Month: September 2024

Aaron Blake of the Washington Post notices something fascinating. A veritable shit-ton of Republicans are planning to vote to constitutionally protect women’s reproductive right to an abortion on their state’s ballots this November. The high point comes in a poll from Nevada where a Fox News survey found 54 percent of GOP voters plan to support an amendment measure on the issue. The same survey in Arizona found 50 percent Republican support. Roughly a third or more Republican voters have expressed support for abortion rights in surveys from South Dakota, Florida and Missouri.

Overall, there are ten states with abortion rights on the ballot, including Nebraska, Colorado, Montana, New York and Maryland.  It’s possible that all these measures will succeed, although Florida has a more difficult 60 percent threshold for passage. Given the popularity of abortion rights even in very red states like Missouri and South Dakota, there’s a feeling that Democratic candidates may see a boost. This could help Sen. Jon Tester survive a strong challenge in Montana, or assist Angela Alsobrooks in retaining the seat in Maryland. Maybe it could lead to Sen. Rick Scott’s demise in Florida. The idea is that people who are motivated to turn out to protect women’s rights will cast a vote for the Democratic candidates on the ballot as well. This makes perfect sense.

But, we may also see a lot of Republicans turn out and vote both for abortion rights and for Republicans candidates, even though this doesn’t make intuitive sense. This is what Donald Trump is hoping for when he spews nonsense about having done what everyone wanted by removing federal protections and moving the debate to the states. And it makes me wonder what comes next if slowly but surely, reproductive rights are protected by the people as state after red state enshrines them in their constitutions.

I can see it cutting in two totally different ways. In one scenario, the Democrats will lose a major issue that galvanizes their supporters and leads otherwise right-leaning people to reject the GOP. In the other, the conservative movement will splinter and become disorganized, and provide much weaker opposition.

One thing I am curious about is why the conservative movement has been so cohesive all these years given the now clear internal divisiveness of their extreme position on abortion. It makes me wonder who cohesive they can remain once the issue becomes settled against them.

But the whole Trump phenomenon is befuddling. How does the GOP remain united around this man who exemplifies disrespect for law and order, exposes their divisions on social policy, is so weak on Russia and our traditional strong defensive alliances with Europe, Japan and South Korea, and who seeks to replace free trade with protective tariffs? He’s knocked out or confused all the pillars of traditional conservatism, and yet he seems to have picked up a vote for every vote he’s lost.

Until I can better understand who this is possible, it’s really hard to predict what comes next if Trump is out of the picture, or even how well things will hold together with his coalition if he gets his shot at fascist dictatorship.

I’d say that I’ve had a bit of writer’s block recently, but it’s a bit more complicated. I hate writing indoors and it’s been raining here every day for a week. I like having a nice block of time to think, and this is my son’s busiest time of the year with 3-to-4 soccer matches a week and many more practices between his club and his high school team. But, most of all, I feel like I’ve arrived at that moment when you look up and realize that a fast train is bearing down on you and it’s too late to do anything about it. You’re stuck on the rails and no decision or reflex can save you.  Your only chance of survival is that someone else flips the railway switch so the train jumps to another track.

For this first time since I started this blog, 19 years ago, it feels like I am at the complete mercy of others. Either they’ll save the country by electing Harris and Walz or they won’t, and there isn’t anything I can write that will alter our fate. There are a number of factors that explain this feeling of helplessness, but they all combine to describe the irreparable peril we’re in. If Donald Trump wins, there is no force remaining, not the law and courts, not the media, not the Constitution, not Congress, and certainly not Trump’s own party that can or will restrain him and hold him accountable.

This is completely different from the peril of a second term of George W. Bush, which the country barely survived and never fully recovered from. It’s different than the prospect of Mitt Romney winning and wiping away President Barack Obama’s accomplishments, which we partially saw later on with the election of Trump. It’s even different from what would have happened if Trump had been reelected in 2020, because he’s now much more clearly trying to avoid prison, more hellbent on revenge, and the Supreme Court has put the office of the presidency almost completely above the law.

He will unleash a kind of hell on the country and the world unlike anything we’ve seen since the Civil War, and more serious because of the international consequences. All our guardrails and institutions will break, and there won’t be any legal or normal nonviolent pathway back to normalcy. Our system depends too much of bipartisan consensus to survive when one party opts for dictatorship and gains the power to pursue vengeance.

I confess that this feeling isn’t rational. I never really had that much influence anyway. None of us can move the river or control the winds. And I probably still can have more influence by writing and podcasting than by simply taking a walk-sheet and knocking on doors. A better description might be the deer in the headlights that still might technically have time to evade an approaching car but freezes out of panic.

Rest easy that I am not completely panicked. I’m actually modestly optimistic, bolstered somewhat by polls that are more encouraging than not. It’s the profound sense of loss of agency in the face of stakes of unimaginable scale and permanence that has me rattled. What should I write about? What can compare to the main thing?

But I’ll soldier on as I always have, because we need all hands on deck right now. We need people using every tool and skill they have available to them, including taking those walk-sheets and talking to their neighbors. We still need bloggers and podcasters to work the media and the refs, and to educate people about Trump’s intentions.

I’m just saying, it’s never been so hard to just sit down and write.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing my painting of Navajo Bridge near the Arizona/Utah border. My recent photo is seen below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 5×7 inch canvas panel.

When last seen, the painting appeared as it does directly below.

Surprise. I’ve changed the color of the river. It looks more conventional but more believable to my “style” of painting. I’ve also revised the distant rear and the left side cliff.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

I quite enjoyed reading Rick Perlstein’s critique of the polling and political prognostication profession, but I’m a little resistant to adopting his “dime store Buddhism” approach to predicting the winners of our elections. While I can agree that many of the most famous pollsters throughout history can properly be called “assholes” for their refusal to own their mistakes and their willingness to blame others for the failures, I still see value in what they do. And I do have one complaint about Perlstein’s otherwise comprehensive treatment of that history. He doesn’t even discuss the challenge presented to pollsters by the Electoral College.

It’s difficult enough to get a good polling sample and then to weight it correctly, but sussing out that the loser of the popular vote is actually going to win the election is another ball of wax. There’s also the example of John Kerry, who would have joined George W. Bush and Donald Trump as victorious popular vote losers if only he had overcome a massive voter suppression effort by Ohio’s Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell who deliberately created massive lines in urban centers and college towns. Are pollsters supposed to weight for that?

In 2024, I think people will be genuinely shocked if Trump wins the popular vote, but his chances of winning the Electoral College look like even money, and calling that correctly is probably more luck than science given how much hinges on multiple likely 50-50 outcomes. And that gets me to the value of the poll aggregator method. It’s true that deciding which polls to exclude or adjust for obvious political bias is difficult, and it’s also true that pollsters often display a herd mentality that leads them to calibrate their results toward the consensus for fear of being an outlier. While aggregating polls doesn’t involve magical thinking, that’s a good term to describe believing in the method’s infallibility. Yet, one thing aggregating does accomplish well is showing movement.

This is for two reasons. First, by doing some work to minimize the effectiveness of gaming the system with dishonest polls, the method properly limits the noise. The honest pollsters are consistent with how they weight their results, so that even if their weighting is badly off, differences between their August survey and their September survey have validity. And when we see that movement confirmed by multiple outfits, we can have some confidence in how an election is developing and how certain events are affecting the electorate.

Of course, the fear of being an outlier can mute the signal of movement. Who wants to be the first to say that the electorate has strongly tilted? It’s probably built in that aggregations of polls will underestimate strong shifts and present them as modest. In other words, honest polling outfits are consistent until they find themselves too far off on an island.

Internal polling is subject to similar risks. I believe that Mitt Romney’s pollsters consistently weighted their surveys with optimistic assumptions that just weren’t justified. They wound up genuinely convincing Romney that everyone else was wrong and they were right, and he was astonished when he lost. But on the whole, I think internal polls are probably more accurate precisely because their primary purpose isn’t to predict but to direct time and resources and to evaluate the effectiveness of the campaign. Did our most recent trip to North Carolina move the needle? Is our big ad campaign in the Philly suburbs working as planned?

Of course, we in the public only see internal polling when a candidate wants us to see it, and sometimes a dishonest internal poll is produced for the express purpose of impressing donors or garnering good press coverage. That’s different from what campaigns use to gauge the mood of the electorate and explains why aggregators are suspicious of internal polls.

One thing I’ll say in defense of Nate Silver is that he’s correct when he says people don’t really understand odds. If we made a coin that had a 75 percent chance of landing on tails, how much money would you bet on it coming up heads? Or tails? Would we really fault someone who told us the odds for being wrong about the outcome? Would that even make sense?

There are some things we can take from polls with some confidence. I think it’s a safe bet that Kamala Harris is doing better against Trump than Biden was. I think the election is tick-tight in the so-called swing states. Whether Harris has a 65 percent chance of winning or losing is kind of a meaningless prediction given that there will be only one election, just as predicting heads or tails is meaningless on any given coin flip. And, finally, I think when we see movement in the aggregators, we can believe that there is movement.

There are some other things political surveys can detect. It could be that Harris is doing poorly compared to Biden is places where the Democrats did poorly in the 2022 midterms, and this will bring down her popular vote advantage without having any meaning for the Electoral College. For example, the Democratic Party in New York couldn’t be more of a mess, especially with the mayor of New York being indicted. Trump could rack up bigger margins in the Deep South. Some of this will be useful for predicting the outcome of House races even if it tells us nothing about who will be our next president.

In any case, hating on pollsters and polling aggregators is fine, but I wouldn’t support flying blind without their input. What matters is knowing how to interpret their output.

Howdy! I am a bit under the weather this week, so this is a short post:

The brief collaborative partnership between piano/keyboard legend Herbie Hancock and Foday Musa Suso didn’t last beyond the mid-1980s, but those two created plenty of magic on their one LP together.

Cheers.

Jimmy Keady, the founder and president of JLK Political Strategies, a GOP consulting firm, is telling Fox News Digital that Republicans are doing a better job of early voting. That’s based on Decision Desk HQ data showing that relative to 2020, “the Democratic lead in vote-by-mail requests has shrunk by over 5% in Florida, nearly 15% in North Carolina and over 35% in Pennsylvania.”

“It definitely signals that A, there’s turnout… but B, also that the base has adopted, kind of being able to accept that early voting is a proper and mostly secure way to vote,” Keady said.

I’m not sure this is really such great news for the Trump-Vance ticket, however. But, first, let me remind you of the scene from the summer of 2020. It was the pre-vaccine height of the pandemic. On June 15, I wrote about President Trump’s self-defeating war on vote-by-mail, using Florida as my prime example. In June, I wrote Trump Has Destroyed the GOP’s Vote-By-Mail Advantage in Florida. By that time, the Biden campaign had opened up “a 302,000-voter advantage over Republicans in vote-by-mail enrollment” in the Sunshine State, which was a complete reversal from 2016 when more Republican Floridians voted by mail than Democrats.

In Pennsylvania, by contrast, we did not have a no-excuse vote-by-mail option at all prior to the pandemic. Unlike in Florida, where Republicans historically had the option and were more inclined than Democrats to use it, in Pennsylvania it was a new concept. And Trump told his supporters it was unreliable and a potential source of fraud. He also kept complaining about safety measures to keep people safe from COVID-19, which made Republicans less inclined to worry about queuing up in lines to vote in-person. The results were predictable and I did predict them. The Republican mail-in advantage in Florida was completely reversed, and in Pennsylvania the Democrats gained a giant new advantage by banking many, many more early votes than the GOP.

Keady does a good job of explaining why this is important:

Getting voters out to early in-person voting or to vote by mail can free up resources for campaigns, Keady said, allowing them to focus their attention on lower propensity voters who often play a big role in deciding elections.

“I’m sure voters complain all the time about text messages, about getting mail, about getting robocalls to go vote,” Keady said. “Campaigns are now sophisticated enough that once you go vote, those stop… once a voter goes to vote, and those stop, that allows resource allocation from that voter to another voter.”

Despite winning the vote-by-mail battle, the 2020 election in Florida did not go well for the Democrats. and it was even worse in 2022. The state is drifting to the right. One reason the Democrats’ didn’t do better in 2020 is that Florida also has a robust in-person early voting system, and very few Democrats chose that method. In other words, Democrats early voted by mail and Republicans early voted in-person, and it largely canceled out. But there was no in-person early voting option in Pennsylvania, and so the Dems banked a huge and probably decisive advantage.

Now, hopefully this helps you understand why there’s such a big difference in Decision Desk HQ’s numbers for the two states in 2024. In Florida, the Democratic lead in vote-by-mail requests has shrunk by about 5 percent. That’s really not much of a change, and it’s to be expected that there would be some reversion to pre-pandemic splits. Remember that before the pandemic, voting-by-mail was familiar to Floridians and more popular with Republicans. But if the Democrats still have an edge, then it’s still an improvement over the status quo ante.

The change in Pennsylvania is significant, with a 35 percent reduction in the Democratic advantage. But, again, few Pennsylvania Republicans chose to vote by mail in 2020 because they were not familiar with it and President Trump was telling them not to trust the voting method. The numbers are telling. There were 1,702,484 Democrats who cast mail ballots in 2020 compared to 623,404 Republicans. That gave the Democrats over a million vote advantage before any Election Day votes were cast, and the final outcome was 3,458,229 votes for Biden compared to 3,377,674 votes for Trump.

If I am a supporter of Trump, I’m encouraged to see that more Pennsylvania Republicans are asking for mail ballots, but the 35 percent number isn’t as significant as it might seem. In 2020, 64.7 percent of Pennsylvania ballot requests were made by Democrats compared to 23.7 percent by Republicans, and the Democrats had a higher return rate. (87.7 percent to  79.4 percent). Cutting into that 39 percent deficit by a little more than a third is helpful, but we’re still talking about a 25 or so percent advantage for the Dems. And this won’t be offset by any early in-person option.

Again, given that the 2020 election was held during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, many more Democrats were eager to stay safe and vote by mail, while Republicans were actively discouraged from either staying safe or voting by mail. We should expect more natural splits in our current environment. It’s not just that Republicans are more comfortable voting by mail this time, but also that Democrats are more comfortable voting in person.

No matter what, I would expect the splits to be less dramatic in 2024 than they were in 2020. The way the splits look in Florida and Pennsylvania reflect much more  the political and voting situation in 2020 than anything specific to the current campaign.

The truth is, the Democrats will still have an enormous early voting advantage in Pennsylvania and that this will make it easier for them to do their get out the vote work on Election Day. That’s a legacy of Trump poisoning his own supporters’ view of mail voting in 2020, and he’s going to pay a price for it.

If the GOP wants to grasp for good news, they can seize on these numbers, but they don’t concern me. They are exactly what I would expect.

As we approach a possible government shutdown, I don’t want to reinvent the wheel so I will refer you to a piece I wrote in January 2023 called Can Kevin McCarthy Avoid Blowing Up the Global Economy?. It’s proof of both my political acumen and my prescience, but the topic was modestly different from what we’re dealing with now. In that case, I was explaining why we should be concerned that the U.S Government might default on its debt in 2023 and cause another Great Depression. My argument was essentially that McCarthy had made a series of concessions to the hard right in order to secure the Speakership, and that it would probably wind up costing him his job.

To be a little more specific, I knew that McCarthy was going to face two really difficult tasks. The first was to avoid a default on our debts in May 2023. The second was to avoid a government shutdown at the end of the fiscal year in September 2023. As it happened, McCarthy barely made it through the debt crisis but, in the process, used up all the leeway the hard right was willing to grant him. The good news was that he avoided blowing up the global economy, but it meant that when he went back to the well in September to avoid a shutdown, he was immediately ousted from power. My prediction that his concessions to the hard right would quickly doom him was accurate.

One of the key concessions McCarthy made was giving three seats on the Rules Committee to Freedom Caucus members Ralph Norman, Chip Roy and Thomas Massie.. As I explained in the earlier piece, this meant that despite having 9-to-4 Republican majority on the committee, McCarthy couldn’t pass a rule the Freedom Caucus opposed without Democratic help. And if you can’t pass a rule on a bill, the only way to bring that bill to the floor is under a suspension of the rules which requires a two-thirds supermajority to pass. Obviously, if you need a two-thirds majority, that means you need a lot of Democratic votes.

Now, it took a while for the Republicans to agree on a replacement for McCarthy as Speaker, but they eventually settled on Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana. And he wound up in the exact same pickle, needing Democratic votes to pass must-pass spending legislation because of a narrow majority and lack of control of the Rules Committee. I thought it would cost him his job this year, but Donald Trump stepped in to save him, no doubt concerned that another protracted Speaker fight would be unhelpful to his cause in the November election.

As Johnson struggles to pass a continuing resolution to avoid a shutdown six weeks out from the election, Trump has made his job more difficult by demanding he attach the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE Act). But Johnson didn’t have the votes and so he cut a deal with the House Democrats and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to pass a CR that lets FEMA tap into next year’s disaster relief money and provides an extra $231 million for the Secret Service. There’s also some extra coin for security at the inauguration and a few other extensions. However, this likely won’t fly with the Freedom Caucus members of the Rules Committee.

Republican leaders have doubts that the panel will be able to pass a rule allowing the House to consider the funding bill under a simple majority vote.”

The Rules Committee has nine Republicans and four Democrats. Among those nine Republicans are three conservative hardliners: Reps. Ralph Norman, Chip Roy and Thomas Massie. The trio has the power to block any rule if they side with Democrats.

Norman famously hates CRs and told us last week he wouldn’t back a three-month stopgap bill. Roy’s SAVE Act was twinned to a six-month CR and failed on the floor last week. And Massie loathes Speaker Mike Johnson and seems to relish criticizing him publicly.

The Democrats on the committee could vote for the rule but Roll Call reports that convincing them to do so is “a task made more complicated by the omission of several policy and funding riders Democrats sought” in the continuing resolution. These include a rate increase for “Social Security Administration expenses and expanded loan guarantee authority for State Department financing of Ukrainian purchases of U.S. military equipment.”

To be clear here, a strong majority of congressional Republicans in both the House and Senate, and all their leaders are ready to completely capitulate to the Democrats on this temporary spending bill because they absolutely do not want an October government shutdown. But, procedurally, it’s just not that easy to capitulate, especially when Trump isn’t providing any cover. They think it’s a political loser, and history definitely supports them in that sentiment, but the concessions McCarthy made last year are still haunting his successor.

So, as has been the case for this entire Congress, the Democrats are in the functional majority in the House because their votes are needed both to keep the country solvent and to keep the government operating, and that means that they can make demands. It’s true that Speaker Johnson cut a deal with Schumer, but that deal didn’t necessarily envision Democrats on the House Rules Committee voting to make Johnson”s job easier. In general, the minority on the Rules Committee almost never votes with the Speaker and they’re happy to pass the CR under a suspension of the rules.

The problem for Johnson, as it was for McCarthy, is that relying on Democratic votes makes you the leader not of the Republican Party but of a bipartisan governing majority, and that’s not viable. The Democrats were willing to save Johnson when he paid our debts, but they don’t have much use for him in general. It’s hard to see how he can continue for long as the leader of the House GOP, and that’s true whether the Republicans retain control after the midterms or relinquish it, as is widely expected.

The House GOP will probably oust Johnson for the sin of trying to protect their jobs. They did it to McCarthy and they’ll probably do it to any future Republican Speaker. This is a party that can only really function in the minority. They are incapable of governing.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing my painting of Navajo Bridge near the Arizona/Utah border. My recent photo is seen below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 5×7 inch canvas panel.

When last seen, the painting appeared as it does directly below.

I’ve now done some work on the cliffs and river. I’m not particularly happy with the color of the water. I may change it.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

Hi photo lovers.

I am seeing if I can post just a bit more frequently. The featured photo this time is one of the new sunflowers that one of my daughters brought home this summer. These plants started blooming before we could get them in the ground. They will look quite nice for the early fall, and should come back next year. I’ll appreciate these for now, and am excited to see what next growing season has in store for them, as well as a host of additional sunflowers we’ll plant next spring along the back fence.

I am still using my same equipment, and am no professional. If you are an avid photographer, regardless of your skills and professional experience, you are in good company here. Booman Tribune was blessed with very talented photographers in the past. At Progress Pond, we seem to have a few talented photographers now, a few of whom seem to be lurking I suppose.

I have been using an LG v40 ThinQ for almost six years. My original LG v40 ThinQ is gone. The back of the phone came off. Apparently the battery began to burst. My initial replacement had a similar fate. I bought yet another version of the same phone about a year and a half ago for hardly anything, as I simply didn’t have the time to really research a good permanent replacement. We will see how long this one lasts. I need more time to research smart phones, especially at the high end. I prefer to get a device and keep it for four or five years. Most of my family seems to be gravitating toward iPhones, but I am determined to avoid going that route. The newer Samsung phones look really promising. Given the times we live in, my default is to delay any major purchases as long as possible. So, unless something really goes wrong with my current phone, I’ll stick to the status quo for as long as possible. Keep in mind that my last Samsung kept going for over four years (although the last year was a bit touch and go). Once I do have to make a new smart phone purchase, the camera feature is the one I consider most important. So any advice on such matters is always appreciated. Occasionally I get to use my old 35 mm, but one of my daughters commandeered it. Presumably she’ll return it before she moves out. So it goes.

This series of posts is in honor of a number of our ancestors. At one point, there were some seriously great photographers who graced Booman Tribune with their work. They are all now long gone. I am the one who carries the torch. I keep this going because I know that one day I too will be gone, and I really want the work that was started long ago to continue, rather than fade away with me. If I see that I am able to incite a few others to fill posts like these with photos, then I will be truly grateful. In the meantime, enjoy the photos, and I am sure between Booman and myself we can pass along quite a bit of knowledge about the photo flog series from its inception back during the Booman Tribune days.

Since this post usually runs only a day, I will likely keep it up for a while. Please share your work. I am convinced that us amateurs are extremely talented. You will get nothing but love and support here. I mean that. Also, when I say that you don’t have to be a photography pro, I mean that as well. I am an amateur. This is my hobby. This is my passion. I keep these posts going only because they are a passion. If they were not, I would have given up a long time ago. My preference is to never give up.

Brian Beutler writes that The Trump Lie Machine is Broken, and uses as evidence the right’s failure to negatively define Tim Walz and Trump’s apparent inability to convert two assassination attempts into any bounce in the polls. I suppose there’s something to this, but I’m not really convinced.

It’s true that efforts to Swift Boat Walz have had nowhere near the impact they had on John Kerry. But I think the explanation for this is probably different from the one Beutler offers, which is that “tried-and-true GOP tactics ha[ve] suddenly stopped working” and “Republicans can no longer dependably scandalize their enemies with concerted bullshit.” First, we need to understand why the Swift Boating of Kerry worked so well.

The 2004 election, which took place during the height of the War on Terror, was one in which the Democrats were laboring to convince the public that they had the toughness to protect the country from another devastating September 11-style attack and to take over responsibility for the faltering wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Democratic primary voters understood this, and they chose a Vietnam War hero as their candidate over more convincing and committed antiwar alternatives. Kerry had the sterling military credentials to ward off attacks from chickenhawks like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. But Karl Rove’s strategy was always to attack your opponents’ strengths rather than their weaknesses. Attacking Kerry’s war record blunted his advantage and undermined the very purpose of choosing him over someone like Howard Dean.

Tim Walz was chosen by Kamala Harris for entirely different reasons. She likes him. He’s affable and funny. He’s down to earth. He’s midwestern. He’s totally normal. He’s a white man. He has executive experience. He’s got an attractive bio that does include military service but also a long career as a public school teacher and sports coach. It’s a total package, so you can’t target just one strength and do any kind of fatal damage.

Walz has the best favorability ratings of any of the four candidates at the top of the ticket, so clearly the Republicans were not successful in making the American public dislike or distrust him, but I think that has more to do with Walz being a difficult target and a good choice than some sudden failure of tried-and-true GOP tactics.

As for the second example, Trump’s decision to falsely blame the Democrats for the attempts on his life rather using the opportunity to signal personal growth is the main reason he’s getting no bounce. Beutler notes this, but focuses on Trump’s inability to sell the Democrats as the culprits.

Nobody outside Trump’s existing pool of supporters has time for his shit anymore. Everyone at some level knows that he sowed the maelstroms that now threaten to sweep him into oblivion.

Here I think the problem is somewhat the same as it has always been with Trump. It’s not that he’s convincing to most Americans. It’s that about 45 percent of Americans will stick with him no matter what he does. And I don’t know how much that’s attributable to people believing his lies, and how much it’s a byproduct of people being willing to overlook his lies to get the parts of his political movement that they want.

Whatever stupid shit he says or unethical thing that he does, he’ll appoint conservative judges, cut taxes for the rich, and insult people who need insulting. That’s good enough for more 4 out of 10 American voters, and this won’t likely change. When you add this strong floor of support to the advantages he has with the Electoral College, he’s still in a toss-up race against Harris.

Almost all the recent national polls of the race have at 45 percent or below, and he shouldn’t expect to do much better than that. I’d guess his ceiling if he gets some breaks is about 47 percent, although I doubt he’ll get so lucky. But he doesn’t need to win the popular vote or even get close to winning the popular vote. Whatever has worked for Trump in the past seems to be working just about the same for him now.

If he were more flexible, he might be able to raise his ceiling, but it’s really his floor that fascinates me. His stubborn level of support is confounding and deeply depressing, but very little of it seems driven by the effectiveness of his lies on people outside of his core supporters. It’s much more accurate to say that many of his supporters have given him permission to lie in the interests of winning and getting satisfaction out of his slanderous attacks on people they consider their political enemies.

Sure, there’s a group utterly convinced that the 2020 election was stolen and the Democrats are trying to kill him, but that’s a small subgroup of his core of support. What gets him to near parity with Harris is the people who have abandoned every standard in the interest of owning the libs and getting some policy they want. I don’t see whatever process drives this dynamic as broken at all. Because it still works, Trump can easily win this election.