I missed the debate. I was busy at my Toastmasters group giving a speech with Q&A, entitled "Debates Are Bad, Actually." This is 100% not a joke, I was really doing exactly that.
Fair point, North, but that's taking Trump at his word that if he loses this election he'll not run again in 2028. About 80% of me doesn't believe that.
Certainly not when you justify seeing the execution through so that faith in the system as a whole may be preserved via the mechanism of pretending to ignore the evidence of innocence. What that does is make a mockery of the standard of "reasonable doubt," and inevitably thereafter diminish rather than buttress respect for the law.
Which is why I think the headline of this post raises a question whose answer is "no." If I had to predict, it'd be that polling numbers will remain roughly static through November, and only move towards convergence in the last few days before the actual election, because they always converge at the end of the campaign.
And if that sounds distressingly like 2016, yeah, it does.
I've little to add to the OP beyond, if these people (Trump and Vance in particular) want to be leaders, and they want to see Democrats tone their rhetoric down... leadership by example would be a great place for them to start.
"JD Vance schtupped a couch once" was a joke. A well-drafted, Onion-at-its-best quality satire in its original form (a parody of a page from Vance's novel) but it's never been anything but a joke and everyone has known that all along. No one seriously believed it at any point in time.
I guess I shouldn't say "no one," I don't know that one way or another. But no one in the public forum, even the Democratic candidates using the joke as a laugh line, even pretends it's real.
And certainly it stains Vance's dignity a bit that the joke has lingered as long as it has. But he's the only one who's been hurt by it, and then only his dignity.
Trump said "They're eating the dogs, they're eating the cats, they're eating the pets of the people that live there," and he was as serious as a heart attack about it. He went on for sixty seconds of screen time and argued with the debate moderators that he had good reason to believe it was true and the journalists' sources were lying to cover it up. And since then there have been efforts made to validate the lie.
What's more, it's had real world consequences, as noted in the OP. Ones which it is plain to see have the potential to erupt into violence and thank the Gods that they haven't yet.
[M]y student said to me that I just didn't understand him and his friends. He said that he is 30 years old and believes the entire federal government is corrupt, that the system is not working, and that America is in a very dark place. He said that Trump is the only politician who is conveying that message and that it is possible that there has to be chaos and the tearing down of institutions before our country can get back on its feet again. He was clear it is the message, not the messenger, that attracted him to Trumpism.
[Emphasis added.]
The message that "We're a failing nation. We're a nation that's in serious decline. We're being laughed at all over the world. All over the world, they laugh...." seems to resonate with a certain group of people. And yeah, that's where Trump chose to end it. The pitch, I guess, is "No matter what you think of me, she's worse."
My mistake. It's not one memo, it's several; it's not written specifically by RT, it was written by a different state-controlled entity looking to flood the U.S. information environment with misinformation and foster discord.
See exhibits to this Justice Department filing made last week, in particular exhibits 3-13 (version A of each exhibit is a transition; version B is in the original Russian). Offered for proof of the proposition that the Russian government has taken a relatively sophisticated look at U.S. (and in one case Mexican) culture and tried to find pressure points to increase dissenion and disunity through manipulation of social media and the generalized information environment.
First of all, the RT memo (assuming we credit it with authenticity and I see no reason not to) first eliminates the notion that there is a sufficiently "pro-Putin" constituency within US culture to develop, so it determines that the next best thing for Russian interests to do is to foster dissension, disunity, distrust, and political paralysis. To that end, it identified a constellation of arguments and concepts to advance into the American cultural consciousness, which would create the distrust and political paralysis Russia would need to force America to effective (although not official) neutrality. Concepts which happen to dovetail very closely with social conservative talking points.
Secondly, these guys are taking the position that they had no idea at all that it was Russian money paying them to push those exact same talking points out into the culture, that no one told them what to write or think, they believe all those things all on their own. Which means, if true, they somehow decided that they would advocate the exact same things that Russia thought would cause the most harm, friction, and paralysis in our culture. And indeed they saw and relished in the contentiousness they caused. Dozens of tweets from Tim Pool talking about a new civil war in America are still readily findable. That's what they sold, and they knew they were selling it.
The only real question is did they know their sales commissions were being subsidized by Russia? We can choose to disbelieve them about their awareness that they were being paid by someone to push these ideas, even if we credit that they didn't know it was Russia that was doing it. I have a hard time thinking that they really believed the advertising from Tenet Media and their own ventures partnered with Tenet was even close to enough to come up with the money they were making.
They were either traitors or whores, and they're trying hard in their public statements to deny being whores. "We're just inconsequential idiots who didn't know what was going on, please don't pay attention to us smol beans," is not a particularly great defense in my book.
My workout buddy got diagnosed as pre-diabetic and got some GLP-1 receptor agonists, at low doses. She's dropped ten pounds in ten weeks, says she feels great. Taught me kettlebells this morning and... um... well that's quite an exercise and I need to work on my form.
All of which is to say, the chems aren't going to be the whole answer no matter what, but my friend thinks they help a lot on the diet part, and let's face it, that's the big part.
More food than exercise, more carb-rich, high-fat tasty foods than vegetable- and protein-rich components to the diet. I'm right there with you, Em. Took a step on the scale earlier this summer and realized I'd exceeded my pandemic weight over the winter.
So I entered into a bet with a friend -- lose 20 lbs. by December, or I have to give $500 to the Republican National Committee.* This has given me the willpower to lose 9 of those pounds already. I REALLY like apple pie, but now I can visualize the candidate when I look at the apple pie and think, "No, I don't like apple pie quite that much." And that helps!
Setting a realistic goal helps, setting a time that is achievable and sustainable helps. Learning new habits helps, but the reinforcement for the willpower, especially at the start, has been a big motivator for me.
* If one were of a more politically conservative mindset than I, such a person could just as easily have chosen to promise the money to the Democrats were the goal not reached. The power of the commitment ought to readily translate.
I'm not nearly so skeptical as Philip about your gut instinct here, Pinky. 16 years may well be enough time to turn a state around -- with skill, money, vision, and some help.
Arizona from 2004-2020 seems like a good example. Not all of that was AZ Dems being smart about growing their base but some of it surely was. Some of it was demographic changes that neither party could directly control but which worked out to favor the Dems, and and some of it was the AZ Republicans making a string of sub-optimal decisions about which we need not dwell here.
Would AZ have flipped on the strength of the demographic changes alone? I don't know.
I get the appeal of seeing politicians campaign everywhere, of candidates for President telling every American that their votes matter. Totally.
The Electoral College is the basic reason this doesn't happen. At the Presidential level, there's no real point in a Presidential candidate spending a lot of time and effort campaigning in a state they can't possibly win, or in a state they're going to win regardless.
Why should Trump go to Hawaii, for instance? He can't possibly win there or rather, if he does win there, it means he's winning basically everywhere in a 1984-for-Reagan style landslide, and therefore still doesn't need to go. Or, for that matter, why should he go to Mississippi? If Trump is losing in Mississippi, ain't nothing he does anywhere will salvage the campaign.
Now, supporting a downticket race that can be influenced by a Presidential candidate's visit might be worth a trip. For instance, Trump recently went to Montana, which he's going to win regardless, because the Senate race between Tester and Sheehy is really close; if both Trump and Sheehy win, Sheehy owes Trump a favor. Maybe Trump also raised some money there too. But without a close race to influence, why go? Trump's time is better spent in places like Pennsylvania and Arizona. (As is Harris', and for the same reason.)
If you wanted to change the incentive structure such that politicians would have incentives to go everywhere for the sake of influencing votes, switch from the Electoral College to a national popular vote. With a popular vote governing who wins, you can either find regions that have a lot of undecided votes, or you can spend your time working in safe places to pump up turnout in regions where you're likely to win by big percentages. For Democrats that'd be urban areas (even in otherwise red states, places like St. Louis, Missouri) and for Republicans that'd be the denser-populated rural areas (even in otherwise blue states, places like Bakersfield, California).
Politicians who don't have rallies tend not to win. So the rallies must help somehow, or politicians wouldn't have them.
Maybe they help because they create positive-looking environments for free media to come and rebroadcast what is said to the already-converted. Maybe they help because they generate money that can be used for persuasive outreach or GOTV efforts later, to get at the less-motivated or the less-engaged come election day. Maybe they help because they enthuse the already-faithful to go out and evangelize to their less-engaged friends and neighbors.
My personal theory is that it's more of that last possibility than anything else: increasing engagement from the already-converted generates a downstream effect of more votes from the previously-unengaged. But YMMV.
But they surely help somehow. If they didn't, it would be a hell of a lot cheaper and less exhausting to just stay home and have your comms team issue cleverly-worded Tweets, and spend all your money on paid media instead of the movable feast that's associated with having rallies at all.
On “Vice Presidential Candidate Debate: Sen JD Vance vs Gov Tim Walz”
I'll see if I can get Tod Kelly to co-author it with me.
"
I missed the debate. I was busy at my Toastmasters group giving a speech with Q&A, entitled "Debates Are Bad, Actually." This is 100% not a joke, I was really doing exactly that.
On “Open Mic for the week of 9/23/2024”
Fromkin relies heavily here on Drew Magary of SFGate. I corresponded directly with Magary just this week on Bluesky, and Magary has been proven definitely right about one thing: Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis is a disaster of a scale of magnitude roughly equivalent to Hurricane Katrina. Magary knows excrement when he sees it and is not afraid to call it out for what it is, either on film or on the campaign stump.
"
I didn't have sex with Diddy either, but at this point I think it might be statistically likely that all of us personally know someone who did.
On “Why a Trump Loss is Best for Conservatives”
Fair point, North, but that's taking Trump at his word that if he loses this election he'll not run again in 2028. About 80% of me doesn't believe that.
On “Missouri Conducts Controversial Execution of Marcellus Williams”
Certainly not when you justify seeing the execution through so that faith in the system as a whole may be preserved via the mechanism of pretending to ignore the evidence of innocence. What that does is make a mockery of the standard of "reasonable doubt," and inevitably thereafter diminish rather than buttress respect for the law.
On “Is the Logjam About to Break?”
Which is why I think the headline of this post raises a question whose answer is "no." If I had to predict, it'd be that polling numbers will remain roughly static through November, and only move towards convergence in the last few days before the actual election, because they always converge at the end of the campaign.
And if that sounds distressingly like 2016, yeah, it does.
On “Open Mic for the week of 9/16/2024”
Rooney Mara's and Robin Wright's characters in House of Cards were not that! And not just because of their sexual choices, either.
On “The Unspoken Truth About The Trump Assassination Attempts”
I've little to add to the OP beyond, if these people (Trump and Vance in particular) want to be leaders, and they want to see Democrats tone their rhetoric down... leadership by example would be a great place for them to start.
On “Open Mic for the week of 9/9/2024”
Finally someone treating the Cat Libel and its author with the gravity it deserves.
On “Missing the Forest for the Trees on Springfield”
There's another difference.
"JD Vance schtupped a couch once" was a joke. A well-drafted, Onion-at-its-best quality satire in its original form (a parody of a page from Vance's novel) but it's never been anything but a joke and everyone has known that all along. No one seriously believed it at any point in time.
I guess I shouldn't say "no one," I don't know that one way or another. But no one in the public forum, even the Democratic candidates using the joke as a laugh line, even pretends it's real.
And certainly it stains Vance's dignity a bit that the joke has lingered as long as it has. But he's the only one who's been hurt by it, and then only his dignity.
Trump said "They're eating the dogs, they're eating the cats, they're eating the pets of the people that live there," and he was as serious as a heart attack about it. He went on for sixty seconds of screen time and argued with the debate moderators that he had good reason to believe it was true and the journalists' sources were lying to cover it up. And since then there have been efforts made to validate the lie.
What's more, it's had real world consequences, as noted in the OP. Ones which it is plain to see have the potential to erupt into violence and thank the Gods that they haven't yet.
On “Debate Recap: Harris Played the Tune and Trump Danced To It”
Related?
https://www.semafor.com/article/09/11/2024/republicans-fear-laura-loomer-is-influencing-donald-trump
Your brain is like anything else in your body -- it becomes what you feed it.
On “Watch And React Live: The Harris Trump Debate”
Or these might -- hear me out here -- these just might not have been actually "undecided" voters.
"
I've had a lot of thoughts about this post from Georgia Law professor Eric Segall since reading it. Specifically:
[Emphasis added.]
The message that "We're a failing nation. We're a nation that's in serious decline. We're being laughed at all over the world. All over the world, they laugh...." seems to resonate with a certain group of people. And yeah, that's where Trump chose to end it. The pitch, I guess, is "No matter what you think of me, she's worse."
On “Debate Recap: Harris Played the Tune and Trump Danced To It”
Live with terminally internetted brain, lose with terminally internetted brain.
On “Watch And React Live: The Harris Trump Debate”
The Swifties called justice down on Ticketmaster with the heat of ten thousand furious suns. What chance does a mere politician have against them?
"
Wait, Turkey, the country? Or Turkey, the sandwich meat?
On “Russian Influence Indictment: Read It For Yourself”
My mistake. It's not one memo, it's several; it's not written specifically by RT, it was written by a different state-controlled entity looking to flood the U.S. information environment with misinformation and foster discord.
See exhibits to this Justice Department filing made last week, in particular exhibits 3-13 (version A of each exhibit is a transition; version B is in the original Russian). Offered for proof of the proposition that the Russian government has taken a relatively sophisticated look at U.S. (and in one case Mexican) culture and tried to find pressure points to increase dissenion and disunity through manipulation of social media and the generalized information environment.
"
So you're saying they were thieving whores.
"
Two observations about this.
First of all, the RT memo (assuming we credit it with authenticity and I see no reason not to) first eliminates the notion that there is a sufficiently "pro-Putin" constituency within US culture to develop, so it determines that the next best thing for Russian interests to do is to foster dissension, disunity, distrust, and political paralysis. To that end, it identified a constellation of arguments and concepts to advance into the American cultural consciousness, which would create the distrust and political paralysis Russia would need to force America to effective (although not official) neutrality. Concepts which happen to dovetail very closely with social conservative talking points.
Secondly, these guys are taking the position that they had no idea at all that it was Russian money paying them to push those exact same talking points out into the culture, that no one told them what to write or think, they believe all those things all on their own. Which means, if true, they somehow decided that they would advocate the exact same things that Russia thought would cause the most harm, friction, and paralysis in our culture. And indeed they saw and relished in the contentiousness they caused. Dozens of tweets from Tim Pool talking about a new civil war in America are still readily findable. That's what they sold, and they knew they were selling it.
The only real question is did they know their sales commissions were being subsidized by Russia? We can choose to disbelieve them about their awareness that they were being paid by someone to push these ideas, even if we credit that they didn't know it was Russia that was doing it. I have a hard time thinking that they really believed the advertising from Tenet Media and their own ventures partnered with Tenet was even close to enough to come up with the money they were making.
They were either traitors or whores, and they're trying hard in their public statements to deny being whores. "We're just inconsequential idiots who didn't know what was going on, please don't pay attention to us smol beans," is not a particularly great defense in my book.
On “Em is on a Diet, Again”
My workout buddy got diagnosed as pre-diabetic and got some GLP-1 receptor agonists, at low doses. She's dropped ten pounds in ten weeks, says she feels great. Taught me kettlebells this morning and... um... well that's quite an exercise and I need to work on my form.
All of which is to say, the chems aren't going to be the whole answer no matter what, but my friend thinks they help a lot on the diet part, and let's face it, that's the big part.
"
More food than exercise, more carb-rich, high-fat tasty foods than vegetable- and protein-rich components to the diet. I'm right there with you, Em. Took a step on the scale earlier this summer and realized I'd exceeded my pandemic weight over the winter.
So I entered into a bet with a friend -- lose 20 lbs. by December, or I have to give $500 to the Republican National Committee.* This has given me the willpower to lose 9 of those pounds already. I REALLY like apple pie, but now I can visualize the candidate when I look at the apple pie and think, "No, I don't like apple pie quite that much." And that helps!
Setting a realistic goal helps, setting a time that is achievable and sustainable helps. Learning new habits helps, but the reinforcement for the willpower, especially at the start, has been a big motivator for me.
* If one were of a more politically conservative mindset than I, such a person could just as easily have chosen to promise the money to the Democrats were the goal not reached. The power of the commitment ought to readily translate.
On “Why on Earth Would Trump Plan This Speech At This Location At This Time”
I'm not nearly so skeptical as Philip about your gut instinct here, Pinky. 16 years may well be enough time to turn a state around -- with skill, money, vision, and some help.
Arizona from 2004-2020 seems like a good example. Not all of that was AZ Dems being smart about growing their base but some of it surely was. Some of it was demographic changes that neither party could directly control but which worked out to favor the Dems, and and some of it was the AZ Republicans making a string of sub-optimal decisions about which we need not dwell here.
Would AZ have flipped on the strength of the demographic changes alone? I don't know.
"
I get the appeal of seeing politicians campaign everywhere, of candidates for President telling every American that their votes matter. Totally.
The Electoral College is the basic reason this doesn't happen. At the Presidential level, there's no real point in a Presidential candidate spending a lot of time and effort campaigning in a state they can't possibly win, or in a state they're going to win regardless.
Why should Trump go to Hawaii, for instance? He can't possibly win there or rather, if he does win there, it means he's winning basically everywhere in a 1984-for-Reagan style landslide, and therefore still doesn't need to go. Or, for that matter, why should he go to Mississippi? If Trump is losing in Mississippi, ain't nothing he does anywhere will salvage the campaign.
Now, supporting a downticket race that can be influenced by a Presidential candidate's visit might be worth a trip. For instance, Trump recently went to Montana, which he's going to win regardless, because the Senate race between Tester and Sheehy is really close; if both Trump and Sheehy win, Sheehy owes Trump a favor. Maybe Trump also raised some money there too. But without a close race to influence, why go? Trump's time is better spent in places like Pennsylvania and Arizona. (As is Harris', and for the same reason.)
If you wanted to change the incentive structure such that politicians would have incentives to go everywhere for the sake of influencing votes, switch from the Electoral College to a national popular vote. With a popular vote governing who wins, you can either find regions that have a lot of undecided votes, or you can spend your time working in safe places to pump up turnout in regions where you're likely to win by big percentages. For Democrats that'd be urban areas (even in otherwise red states, places like St. Louis, Missouri) and for Republicans that'd be the denser-populated rural areas (even in otherwise blue states, places like Bakersfield, California).
"
Politicians who don't have rallies tend not to win. So the rallies must help somehow, or politicians wouldn't have them.
Maybe they help because they create positive-looking environments for free media to come and rebroadcast what is said to the already-converted. Maybe they help because they generate money that can be used for persuasive outreach or GOTV efforts later, to get at the less-motivated or the less-engaged come election day. Maybe they help because they enthuse the already-faithful to go out and evangelize to their less-engaged friends and neighbors.
My personal theory is that it's more of that last possibility than anything else: increasing engagement from the already-converted generates a downstream effect of more votes from the previously-unengaged. But YMMV.
But they surely help somehow. If they didn't, it would be a hell of a lot cheaper and less exhausting to just stay home and have your comms team issue cleverly-worded Tweets, and spend all your money on paid media instead of the movable feast that's associated with having rallies at all.