicide rate in the US hit new (post-1968) lows and so did the gap between it and the rate for everybody else. When the homicide rate goes up, Black Americans suffer disproportionately. When it falls, as it did last year and appears to be doing again this year, it is mostly Black lives that are saved.

As hinted in the chart, racial definitions have changed a bit lately; the US Census Bureau and other government statistics agencies have become more open to classifying Americans as multiracial. The statistics cited in the first paragraph of this column are for those counted as Black or African American only. An additional 1.4% of the US population was Black and one or more other race in 2022, according to the Census Bureau, but the CDC Wonder (for “Wide-ranging Online Data for Epidemiologic Research”) databases from which most of the statistics in this column are drawn don’t provide population estimates or calculate mortality rates for this group. My estimate is that its homicide rate in 2022 was about six per 100,000.

A more detailed breakdown by race, ethnicity and gender reveals that Asian Americans had by far the lowest homicide rate in 2022, 1.6, which didn’t rise during the pandemic, that Hispanic Americans had similar homicide rates to the nation as a whole and that men were more than four times likelier than women to die by homicide in 2022. The biggest standout remained the homicide rate for Black Americans. 

Black people are also more likely to be victims of other violent crime, although the differential is smaller than with homicides. In the 2021 National Crime Victimization Survey from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (the 2022 edition will be out soon), the rate of violent crime victimization was 18.5 per 1,000 Black Americans, 16.1 for Whites, 15.9 for Hispanics and 9.9 for Asians, Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders. Understandably, Black Americans are more concerned about crime than others, with 81% telling Pew Research Center pollsters before the 2022 midterm elections that violent crime was a “very important” issue, compared with 65% of Hispanics and 56% of Whites.

These disparities mainly involve communities caught in cycles of violence, not external predators. Of the killers of Black Americans in 2020 whose race was known, 89.4% were Black, according to the FBI. That doesn’t make those deaths any less of a tragedy or public health emergency. Homicide is seventh on the CDC’s list of the 15 leading causes of death among Black Americans, while for other Americans it’s nowhere near the top 15. For Black men ages 15 to 39, the highest-risk group, it’s usually No. 1, although in 2022 the rise in accidental drug overdoses appears to have pushed accidents just past it. For other young men, it’s a distant third behind accidents and suicides.

To be clear, I do not have a solution for this awful problem, or even much of an explanation. But the CDC statistics make clear that sky-high Black homicide rates are not inevitable. They were much lower just a few years ago, for one thing, and they’re far lower in some parts of the US than in others. Here are the overall 2022 homicide rates for the country’s 30 most populous metropolitan areas.

Metropolitan areas are agglomerations of counties by which economic and demographic data are frequently reported, but seldom crime statistics because the patchwork of different law enforcement agencies in each metro area makes it so hard. Even the CDC, which gets its mortality data from state health departments, doesn’t make it easy, which is why I stopped at 30 metro areas.(2)

Sorting the data this way does obscure one key fact about homicide rates: They tend to be much higher in the main city of a metro area than in the surrounding suburbs.

But looking at homicides by metro area allows for more informative comparisons across regions than city crime statistics do, given that cities vary in how much territory they cover and how well they reflect an area’s demographic makeup. Because the CDC suppresses mortality data for privacy reasons whenever there are fewer than 10 deaths to report, large metro areas are good vehicles for looking at racial disparities. Here are the 30 largest metro areas, ranked by the gap between the homicide rates for Black residents and for everybody else.

The biggest gap by far is in metropolitan St. Louis, which also has the highest overall homicide rate. The smallest gaps are in metropolitan San Diego, New York and Boston, which have the lowest homicide rates. Homicide rates are higher for everybody in metro St. Louis than in metro New York, but for Black residents they’re six times higher while for everyone else they’re just less than twice as high.

There do seem to be some regional patterns to this mayhem. The metro areas with the biggest racial gaps are (with the glaring exception of Portland, Oregon) mostly in the Rust Belt, those with the smallest are mostly (with the glaring exceptions of Boston and New York) in the Sun Belt. Look at a map of Black homicide rates by state, and the highest are clustered along the Mississippi River and its major tributaries. Southern states outside of that zone and Western states occupy roughly the same middle ground, while the Northeast and a few middle-of-the-country states with small Black populations are the safest for their Black inhabitants.(3)

Metropolitan areas in the Rust Belt and parts of the South stand out for the isolation of their Black residents, according to a 2021 study of Census data from Brown University’s Diversity and Disparities Project, with the average Black person living in a neighborhood that is 60% or more Black in the Detroit; Jackson, Mississippi; Memphis; Chicago; Cleveland and Milwaukee metro areas in 2020 (in metro St. Louis the percentage was 57.6%). Then again, metro New York and Boston score near the top on another of the project’s measures of residential segregation, which tracks the percentage of a minority group’s members who live in neighborhoods where they are over-concentrated compared with White residents, so segregation clearly doesn’t explain everything.

Looking at changes over time in homicide rates may explain more. Here’s the long view for Black residents of the three biggest metro areas. Again, racial definitions have changed recently. This time I’ve used the new, narrower definition of Black or African American for 2018 onward, and given estimates in a footnote of how much it biases the rates upward compared with the old definition.

All three metro areas had very high Black homicide rates in the 1970s and 1980s, and all three experienced big declines in the 1990s and 2000s. But metro Chicago’s stayed relatively high in the early 2010s then began a rebound in mid-decade that as of 2021 had brought the homicide rate for its Black residents to a record high, even factoring in the boost to the rate from the definitional change.

What happened in Chicago? One answer may lie in the growing body of research documenting what some have called the “Ferguson effect,” in which incidents of police violence that go viral and beget widespread protests are followed by local increases in violent crime, most likely because police pull back on enforcement. Ferguson is the St. Louis suburb where a 2014 killing by police that local prosecutors and the US Justice Department later deemed to have been in self-defense led to widespread protests that were followed by big increases in St. Louis-area homicide rates. Baltimore had a similar viral death in police custody and homicide-rate increase in 2015. In Chicago, it was the October 2014 shooting death of a teenager, and more specifically the release a year later of a video that contradicted police accounts of the incident, leading eventually to the conviction of a police officer for second-degree murder.

It’s not that police killings themselves are a leading cause of death among Black Americans. The Mapping Police Violence database lists 285 killings of Black victims by police in 2022, and the CDC reports 209 Black victims of “legal intervention,” compared with 13,435 Black homicide victims. And while Black Americans are killed by police at a higher rate relative to population than White Americans, this disparity — 2.9 to 1 since 2013, according to Mapping Police Violence — is much less than the 7.5-to-1 ratio for homicides overall in 2022. It’s the loss of trust between law enforcement agencies and the communities they serve that seems to be disproportionately deadly for Black residents of those communities.

The May 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer was the most viral such incident yet, leading to protests nationwide and even abroad, as well as an abortive local attempt to disband and replace the police department. The Minneapolis area subsequently experienced large increases in homicides and especially homicides of Black residents. But nine other large metro areas experienced even bigger increases in the Black homicide rate from 2019 to 2022.

A lot of other things happened between 2019 and 2022 besides the Floyd protests, of course, and I certainly wouldn’t ascribe all or most of the pandemic homicide-rate increase to the Ferguson effect. It is interesting, though, that the St. Louis area experienced one of the smallest percentage increases in the Black homicide rate during this period, and it decreased in metro Baltimore.

Also interesting is that the metro areas experiencing the biggest percentage increases in Black residents’ homicide rates were all in the West (if your definition of West is expansive enough to include San Antonio). If this were confined to affluent areas such as Portland, Seattle, San Diego and San Francisco, I could probably spin a plausible-sounding story about it being linked to especially stringent pandemic policies and high work-from-home rates, but that doesn’t fit Phoenix, San Antonio or Las Vegas, so I think I should just admit that I’m stumped.

The standout in a bad way has been the Portland area, which had some of the longest-running and most contentious protests over policing, along with many other sources of dysfunction. The area’s homicide rate for Black residents has more than tripled since 2019 and is now second highest among the 30 biggest metro areas after St. Louis. Again, I don’t have any real solutions to offer here, but whatever the Portland area has been doing since 2019 isn’t working.

(1) The CDC data for 2022 are provisional, with a few revisions still being made in the causes assigned to deaths (was it a homicide or an accident, for example), but I’ve been watching for weeks now, and the changes have been minimal. The CDC is still using 2021 population numbers to calculate 2022 mortality rates, and when it updates those, the homicide rates will change again, but again only slightly. The metropolitan-area numbers also don’t reflect a recent update by the White House Office of Management and Budget to its list of metro areas and the counties that belong to them, which when incorporated will bring yet more small mortality-rate changes. To get these statistics from the CDC mortality databases, I clicked on “Injury Intent and Mechanism” and then on “Homicide”; in some past columns I instead chose “ICD-10 Codes” and then “Assault,” which delivered slightly different numbers.

(2) It’s easy to download mortality statistics by metro area for the years 1999 to 2016, but the databases covering earlier and later years do not offer this option, and one instead has to select all the counties in a metro area to get area-wide statistics, which takes a while.

(3) The map covers the years 2018-2022 to maximize the number of states for which CDC Wonder will cough up data, although as you can see it wouldn’t divulge any numbers for Idaho, Maine, Vermont and Wyoming (meaning there were fewer than 10 homicides of Black residents in each state over that period) and given the small numbers involved, I wouldn’t put a whole lot of stock in the rates for the Dakotas, Hawaii, Maine and Montana.

(https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/09/14/where-it-s-most-dangerous-to-be-black-in-america/cdea7922-52f0-11ee-accf-88c266213aac_story.html)

[tomorrowusa]

Both parties now have nominees for governor of New Jersey. NJ along with Virginia are having elections for governor this year.

NJ Dems nominated Mikie Sherrill. She is a former US Navy helicopter pilot and federal prosecutor who flipped a GOP US House seat in 2018 and has since been re-elected three times.

Republicans nominated Trumpster Jack Ciattarelli who lost the 2021 governor's race to incumbent Democrat Phil Morphy. Republicans like losers.

Tuesday’s results set the stage for one of this year’s two potentially competitive gubernatorial races, along with Virginia, that will serve as a key barometer of President Donald Trump’s job performance and a gauge of the energy in both parties ahead of next year’s midterm elections. Already, the president has been a central figure in both candidates’ campaigns. Sherrill, a former Navy helicopter pilot, bested five other candidates who all ran as fighters who would push back on the chaos of Washington. Ciattarelli, who narrowly lost a 2021 bid for governor, won the nomination again with the help of Trump’s endorsement. Turnout in both races broke records for New Jersey’s gubernatorial primaries. Historic trends could favor Democrats in November. New Jersey voters have consistently picked the gubernatorial candidate from the party out of power in Washington in recent decades with one exception – incumbent Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy was re-elected in 2021, one year after Joe Biden won the presidency. Murphy is term-limited from seeking another term.

The odds favor Sherrill in November, but in politics we should never take things for granted.

Sherrill’s platform centered on lowering costs for New Jersey voters and portraying herself as a fighter who would take on Trump. “A state like this is not going to be led by a Trump lackey like Jack Ciattarelli,” Sherrill said. “I am ready to shake up the status quo and Jack is the status quo. He’s not changed. He’s a re-run. He’s a ghost of elections past. And I have fought for new opportunities my entire life.”

It was a very crowded field for the Democratic nomination.

Regional loyalties were apparent in the election.

It's likely that almost all the Dem voters who voted for candidates other than Sherrill will support her this autumn. And if numbers mean anything, all the Dem candidates received 332,000+ more votes than all the GOP candidates in the primary.

[meret118]

this tax cut will add to the budget deficit either $820 billion (House version) or $736 billion (Senate version). More than half the benefit will go to millionaires.

Pass-through income is a key driver of income inequality. Between 1985 and 2021, the top 1 percent in the income distribution increased its share of the nation’s income from 13 percent to more than 25 percent. The majority of that increase came from pass-through income.

And in a particularly slick move, the cuts to Medicaid and food stamps/SNAP will not kick in until January 2027, two months after the midterm 2026 elections, so people won’t notice the damage before they vote next year.

[mariacallous]

A trove of leaked internal messages and documents from the militia American Patriots Three Percent—also known as AP3—reveals how the group coordinated with election denial groups as part of a plan to conduct paramilitary surveillance of ballot boxes during the midterm elections in 2022.

This information was leaked to Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets), a nonprofit that says it publishes hacked and leaked documents in the public interest. The person behind these AP3 leaks is an individual who, according to their statement uploaded by DDoSecrets, infiltrated the militia and grew so alarmed by what they were seeing that they felt compelled to go public with the information ahead of the upcoming presidential election.

Election and federal officials have already voiced concern about possible voter intimidation this November, in part due to the proliferation of politically violent rhetoric and election denialism. Some right-wing groups have already committed to conducting surveillance of ballot boxes remotely using AI-driven cameras. And last month, a Homeland Security bulletin warned that domestic extremist groups could plan on sabotaging election infrastructure including ballot drop boxes.

Devin Burghart, president and executive director of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, says that AP3’s leaked plans for the 2022 midterms should be a warning for what may transpire next month. “Baseless election denial conspiracies stoking armed militia surveillance of ballot drop boxes is a dangerous form of voter intimidation,” Burghart tells WIRED. “The expansion of the election denial, increased militia activity, and growing coordination between them, is cause for serious concern heading into November. Now with voter suppression groups like True the Vote and some GOP elected officials targeting drop boxes for vigilante activity, the situation should be raising alarms.”

The leaked messages from 2022 show how AP3 and other militias provided paramilitary heft to ballot box monitoring operations organized by “The People’s Movement,” the group that spearheaded the 2021 anti-vaccine convoy protest, and Clean Elections USA, a group with links to the team behind the 2000 Mules film that falsely claimed widespread voter fraud. In the leaked chats, People’s Movement leader Carolyn Smith identifies herself as an honorary AP3 member.

AP3 is run by Scot Seddon, a former Army Reservist, Long Islander, and male model, according to a ProPublica profile on him published in August. That profile, which relied on the same anonymous infiltrator who leaked AP3’s internal messages to DDoSecrets, explains that AP3 escaped scrutiny in the aftermath of January 6 in part because Seddon, after spending weeks preparing his ranks to go to DC, ultimately decided to save his soldiers for another day. ProPublica reported that some members went anyway but were under strict instruction to forgo any AP3 insignia. According to the leaked messages, Seddon also directed his state leaders to participate in the “operation.”

“All of us have a vested interest in this nation,” Seddon said in a leaked video. “So all the state leaders should be getting their people out and manning and observing ballot boxes, to watch for ballot stuffing. This is priority. This goes against getting your double cheeseburger at mcdonalds … Our nation depends on this. Our future depends on this. This ain't no bullshit issue. We need to be tight on this, straight up.”

A flier using militaristic language shared across various state-specific Telegram channels lays out how this operation would work. With “Rules of Engagement” instructions, ��Volunteers” are told not to interfere with anyone dropping off their ballots. If someone is suspected of dropping off “multiple ballots,” then observers are told to record the event, and make a note of the individual's appearance and their vehicle's license plate number. In the event of any sort of confrontation, they’re supposed to “report as soon as possible to your area Captain.”

“At the end of each shift, Patriots will prepare a brief report of activity and transmit it to [the ballot] box team Captain promptly,” the flier states.

The person who leaked these documents and messages says that these paramilitary observers masquerading as civilians will often have a QRF—quick reaction force—on standby who can “stage an armed response” should a threat or confrontation arise.

The goal of the “operation,” according to that flier, was to “Stop the Mules.”

“These are the individuals stuffing ballot boxes,” the flier says. “They are well trained and financed. There is a global network backing them up. They pick up fake ballots from phony non-profits and deliver them to ballot boxes, usually between 2400 hours and 0600 hours.” (This was the core conspiracy of 2,000 Mules; the conservative media company behind the film has since issued an apology for promoting election conspiracies and committed to halting its distribution).

Fears about widespread armed voter intimidation during the 2022 midterms—stemming from online chatter and warnings from federal agencies—never materialized in full. However, there were scattered instances of people showing up to observe ballot drops in Arizona. These individuals, according to the statement by the anonymous leaker in the DDoSecrets files, were not “lone wolves”—they were part of “highly organized groups who intended to influence the elections through intimidation.”

In one widely-publicized incident, two clearly armed people wearing balaclavas and tactical gear showed up in Mesa, Arizona, to conduct drop box surveillance. They were never identified, though a Telegram video on DDoSecrets shows AP3’s North Carolina chapter head Burley Ross admitting that one of them was part of his unit. Ross says that the individual was Elias Humiston, who had previously been conducting vigilante border surveillance. “I was well aware they were doing drop box observations,” said Ross. “I was not aware they were doing so in full kit.” Ross added that Humiston had since resigned from the group.

Seddon also addressed the “little incident in Arizona,” stressing the importance of maintaining clean optics to avoid scrutiny. “We had pushed for helping to maintain election integrity through monitoring the ballot boxes,” said Seddon, in a video message on Telegram. “We never told anyone to do it like that.”

The militia movement largely retreated from public view in the aftermath of the January 6 riot at the US Capitol in 2021. The high-profile implication of the Oath Keepers in the riot, which at the time was America’s biggest militia, thrust the broader militia movement into the spotlight. Amid intense scrutiny, stigma, and creeping paranoia about federal informants, some militias rebanded or even disbanded. But as WIRED reporting has shown, after a brief lull in activity, the militia movement has been quietly rebuilding, reorganizing, and recruiting. With AP3 at its helm, it’s also been engaging in armed training.

Election conspiracies have only continued to fester since 2022, and AP3 has been aggressively recruiting and organizing. Moreover, the rhetoric in the group has also intensified. “The next election won’t be decided at a Ballot Box,” wrote an AP3 leader earlier this year in a private chat, according to ProPublica. “It’ll be decided at the ammo box.”

“Every American has a right to go to the ballot box without fear and the authorities need to urgently learn the lessons of 2022—and the lessons contained in these documents—so they can prevent something even worse from happening in the coming weeks,” the infiltrator wrote in the DDoS statement.

[jeffhirsch]

New 2025 Almanac Is Here! Founder’s 101st!

We lost Yale Hirsch three years ago at 98, but his legacy lives on. Santa Claus Rally, January Barometer, Best Six Months Strategy: all invented by Yale! It is fitting that the 58th Annual Edition of the Stock Trader’s Almanac, is released today, one day before what would be his 101st Birthday.

This year’s edition highlights how, “Post-election years have improved since WWII and since 1985 DJIA averages a gain of 17.2% with eight up years and two down. This is the best average gain of the four-year cycle over this period.” My outlook for 2025 expects, “the market to be up 8-12% for the year with pullbacks in Q1 and Q3.”

Past four years forecasts have been on point: “unabashedly bullish for 2021, anticipated the 2022 midterm year bear market and called the textbook October 2022 midterm bottom, expected a new bull market to emerge in 2023 with above average pre-election year gains and 2024’s bullish outlook is right on track.”

This 2025 Almanac is a testament to the original iconic work founder Yale Hirsch created in the first 1968 edition and the over five decades of behavioral finance thought leadership it has provided since. The Almanac remains the most valuable trader’s desk reference on Wall Street and this year’s Almanac is packed with seasonal and historic investing insights for the year ahead including:

My 2025 Outlook – page 10

Bulls Win When Market Hits The January Trifecta – page 20

Market Charts of Post-Presidential Election Years – page 26

Post-Election Year Performance by Party – page 28

Post-Election Years: Paying the Piper – page 32

Market Fares Better Under Democrats; Dollar Holds Up Better Under Republicans – page 34

Republican Congress & Democratic President Is Best for the Market – page 80

Traders Feast on Small Stocks Thanksgiving Through Santa Claus Rally – page 104

The Incredible January Barometer: Only 12 Significant Errors in 74 Years – page 18

“Best Six Months”: Still An Eye-Popping Strategy – page 54

MACD-Timing Triples “Best Six Months” Results – page 56

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Asawin Suebsaeng, Tim Dickinson, and Ryan Bort at Rolling Stone:

Donald Trump — the twice impeached former president, Jan. 6 coup leader, convicted felon, adjudicated sexual abuser, and man who mismanaged the 2020 economic implosion and coronavirus disaster that killed more than 1 million people in this country — has convinced American voters to give him another term in the White House.

After a campaign marked by nativism, open bigotry, and aspiring authoritarianism, Trump triumphed over Vice President Kamala Harris, despite being denounced by several of those who worked most closely with him in his first term as a “fascist.” The 45th president will become the 47th in late January. Trump got out to an early lead on Tuesday and never looked back, securing North Carolina and Georgia before shattering the Democratic “blue wall” of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. The race was called at 5:35 a.m. EST by the Associated Press after Trump earned 270 electoral college votes by winning Wisconsin. [...]

The stakes of a Trump victory could not be higher for many of the most vulnerable people living in this country. Trump’s central campaign promise has been to embark on the largest mass-deportation program in the nation’s history, a supercharged version of a racist Eisenhower-era program called “Operation Wetback.” Trump has promised to forcibly remove millions, and said that it will be a “bloody story.” He has vowed to employ local law enforcement, sheriffs, and, if necessary, the armed forces.

Trump has also vowed to use the Justice Department as an instrument of revenge on his political enemies, to crack down on media outlets that have criticized him, to hollow out the professional ranks of the federal government (and stock it full of his MAGA cronies), and to impose massive tariffs that will increase the cost of everything from avocados and automobiles to iPhones and apparel. 

America’s democracy has rarely been in a more fragile place. The country has chosen a leader who has promised to govern as a strongman, and who will not be held accountable for breaking the law, thanks to a ruling by his hand-selected, far-right Supreme Court majority that puts the presidency beyond the reach of criminal prosecution. This implausible victory — coming after a chaotic campaign that saw Democrats change candidates mid-election, and Trump galumph down the closing stretch with an increasingly bizarre series of stunts, including dressing up as a garbage man — also has huge stakes for Trump personally. 

As early as the summer of 2021, according to three sources familiar with the matter, longtime political operatives and GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill who had remained in direct contact with Trump were coalescing around a shared belief: If the criminal investigations into the former president keep ramping up, and especially if charges materialize, there is no way he doesn’t run for the presidency again. This conviction was based on conversations these Trump allies had been having with the ex-president at the time, when Trump’s fixation on, and barely veiled anxiety about, prosecution and potential prison sentences was already palpable. As time inched closer and closer to the 2022 midterm elections, Trump would, in discussions with close advisers about running again, increasingly ramble about the unique legal protections from prosecution that a sitting American president enjoys.

Two years, several history-making indictments of a former president, and billions of dollars later, those anxieties continued to fester in Trump’s brain. Over the 2024 election season, he and his allies had brainstormed and plotted numerous ways to shield him from dire legal consequences; earlier this year, the former president personally pressured multiple Republican lawmakers to pass legislation essentially designed to keep him out of prison forever. (This law did not pass, but stay tuned.)  Trump appears in the clear for at least another four years after voters handed him his long-coveted get-out-of-jail-free card on Tuesday. [...]

Trump won this year even though — and, surely in some cases, because — he ran on imposing upon the American people and global community an openly authoritarian regime concerned largely with score-settling. In addition to pledging mass deportations, militarized crackdowns, and disassembling and reconstructing the federal government around protecting and empowering himself, the former president loudly and explicitly ran on a platform of letting fellow Americans die if he doesn’t get his way or if your local leaders don’t bend to his will. Trump has recently threatened to deny potentially life-saving natural disaster aid to states whose leaders don’t bend to his wishes, threats that should be taken seriously given his history of withholding such aid for political reasons.

[...] Trump’s win demonstrates that the most powerful people in the country are indeed above the law. An elderly, foul-mouthed, racist game-show host can try, in broad daylight, while the TV cameras are fixed on him, to execute a coup d’état in our nation’s capital, people can die from it, and in a few short years be rewarded with the full-throated support of his political party, and now the keys to the White House.

For just the 2nd time in American history, A president who previously lost an election wins a 2nd non-consecutive term, as Grover Cleveland was the first to do so.

34x convicted felon, insurrection-inciter, adjudicated rapist, fascist, and vile bigot Donald J. Trump, who tried everything he could to sabotage his re-election bid, won the 2024 elections… this time with the popular vote to likely swing his way.

Assuming the 2-terms limit applies to consecutive and nonconsecutive terms, 2028 will be a wide open Presidential election for both parties (provided that America has free elections still at that point).

[jjmcquade-misc]

Allegations of Electoral Fraud in Michigan Spark Debate Over Voter Roll Integrity

March 25, 2025 A recent report from The Gateway Pundit has ignited fresh controversy in Michigan, where data analyst Tim Vetter of Data Evaluation of Election Processes (DEEP) alleges that Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson’s office illegally erased over 35,000 voter histories from the state’s voter rolls. This revelation, tied to two 2024 special elections, has raised serious questions about election integrity in a state that has long been a battleground for partisan disputes over voting processes.

According to Vetter, the missing voter history records violate Michigan laws MCL 168.932(c), which prohibits fraudulent alterations to vote history records, and MCL 168.509q(1)(f), which mandates that voter histories be maintained for a five-year period. The erased records pertain to special elections held on January 30 and April 16, 2024, to replace two Democratic state representatives. Vetter’s analysis revealed discrepancies between the “Source QVF” (Qualified Voter File) held by local clerks and the “Altered QVF” managed by Benson’s Bureau of Elections (BOE), with the latter missing vote history data for all 10 sample voter IDs he tested.

Vetter, a respected Manufacturing Equipment Engineer who has spent years scrutinizing Michigan’s voter rolls, told The Gateway Pundit, “We have never reviewed an accurate list of voters in the vote history data from Jocelyn Benson’s BOE.” He argues that such discrepancies, bloated voter rolls and altered histories, create opportunities for electoral fraud and make auditing elections nearly impossible. “They could fix this today if they wanted,” Vetter added, calling for the BOE to publish accurate voter lists and secure the data.

The allegations have quickly been seized upon by Republican figures, who argue that this incident validates their long-standing claims of systemic election fraud, particularly against former President Donald Trump. Michigan, a key swing state, was at the center of Trump’s 2020 election challenges after he lost to Joe Biden by 154,000 votes, a margin of 3 percentage points. A 2021 report by the Republican-led Michigan Senate Oversight Committee found no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election, but Trump and his allies have continued to push for investigations, often citing irregularities in voter rolls as evidence of malfeasance.

Benson, a Democrat who has served as Michigan’s Secretary of State since 2019, has not yet publicly responded to the allegations. Her office has faced prior criticism from Republicans over voter roll maintenance, with some accusing her of failing to remove inactive voters, a charge her administration has denied, pointing to regular updates in compliance with state law. The current controversy, however, raises new concerns about transparency and accountability, especially as Michigan prepares for future elections, including the 2026 midterms.

For Republicans, the erased voter histories are seen as part of a pattern of electoral misconduct that disproportionately harms their candidates. The Gateway Pundit’s post echoed this sentiment, with some calling for Benson’s prosecution and others questioning why such issues seem to persist in Democratic-led states. Republican losses in Arizona and other battleground states, Trump’s 2024 victories were undermined by “usual games” in down-ballot races.

As the debate rages on, the lack of accurate voter history data in Michigan remains a pressing issue. Without a transparent and reliable voter roll, public trust in the electoral process, already strained by years of partisan battles, may erode further. Whether Benson’s office will address these allegations with concrete action remains to be seen, but for now, Michigan’s voter rolls have once again become a flashpoint in the nation’s ongoing struggle over election integrity.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

The New Yorker

* * * *

[Robert Hubbell Newsletter]

I want to begin by acknowledging the many emails I am receiving from volunteers across America sharing uplifting stories of positive interactions with voters. I have read them all but could not respond to any emails today. I thank all of you for your hard work. And I also acknowledge the comments and emails about hostile reactions and incivility from voters. It takes a special kind of fortitude to tolerate such abuse and continue the hard work of reclaiming democracy one voter at a time.

Jill and I spent the day completing six different canvass lists with the help of a rented van, Jessica Craven, and readers Steve Hill, Ellen Hill, and Mary Bartlett. It was a little tougher going today as some of the neighborhoods became more insular and upscale, but when we were able to connect, it was almost always positive and productive.

Jessica continues to be a star canvasser. With all six of us packed in the van, we drove up to a residence with a long driveway and expansive lawn. Jessica volunteered to get out and knock on the door. A young woman (who identified as a registered Republican) came out and engaged in conversation with Jessica. The rest of us watched from afar in the van. After about five minutes, Jessica did an “endzone dance” and hugged the voter. We knew she had added another vote to Kamala’s column!

I continue to be impressed by the incredible organization, efficiency, and technology of the MeckDems. The process of canvassing is seamless and automated. Voters who answer the door and say, “I already voted,” are impressed as we are able to ask about others in the same household who have not yet voted.

We covered about 150 residences consisting of voters identified as Democrats and Undecideds. After a full day of canvassing, we saw only two residences with Trump “door hangers” on the front door. We respectfully placed door hangers for Harris / Walz on top of the Trump literature and moved on after receiving no response to our knock. I have been surprised by the general absence of signs, literature, and billboards for Trump.

Later in the evening, the out-of-state canvassers gathered at a local restaurant to hear from Drew Kromer, the Chair of the Mecklenburg Democratic Party. Drew told us that over 1,000 readers of Today’s Edition and Chop Wood Carry Water newsletters have volunteered for MeckDems. Without getting into specifics, the results are encouraging. To all who have or will volunteer for MeckDems, please know that you are making a difference that may make a difference in the electoral college count and statewide races in North Carolina.

The same goes for every reader who is volunteering across the nation. I wish I could capture the enthusiasm and excitement exuded in the emails that flood my inbox. Every vote in every race everywhere matters. We must win up and down the ballot. And we must ensure that Kamala Harris has a commanding margin of victory in the popular vote to protect the integrity of the election.

At the gathering on Sunday evening, Jessica and I gave remarks. I include the notes of my remarks below—because they apply to all of you, dear readers, who have helped us arrive at this moment filled with hope and promise!

Remarks 11/3/2024

First, let me introduce you to a true patriot and hero of democracy. Turn to your left and your right. Give a pat on the back and hug to the person standing next to you. Everyone where is a true hero and patriot. Bless you all for your work to save democracy!

I want to recognize what it took for us to arrive safely at this moment—one that is bursting with possibility and hope. We are here because your work carried to the point where we stand on the verge of victory.

For many, the journey began with Hillary’s devastating loss in 2016. But you did not give up. You picked yourselves up and vowed to do whatever it took win back our democracy.

You fought and won in 2018 in the midterms.

In 2020 with Joe Biden’s victory.

In 2021 in special elections.

In 2022 in defeating the predicted “red wave.”

In 2023 in special elections.

And now, in 2024, you will carry us to victory again.

We have arrived at this moment because you have abided, because you have kept the faith and maintained your spirits by

-gathering in community; -calling; -postcarding; -doorknocking; -fundraising; -Zooming; and -lifting up friends, neighbors and family members when they flagged from fatigue, anxiety, and despair.

We arrived safely at this moment because you refused to give up.

Because you refused to wait for permission to act.

Because you refused to “get in line” or “wait your turn.”

You took democracy into your own hands and saved it.

I am hopeful about this moment because I believe that pollsters and pundits have made the grievous error of underestimating

-the grassroots movement; -women, who have been denied the full liberty afforded all other citizens; -Black and Hispanic voters; -young voters; -older voters; and -voters who care about democracy.

I am filled with confidence about the future of democracy because we are not going back!

It doesn’t matter if we win the Electoral College by 200 votes or lose by 2; we are not going back! This moment has changed us. We will not quit—no matter what happens on election day. We are not going back.

Historians will look back on this period and your efforts. They will conclude that you saved democracy. Literally. Not figuratively. Not metaphorically. Literally. You saved democracy.

So, as we head into Election Day, we should be

-confident;

-proud; and

-joyful.

Because we are on the right side of history. We are going to win. There is no question about our ultimate victory. The only question is when the full, final, and redemptive victory will occur.

If we keep the faith, if we work, if we fight, and if we vote, we will win.

Concluding Thoughts

Polling, predictions, and punditry are red hot. Ignore them. Votes are real. That is all that matters.

Jill posted a video blog about our canvassing and attending the Kamala Harris rally in Charlotte on Saturday. See Everyday With Jill, Canvassing, Rallying, & Celebrating FOR KAMALA!

A reader who is a friend and former law partner, Brent Rushforth sent a note that resonates in this moment.

On my way home from canvassing for Kamala in Gettysburg yesterday, I stopped at the battlefield along a fence line adjacent to the field through which Robert E Lee sent General Pickett's massive assault against the Union forces dug in on Cemetery Hill. It was Lee's audacious gamble to end the war and permanently establish the confederacy.

The Union troops, at enormous cost, held—and the United States survived. Now Trump is once again seeking to render us asunder . . . I am filled with hope over the next couple of days that the center will hold and that the Union Jack will stand proudly over our republic as it did on Cemetery Hill twice our lifetimes ago.

“Twice our lifetimes ago,” Americans gave their lives to defend the Union created by the Constitution in 1789. Now, two lifetimes later, we are asked to once again save our Union. But all we need do is vote—and convince others that they must do so, too.

We can do that. We are doing it. Votes are real. That is all that matters at this point. Vote and urge others to vote!

Talk to you tomorrow!

[Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter]

[comeonamericawakeup]

“For the billionaire donor class,” this election is about one thing, said Timothy Noah: “Keeping rich people’s taxes low.” Wall Street billionaires like JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, Blackstone Group CEO Stephen Schwarzman, and investor Nelson Peltz condemned Donald Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, while hedge fund manager Kenneth Griffin called the former president a “three-time loser” after the 2022 midterms. Yet “all four sing a different tune today.” They claim to support Trump because of inflation (which has dropped to 3.4 percent), the immigration crisis, or rising antisemitism on the Left, “but they’re all full of it.” These plutocrats are actually “drifting back to Trump” because “they want to keep the tax cuts” he gave them in 2017, which are due to expire in December 2025. President Biden plans to let the cuts for the wealthy and corporations run out, keeping them only for Americans earning under $400,000. Trump’s plan to extend them would increase the budget deficit by $4 trillion over a decade — which, along with his promised steep tariffs, would be highly inflationary. Nonetheless, they’re “holding their noses and rallying around Trump” simply because he’ll “make them richer.”

THE WEEK JUNE 14, 2024

[liskantope]

I have a lot of mixed thoughts nowadays about the "threat to democracy" angle to Trump's potential re-presidency.

On the one hand, Trump has made it abundantly clear, from long before the period of the 2020 campaign season when he began priming his base to expect the election to be rigged against him, that he has a fundamentally antidemocratic mentality, that for him, the concept of "democracy" is what it means to a (not particularly bright) second-grader: a fancy word for something that in the US we say we value all the time but which doesn't mean anything of significance. He has instilled a similar mentality among his cult following, and it's eroding our collective sense of what it means to be the United States and our once robust underlying trust (across political ideologies) in our system of elections. It already culminated in the events of January 2021, which made our country an embarrassment to the world and suggests that more violence and strife is in our future as long as he's on the political scene (even if Harris wins in November, I'm dreading how the Trumpists are going to react).

For me on a gut level, the deepest pang of insult and disgust (among very many!) associated with Trump getting into the White House again comes from the idea that he's unqualified not only in his inability to competently handle object-level issues but on the meta level of having no respect whatsoever for democracy, which to me represents the error-correcting mechanism of supreme importance in any system and the primary feature that, uh, makes America great (and revolutionary, back in the 18th century).

But then, at the same time... let's say he wins again. Where does his disrespect for democracy lead, exactly?

Trump has very deliberately undermined trust among his base in elections, and this time around he'll do better with appointing people in crucial positions who will fix elections for him, but what will this mean, concretely? It seems to me that the worst I can conceive of, without inventing scenarios that go completely off the rails, is that Trump manages to find the energy and knowhow to fix the results of a number of 2026 midterm elections and then get through more legislation in the second half of his term than he would have and maybe this includes an abolishment of term limits so that he could run again and fix the results to win again. This does seem quite bad, but it's also pretty far-fetched that he'd actually be able to do all this (starting with doctoring the visible results of a great enough number of midterm races to make a real difference), and anyway, the damage done would be severely hampered by (1) the fact that he'll be getting into his 80's and seems quite likely to drop dead quite suddenly, and (2) his lack of actual focused ideological beliefs (like what's he actually going to try to accomplish with one or two more terms?) -- he's seeking to get back into the White House basically because campaigning is fun and power and attention feel good and it's a way of screwing around and keeping the law from catching up with him.

Maybe I'm lacking in imagination on this, and I do remember Sam Harris having someone on his podcast who described a very concrete scenario of Trump eroding democracy if back in power that sounded pretty scary the way it was spoken at the time, but I can't remember the details now. Meanwhile, the recent Supreme Court decision about presidential immunity seems murky and up to interpretation and like it would maybe require a pretty contrived situation to allow Trump to get away with something truly dictatorial.

I think it's good that Democrats are reminding voters over and over again how incredibly offensive Trump is with regard to his attitude towards our democratic ideals; it seems that a lot of Americans care about this (rightly) and it will help Trump get defeated. That said, I don't know that it does any favors to throw around such vague and dramatic phrases as "will destroy democracy" though. First of all, what does that mean? Secondly, to the extent that it exaggerates the situation, it sounds hysterical, which is something the other side can always capitalize on. I suspect it has, at least in that Trump himself has noticed on some level that he can use desperate and freaked-out-sounding rhetoric from the other side as fodder for trolling.

It really bothers me the way the anti-Trump side has completely taken the bait in moments like Trump's comments about how he'll be a dictator on day one only. It would be one thing to be upset and offended because Trump's cult has flaunted the democratic process and the perception of it in serious ways and so it's in extremely bad taste for him of all people to be flippant and joking about it. It's another thing to hear the "I'll be a dictator but only on day one" comment and conclude in a serious tone, "See? He just admitted right out that he wants to be a dictator!", as if we shouldn't all have the collective psychological intelligence to understand that speaking that way is a form of mischievous, irreverent, trolling-while-projecting-a-strongman humor that Trump has always specialized in (and is indeed what makes him so refreshing to so many people).

I'm similarly really annoyed at the reactions -- including from such smart and sensible commentators as David Pakman -- to Trump's recent remark to a Christian audience about going out and voting just this one time and then he'll "fix" it so they won't have to vote again. I heard that the first time, and it was fairly obvious to me that there were several more likely explanations as to what he meant in context apart from "I'm going to make myself dictator for life" -- the first one that came to my head was "the main reason why a lot of Christians vote is the abortion issue, and Trump is implying that he'll 'fix it', meaning get an amendment passed banning abortion everywhere". Then I saw in an clip from a Trump interview afterwards (I only saw this because it was played by David Pakman I think, though he professed not to understand any sense of what Trump was saying) that Trump's explanation for the remark had to do with Christians not voting in very large numbers. ("I know you don't always care enough to vote, but do it just this once and then you won't have to again" actually sounds very close to the usual line, popular on the liberal side, about "this is the most important election of our lives", with my own personal addition of "vote to resoundingly defeat MAGA so that maybe the each subsequent election won't continue to be the most important of our lives.") I found out today from Matt Lewis' weekly podcast episode with Bill Scher that the context of Trump being concerned about low Christian voter turnout was in fact plainly acknowledged in earlier parts of Trump's same speech, although Scher says that the oft-cited notion of Christians not voting is a myth. Trump's confident claims that he'll "fix everything" are characteristic of him (and one of his main recognized demagogic rhetorical faults he's ridiculed for!) and a much less athletic explanation for his comment than "I'll change the country so that there won't be any elections", a thing that he's never said or implied.

Of course, if Trump cared a shred about truly assuring people that he has no dictatorial inclinations, he would be careful not to make comments that could even remotely be interpreted as such, and one could argue that in that context his "vote for me now and I'll fix it so that you won't need to again" comment was offensive. I'm not sure whether he maybe even intended that comment to be misinterpreted by his opponents this way so as to rile them up, although I seriously doubt that he was being that clever. I just wish people would stop feeding the troll and walking right into the trap of interpreting as much as possible in terms of "destroying our democracy" and treating every remark Trump says as a way of taking the man much more seriously than he deserves, even while at the same time we could simultaneously call attention to the seriously threatening aspects of Trump and Trumpism.

[beardedmrbean]

Sen. John Fetterman could land himself in trouble with voters after he doubled down on his claims that he is not a progressive Democrat, despite comments he made during his election campaign.

"I'm not a progressive, I'm just a regular Democrat," Fetterman said on X, formerly Twitter.

The statement was contradicted by the website's community notes feature, referencing tweets from Fetterman in 2016 and 2020 in which he clearly said he was a progressive.

Despite the contradiction, Fetterman has noticeably shifted away from the position upon which he narrowly defeated Donald Trump-endorsed Dr. Mehmet Oz in the 2022 midterms.

Politicians such as Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent closely aligned with the left of the Democratic Party, have called for a ceasefire in Gaza, whereas Fetterman has said he supports the Israeli response to the attack by the Palestinian militant group Hamas on October 7 "unequivocally," despite criticism that it has been too strong.

"I just think I'm a Democrat that is very committed to choice and other things. But with Israel, I'm going to be on the right side of that," Fetterman said.

The Pennsylvania senator's stance on Israel is a particular source of ire for many who consider themselves part of the progressive movement, largely younger voters.

A November 2021 poll by Pew Research recorded that 71 percent of the progressive left movement is made up of people aged 18 to 49.

It is young voters that favored Fetterman in his 2022 Senate race against Oz. According to an exit poll taken by Statista, 72 percent of voters aged 18-24 who answered said they voted for the Democrat. The figure was similar for voters aged 25 to 29, at 68 percent.

His position on Israel-Gaza could spell trouble among this voter demographic. According to a New York Times/Siena poll published on Tuesday, 45 percent of people aged 18 to 29 think President Joe Biden is "too supportive" of Israel. In the same age group, 46 percent of people who responded said they were supportive of Palestine, compared to 27 percent favoring Israel.

The same poll said that just 20 percent of all voters aged 18 to 29 believe Biden is handling the conflict well. Asked about the result on CNN on Tuesday, Fetterman said: "If you're getting your perspective on the world on TikTok, it's going to tend to be kinda warped."

He added: "Sometimes you may alienate some voters, but it is really most important to be on the right side on that. That's where I am at."

A total of 16 of his former campaign staffers wrote him an open letter, asking him to change his stance.

"It is not too late to change your stance and stand on the righteous side of history," it said.

An op-ed in news outlet PennLive was published in November by Mireille Rebeiz, Ph.D., chair of Middle East Studies and associate professor at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in which his position on the issue was labeled "disturbing" and saying he was "unworthy of my trust."

Fetterman has called for humanitarian aid to be sent to Gaza, but criticized pro-Palestinian protesters when they staged a demonstration outside a Jewish-owned store in Philadelphia in December, calling the gathering antisemitic.

Immigration is also a divisive issue in Congress, and Fetterman has made it clear he wants to work with Senate Republicans and says it is a "reasonable conversation" to have. The GOP has pushed for stricter measures along the southern border with Mexico.

"It's a reasonable conversation—until somebody can say there's an explanation on what we can do when 270,000 people are being encountered on the border, not including the ones, of course, that we don't know about," Fetterman said to NBC. "To put that in reference, that is essentially the size of Pittsburgh, the second-largest city in Pennsylvania."

His wife, Gisele Fetterman, arrived undocumented from Brazil as a 7-year-old and was an important part of his Senate campaign. Some accused him of throwing his wife under the bus because of his stance.

Newsweek has reached out to Fetterman via email through his Senate office for comment.

"Fetterman has never been progressive, but endorsing talks for tougher immigration laws when he's married to an incredible woman who was once an illegal immigrant and who kept his campaign alive while he was recovering from a stroke is actually sickening," said Alexandra Hunt, a former Democrat candidate for Pennsylvania's 3rd Congressional District.

The conversation around Fetterman has some such as left-leaning commentator Mehdi Hasan questioning if he is the "new Kyrsten Sinema," the Arizona senator who became an independent in 2022.

"Fetterman has been a pleasant surprise for his Republican colleagues and a thorn in the side of progressive Democrat," Hasan wrote in British news magazine The Spectator in December. He added: "One still has to wonder if he might follow in Sinema's footsteps and officially extricate himself from the two-party system."

Sinema cited a "deeply broken two-party system" as the reason she left the Democratic Party in 2022.

However, Heath Mayo, a conservative who founded the anti-Trump nonprofit Principles First, praised Fetterman.

"John Fetterman is testing a lot of new boundaries for the Democratic Party right now. Aggressively pro-Israel, pro-border security, anti-corruption in his own party[...]That's principled leadership and Dems should embrace it. He is speaking to a lot of us," Mayo said.

On X, Hasan said Fetterman's comments on him not being aligned with the progressive movement was "a total attack on the people who worked hard to elect him."