#midterm elections 2021

[tomorrowusa]

Turnout is the only factor that really matters in elections.  ☒

You doubt this?

Take a look at two recent elections in Virginia a year apart.

In the 2020 presidential election Joe Biden carried Virginia by 10.11%. In the 2021 gubernatorial election, Trump Republican Glenn Youngkin won by 1.94%.

While all age groups voted in lower numbers in 2021, people under 40 voted in substantially lower numbers and the number of those in the 18-29 group fell off a cliff.

In November of 2020, the two under 40 cohorts made up a healthy 29.83% of the Virginia vote. 12 months later, that percentage plummeted to 22.01%. In the same period, the three oldest cohorts saw their combined percentage leap from 54.35% to 62.41%. As a result, Virginia now has a governor in the form of Glenn Youngkin (AKA: “Trumpkin”) who repealed state protections for trans students, tried to recriminalize weed, and is opposed to increasing the minimum wage in the state.

Voting is the way you exercise power in a democracy. If you don’t vote, you are relinquishing power to those who do vote.

(Source of stats in tables - click “Final election” )

[absmarchive]

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

[trumpbites]

Opinion | No One Knows What to Do About Trump’s 2024 Campaign - The New York Times

Opinion | No One Knows What to Do About Trump’s 2024 Campaign – The New York Times

Everyone knows by now how many Trump candidates lost this year, especially the higher-profile, more hard-core ones who claimed the 2020 election was stolen. The Democrats even added on in Georgia on Tuesday, with the same, central animating force behind each development: that Donald Trump forced his party to run a candidate, Herschel Walker, who lost, weakening Mr. Trump and the party – a mutual…

[personal-blog243]

Am I the only one who is still frustrated by how long and drawn out this process is?

A “subpoena” is nothing. He’s not going to care and he’s not going to obey it. It’s been almost 2 YEARS since January 6th and they are just getting around to POLITELY asking him to submit paperwork???? Are you fucking stupid??

I’m afraid the media and the democrats want to set him up to make a 2024 comeback 😭. Notice how they purposely gave him a deadline AFTER the midterms 🙄. Keep in mind this is just a subpoena, they STILL need to get around to charging him, arresting him, taking him to court, and then he will only get a few months and a small fine like Steve Bannon got🙄.

These people need to hurry the fuck and sentence him to real jail time up or he WILL be in office again by 2024. This is what happens when you think you can only stop fascism by patiently awaiting legal proceedings 🙄.

[decolonize-the-everything]

The legal offensive, led by Dana Remus, who until 2022 served as President Biden’s White House counsel, and Robert Lenhard, an outside lawyer for the party, will be aided by a communications team dedicated to countering candidates who Democrats fear could play spoiler to Mr. Biden. It amounts to a kind of legal Whac-a-Mole, a state-by-state counterinsurgency plan ahead of an election that could hinge on just a few thousand votes in swing states. The aim “is to ensure all the candidates are playing by the rules, and to seek to hold them accountable when they are not,” Mr. Lenhard said.

WHAT???

You're telling me that this guy

Suddenly gives a single shit about the rules???

The headlines about this are fucking insane also

"will giving voters access to vote for whatever candidate they want dooming democracy"

Normal headline for a country that definitely isn't being run by fascists.

Btw this is Dana Remus

"In August 2022, President Biden questioned in a 60 Minutes interview “how anyone can be that irresponsible” when asked about classified documents in the possession of former President Trump. But when President Biden said this, he knew he had stashed classified materials in several unsecure locations for years, dating back to his time as vice president and even as U.S. senator."

[...]President Biden’s attorneys claim to have first discovered classified material at Penn Biden Center on November 2, 2022. However, President Biden and his lawyers kept it secret from the American people before the midterm elections. CBS News broke the story in January 2023, leaving Americans to wonder if the White House had any intention of ever disclosing that President Biden hoarded classified documents for years.

You know what else they did together? Lied about codifying Roe v Wade if they won mid-terms. 6months AFTER dems won a narrow majority, Rie v Wade was overturned.

And like not to be a wacky conspiracy theorist who's right again but

"The case concerned the constitutionality of a 2018 Mississippi state law that banned most abortion operations after the first 15 weeks of pregnancy. The Mississippi law was based on a model by a Christian legal organization, Alliance Defending Freedom, with the specific intent to provoke a legal battle that would reach the Supreme Court and result in the overturning of Roe"

Guess what the Alliance Defending freedom works with and serves an agenda for?

Project 2025 yeah, the heritage foundation lists them as partners

Yeah remember how Dana Remus worked with Samuel Alito? Guess who's vote helped overrule abortion rights?

Samuel Alito, correct. Guess who else? Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett.

All Trump appointments.

Odd company to find yourself in without having ANY ties to the ADF or heritage foundation or project2025.

I wonder who the lawyers involved were?

Scott G Stewart. Interesting. Well who appointed him, right?

In 2021, Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch appointed Scott G. Stewart as Solicitor General for the State of Mississippi.

Oh so she was voted in.

Well im sure it was a normal election that Democrats didn't tamper with or anything. Like SURELY they didn't intentionally platform this woman using the Pied Piper method? SURELY NOT after platforming Trump and making the entire 2016 elections about anti-Trumpism. SURELY, they wouldn't have tried to make themselves look better by positioning themselves against extremists only to LOSE the bet they were making.

SURELY WE DIDNT LOSE ROE V WADE BECAUSE DEMOCRATS WONT STOP USING THE PIED PIPER STRATEGY TO WIN ELECTIONS? R I G H T???

Riley Collins, 53, is running against the state's treasurer, Lynn Fitch, who was the chair of the group Mississippi Women for Trump in 2016. Riley Collins is running an explicitly anti-Trump message, saying Monday that she doesn’t understand how Donald Trump's Christian supporters can reconcile their politics with their faith

Oh.

Welp.

Everyone thank democrats for Trump and the stacked supreme court and the loss of Roe V Wade. It Truly couldn't have happened without them blasting primetime tv with alt right candidates 24/7.

One day democrats will stop platforming right wing extremists and election tampering but I guess it won't be anytime soon.

Let me ask, what's the biggest argument for voting blue this year?

Right.

And how's that going? Y'all feel confident in that strategy right now?

And don't forget what they did to Bernie. Because Biden is very poetically doing the same fucking shit to sabotage 3rd parties right now.

Remember to act surprised when Trump wins.

Like voters and progressives and leftists haven't been saying for MONTHS that we won't vote Biden. Like swing states aren't voting uncommitted. Like labor unions aren't voting uncommitted. Like he isn't tanking the polls.

You know I will say that this election is a little different. Clinton didn't have nearly this much pushback so early in the race.

Biden's massive gap of votes compared to Trump is gonna look like the grand fucking canyon.

[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)

[mariacallous]

It is a measure of the divisiveness and tolerance for violence in the United States that the possibility of civil war looms so large over the 2024 presidential election—no matter which candidate wins. It is even the subject of a hit dystopian thriller. Though an actual civil war resulting from the election’s outcome remains unlikely, a range of sufficiently alarming politically violent scenarios are nevertheless quite possible.

Former President Donald Trump’s conviction on 34 counts of falsifying business records has sharpened frictions, with threats to the judiciary and his opponents immediately intensifying. “Time to start capping some leftys. This cannot be fixed by voting,” was one typical reaction tracked by Reuters on Gateway Pundit, a right-wing news site. Far-right media personality Stew Peters said on his Telegram channel that “our judicial system has been weaponized against the American people. We are left with NO option but to take matters into our own hands.”

Meanwhile, our assessments suggest that elements on the far left in this country are also escalating militant threats. A call to “Fuck the Fourth” recently appeared on an anarchist website, heralding a day of action on July 4 targeting the ports of Seattle, Oakland, Los Angeles, Boston, New York, New Jersey, and Baltimore. Additional summons to “Flood The Gates: Escalate” over the Gaza War both on college campuses and in communities across the nation this summer and fall are circulating on social media. At a pro-Palestine protest at the White House in June, one protester held up a decapitated likeness of President Joe Biden’s head, while crowds chanted “Revolution.”

These would-be violent extremists represent a microcosm of a U.S. political landscape that is increasingly willing to tolerate violence. A survey conducted last year found that 23 percent of Americans agreed with the statement that “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.” Another more recent poll similarly found that 28 percent of Republicans strongly agree or agree that “Americans may have to resort to violence in order to get the country back on track.” Meanwhile, 12 percent of Democrats agreed with the premise.

Among gun owners in the United States, these sentiments are even more prevalent. According to a survey conducted by the University of California, Davis, “About 42% of owners of assault-type rifles said political violence could be justified, rising to 44% of recent gun purchasers, and a staggering 56% of those who always or nearly always carry loaded guns in public

As the United States approaches its November election, the risks of violence will thus rise. This should not be surprising. Historically, violence is actually quite common in the United States, especially during election seasons. During the Reconstruction era, much of white supremacist violence directed against freed Black men and women was intended to intimidate would-be voters, ensuring that segregationist Democrats maintained their grip on power in the Deep South.

More recently, the 2022 midterms saw an assassination attempt target the speaker of the House of Representatives in an attack that seriously wounded her husband. The 2020 election, of course, sparked the Jan. 6, 2021, terrorist attack on the U.S. Capitol. In the 10 days leading up to the 2018 midterms, there were no fewer than four far-right terrorist attacks, most notably the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. The mail bombs that circulated that same week showed that threats to politicians have in fact been particularly frequent during the Trump era.

Despite that disquieting pattern, 2024 appears to provide even more fertile ground for militant responses to electoral developments. Trump’s court cases, coupled with the insistence from both parties that—in Trump’s words—“If we don’t win this election, I don’t think you’re going to have another election in this country,” have painted the election in existential terms.

As the United Nations Development Program concluded from its research into election violence around the world, “A common cause of election violence is that the stakes of winning and losing valued political posts are in many situations … incredibly high.”

Rendering the threat yet more severe is the range of possible locations and individuals that extremists may target, spanning the duration of election season. But how might violence differ at various stages of the campaign? Before the election, extremists may be more likely to target politicians on the campaign trail, seeking to intimidate them into changing their policies or deter them from running in the first place. Presidential candidate Nikki Haley had, for instance, requested Secret Service protection during her Republican Party primary challenge, while prominent Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher hinted that he was forced into retirement by threats against his family.

Based on experience, the election itself will likely feature armed intimidation at polling places and threats levied against election officials. A database analyzed by scholars Pete Simi, Gina Ligon, Seamus Hughes, and Natalie Standridge found that threats against public officials are likely to hit an all-time high in 2024. The data initially jumped in 2017, the year of Trump’s inauguration.

In the weeks after the forthcoming election, depending on the results, extremists will likely direct their animus toward representatives of the government—especially on one of the many ceremonial dates accompanying the transition of power—such the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, for instance. An exact repeat of that attack is probably less likely; law enforcement agencies will be far better prepared this time, and the groups that led the assault on the Capitol have been effectively dismantled by seditious conspiracy charges targeting their leadership.

Although white supremacist and anti-government extremists will be the likeliest to lash out, in line with trends over the past decade, violence from the far left cannot be discounted. Stabbing attacks have repeatedly targeted right-wing political leaders in Germany, for instance, and the harassment and violence targeting American Jews on U.S. college campuses have highlighted a more militant political left that has historically been quite open to violent action, including in the United States. This violent fringe has frequently deployed armed threats against politicians in particular—never more seriously than the lone gunman who targeted the Republican team practice for the congressional baseball game in 2017, or the far-left extremist from California who brought weapons to the home of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh to threaten him in 2022.

Salafi jihadi actors are also emboldened by recent successes in Afghanistan, Iran, and Moscow, and they may seek to take advantage of this particularly divided moment in the United States to elbow themselves back into the national consciousness. FBI Director Christopher Wray has suggested that his organization is growing increasingly concerned about the “potential for a coordinated attack here in the homeland, not unlike the ISIS-K attack we saw at the Russian concert hall back in March.” The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has similarly warned that “threat actors” will likely “converge on 2024 election season,” with foreign adversaries using influence operations to further divide the U.S. populace and create new sources of divisiveness and violence.

Is the violence likely to lead to civil war? Trump and many of his allies have repeatedly warned that another election loss—coupled with forthcoming trial verdicts—would trigger one or lead to revolution in the United States. A post on Truth Social shared by Trump, for instance, suggested that 2024 might resemble 1776, “except this time the fight is not against the British, it’s against communist Americans.” The threat doubled down on Trump’s previous warning that his defeat would spark a “bloodbath” in this country.

Punditry, however, is not prophecy. Despite the warnings from scholars, policy wonks, journalists, and others, civil war is in fact unlikely in this country. Geographic distinctions between would-be warring factions today run urban-rural rather than north-south, robbing any potential seditious movement of the geographical safe haven it would need to engage in nationwide conflict. But political rhetoric and the proliferation of threats is almost certain to lead to some level of violence.

Making the threat even more serious is that the Biden administration carries little-to-no legitimacy among most hardcore Trump supporters—who still persist in believing that the 2020 election was stolen. The vice grip that these conspiracy theories hold on many mainstream Republicans means that any response by the Biden administration will be regarded as illegitimate—whether that response is deploying additional law enforcement or even the National Guard to polling places or seeking to educate the public about the veracity and integrity of U.S. elections.

In other words, the United States finds itself in a security dilemma, where any defensive measures designed to safeguard the electoral process will in fact likely be interpreted as an offensive strike—that is, to ensure a repeat electoral fraud. As the aforementioned White House protests have demonstrated, Biden also has little legitimacy in the eyes of the far left, meaning that particular movement would not likely be sated by a Democratic election victory.

Countermeasures will need to focus on education and law enforcement preparation. In particular, the Biden administration should champion education tools that reassure the U.S. public about the resilience of its electoral system from hacking or cheating while also pioneering digital literacy measures that might help protect Americans from disinformation and conspiracy theories shared online, including through artificial intelligence.

In particularly high-risk areas, which might include swing states, the administration should also consider raising the law enforcement presence to deter violent actors from targeting such locations. Successfully stopping violence, however, will require a bipartisan commitment to accept election results and publicly praise the integrity of the election and its many officials—which seems completely unrealistic at this stage.

Americans are therefore left with a political landscape defined by existential rhetoric and violent threats, with very little that the government can do to effectively counter these charges. Accordingly, the threat may be less of another civil war than of the total breakdown of the democratic electoral process that has defined the country since its creation.

[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

[jeffhirsch]

Seasonality Works! Trade the Cycles & Profit from History

Source: Super Boom (April 2011) by Jeffrey A. Hirsch, Fig. 1.3 p12, 500+ Percent Moves Follow Inflation

Earlier this month when we signed off on the final page proofs and sent the 2025 Stock Trader’s Almanac to press, I took pause to reflect upon the historic seasonal research my late father and founder of the Almanac, Yale Hirsch, accomplished and that we now continue. When Yale published the 1st edition of the iconic Stock Trader’s Almanac in 1968 who would have thought that many of the patterns and trends would still be working today? There have been changes and updates. Some trends have gone to the indicator graveyard while new patterns have emerged.

Perhaps the most quintessential Almanac pattern ever just completed for the second time in Almanac history. Remember my Super Boom forecast for Dow 38820 published in 2011

Look at this chart of the 4-Year Presidential Election Cycle! We first sent this chart to members in July 2021. It guided us through the covid bull market, called the midterm bear, pre-election year bull and current election year strength.

The market continues to follow the trends of our seasonal and 4-year cycle patterns we track and monitor. In our July Outlook, we maintained our bullish outlook for 2024, but cautioned that the market was possibly due for some mean reversion (a pullback) once NASDAQ’s 12-Day Midyear Rally ended in mid-July. NASDAQ did top out on July 10 while DJIA and S&P 500 topped about one week later.

The market has recovered in line with historical election year strength in August, but the correction is not likely over. With President Biden stepping aside our Open Field election year is back in play. This does not mean we are heading into the red for the year, but it does suggest the market may continue to struggle over the next few months during the seasonal weak period and leading up to this now more uncertain election. But remember since 1952 there have been “Only Two Losses Last 7 Months of Election Years” (page 80 STA 2024). Any potential September/October market weakness could set up a solid Q4, end-of-year rally, most likely beginning after Election Day.

For over five decades, top traders, investors and money managers have relied upon the Stock Trader’s Almanac. The 2025, 58th Annual Edition shows you the cycles, trends, and patterns you need to know in order to trade and invest with reduced risk and for maximum profit.

Limited time offer available now! Get the 2024 & 2025 Stock Trader's Almanacs for Free, while 2024 supplies last! Subscribe to my digital service, Almanac Investor, now and get the 2024 and 2025 Stock Trader’s Almanacs as free bonuses. Receive the 2024 STA now and be first to get the 2025 edition this fall hot off the press!

[anamericangirl]

We’ve been told over the past few years that, starting in 2021, questioning a “free and fair” election is dangerous and a “threat to democracy” only to discover that the FBI and social media conspired together and interfered in the election by suppressing a story they knew would damage Joe Biden’s campaign until after the election and then a few days ago finding out that Biden has classified documents from his vice presidency. And it was known he had them about a week before midterms but the information was kept from us until after the election. And that’s just what we know for certain right now. It was not a free and fair election. And they are going after people for questioning it because they know it wasn’t free and fair. Biden’s presidency is illegitimate.

[darkmaga-retard]

The chief of staff for Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign promoted mobile (online) voting while heading up an organization that advocated for it. However, online voting has repeatedly been found to not be secure enough for widespread voting.

Sheila Nix, Harris’ campaign’s chief of staff, once led an organization that pushes for mobile voting. The organization was co-founded by another former deputy governor who worked for former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D). Nix promoted mobile voting, which the organization's co-founder discovered is still not secure, even after allowing a state to use it in midterm elections. 

Nix is well embedded in the Democratic party machine. She was deputy governor from 2004 to 2008 for Blagojevich, who was later impeached and removed from office and convicted of federal corruption charges, a position that is not mentioned on her LinkedIn account. She also served as chief of staff for Biden during the 2012 presidential campaign for then-President Barack Obama, then became chief of staff to then-second lady Jill Biden during the Obama administration's second term, before being a senior adviser for Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign, according to LinkedIn. From January 2021 to July 2023, Nix was chief of staff at the U.S Department of Education.

[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."

[yobaba30]

Thank you, David Rothkopf

Spot the pattern:

2020: Biden can't win. (Biden wins.)

2022: Biden to be slammed in midterms. (Dems do great.)

Off-year elections: Biden in peril. (Dems win even in many red states.)

2021-2023: Biden can't get past GOP in Congress. (Biden achieves more legislative wins than any Dem in 60 years.)

2020-2024: Biden too old. (Biden more successful at presidenting than every single younger predecessor since WWII. Which is all of them.)

If you're stuck, let me know and I'll help you with the math.

Let me add one more factor to this analysis, Biden's likely opponent has never won a popular vote, achieved nothing as president, was impeached twice, has been indicted on 91 felony counts, is planning to destroy democracy and elevate our enemies, is a rapist, a racist and criminally incompetent...and, by any objective analysis is the worst president in US history. Also, he's old, mentally unstable, fat, and as close to Satan as you will ever get in human form. So, you know, if you can do the advanced math, factor that in too.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Michael Kruse at Politico Magazine:

WEST PALM BEACH — Susie Wiles, the people who know her the best believe, is a force more sensed than seen. Her influence on political events, to many who know what they’re watching, is as obvious as it is invisible. The prints leave not so much as a smudge. It’s a shock when she shows up in pictures. Even then it is almost always in the background. She speaks on the record hardly ever, and she speaks about herself even less. Last month, though, on the afternoon of the day of the Republican primary in Florida, here Wiles was — sitting outside a Starbucks, at a table with an umbrella she picked for protection from the glare, wearing sensible flats and a cream-colored top and the sunglasses she likes with the lenses like mirrors, not far from the campaign headquarters of Donald J. Trump.

Wiles is not just one of Trump’s senior advisers. She’s his most important adviser. She’s his de facto campaign manager. She has been in essence his chief of staff for the last more than three years. She’s one of the reasons Trump is the GOP’s presumptive nominee and Ron DeSantis is not. She’s one of the reasons Trump’s current operation has been getting credit for being more professional than its fractious, seat-of-the-pants antecedents. And she’s a leading reason Trump has every chance to get elected again — even after his loss of 2020, the insurrection of 2021, his party’s defeats in the midterms of 2022, the criminal indictments of 2023 and the trial (or trials) of 2024. The former president is potentially a future president. And that’s because of him. But it’s also because of her. Trump, of course, is Trump — he can be irritable, he can be impulsive — and this campaign is facing unprecedented stressors and snags. It’s a long six-plus months till Election Day. For now, though, nobody around him is so influential, and nobody around him has been so influential for so long. “There is nobody, I think, that has the wealth of information that she does. Nobody in our orbit. Nobody,” top Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio told me. “She touches everything.” “Certainly,” said former Florida Republican Rep. Carlos Curbelo, “she’s one of the most consequential people in American politics right now.” “And nobody,” said veteran Florida lobbyist Ronnie Book, “even knows who she is.”

She’s a mother. She’s a grandmother — she turns 67 next month. She’s worked in politics for more than 40 years — for presidents, for mayors, for governors, for members of Congress. She’s a soft-spoken Episcopalian. She’s a self-described moderate. Over the last few months, I’ve talked about Wiles with more than 100 people, people who have worked with her, around her, for her and against her, and there is a surprisingly bipartisan consensus: She’s good at what she does. She’s a savvy operator, a capable manager, a spotter and cultivator of up-and-coming talent, a maker and keeper of relationships with reporters, and a sly, subtle shaper of stories that help frame the political currents that can determine the difference between a win and a loss. She’s helmed signature statewide campaigns in 2010, 2016, 2018 and 2020 — Rick Scott, Trump, DeSantis, Trump again — all of which could have been defeats but were not. “She was already the most successful, well-respected Republican operative in Florida by a long mile, and she’s now cementing that brand,” said Ashley Walker, a Democratic strategist who twice ran Barack Obama’s Florida campaigns and has worked in lobbying with Wiles. “She is,” said Joe Gruters, a former chair of the Florida Republican Party, current state senator and longtime Trump ally, “the most valuable political adviser in the country.”

But coursing, too, through my conversations were not just questions I had for these scores of people but questions these people had for me — earnest inquiries from types who are perhaps not so accustomed to such doubt. Why is she working for him? And why does it seem to be working so well? Republicans and Democrats alike who know her and respect her and respect her work — they struggle to explain it. People who have considered themselves confidants and friends — they talk and they text, not so much with her as with each other, perplexed. In her usually calm disposition, in what most of them consider her general good sense, some of them find some small solace — at least he, they say, is listening to her. For others, though, it’s that placid mien and level head that’s in some sense precisely the source of the confusion. Liberals and even anti-Trump conservatives sketch analogies to the most odious authoritarians and see Wiles therefore by extension as the kind of associate who’s smart enough and sane enough to know better — and without whom any would-be dictator would be unable to get or wield such potentially destructive power. They see her as an accomplice.

[...] She worked in the 1990s and 2000s for a pair of two-term, generally centrist mayors of Jacksonville — first John Delaney, then John Peyton. She was by then certainly no novice. She’d been on Capitol Hill as an entry-level staffer for Jack Kemp, on the campaign and in the White House as a scheduler for Ronald Reagan, and in Northeast Florida as the district director for congressmember Tillie Fowler — after she’d gotten married to Reagan advance man Lanny Wiles and they’d moved south to Ponte Vedra Beach. She was Delaney’s director of communications and intergovernmental affairs, then his deputy chief of staff, then his chief of staff — the city’s very first female chief of staff. Delaney at the time called her “essential to what we are doing.” He described her as “a soulmate.” Peyton, for his part, hired her as his chief of special initiatives and communications — even after she worked for an opponent of his in the primary. It was a sign of respect, but something like unease as well — it was safer, he decided, to have her inside and not outside City Hall, working for him and not against him.

[...] It took nearly two years, though, before her next big post in politics. In 2008, she was the Duval County co-chair for John McCain’s presidential campaign. In 2009, she was a regular panelist on a local talk show on Jacksonville TV. In 2010, in March, she gave $500 to establishment GOP gubernatorial candidate Bill McCollum — five and a half weeks before she signed on to manage the longshot campaign of a businessperson and political outsider. Rick Scott stuck in his bid to a catch phrase — “Let’s get to work” — and steadfastly refused to meet with editorial boards at newspapers around the state. “Why?” he was asked. “I’ll have to ask Susie,” he answered.

In 2011, instead of joining Scott in Tallahassee, Wiles joined lobbyist Brian Ballard’s Florida-based firm to open an office in Jacksonville. “I really needed somebody in Jacksonville,” Ballard told me, “and she had great reach across the board.” She was a brief, ill-fated campaign manager for Jon Huntsman’s brief, ill-fated presidential campaign — a faltering, frustrating few months that spring, others involved remember, in which she clashed with the chief strategist and cried in the office. As an ex-head of an in-cycle campaign, she was for reporters on the presidential beat an at-the-ready quote — criticizing businessperson Herman Cain (“the possibility that he is a philanderer and an abuser”), praising in the National Journal more moderate New Jersey governor Chris Christie (“the best foil” for Barack Obama) and eventually endorsing former Massachusetts governor and private equity investor Mitt Romney (“the stability, intellect and integrity that Republicans are looking for in their standard bearer,” she said). In 2012, she advised one of the losing candidates in a seven-candidate congressional primary running from Jacksonville down toward Daytona Beach — the winner of which was a newcomer named DeSantis. In 2014, she gave money to then-South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley. And in 2015 — in August, a month in which she gave money to Jeb Bush — she went to New York, to Trump Tower, to meet with Donald Trump.

She came home and told Delaney she was impressed. She told Ballard she “saw something” in him. She told her friend Rick Mullaney, an adviser to Delaney and Peyton, she thought he was going to be the next president. And she told her friend Paul McCormick, a longtime Jacksonville political consultant and P.R. man, a story. “She said she went in to sit for her interview,” McCormick told me. She said the chair that had been set up for her was some 20 feet from where Trump was, and Trump started talking, and Wiles found it awkward. “And long story short, wherever she was sitting, and exactly how many feet away, she moved,” said McCormick, “right up next to where he was.” [...]

Her father was Pat Summerall. A native of rural Lake City, Florida, he endured a brutal childhood, as he recounts in his memoir — a club foot a doctor was able to somewhat miraculously fix, abandoned by his parents, a stepfather who beat him with a rubber hose. He played professional football, for the Lions, Cardinals and most notably the Giants in New York, an end and a kicker who booted with what had been his deformed foot one of the most important field goals in National Football League history. He got rich and he got famous, though, as a broadcaster. With a relentless work ethic and a smooth, spare speaking style, Summerall was the mellifluous voice of the Masters of golf, the U.S. Open of tennis but first and foremost the NFL — “the voice,” in the words of his longtime partner John Madden, “of football.” He was also, because of his drinking, a mostly absent parent. His daughter was born in 1957. She was followed quickly by two brothers. He had an affair for 17 years before his wife divorced him and he married his mistress. “My children grew up without me,” he wrote. “I failed them as a father.” Her mother was the former Katharine Jacobs. Also from Lake City, she was, according to her daughter, “a fantastic gardener,” “a beautiful seamstress” and “the best cook there ever was.” She made all the meals. She set all the appointments. She bought all the Christmas gifts, one of her brothers once wrote on Facebook. She so often had to do so much on her own. And every evening around 5, in the big, tidy house in Saddle River, New Jersey, she went upstairs and took a warm bath. She coped, her observant daughter thought, with courage and with grace.

POLITICO Magazine has a detailed report on GOP political operative Susie Wiles, who is the daughter of the late sports announcer Pat Summerall.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

By Jess Coleman

When, in December 2021, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin announced he would vote “no” on President Biden’s signature legislative proposal, the Build Back Better Act, the reaction boiled down to: “Well, what did you expect?” After all, Manchin, despite being a Democrat, is from deep-red West Virginia, and politicians from deep-red states simply cannot vote in favor of major progressive policies championed by the leader of the Democratic Party. That’s just politics, dummy. That Biden and his fellow Democrats even tried was treated in some circles as painfully naïve: Unless Democrats learn that basic lesson and bring centrists into the fold, they’ll never achieve a vibrant, sustainable majority. Or so sayeth the conventional wisdom.

So when Manchin announced last week that he is considering leaving the Democratic Party to become an independent, his rationale was hardly difficult to predict. “The brand has become so bad,” he said, drawing on the oft-repeated talking point that the Democrats have lept too far left. In other words—and in contravention of all logic, given the results of the 2022 midterms—Manchin simply cannot in good conscience remain with a party that, in substance and style, provides no room for leaders seeking to appeal to a moderate, bipartisan electorate.

Don’t be fooled. Manchin’s charade is hardly one of principle. It’s one of total desperation.

There are no secrets about Manchin’s political situation at home. After being reelected in 2018 by just 3%, in a year in which Democrats vastly outperformed expectations nationally, Manchin has an enormous hill to climb with his reelection looming in 2024. But the West Virginia Senator doesn’t seem to have much interest in taking responsibility for the electoral crisis in which he has enmeshed himself. Instead, he’d like us to believe the political forces around him have simply left him no choice: Both sides have drawn too far to the extremes, leaving no political home for the critical mass of centrist West Virginians who sent him to Washington. Hence the need to chart a new path on his own.

The framing echoes a convenient perspective that is adored by the media and political establishment: Elections are not won with base voters, but through a small slice of persuadable, moderate swing voters, perpetually lurking just outside of frame. Democrats, in turn, need to have some Joe Manchins—those politicians who embody the voters who are key to electoral success—lying around to be taken seriously. The failure to keep these soi-disant moderate saviors on hand reveals a fundamental structural deficiency for the party writ large.

But if it’s true that Manchin is such a political genius—uniquely capable of surviving as a Democrat in a deep red state—you would expect that his victory is owed to a broad cross section of voters from a variety of political camps. Alas, that’s the complete opposite of what happened in 2018. According to CNN exit polls, Manchin garnered the votes of 64% of those who identify as moderates, and just 23% of conservatives. Those numbers are roughly in line with what New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand achieved that same year: 70% and 18%, respectively. The reality is Manchin barely made it over the finish line in roughly the same way Democrats all around the country win their seats: by running up the numbers with voters on the political left—Manchin won 80% of self-identified liberals in 2018.

Indeed, as The New Republic’s Alex Pareene observed in 2021, Manchin is actually far more reliant on Democratic voters than many of his blue state counterparts. While someone like Gillibrand can afford to lose large swaths of Democrats in a state where they are in ample supply, Manchin needs to pull virtually every registered Democrat in his state to win. Against all logic, Manchin approached Biden’s first term as if the rules that governed his electoral hopes were precisely opposite to reality. Instead of rewarding his most loyal voters—dyed-in-the-wool liberal Democrats—by delivering for them in Washington, Manchin has spent his latest term going out of his way to alienate his base and position himself in a political no man’s land: personally steamrolling key Democratic priorities while siding with his party on most routine issues and appointments.

In short, Manchin made a bet. He believed he could rely on the support of Democrats and spent nearly all his time trying to appeal to a tiny, if not nonexistent, group of voters who are up for grabs and have no real allegiance to either of the two dominant political parties. It hasn’t worked out the way Manchin anticipated, and this is where he now finds himself—orchestrating a last-ditch, hopeless effort to create a new political reality from thin air.

It is possible Manchin never had a shot at reelection, had fortune and circumstance not permitted him to avail himself of 2018’s political trends, we’d already have a Republican holding that West Virginia Senate seat. But the broader lesson is crucial for those in the media and elected leadership who constantly insist that disregarding the Democratic base in service of pursuing the allegedly vast rewards that come from focusing solely on the views of the so-called centrist, swing voters is the only viable path to victory in American politics. Those who subscribe to this view should explain why the two most notable Democrats who aggressively pursued this approach—Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin—are currently fighting for their political lives, while other red-state Democratic senators such as Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Jon Tester of Montana have consistently survived—and remain loyal to the party’s big priorities even when their electoral hopes face massive headwinds.

Mostly, we have to understand something simple about Manchin: We are not watching a political genius at work. He’s not on the verge of revealing a masterful plan to pull off another miracle in West Virginia. This is a desperate politician squirming for his political life after making a series of catastrophic political decisions. Manchin has hardly proven that the Democratic Party is mortally wounded due to its failure to leave room for the center left. All he’s done is reinforce a very basic rule in politics: Doing the opposite of what your voters want is an idiotic election strategy.