We begin today with Kimberly Atkins Stohr of The Boston Globe and her frustration that Vice President Harris has to walk backwards in heels to meet the media’s double standards vis-a-vis her opponent in the presidential race.
Frustration was what I felt as I listened to Harris give an extraordinary closing argument to American voters at the Ellipse in Washington — the same place where Donald Trump stood four years earlier in front of a crowd of supporters, knowing some were armed, and sicced them on the Capitol building.
But instead of inciting an insurrection and appealing to the worst of human instincts as Trump did on Jan. 6, 2021, Harris called on the nation’s better angels. In stark contrast to Trump’s rally Sunday in New York that was marked by racist, xenophobic, and anti-LGBTQ vitriol, Harris’s address was focused on bringing the promise of American ideals within reach of everyone, regardless of how they vote. [...]
But rather than being able to bask in that historic moment, Harris was immediately put on the defense again, this time about a comment she didn’t even make.
During a video call with a Latino voting organization Tuesday night, Biden blasted attacks on Latino’s from Trump’s supporters as “garbage.” That spurred outrage from the right, which compared the comment to Hillary Clinton calling Trump supporters “deplorables” during her 2016 presidential bid.
And just like that, the news cycle switched in a way that proved what CNN’s Van Jones lamented last week about the double standard in the presidential race. Trump, Jones said, “gets to be lawless. [Harris] has to be flawless. That’s what’s unfair.”
With every due apology to Fred Astaire for comparing him to a certain shoe salesman.
Charles Franklin presents the final Marquette University Law Poll which shows Vice President Harris with a 1- point lead over Donald Trump, well within the MOE.
MILWAUKEE – A new Marquette Law School Poll survey of Wisconsin finds Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris supported by 50% of likely voters and Republican former President Donald Trump supported by 49%, in a head-to-head matchup. These results include initially undecided voters who were then asked whom they would vote for if they had to choose. In the previous poll in late September, Harris received 52% and Trump 48% among likely voters.
Keeping initially undecided voters as a separate category, Harris holds 48% of likely voters, Trump gets 47%, and 5% are undecided.
In a multicandidate race, Harris also leads, with 46% to Trump’s 44%, while Robert F. Kennedy Jr. receives 5%, the Party for Socialism and Liberation’s Claudia De la Cruz 0%, Libertarian Party’s Chase Oliver 2%, Green Party candidate Jill Stein 1%, Constitution Party candidate Randall Terry 0%, and independent Cornel West 1%, among likely voters. Kennedy suspended his campaign on Aug. 23 but remains on the Wisconsin ballot.
In a combined sample of all four Wisconsin surveys since Harris entered the race in July, she wins a majority of Stein, West, and De la Cruz supporters when they are asked to choose between Harris and Trump. A majority of Kennedy, Oliver, and Terry supporters back Trump when asked to choose.
There are other polls that show Harris with wider leads in both Wisconsin and Michigan.
Susquehanna Polling and Research also released a poll showing a dead heat in Pennsylvania.
Bob Dreyfuss of TomDispatch asks: Who are these undecided voters in Pennsylvania that could ultimately decide the presidential election?
Well, it turns out that I’ve met a fair number of those undecided voters in person, going door to door canvassing in eastern Pennsylvania, where, it’s fair to say, the 2024 election may be decided. They’re real people, with perfectly real everyday concerns. They have families living in pleasant suburbs in and around Easton, Bethlehem, and Allentown, their neatly tended lawns a mix of grass, crabgrass, and dandelions, and older model SUVs, minivans, and pickup trucks in their driveways. And I’d dare you to knock on one of their doors and, when someone answers, say, “So, who the hell are you?” [...]
As a start, it turns out, a number of them haven’t really been following the news. According to research by the campaigns, many of them work two jobs. They don’t get the Times or the Post. Many, in fact, don’t even get the local paper. They know who’s running, but while they seemingly know a fair amount about Donald Trump, they know a lot less about Kamala Harris. They didn’t watch the two conventions on TV or even get around to watching the presidential debate between Harris and Trump. And, by the way, that puts them among the majority of Americans: an estimated67 million people watched that event on September 10th, while 158 million people voted in 2020 and an additional 81 million eligible voters who didn’t cast a ballot back then missed it or skipped it.
My sense, from the voters I talked to — totally unscientific, yes, but backed up by some polling and research — is that voters who say they’re undecided have largely tuned out politics in these years. Maybe that’s because they’ve long come to believe that all politicians are corrupt or feckless; or maybe it’s because they’ve been around long enough to have concluded that “things never change” and that their own lives are only marginally affected by whoever’s in office; maybe it’s because with kids, a job (or two), caring for older parents or relatives with special needs, and struggling to make ends meet, they just don’t have space in their lives for “the news”; or maybe they just didn’t care to share their thoughts with a stranger at their door. Whatever the reasoning, not a single undecided voter I spoke to rejected the message I was carrying or pushed back hard against the idea that maybe Harris deserves a genuine look.
Dreyfuss does note that at least up through mid-October, undecided voters have been breaking for Harris. If that trend continues, then Harris will win Pennsylvania but...sheeesh.
Jake Lahut of WIRED notes that Trump’s “ground game” in Michigan consists mostly of glitchy and ineffective apps.
Instead of a traditional voter turnout operation led by the GOP nominee’s campaign and the Republican National Committee, the Trump campaign is leaning into some not-so-cutting-edge technology and a podcast blitz to target younger men who are either sporadic voters or don’t vote at all.
Republicans are depending on a pair of mobile apps which are difficult to find, since they aren’t on the Apple or Android app stores. The one used by Elon Musk’s America PAC is severely limited by
the lack of a geo-tracking feature, forcing users to rely on “offline walkbooks” which don’t always upload, a key bug first reported by The Guardian. The other, 10xVotes, which has been promoted by Tucker Carlson and the Michigan GOP, requires users to enter search queries for people they know, rather than providing them with a list of contacts. (This reporter created an account and tried searching for family members in Michigan who would fall squarely under the category of low-propensity voters and came up with no results.)
“I think it’s what happens when you let a bunch of grifters take over,” a Trumpworld source said of Musk’s seat-of-the-pants operation, requesting anonymity to speak candidly about internal discussions on the campaign’s lack of a voter turnout strategy. “Shit is always gonna produce shit.”
David A. Graham of The Atlantic says that the “countrypolitan” counties of North Carolina will play a decisive role in who wins the state and its 16 electoral votes.
North Carolina is sometimes discussed as a state split along urban (Democratic) and rural (Republican) lines, but that’s too crude a division. Places like Gaston represent a crucial third category. Mac McCorkle, a professor at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy and a Democratic strategist unaffiliated with the Harris campaign, has identified 28 counties that he calls “countrypolitan,” borrowing a term from 1970s country music. (I teach journalism as an adjunct at Duke.) Sometimes called exurban, these places are technically defined as metropolitan, but their heritage is rural. “People have memories and nostalgia. They still want to think they’re in a small town,” McCorkle told me. “That’s why they don’t live in Charlotte. They want the values to be that way.”
In the 2020 election, Joe Biden won North Carolina’s 10 biggest counties decisively, while Trump won rural counties easily. But Trump’s victory in the state—by 1.34 percent, or fewer than 75,000 votes—was decided in the countrypolitan counties, where he captured 63 percent of the vote. Democrats have no hope of winning these counties, but they need to lose them by less to take the state overall. It’s here, not in rural areas, where North Carolina will be won and lost. [...]
So why now? Countrypolitan counties aren’t what they used to be. North Carolina’s population is becoming more racially diverse, and about half of the adult population was born out of state. Many of those newcomers have landed in places like Gaston, Cabarrus, and Union Counties, all countrypolitan counties outside Charlotte. Movement within the state is important too. As cities like Charlotte grow and sprawl outward, younger, more liberal people are moving with them.
David Remnick of The New Yorker argues that just because an editorial endorsement might have little to no influence does not mean that one shouldn’t publish it.
Every editor who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that endorsements are of modest influence at best. The editors of this magazine, when it recently published a lengthy essaydescribing (for the thousandth time) the authoritarian prospects of a second Trump Presidency, and endorsing Kamala Harris, had no illusions. Editors may be as prone to sanctimony as they are to the common cold, but there was never any thought that such an endorsement would suddenly tip the balance in the battleground states, much less win majorities in the Deep South or the Great Plains. The point was that we, like other publications, attempted to make a cogent case, and had the editorial freedom to do so.
Perhaps experience ought to tell us that it is ridiculous to clutch our pearls every time a person of immense political power or financial means acts in his own selfish interest. Bezos is hardly alone. Senator Mitch McConnell, who denounced Trump in the immediate aftermath of January 6th and, in private, has called him “stupid” and a “despicable human being,” is endorsing him. The billionaire Nelson Peltz has referred to Trump as a “terrible human being,” and yet is helping to bankroll him. Is there anything still to know about Donald Trump? Deeply conservative and reticent figures who have long working experience with Trump—such as his former chief of staff John Kelly and the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley—have gone on the record to declare him a fascist, a peril to national security, and yet they cannot seem to dissuade Elon Musk, Stephen Schwarzman, Paul Singer, Timothy Mellon, and a line of other plutocrats from backing him. Éric Vuillard’s “
The Order of the Day” opens with a lightly fictionalized scene of two dozen German industrialists and financiers summoned, in 1933, to meet Hermann Göring, who demands their fealty. If the Nazi Party wins the election, Göring tells them, “These would be the last elections for ten years––even, he added with a laugh, for a hundred years.” Where have we heard similar “jokes”? [...]
The literature of anti-authoritarianism—Czeslaw Milosz’s “The Captive Mind”; Václav Havel’s essays and letters to his wife, Olga; Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoirs; Frederick Douglass’s autobiographies—are written by souls larger and vastly more heroic than common mortals. Yet they describe the ways that human-scale people, all of us, can refuse complicity, and act in the face of repression and outrage, if that is what public life comes to. The reporters and the editors at the Post who have resigned or spoken out against something as seemingly trivial as a spiked editorial may not be risking their lives or their immediate material comfort, but they are writing an endorsement that is worth signing on to: In order to stand up, one must have a backbone.
Finally today, I offer my best Casey Kasem impersonation with a long distance dedication to our MVP, Kamala Harris, with “Flawless (Go to the City)” by the incomparable George Michael.
Everyone have the best possible day!
