Final Thoughts Before November Fifth
“Remember, remember the Fifth of November.”
If you’re not somewhat acquainted with English history, you may not have heard the line memorializing Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. English history is fairly bloody but Fawke’s scheme to blow up parliament is remembered with particular infamy. The occasion is now celebrated with fireworks akin to the American Independence Day.
Anyway, all this is really apropos of nothing except that I hope this November 5 won’t be remembered for similar political violence. The stage is set, the fuse is lit, and Donald Trump’s supporters have already been fanning the flames with claims of cheating and voter fraud.
Since last week, the race and vibe have noticeably shifted. On Saturday, the Des Moines Register released its final poll before the election. The poll shocked the political world with a seismic shift towards Kamala Harris, who led Trump by three points in the poll. I’ve historically cautioned about outlier polls and the margin of error still puts Iowa within Trump’s reach even if the poll is accurate – and the Des Moines Register poll is typically very accurate – but it should set off alarm bells for Republicans.
If Iowa is really in play, it would likely mean that swing states are breaking for Harris as well. But could there really be such a YUGE shift if other pollsters aren’t seeing it?
The answer is a definite maybe. Outliers are likely to be inaccurate if there has been no fundamental change in the lay of the land to cause a shift in opinion. That’s not the case this time.
I’ve often said that Trump can’t play it straight for more than a week or two, and this campaign was no exception. Trump managed to keep a low profile for months, but over the past two weeks, he went off the chain. His unhinged behavior may have very well tilted undecided voters against him.
Here are a few of the Trump-related stories from recent weeks:
- Trump called America a “garbage can”
- Trump fantasized about the death of Liz Cheney
- Trump said, “Whether the women like it or not, I’m going to protect them”
- Trump said he would give RFK, Jr. a “big role” in healthcare if he wins
- RFK subsequently said Trump would push to remove fluoride from drinking water and use federal health data to attack vaccines
- Trump fondled a microphone stand in a sexual manner at a rally
I think it’s very possible that many undecided voters had forgotten just how bad and chaotic the Trump presidency was until the last two weeks. They may be remembering now.
But what about the other polls that show a tight race? There are two possibilities. One is that weighting and algorithms meant to compensate for undercounting Trump voters in past elections are now masking a Harris surge. Pollsters could be suppressing what they see as outlier results because they are afraid of underestimating the MAGA vote.
The other possibility is that this could be a late polling swing that wasn’t there a few weeks ago. Trump’s aberrant behavior could be causing undecided voters and skeptical Republicans to break for Harris.
The truth is that we really don’t know. If the swing is real, we may find out who the next president will be early on Tuesday night rather than after days of counting absentee ballots.
As for me, I’ll be calling it an early night either way. I have an early wake up for a long day at my full-time job on Wednesday. That’s if I can sleep. Such is often the life of a professional pilot. I’ve often had to skip the Super Bowl or Fourth of July fireworks or even Christmas to go to work or to go to sleep in preparation for early flights, but the election results will still be there the next day.
The election won’t end with the counting. I fully expect Donald Trump to reject a loss the way he did in 2020, and there is a real possibility that Republican state and local officials may try to impede certification of election results. There is also a possibility that Democrats will behave poorly if they lose, but probably on a smaller scale and almost certainly without the candidate’s direction or provocation.
What I’d like for both sides to remember is that we are Americans and we are not supposed to behave this way. We have a long tradition of accepting election results and engaging in peaceful transfers of power, broken only by Donald Trump’s MAGA movement in 2020 and the Confederacy in 1860. Both sides should commit to peacefully getting on with the business of government after the results are in. [I’m looking pointedly in Donald Trump’s direction as I say this.]
Both sides – and especially Christians on both sides – need to remember that God remains in control. Just because your preferred candidate lost, it doesn’t mean that God somehow made a mistake or that things are not going according to his plan. Maybe God’s plan wasn’t what you thought it was.
As Americans and Christians we want the best for our country, but it may be that what we think is best isn’t what God thinks is best. Maybe it’s just that God has a different plan. But God will remain sovereign. To echo a popular conspiracy group, trust the plan. Trust God’s plan.
If Donald Trump loses, I urge my MAGA and Republican friends not to buy into the conspiracy theories about election fraud that he is already pushing. Christians should have better discernment than to believe anything that comes out of the mouth of a man who is dishonest in the extreme.
If Kamala Harris loses, I urge my Democrat friends not to take the streets to vent their disappointment and anger on neighborhood businesses, homes, and police. Christians should not engage in wanton acts of violence.
As Election Day approaches, it’s okay to pray for your candidate, but pray for the opposition too. The Bible tells us to pray for all people and all leaders, not just the ones we like. And I’m taking about real, supportive prayer, not the joking prayer of Psalm 109:8.
Pray that God’s will be done because God’s will is going to be done regardless of our personal preferences. Pray that our leaders guide America with wisdom, justice, and strength tempered with mercy.
And spend some time praying for peace, unity, and an end to the anger and hatred that divides America. Pray that truth and love win out. Pray for national revival, something that both sides desperately need.
I’ll see you on the other side.
“God’s will is going to be done regardless of our personal preferences.”
God is unimaginably greater than we are. People who confidently claim to know what His plan is should perhaps spend more time absorbing what that means.Report
And they should seek to reconcile themselves rather than try to make deals with the Devil in order to do God’s will (as they understand it). The lack of faith demonstrated by this approach is breathtaking.Report
Only, I think, to the faithful.
Like, if religion is mostly about providing a sense of community and social connection in an increasingly materially comfortable, but atomized and individualistic, society, faith is not necessarily going to be a huge priority.
The central mythology of Christianity is going to immensely comforting when you are looking for reassurance that things can get better despite all evidence to the contrary. I wonder how relevant it is when you’re looking for reassurance that things that seem to be kind of OK now won’t get worse.Report
Dostoevsky had a great line:
“Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.”
In a story that sounds like Rupert Murdoch created in a lab but really happened, we are getting this announcement from Ethical Culture Fieldstone, an elite private K-12 that charges 65K a year. This type of performative fragility annoys me.
“One of New York City’s elite private schools told families on Thursday that “students who feel too emotionally distressed” the day after Election Day will be excused from classes, and that psychologists will be available during the week to provide counseling.
In a section of an email to members of the school’s community headed “Election Day support,” Stacey Bobo, principal of the upper school at the institution, the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, said that it “acknowledges that this may be a high-stakes and emotional time for our community.”
“No matter the election outcome,” she wrote, the school “will create space to provide students with the support they may need.”
No homework will be assigned on Election Day, the email said, and no student assessments will take place on Wednesday. Excused absences will be allowed on Wednesday or whatever day the election results are announced for students who feel unable to “fully engage in classes.'”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/31/nyregion/fieldston-school-election-attendance.html?fbclid=IwY2xjawGVsBxleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHRwj4j9E5_3CBMgAHwJ_4NQg5iNmVVIl-SPoE2vOkksiXX-O_foq5ZPx4A_aem_0AVtkLuN5FAqvluod1MVtgReport
This kind of sh*t is just terrible for children. That people pay 65k a year for it is insane. Everyone should be fired.Report
Well this is the world that school “choice” proponents want . . . using other people’s tax dollar to “invest” in an educational setting that shields kids from uncomfortable realities. Down south in the 1960’s we called them segregation academies.Report
This is an anti-vouchers tactic I had not seen before: appealing to the “get off my lawn!” crowd using “kids these days, amirite?!”. I’m skeptical, but more power to ya.Report
Ethical Culture Fieldstone is a very weird place even by private school standards. Ethical Culture is basically one of those 19th century liberal universal movements but in this case started by Jews who wanted Reform Judaism with even less religion than Reform Judaism. They eventually founded a day school in NYC. The reputation of Ethical Culture Fieldstone in NYC is that it is the type of school that well-meaning but very sheltered and innocent wealthy people send their kids to. Basically the upper tier of the In This House set.Report
I can promise you that this is not now, nor would it have been 40 years ago, the worst sort of pampering rich kids experience at elite private schools. Does it look silly? Sure. Is it harmful? I can’t imagine how, particularly in context.
And besides, why wouldn’t kids be distressed? Adults, including many on this site, have been telling everyone who’ll listen that our country and system of government are at stake, and that if the wrong person wins, it means disaster. If this is bad for kids, it ain’t that school’s fault.
Y’all sound like a couple of old men yelling at clouds.Report
People that want me to stop laughing at the limousine lefties can stop cultivating them any time. But anyway, back to the clouds.Report
Coincidentally, this is a school that’s well known among the left not because it’s a generally progressive institution (though I gather it is), but because 4 or 5 years ago they fired a (Jewish) teacher for pro-BDS tweets.Report
The kids who would actually be on the receiving end of a second Trump presidency aren’t getting this luxury.Report
I’m guessing that the parents dropping $65k a year are getting exactly what they’re paying for her.Report
Probably so.Report
Lets compare and contrast-
If “Emotionally distressed and unable to attend classes” sounds ridiculous, what should we make of “emotionally distraught and willing to violently attack Congress”?
Security fencing goes up around White House, Capitol, VP residence
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4969264-security-fencing-goes-up-around-white-house-capitol-vp-residence/
In the first example, a good case can be made that young people SHOULD be traumatized by the prospect of living under a regime that shrugs indifferently if they get slaughtered by a spree shooter, or yawns when a young women dies in screaming agony during a pregnancy complication.
In the second example, Trumpists are threatening to become violent if they are prevented from forcing their will upon and nonconsenting majority., and seizing control of other people’s personal lives.
So really, where are the fragile snowflakes, unable to cope with the rigors of adversity and diverse points of view?Report
My ire at this isn’t that a school is doing this necessarily but that one of the most expensive K-12 private schools in the nation is doing it. 82% of the kids going to Ethical Culture pay full freight. These kids are from some of the wealthiest and privileged families in the United States. They might have some issues under a second Trump but not that many. They have resources at their disposal. Immigrant and children of immigrant kids in public schools aren’t going to have this luxury. Election day and the day after will be normal school days for them even if Trump gets elected and immediately pledges to deport everybody with a Spanish and Asian last name even if they lived in the United States for generations.
This type of performative fragility does not give me a lot of hope about the resistance either. Just nearly as useless as aging hippies singing counter-culture songs at a Farmer’s Market. We won’t defeat Trump with Peter, Paul, and Mary or therapy sessions.Report
In the event of a Trump victory, performative wailing by upper class twits will be the least of our worries.Report
Just generally we, as a culture, seem to have gotten vastly more protective of children during my lifetime, in ways that don’t necessarily line up with any straightforwardly sensible approach to actually protecting them.
I think this particular bit of coddling is silly, sure, but not extremely so given all the other bits of performative coddling out there.Report
I thought this happened longer ago but google informs me this debate happened in 2011. During the late first Obama years, there was a debate in the ink space about whether playgrounds were too safe because they are made out of materials that are less prone to causing injury. The argument was that the slightly riskier caused children to learn the benefits and costs of risk taking.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/19/science/19tierney.html
I think there was one dissenter who argued that safety is always paramount. Part of this is because people are having fewer children. Another part of this is because of a near Freudian belief in the danger of childhood traumas. A last part is because many people learned that screaming trauma was a great way to get listened to.Report
Complaints about young people fall into two categories:
1. These kids today are too reckless and irresponsible- Drugs! Sex! Crime! The world isn’t as peaceful as it used to be.
2. These kids today are too soft and coddled. They don’t take risks like we did.
In both cases, we are comparing our adult view of young people to our childs- eye memories of our youth.
But our memories are faulty. We think the world of our youth was peaceful because our parents shielded us from the ugly reality. And we imagine we were brave and daring, when in fact we were swaddled in a cocoon of safety which was invisible to our child’s eyes.
I’m old enough now to see these complaints from parents who are my sons age, talking about childhood in the 80s and 90s.
I’m amazed because I remember those years because I was one of the parents handing participation ribbons.
But they don’t. They all sound like Four Yorkshiremen gassing on about Luggghzury.Report
There are a lot of reasons to believe this one is objectively false. Like most if not all stats suggest that all three are down among kids from where they were when I was a kid. There’s less crime, less teenage pregnancy, less teenage sex in general, and last I checked less teenage drug use.
I don’t know about how soft the kids are or what their risk tolerances are, but I stand my position that there’s a lot of absurd performative protectiveness that revolves around protecting kids from ever-milder “traumas”, traumas which have more to do with stuff that upsets their parents than which upsets them.
Like here it’s election results and it’s only affecting kids whose parents have $65k to blow on a school that is going to be extremely solicitous of its customers’ political anxieties, but it’s at the end of the day it’s a more farcical and less-destructive manifestation of the impulse that leads to mentions of racism being edited out of textbook entries on Rosa Parks in Florida.Report
For real, if kids really are softer today this nonsense has nothing to do with it because this nonsense isn’t protecting kids from sh!t.Report
My take is that the safety-ism operates as the default but that a person can still mostly opt out of it. The catch is that opting out takes planning, effort, and at times resources. I am also of course not operating in the world of people able to send their kids to these types of schools so no idea what the norm is for them. Though part of the reason we do Catholic school is because we find they haven’t ever heard of the kind of thinking expressed in that email, not that there aren’t other trade offs.Report
Semaphor is reporting on the NYT Tech Union’s strike and the article includes this paragraph:
This strikes me as accurate. I mean, it strikes me as likely that management said this.
Now… was management lying?
If I wanted to undermine outside support for the union, I’d make up something about how they want trigger warnings for discussing troublesome news stories. I mean, it’s one hell of a smear, if false.
If they are telling the truth?
Well, “here” is one of the places that safetyism will take us.Report
My theory and it is mine is that the the decrease in wild teen behavior comes from the regulation of lead. Basically, lead exposure didn’t just cause a crime wave but it led to a lot more wild but not necessarily criminal behavior in teens in general, so you had more teen pregnancy, sex, and intoxicant use. The other reason for the decrease is that most college bound kids are busy doing activities that will help them get into a prestigious college and a lot of hang out and then go do mischief places are gone.Report
There’s some of that. However I also think culture and technology has really changed things. I’ve come across studies suggesting that risky behavior is part of human development and that closing it off with safety-ism and screen based childhoods may be a driver of the decline in mental health reported by teens and young adults.
That doesn’t mean we need to totally let everything go but there’s a point where it starts doing more harm than good. FWIW the principal at my kids’ school made a major point at back to school night this year that anyone not letting their kids have unstructured low or no supervision play time need to get comfortable allowing it ASAP.Report
What exactly do you think high school kids were doing in the ” unsupervised play time” back in the 1970s?
Would believe an eyewitness account?Report
Heh, that was about elementary aged students, Chip.
Back in the 90s in high school I did a lot of smoking pot and cigarettes, chasing girls, and trying to get adults to buy me beer. Got into plenty of stupid trouble with various authority figures and other teens and I shudder to think at a number of things we got away with in automobiles.
My assumption then was that we were downright tame compared to our post 60s predecessors. But look if you think we’re in a better place now I’ll let you make that case.Report
I’m not certain–it was a couple decades before I experienced “unsupervised play time” as a high school student–but I am skeptical that screens, in the modern sense of the term, had much to do with it.
Not saying that screens in the modern sense are worse for wellbeing than the ones of the past. The screens I had access to when “unsupervised play time” was a meaningful concept had a disconcerting tendency to display Giligan’s Island reruns and man but that show reeked.Report
Playing very early D&D? Listening to Joni Mitchel and Carole King?Report
Leif Garrett and the Bay City Rollers.Report
I never had any desire for risky behavior beyond underage drinking and naughty times with girls, I got to do the underage drinking part, and generally think I turned out fine.Report
“…traumas which have more to do with stuff that upsets their parents than which upsets them.”
This is so much of it, in my observation. I have these conversations often with folks and so often it comes down to, “I just can’t handle seeing them so upset,” which they think is there way of centering their child’s experience and emotional needs but, seeing as how the subject of the sentence is “I”, it really isn’t.
Parents should have a protective impulse when it comes to their children. I’d be alarmed if someone didn’t. But the goal can’t always be to protect them in the moment; you have to prepare them for life and thing on larger time horizons.
There is a book called “The Blessing of a Skinned Knee” that made the rounds (the original subtitle specifically made reference to “Jewish teachings” as the underpinnings of the mindset, though it has since been rebranded; there is a sequel also, “The Blessing of a B-Minus” that is more focused on teens). One of the big takeaway quotes as, “We don’t prepare the road for the child but the child for the road.”
Of course, there is a balance. We don’t want to go full “Arrest Development” and have schools where children are seen but not heard…. but also not seen. But when we center the emotional response of adults to kids experiencing age-appropriate challenges, we lose sight of who we are really meant to be supporting.Report
For the record I don’t disagree with any of that. I don’t think there’s some grand conspiracy. I do however think there’s a cultural shift among parents, which I’d wager is most pronounced among those able to send their kids to $65k/year schools, combined with risk aversion due to increased litigiousness over the last 40 years, plus probably some weird level of stuff coming out of all the graduate credits a lot of teachers have to take to get a raise, which itself is coopted by administrators in self interested ways.
And it isn’t like you don’t come across plenty of parents caught up in some kind of vaguely political paranoia and and catastrophic thinking. A lot of adults probably could also stand with way less screen time themselves.Report
Fun fact: I worked at Fieldston’s summer program one year!
This seems as much ado about nothing as there ever was.
There was at least one year where all public schools in Georgia were closed the Monday after the Georgia/Florida game because they anticipated too many teachers calling out sick afterwards. So in that scenario, ALL kids were denied the opportunity to goto school because a bunch of adults were expecting to party/wallow too hard based on the outcome of a college football game. So… let’s not pretend like this is some unique thing wherein people failed to perform their responsibilities for a silly reason.
More than anything, this was almost assuredly “client service.” I’m sure more than one of those folks paying the $65K tuition reached out to the school and said, “My kid is really stressing the election and is worried they may not be able to goto school the day after based on the results. Please don’t mark them with an unexcused absence.”
More than anything, this is wealthy, powerful people using their wealth and power to avoid consequences for their children.Report
It’s very weird that we’ve got a bunch of old farts here complaining in a now long thread about a school taking kids’ emotional well-being seriously. And lest I be pilloried for suggesting that the election has anything to do with emotional well-being, I’ll remind the old farts that many of them are among the people acting as though this election has existential consequences for the country, in full view of school age children everywhere.Report
If we treated adults like we treat children… well, it wouldn’t go well.Report
You and to a degree Chip are the ones responding like there’s some kind of moral panic. I don’t think screens, or crazy risk aversion, or overwrought concern about emotional well-being is going to kill anyone, nor do I think that tablets, smart phones, or modern video games are going to create a generation of psychopaths and/or totally useless and effette weaklings. I’m not Tipper Gore and I’m not someone who subscribes to the idea that children need to be raised by drill sergeants. However I do think these things have a good chance of working in concert to produce a lot more overly anxious, neurotic adults with a lot of trouble finding happiness. YMMV as to whether you care about that but if that’s the case just say so instead of arguing against straw men.Report
How about we figure out how folks who raided the Capitol and those laying the groundwork to subvert the election were raised and just do the opposite of whatever their parents did? Because, to me, those folks are pretty high up on the list of those who can’t find happiness, deal with opposition, or accept disappointment.Report
The only help for them is a stint in federal prison.Report
If it looks like moral panic, walks like moral panic, and quacks like moral panic, it’s probably moral panic.
This one case, the unreasonableness of which has not been explained, merely stated as obvious, has been used to launch an entire discussion about pampered kids. That’s a lot of looking, walking, and quacking for a non-moral panic.
Do I think smart phones, tablets, and streaming media generally are bad for kids? Maybe. These are in many ways societal revolutions, and we’re still figuring how to live with them. There’s a really good chance we’re not doing it quite right, and that this affects kids.
Do I think taking kids’ emotional well-being into account in schools has anything to do with this? Absolutely not, and I wish parents didn’t have to pay $65k per year to get that.Report
It isn’t hard to find article after article citing studies finding strong correlations between smart phones and declining mental health. Maybe you think thats not sufficiently conclusive, and it may well not be. Bad reporting and sensationalism are far from unheard of. It’s also possible we’ll find out it’s something else but reasonable people can disagree.
As for accounting for emotional well-being it sounds a lot more like training children into a state of learned helplessness. I suppose if that’s what the rich want they’ll have it but I have no idea why we’d celebrate or hope to emulate it.Report
There is a fair amount of research (see, e.g.).
How does letting them take off on a day that’s likely going to be full of anxiety both among their parents and their peers, making it significantly less likely that they’ll get anything out of a school day, sound like learned helplessness to you?Report
In the year 2024 of our Common Era, it takes Bill Kristol to state the obvious: It’s Abortion, Stupid: https://www.thebulwark.com/p/its-abortion-stupid
“The issue of abortion rights is critical to analyzing and understanding this election. But it makes mainstream commentators uneasy. Not because they’re not for abortion rights—I imagine most of them are. But because it somehow doesn’t seem as momentous or as suitable in deciding a crucial election, compared to issues like the economy, or democracy, or even immigration. It’s also a little personal and, rightfully, emotional. And so I think my (mostly male) counterparts are a bit shy about discussing the issue.
But you know what? Dobbs really was one of the most consequential Supreme Court decisions of modern times. Real lives have been affected and are being affected by it. As Selzer noted, in Iowa, it was the state ban that got people interested in voting. As Steve Kornacki observed, the saturation coverage around the abortion ban has been evident in Iowa polling—with massive opposition correlating into major Harris gains.
That’s just Iowa. But the ripple effects of Dobbs can be seen far beyond there, as well. The issue of abortion remains in question in several major states, and perhaps nationally. The next president will make judicial appointments, could sign legislation, and will have the power to take executive actions that will actually affect abortion access and other related issues.
Reproductive freedom is a real issue that separates the two presidential candidates and their two parties from one another. Voters are entitled to vote on it. Many are.
I’m sure that within the Harris campaign, and allied Super PACs, there’s a fair amount of internal mansplaining going on about how they have to end on a positive, upbeat, message of unity and the future. Perhaps they’re wondering: What kind of a closing message is something so divisive, so discomforting, as abortion rights?
In fact, it’s a powerful closing message. Let the mansplaining political commentators wring their hands. Reproductive freedom is a crucial issue, and a winning one, and the Harris campaign would be foolish not to make it a closing one in these last couple of days.”Report
It’s wild how much Kristol sounds like an LGM front-pager.
This is not criticism, of course. If anything, it does a lot to prove his point.Report
The Bulwark staff has always been consistently anti-Trump and as far as I can tell, most of them have moved to the left to varying degrees.Report
Consistently anti-Trump sure, but not necessarily great at peering beyond the elite pundit consensus that so many of them embodied in the pre-Trump era.Report
If there is a surprise result in Harris’ favor one would have to assume Dobbs is the main factor, maybe in combination with the GOP nominating obviously ridiculous people down ballot like Robinson and Lake.Report
One thing that’s been giving me a bit of hope is the steady drumbeat of stories like this one, about how Elon Musk’s plans to disrupt the GOTV industry have been going about as well as you might expect.
Sure, it’ll only make a real difference in a very close election, but most signs point to this being a very close election.Report
The Nuremberg Rally at MSG appears to be one of the massive self-owns in American political history. We will see on Tuesday but as far as I can tell, nothing good as come out of it for Trump. There was the University of Central Florida poll which had Puerto Ricans in Florida going 85-8 for Harris. Univision had this poll for Pennsylvania:
“Final Univision poll in PA has 64-30; among Puerto Ricans, 67-27. Trump holding only 82% of his ’20 voters (vs. Dems 89%)
The garbage joke broke through. Voters heard about it & don’t laugh it off: 69% say it was “more racist than humorous”, 67% see it as sign of Trump racism.”
There is also Selzer’s Iowa poll which rocketed Harris to +3.
Harris potentially has a firewall of between 400-500K voters in Pennsylvania right now.
Trump can still win but he has not done himself many favors recently.Report
The press wanted to balance it with Biden’s own garbage remarks, but maybe brutally insulting a swing-y low-propensity constituency that probably don’t trust you that much to begin with is worse than gaffe-ily insulting a constituency that was, by construction, guaranteed to vote against you in the first place.Report
Voters might be tired of anti-trans attacks: https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/new-poll-likely-voters-are-tiredReport
Has there ever been strong evidence that they were ever particularly enthused by them?
Like, this seems to be an issue that animates social conservatives and, for whatever reason, appeals to a lot of elite pundits without having a lot of legs at the ballot box.Report
Florida, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming passed 45 anti-trans laws that were either signed into law by their governors or became law because of a veto override. That’s more then half of red states. My strong suspicion is that record will be a successful campaign point for the reelections of the state legislators who did it.
https://www.aclu.org/legislative-attacks-on-lgbtq-rights-2024Report
I think there are about a billion reasons to be skeptical that legislative success in Red States translates well to being a big vote winner with the broader public.
Don’t you?Report
NO I don’t. Over half the Red States now have anti-trans laws in place, passed by state legislators. Most if not all are on off year election cycles for those state offices – Mississippi did ours last year so they are three years insulated from any impacts for these laws. Meaning the Senate, House and Presidential races being decided tomorrow have no relationship in the minds of those red state voters. in three years, GOP state legislators can campaign on the “success” of those laws independent of their impacts on other races.Report
Transphobia worked less well in the United States than Great Britain because it was being pushed by the Evangelicals and a lot of people can’t stand the Evangelicals. They might not be gun-ho on trans rights but the source of transphobia made trans people not that appealing as a boogeyman.Report
I think it’s as simple as women in the UK not having to chose between defending their reproductive rights and the rights they have carved out to sex segregated spaces more generally. One greatly outweighs the other, and understandably so.Report
That is a. Important point.Report
The Christian concept of a personal God has always perplexed me. Judaism just doesn’t believe that God intervenes in the world in this way or any sort of way. If there is a God (and I tend to think there probably is not a God but I can’t prove it one way or the other), whatever happens today, tomorrow, or the day after is not the result of that God’s will.Report
Its a Reformation construct, where part of the break from the Catholic Church was the need to wrestle control of Scriptural interpretation away from the Vatican- which to this day still deploys doctrine built on willful misinterpretation of Scripture. That some protestant denominations have carried it way too far should be o more a surprise then that Catholics would.Report
The Ten Plagues? All of the other miracles in our part of the Bible? Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox Judaism still believes in divine intervention even if in a less spectacular way than Christianity. Many Jews saw and still see Israel’s victories in 1948 and 1967 as evidence of divine intervention. The difference between Jews and the other Abrahamic religions is that our relationship with God is community wide rather than as individuals and everything is supposed to be done as a group rather than alone.Report
What drives me nuts is that the post-mortems for both candidates are the easiest thing in the world to write.
What were the biggest mistakes made by (loser)? We can rattle them off right now.Report
At a less serious level, next weekend’s football games will not be wall-to-wall obnoxious political ads.Report
In their defense, the ads were better than the Broncos game.Report
I’m old enough to remember when nationally-televised advertisements, especially for big sporting events like NFL games, were far too expensive for political campaigns to consider. It might have been Ross Perot or Bill Clinton, I think, who first got enough money to afford a single ad in an NFL game and it was sort of a watershed moment like, “Are we seeing too much money go into these campaigns?”
LOL those were quaint days indeed.Report
David, I’ve enjoyed reading along with your frequent and sober thoughts about the election as we’ve moved through the season. Your perspective isn’t always exactly the same as mine, although we usually arrive at the same destination. That’s fine. That’s what it is to be neighbors and people of good faith living together in the same nation.
I too fear that this will not be the case and we’re in for another three months of courtroom shenanigans (and hopefully ONLY courtroom shenanigans) and uncertainty. But we can hope that no, we’ll get something closer to the Trump folks simply being bad losers and not trying anything subversive. Trump himself? There’s no bottom with him. But the people around him maybe have learned their lesson that the wheels of justice may grind slowly but they are inexorable and it doesn’t pay to bet against America’s institutions.
At least, that’s what I hope. I think everyone here, even the folks that I usually disagree with on political matters, hope for something that’s at least in the same ballpark.Report
Re: the Selzer Poll. Poll geeks consider Ann Selzer’s Iowa Poll to be the gold standard of state-level polls and admire her for refusing to “herd” her reports. Meanwhile, Nate Cohn wrote in the NYT over the weekend that he is seeing a lot of herding by most of the pollsters, which is to say, they manipulate their report numbers to line up with the consensus so that they don’t look like outliers. For her part, Selzer DNGAF if people think she is an outlier, and so she is an outlier here: but maybe she’s an outlier because she’s the one reporting what she found in her polling results and everyone else is putting a thumb on the scale.
We think Selzer may be on to something because she has a track record of stepping out of the conventional wisdom and being vindicated by actual election results (her poll showed Iowa was swinging towards Trump at the last minute in 2016 when nearly everyone else, myself included, was refusing to take Trump seriously). But of course past performance is no guarantee of future results and Selzer herself would surely acknowledge that. All she’d say is “That’s what the poll’s results were. Draw your own conclusions.”
I think our own Andrew Donaldson drew the right conclusion when he said on his podcast, “Nothing is happening. Nobody knows anything.” That’s not literally true, but for our purposes it might as well be. There’s nothing any of us can do to change or control things; there’s probably not a lot the candidates can do to change or control things anymore. Alea iacta est.
Intellectually, I know that’s the truth. Now, if only I could lay down my anxiety about it all in alignment with what my rational brain knows to be the case.Report
FWIW, Democrats, even the most worrywart of worrywart Democrats have been starting to sound more optimistic over the past 72 hours.
I have been feeling more serene and anxiety free than I did in 2016 and 2020. Harris has run as good a campaign as anyone can. Trump can still win but the last few weeks have seemingly created a lot of stuff that makes it better to be Harris than Trump. His MSG rally backfired probably and the MSM wasn’t able to BSDI with Biden’s garbage comment. The Selzer Poll indicates that abortion has been largely underlooked as an issue by the male pundits and pollsters who think it is a girl cooties issue. There is a fair amount of evidence that unaffiliated voters and late deciders are breaking for Harris over Trump by significant amounts.
Currently, AtlasIntel and some other right-wing pollsters with risible cross-tabs are trying to spin hard for Trump and it seems to influence the aggregators like Morris at 538 and Silver and Nate Cohn but no one else.Report
Fwiw strictly in horse-race terms, I’m much more bullish on Kamala today than I was a few days ago when I wrote my endorsement OP and before the Selzer poll.
Not just the Selzer poll itself, though that was big enough, but also because when you look at the Selzer poll in context you can see a coherent story of how Kamala can win. Which imo, was substantially missing before.
She had always been polling well enough to where if you assume some random noise would break in her favor she could win. But until now, there was no demographically credible good story for her. Now there is.
There’s a sweet spot available for her to hit that that’s mostly been hidden for all the commentary we’ve seen of the election. Specifically, there’s been a very loud Chip Daniels/Jen Rubin story, “ZOMG, Drumpf = Fascism in America.” and that story has got little traction among the voters, especially for as loud as it’s been and the number of our pundits who believe it. If it were possible to have negative traction, that would be it.
And the other thing is that the hostility to Trump has been dying down for while. He’s actually been getting more personally popular through most of this cycle.
But the point being, with the Selzer poll especially, that doesn’t entirely close the book on Kamala. What if, maybe we didn’t _hate_ Trump exactly but we just didn’t like him. What if we didn’t care about fascism but we think he’s too old, too flaky, too erratic, too inattentive to detail to go back to the White House.
Well, then among other things, married white women say 67+ years old would be going away from him. In general they are very risk-averse people and Trump is always stirring it up in ways they might not like. I think that’s what the Selzer poll might be getting at.
To that end, it’s not fascism, abortion, or Puerto Rico that’s going to beat Trump, it’s RFK and the general flakiness that goes with him and the general unpleasantness of having to listen to Trump. Among other things most of the points against Trump are accusations against him by adversaries and those can be ignored or discounted but Trump himself is leaning into RFK so that might get through in ways where other Trump criticism doesn’t.
Of course that’s all one side of the equation. In Trump’s favor there’s a lot of narrative, a lot of survey polling, and very important imo, almost _all_ of the hard data that could be a relevant proxy for the election, specifically early voting numbers, party registrations, and primary data.
Among other things, there is little doubt in my mind that the GOP will get the turnout they need win any plausibly close race of this cycle. But there is doubt that the Republicans who are going to the polls will actually vote for Trump (or other Republicans downballot for that matter). Again even here Liz Cheney types are going to be ignored. But RFK talking talking about water fluoridation or vaccines or whatever is going to leave a bad taste in the mouth of a lot of normie Republicans.
Given all the data we’ve seen so far this cycle, and how much of it is Trump-favorable, it’s easy to rationalize that the Selzer poll is a polling mistake, a meaningless outlier or both. I’d still proooobbabbblly, maaaayybe rather be him than her. But, the case for her winning is a lot more credible now than it was pre-Selzer.Report
Red Eagle Politics is here to save Iowa with a trash poll conducted on Saturday and Sunday: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/iowa/Report
Another note in the sheet music of trying to deny the result on Wednesday.Report
Trump’s lead among men might be declining: https://x.com/IanSams/status/1853488490102583651?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1853488490102583651%7Ctwgr%5E84bc3d2bd774a267bdcacdc1df77d5a77a3e3efc%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fdisqus.com%2Fembed%2Fcomments%2F%3Fbase%3Ddefaultf%3Dlawyersgunsmoneyblog-comt_i%3D14589120https3A2F2Fwww.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com2F3Fp3D145891t_u%3Dhttps3A2F2Fwww.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com2F20242F112Fthe-non-college-educated-man-problemt_e%3DThe20Non-College20Educated20Man20Problemt_d%3DThe20Non-College20Educated20Man20Problem20-20Lawyers2C20Guns202620Moneyt_t%3DThe20Non-College20Educated20Man20Problems_o%3Dascversion%3D3eb318847b9ba051e1aaed202ef5cc92Report
Dwight McKissic, senior pastor and founder of Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington, TX, announced yesterday that he’s voting for Harris:
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/evangelical-abortion-same-sex-marriage-harris-rcna178294Report
He’s definitely taking a stand, but with early voting all but done . . . its a less effective stand then it could have been.Report
Quick! Remove his tax exemption! Separation of church and state!!!
Heh.
Remember when we did that? Good times.Report
Yes, unsarcastically.Report
I know you’re just having a go, but the guy was very careful to make it clear that his congregation should vote as they felt best. I don’t believe that he made this declaration from the pulpit anyway.Report
One of the things I have noticed is numerous double Trump voters stating they are going for Harris but very few, if any, Clinton-Biden voters state they are going for TrumpReport
I’ve thought of what the final moments of this campaign resemble for me or perhaps the Trump campaign overall. It reminds me of the Hemmingway line about how bankruptcy occurs gradually and then all at once. Even during the spring and summer when Biden was on the ropes, there were signs Trump’s campaign was not what it should be. He wasn’t killing it when theoretically he should have been able to. The past week or two has felt like the all at once stage.Report
Yeah, there is this notion in the finance world of “capitulation” which observes that 2 thirds of the movement of a bear market happens in 1/3 of its time period. Or something like that.
The word is chosen to take a swing at the psychology of the people doing the selling during this last period. They have given up. I’ve been observing so many Trumpers in denial about how unfit for service he is, and wondering when the capitulation will come.Report
Inconceivable.
Trump winning, that is.Report