Ok that was an extraordinary evening. It’s too soon for all the punditry, so this will be Twitter heavy, but start with this:
It’s the small things that matter, and how you treat the waiter, the driver, and, yes, the elevator operator.
Will Bunch/philly.com:
DNC’s audacity of hope was that America is really empathetic and good
For a nation that’s spent much of 2020 in quarantine, Tuesday’s travelogue of 50 states (and seven other jurisdictions) opened up a spacious, diverse America with pride, possibility, and a not fully quenched thirst for justice that played out on fruited plains, majestic purple mountains, and shining seasides.
It’s on us, fellow white people. Black folks have more than done their share. Get your family and friends and don’t let up. Biden needs 40% of the white vote. Let’s get 45%.
Back to business:
Sarasota Herald Tribune:
Trump's attacks on vote-by-mail may have cost Sarasota Republicans
The huge shift to vote-by-mail among Sarasota Democrats – and President Donald Trump keeping Sarasota Republicans from making the same shift – may have cost the former chair of the Sarasota GOP his School Board seat.
Among the many things to ask about are sorting machines, overtime, drop box use (directions from the WH) , live chick deaths, and delivering the damn mail.
LA Times:
‘Like Armageddon’: Rotting food, dead animals and chaos at postal facilities amid cutbacks
And inside a massive mail-sorting facility in South Los Angeles, workers fell so far behind processing packages that by early August, gnats and rodents were swarming around containers of rotted fruit and meat, and baby chicks were dead inside their boxes.
Morning Consult:
How Voters View the Major Parties’ Competence Has Hardly Changed Since 2016
Nearly four years after Trump’s election, voters remain slightly more likely to deem Democrats capable of governing and tackling big issues
Except on empathy, voters view the parties similarly (edge goes to Democrats, but see undecideds)
Ronald Brownstein/Atlantic:
The Democratic Convention Is a Reality Check for Trump
Blue America is only growing.
Despite a pandemic that has killed more than 170,000 Americans and cratered the economy, the latest surveys show Trump maintaining strong support among the white voters most uneasy about the demographic and cultural changes remaking America, particularly those who are evangelical Christians, live in rural areas, or lack a college degree. And despite a Democratic nominee who stirs only modest enthusiasm among many key party constituencies, those same polls show Joe Biden amassing big advantages among the groups most comfortable with those changes: young people, racial minorities, secular Americans, and college-educated white Americans.
This division of the electorate leaves Biden holding a steady and substantial lead in national polling over Trump that matches or slightly exceeds the Democrats’ 8-percentage-point edge in the total national vote for the House of Representatives in 2018. But the uneven distribution of these contrasting constituencies across the battleground states means that Democrats will likely remain nervous through Election Day about their ability to win the Electoral College, even if Biden maintains a healthy lead in the popular vote.
Being nervous is how Democrats function; it’s in our DNA.
Seth Masket/FiveThirtyEight:
How Clinton’s Loss Paved The Way For Biden
If we want to understand how Biden won the nomination, we first need to understand the Democratic Party in the aftermath of the 2016 election. Biden won the 2020 nomination, arguably, because of the way Democrats interpreted Hillary Clinton’s loss four years ago.
As detailed in my upcoming book, “Learning from Loss: The Democrats 2016-2020,” one of the most consistent and consequential lessons from my conversations with Democratic activists, Democratic National Committee members, officeholders, and other party insiders, was a post-election narrative that blamed Clinton’s loss on her use of “identity politics.”
That’s obviously a loaded term, but I am using it to refer to Clinton’s outreach to women, people of color, the LGBTQIA community, and other marginalized groups during her 2016 campaign. According to many think pieces published shortly after the election, this is why Clinton lost. The argument went that by talking about race and identity bluntly, Clinton excluded working-class white people from a party they’d previously embraced. In turn, they responded by voting for a candidate who was very explicitly courting them: Donald Trump.
Elie Mystal/The Nation:
The DNC Refuses to Address the Elephant in the Room
The Supreme Court will be lost for a generation if Biden loses, dooming almost all progressive policy ideas. But no Democrats are talking about it.
If you want to know why Republicans have come to dominate the judicial branch of government, while Democrats are reduced to offering thoughts and prayers to an 87-year-old woman battling cancer, look no further than the third night of the Democratic National Convention. If you want to understand how Mitch McConnell was able to steal a Supreme Court appointment from a Democratic president without sparking half the country into civil unrest, listen to what the Democrats told their own voters last night. If you want to know why a woman’s right to choose is overwhelmingly popular yet teetering on the brink of collapse, why the right to vote is being suppressed, why people will be forced to risk their lives to vote during a pandemic this fall, or why our children will be shot at whenever it’s “safe” enough to open schools again, behold the ongoing failure of the Democratic Party to make the courts matter to their own voters.
Last night, ahead of the nomination of Kamala Harris, the first woman of color on a major party ticket, the Democrats tackled four issues that are of critical importance to young voters in the upcoming election: gun reform, climate change, immigration, and women’s rights. On paper, it’s nearly impossible to talk seriously about any one of those issues without acknowledging the critical role the courts have to play, much less all of them. But, somehow, the Democrats found a way to ignore the 5-4 elephant in the room.
