We begin today with Ed Kilgore of New York magazine reporting that we could see a so-called “Red Mirage” again on Election Night 2024 as votes are being counted.
Even though Trump has already asserted again and again that the 2024 election has been “rigged,” which suggests he is very likely to contest any defeat, his strategy for claiming victory is a bit less clear. Indeed, there have been some pretty good reasons to believe the “red mirage” and “blue shift” would be significantly less pronounced this time around. With the COVID pandemic having ended, voting by mail would clearly drop from 2020 levels, as it did in the 2022 midterms (in part because some states reinstated more stringent requirements for casting “absentee ballots” once the public-health emergency ended). To the extent that some of the partisan disparity in voting methods was attributable to different perceptions of the risks involved in voting in person in 2020, perhaps the disparity would fade as well, aside from the fact that the Republican Party (and grudgingly and inconsistently, Trump himself) was avidly promoting voting by mail as an option for its own voters.
But now, a new survey from YouGov-Economist suggests that 2020’s big split between Democrats and Republicans in how they plan to vote could recur to an alarming degree. Voting by mail is, in fact, likely to decline: According to a Pew analysis of validated voters, 46 percent used mail ballots in 2020. The new survey suggests only 31 percent plan to vote by mail (either via the postal service or utilizing drop boxes) this year. But the partisan gap in voting methods hasn’t gone away. Fully 54 percent of those planning to vote for Trump, as opposed to 35 percent who say they will vote for Harris, expect to vote in person on Election Day. Meanwhile, 42 percent of Harris supporters plan to utilize mail ballots, as opposed to 20 percent of Trump supporters. So it’s likely that once again Trump will do significantly better than Harris in the votes tabulated first (their voters, interestingly enough, are almost equally likely to vote early in person, which is available to one degree or another in most states; these votes are counted first in some places and later in others).
There are some exacerbating factors that could help produce a red mirage/blue shift in the key battleground states. Both Pennsylvania and Wisconsin refuse to allow election offices to preprocess mail ballots until Election Day; this slows down the count generally but also pushes back mail-ballot counts even more. The Trump campaign is adopting a far more aggressive posture than in 2020 with respect to challenging ballots (and voters) it considers suspect and slowing down both vote-counting and results certifications. And Trump himself is if anything more adamant than ever in his claims that many millions of Democratic votes will be fraudulent (he’s even said he would win California if the votes were counted fairly).
Maegan Vazquez of The Washington Post report that the conservative blog “The Gateway Pundit” has published an acknowledgment that Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss have been cleared of ballot fraud.
Earlier this week, the site settled with Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, two former Georgia election workers. The terms of the settlement have not been disclosed.
“Georgia officials concluded that there was no widespread voter fraud by election workers who counted ballots at the State Farm Arena in November 2020. The results of this investigation indicate that Ruby Freeman and Wandrea ‘Shaye’ Moss did not engage in ballot fraud or criminal misconduct while working at State Farm Arena on election night,” said
the note published to the website Saturday morning by the publication’s founder and editor, Jim Hoft. “A legal matter with this news organization and the two election workers has been resolved to the mutual satisfaction of the parties through a fair and reasonable settlement.”
The Gateway Pundit wrote a series of articles about the 2020 presidential election amplifying spurious claims that Freeman, Moss and former Dominion Voting Systems executive Eric Coomer helped rig the 2020 election in favor of Joe Biden.
Jon Allsop of Columbia Journalism Review looks at how meteorologists have become lead voices in sounding the alarm about climate change.
Morales told other news outlets afterward that the climate emergency, and his frustration that the world has not done more to curb it, contributed to his emotional moment on air, in addition to his shock and fear about Milton’s intensification and the people in its path. According to the New York Times, Morales has long worked to incorporate climate science into his day-to-day weather forecasts, but the moment reflected “a recent shift” in his approach—from “striving to be a ‘non-alarmist’ weathercaster to one who freely admits to being horrified by the mounting threats of global warming.” Not all viewers have taken kindly to this approach: after Hurricane Helene, itself a devastating storm, made landfall last month, Morales wrote in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, where he is a columnist, that one person responded to his warnings by calling him a “climate militant.” “Perhaps those who have known me as the just-the-facts non-alarmist meteorologist can’t get used to the new me,” Morales wrote. “That’s why they bicker and accuse me of overhyping emerging weather threats.”
As Helene hit, followed by Milton—which was not as destructive as some of the early signs had portended, but was still one of the strongest storms ever to hit Florida, killing at least a dozen people—some of the conspiracy theorizing around them made accusations of climate militancy or doom-mongering look mild: the storms have given rise to a flood of absurd mis- and disinformation, boosted by a legion of online grifters and politicians including Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who suggested that a shady, official “they” are controlling the weather. The head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency said earlier this week that the disinformation had reached levels she’d never seen before, and was impeding response efforts; The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel wrote yesterday that the storms have “offered a portrait of American discourse almost too bleak to reckon with head-on.” Meteorologists have been on the front lines of dealing with all this. According to Rolling Stone, some have even reported receiving death threats. (For at least one reader, this fact brought to mind a Simpsons episode in which a direct hit from a comet is averted and Moe the bartender says, “Let’s go burn down the observatory so this’ll never happen again!”)
Professor Mark Lawrence Schrad writes for Salon that MAGA Republicans have abandoned policy designed to promote the public good, including assistance for the aftermath of natural disasters.
Since at least 2016, scholars and journalists have consistently sounded the alarm on the Republican drift into right-wing authoritarianism. But even tinpot dictators and autocrats at least pay lip-service to working for the common good. Modern Republicanism’s belief that the core role of government is instead to wield the power of the state to punish one’s enemies goes beyond myopic allusions to authoritarianism, fascism or caesarism to a premodern, pre-capitalist rival conception of government known as patrimonialism, in which the state is not meant to serve society but society is meant to serve the state — and the autocrat who runs it. [...]
The most obvious indicator of this premodern turn is the longstanding Republican hostility to any policy meant to promote the public good. Public schools? Defund and privatize them. Department of Education? Abolish it. Medicare, Medicaid and public health care? Slash and repeal them. Public transit? Kill it. Public libraries? Defund them, ban certain books and doxx librarians with the threat of criminal penalties. Community and public health? Attack and undermine it. Community centers? Shut them down. Public lands? Sell them off. Public and national parks? Slash them. Public servants? Attack and fire them. Public restrooms? Monitor them, and make it a crime for people to use what are deemed the “wrong” ones. Aside from the military, modern Republicanism is fundamentally allergic to any governmental or public-sector actions that promotes the public interest, safety and well-being — in other words, to the core Enlightenment understanding of government itself. [...]
When Hurricane Katrina smashed the Gulf Coast in 2005, a $52 billion relief package sailed through the House of Representatives 410-11, and a companion bill allowing the National Flood Insurance Program to borrow more money passed unanimously, 416-0. Yet when Hurricane Sandy tore apart the East Coast in 2012, a nearly identical $51 billion relief package was opposed by 179 Republicans and one Democrat, while the same companion flood-insurance bill was suddenly opposed by 67 Republicans, based on unfounded claims that the bills were “full of pork" unrelated to the disaster. This should have been a clear signal that Republican dedication to the bedrock principle that the state should serve the people was wavering.
Damn, that’s a helluva thing to assert: That is, at least Benito Mussolini “made the trains run on time,” unlike today’s MAGA Republican Party.
Only...Mussolini did no such thing. But he sure took credit for the improvements in Italian post-war train operations and used them as propaganda.
Plus ça change...
Elisa Shearer, Michael Lipka, Sarah Naseer, Emily Tomasik, and Mark Jurkowitz of Pew Research Center say that Americans are increasingly having trouble distinguishing fact from fiction in digesting news about the 2024 election.
A new Pew Research Center survey finds that about three-quarters of U.S. adults (73%) say they have seen inaccurate news coverage about the election at least somewhat often, including 37% who have seen this kind of information extremely or very often.
About half of Americans (52%) say they generally find it difficult to determine what is true and what is not when getting news about the election. And 28% separately say that it’s been difficult for them to find reliable information about the presidential election. [...]
Overall, Americans are much less likely to be wary of the information from their most frequent sources of election news. Much smaller shares say they at least sometimes see inaccurate information from the sources they turn to most often for news and information about the election than say the same about election news in general.
Joan Walsh of The Nation grades last week’s media blitz by Vice President Kamala Harris.
The idiocy of the big media’s dismissing Harris’s interviewers can be refuted simply by its massive and varying audiences: Stern draws an estimated 10 million listeners, and his audience is three-quarters male. Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy is the number-one podcast on Spotify, and reaches 5 million listeners a week, overwhelmingly female. The View is the number-one daytime talk show, averaging 2.5 million viewers, most of them women. The Late Show with Stephen Colbert is the top-rated nighttime talk show, also averaging 2.5 million viewers. Harris’s 60 Minutes appearance drew 5.7 million voters, second only to Monday Night Football. No ratings are available yet for the Univision Town Hall. It’s mathematically dubious to simply add up the shows’ viewership, since some people watch more than one, but let’s do it anyway: More than 25 million people potentially viewed Harris’s media swing; millions more likely saw the Univision special.
But we all know quantity is not quality. So how did Harris do? I watched all of her appearances, and graded them, from worst to best, below. Quick summary: She rocked it, dealing with tough questions and funny ones, showcasing policy and empathy, unapologetically centering women, while not ignoring men. It’s no more an assumption than the statements Harris’s big-media critics made about voters to conclude that those critics are mainly jealous that they are no longer the gatekeepers.
Finally today, Sandrine Exil of El País in English says that the Dominican Republic has accelerated its plan to deport Haitians.
On October 2, the government of President Luis Abinader announced plans to deport up to 10,000 Haitians per week, citing an “excessive migrant population” in Dominican communities. This marks the most severe immigration policy in the country’s recent history. In the announcement, the president’s spokesperson stated that the expulsions would occur “within the framework of strict protocols that guarantee respect for human rights and the dignity of those being repatriated.” However, complaints from the border indicate that these protocols are not being followed, with recent videos emerging that depict scenes of police brutality.
In light of this situation, the Haitian transitional government — beleaguered by gang violence — urgently requested a meeting of the Permanent Council of the Organization of American States (OAS) through its Minister of Foreign Affairs, Dominique Dupuy. During the meeting, Haiti’s representative, Gandy Thomas, condemned the deportations, labeling them a “strategy of ethnic cleansing” and a “discriminatory campaign” targeting Haitians based on nationality and skin color.
Minister Dupuy expressed deep concern about the “brutal raids and deportations” that Haitians have faced in the Dominican Republic, asserting that these actions violate human dignity and international human rights standards. She called for respect and justice for her fellow Haitians, urging the Dominican government to reconsider its immigration policies.
Everyone have the best possible day!
