McSweeney’s:
I’m an Undecided Hobbit, Torn Between a Dark Lord Who Promises an Age of Chaos and an Elf Queen Whom I Just Wish I Knew More About
I’m a well-informed Hobbit—a Boffin from Overhill, thank you very much—who is in a kerfuffle about whom to throw my Hobbit-sized support behind. For some, the choice is clear, but for a little guy like me, I’m feeling awfully torn up, like a tear-and-share cheese bread during Winter Solstice! I simply can’t seem to decide between the Dark Lord determined to return to power and stay there until shadows drown all of Arda, or the Elf Galadriel, who seems to be great and exceedingly normal, but I just wish I knew more about her.
This is about right, given the quality of political coverage from major media. This is the week to not believe everything you read. Just do the work.
That’s the overflow crowd.
Fox 5 Atlanta:
Puerto Rican community in Georgia incensed over racist joke at Trump rally
Members of Georgia's Puerto Rican and Latino communities expressed their outrage at a news conference in Norcross on Tuesday.
"Words matter, especially if somebody is going to be the leader of this nation," said community leader Grace Williams.
The Trump campaign has tried to distance itself from the comedian, saying Hinchcliffe's joke about Puerto Rico does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.
Just a week before Election Day, speakers said the vulgar remarks could hurt Trump in key battleground states.
"One-hundred thousand Puerto Ricans live in the metro area, and we vote," said Williams.
From MI, lots of details in early vote modeling:
The margin will drop further but Democrats are in reasonable shape in Michigan. As Ben Wikler says in neighboring WI, this is Margin of Effort stuff.
CT Insider:
Puerto Ricans in Connecticut condemn 'joke' at Trump rally: 'Despicable statement'
Outrage spread swiftly among Connecticut’s sizeable Puerto Rican community on Monday in response to a widely-shared clip of a comic at a Donald Trump rally referring to the territory as “a floating island of garbage.”
“It was just a despicable statement,” said Hartford Democratic City Councilman Amilcar Hernandez, who also serves as treasurer of the committee that helps put on the city’s annual Puerto Rican Parade — one of the oldest celebrations of the island’s culture in the U.S.
“We see it as completely offensive to our community and our culture,” Hernandez added. “It’s just, to me, hard to understand how somebody can think that making a joke that is offensive to a whole community is acceptable.”
There are House seats in play in Connecticut, and Democrats have to vote them all.
Oh, and by the way, in Connecticut how you early vote may affect whether it counts. And as it happens, a quirk of the Civil War means military is exempt. Click the link to see what’s up with that:
They say every vote counts, especially in close elections, but for those who die after they've submitted an absentee ballot or participated in early voting, things aren't so clear cut.
Speaking of WI and Democratic Chair Ben Wikler:
Jonathan V Last/The Bulwark:
What More Do You People Want from Kamala Harris? (Part Deux)
She's done everything voters could reasonably have asked for.
Kamala Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee a hundred days ago. In that time she:
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Unified the Democratic party.
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Reversed Biden’s polling deficit and took the lead over Trump.
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Organized a successful convention.
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Created a policy framework for her prospective administration.
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Pivoted to the center on nearly every issue: From domestic energy production, to gun reform, to immigration.
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Absolutely schlonged Trump in their debate.
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Performed somewhere between adequately and exceptionally in every single media interview.
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Spent time with several non-traditional media outlets.
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Gave almost unfailingly good speeches in front of giant crowds.
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Performed heroic levels outreach to Republicans and swing voters by appearing on Fox News and campaigning with the likes of Liz Cheney—while explicitly inviting and welcoming Republican voters into her coalition.
Harris did not play perfect baseball—you or I could sketch out a handful of things we wish she had done differently. Or better. But the perfect campaign does not exist.
Click the video. The above is mesmerizing. And it is so Vegas.
Brian Beutler/Off Message:
The Resistance Demands Respect, Too
They outnumber MAGA, but political elites and civil society leaders—including mainstream journalists and their benefactors—bend over backward to appease Trump.
Here’s how I responded: “It’s really a question for you to answer based on your own calculus as a patron. If you feel you get a lot out of the news pages, I think there’s a pretty strong case for keeping your subscription. If you feel like you’ve been paying WaPo to ‘support journalism’ but find the political coverage to be bad, then it’s probably a good time to cut bait.”
I note this up front only to establish my agnosticism on the boycott question. My feelings about the rush to cancel subscriptions are pretty mixed, and they’d be mixed even if I didn’t have friends who work there.
But the idea that the backlash against Bezos and the Post has no value is clearly wrong. It can and should be a wake-up call to people with money and reputations on the line that the country’s anti-Trump majority is still a force to be reckoned with. The minoritarian rules of U.S. democracy may allow Trump to become president again despite his broad unpopularity. The resistance may not be geographically well-distributed enough to win the presidency in 2024. But that doesn’t mean liberal Americans will shrug it off when elites or corporate bigwigs or civil society leaders accommodate threats and inducements from corrupt fascists.
Greg Sargent/The New Republic:
Trump’s Ugly Racist Rally Finally Unmasks His Real Closing Argument
The Madison Square Garden rally didn’t devolve into a hate fest. The hate fest was the point all along.
This, and other news stories using similar language, imply that in some sense, the event at the Garden devolved in character into something other than what it was originally meant to be. The gathering went off the rails, goes this account, rather than offering a comprehensive statement of his true rationale for seeking the highest office in the land.
But why should we understand it that way? The event at the Garden actually is Trump’s closing argument.
This isn’t to say that the “grievances, misogyny, and racism” on display are the only things he’s closing on at the end of this presidential race. There is certainly a lot of messaging about the economy as well. Rather, it’s to say that this spectacle absolutely should be seen as an explicit, very public declaration that when he wins, well, he told you exactly what you were going to get, so you’d better bend the knee and get ready to swallow all of it.
Jack Jenkins and Aleja Hertzler-McCain/RNS:
San Juan archbishop condemns racist jokes at Trump's New York rally, demands Trump apologize
Trump has made inroads into the Latino community's solid support for Democratic candidates, but remarks made at a rally at Madison Square Garden may cause some to rethink.
The Trump campaign immediately tried to distance itself from [Tony] Hinchcliffe’s “floating island of garbage” remark. Campaign Senior Adviser Danielle Alvarez told Religion News Service the joke “does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.”
But in an open letter addressed to Trump and sent to RNS on Monday evening, Archbishop Roberto O. González Nieves of the Archdiocese of San Juan condemned the remarks, saying he is doing so after conferring with his fellow bishops.
“Puerto Rico is not a floating island of garbage,” the letter read. “Puerto Rico is a beautiful country inhabited by a beautiful and noble people, which is why in Spanish it is called ‘un encanto, un edén.’‘” or “an enchantment, an Eden.” He continued, “More Puerto Rican soldiers died in the Vietnam War as part of the United States military than soldiers from any state of the United States.”
González went on to say Hinchcliffe’s remarks “do not only provoke sinister laughter but hatred” and “should not be a part of the political discourse of a civilized society,” invoking “a climate of equality, fraternity and good will among and for all women and men of every race, color and way of life” as the “foundation of the American dream.”
Josh Clinton/Good Authority:
Poll results depend on pollster choices as much as voters’ decisions
Simple changes in how to weight a single poll can move the Harris-Trump margin 8 points.
The 4 key questions for pollsters
After poll data are collected, pollsters must assess whether they need to adjust or “weight” the data to address the very real possibility that the people who took the poll differ from those who did not. This involves answering four questions:
1. Do respondents match the electorate demographically in terms of sex, age, education, race, etc.? (This was a problem in 2016.)
2. Do respondents match the electorate politically after the sample is adjusted by demographic factors? (This was the problem in 2020.)
3. Which respondents will vote?
4. Should the pollster trust the data?
...
Adjusting for demographic factors
Naturally, the unweighted sample may not match what we think the 2024 electorate will be. One way to address this is by using voters in past elections as a benchmark. But which election? The 2022 midterm election was most recent, but midterm voters differ from presidential voters. The 2020 election could be a better choice, but perhaps the pandemic made it atypical. Maybe 2016 is better.
Here’s what happens if I make these 1,718 respondents match the demographics of the 2016, 2020, and 2022 electorates in terms of sex, age, race, education, and region. (My estimates of the demographics of those electorates come from the Voter Supplement to the Current Population Survey).
| Raw data: |
+6.0 Harris |
| Weighted to 2016 demographics: |
+7.3 |
| Weighted to 2020 demographics: |
+9.0 |
| Weighted to 2022 demographics: |
+8.8 |
The margin for Harris increases in every case. Mainly, this is because the sample is evenly split on gender – compared to the 2020 electorate, which was 53% female – and 34% of the electorate has a high school degree or less (compared to the 29% in 2020). Given differences in vote choice by age and gender, adjusting the sample to match past electorates has the effect of increasing the margin for Harris.
But of course, this adjustment is a mistake if the 2024 electorate ends up having a higher percentage of “non-college” or male voters than the 2020 electorate. There’s no way to know what is “wrong”: the poll itself, or the assumptions about the electorate that are built into the weighting scheme.
This is the best piece on polling you will read. And good they wrote it, because they are all over the place this week.
Poynter:
Why newspaper presidential endorsements have become an endangered species
The Washington Post. Los Angeles Times. The Minnesota Star Tribune. Tampa Bay Times. Gannett. McClatchy. Alden. The list grows by the day.
I had already been looking at regional papers, where the steady move away from taking sides in presidential elections has become an epidemic. The largest chains — Gannett, McClatchy and Alden Global’s MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing — have all stopped. (Hearst and Advance Local still leave their papers the option.)
Independent, locally owned organizations dominate the shrinking list of holdouts. Here, too, disengagement is becoming a trend. The highly regarded (and recently renamed) Minnesota Star Tribune alerted readers on Sept. 23 that no endorsement would be forthcoming.
The Star Tribune published an explanation that reads, to me, as many such do: murky and excuse-filled. The note to readers from opinion editor Phil Morris said in part: “We will vet the positions and offer policy analysis of the candidates seeking the nation’s two highest offices. We will take note of but forgo … judgment as to what might qualify as disqualifying campaign behavior. We are confident in the ability of informed citizens to decide whom they wish to vote for based on what they see, hear and research.”
(Poynter’s Tampa Bay Times has also dropped its tradition of recommending a presidential candidate.)
Yet another early vote poll, this from Noble Predictive Insights, out this a.m. :
NPI NATIONAL POLL OF RECORD: Harris Leads Trump by 3 Points
According to the poll, 37% of likely voters report that they have already cast their ballot and 63% have not voted yet. Harris leads by 22 points among those who have already voted (60% to 38%) while Trump leads by 10 points among those who have yet to vote (50% to 40%).
They all have Harris leading. That means the hate rally at Madison Square Garden has time to penetrate to those who have not voted.
