Month: November 2024

British journalist and podcaster Oliver Hall spent five weeks on the phones calling American voters and trying to convince them to vote for Kamala Harris. One reason they were resistant had to do with genitalia.

Time and again, voters, very often women themselves, told me that they just didn’t think that “America is ready for a female president”. People said they couldn’t “see her in the chair” and asked if I “really thought a woman could run the country”. One person memorably told me that she couldn’t vote for Harris because “you don’t see women building skyscrapers”. Sometimes, these people would be persuaded, but more often than not it was a red line. Many conversations would start with positive discussions on policy and then end on Harris and her gender. That is an extraordinary and uncomfortable truth.

This wasn’t the only or even the primary problem Harris faced, at least in Hall’s experience, but it was still a significant factor. Here’s another. The Trump campaign managed to take votes away from Harris both because she was too tough as a California prosecutor, and because she was supposedly too soft on crime. Hall claims the war in Gaza only came up in six of approximately 1,000 calls, and he completely dismisses the idea that she wasn’t leftwing enough since “the majority of the country just voted for the complete opposite.”

Here is Hall’s bottom line take on his experience:

After all those conversations, I think the main reason that Harris and Walz lost this campaign is simple: Trump. Ultimately, he was simply too much of a pull again. Despite the gaffes, despite his views on women, despite his distaste for democracy and despite an insurrection, voters just didn’t care.

For reasons that I’m sure will be studied for decades, when he speaks, people listen. When he speaks, people believe him. After all those calls, I can be shocked at this result, but hardly surprised.

To be clear, some voters did ditch Harris because she wasn’t leftwing enough, for example, those for whom tough-on-crime prosecutors are a non-starter and a smattering of folks who feel American military support for Israel’s relentless reaction to the October 7 atrocities is a dealbreaker. But she lost support for many other reasons, many contradictory. A couple, like her gender, she had no control over.

When it comes to doing an informed autopsy of the 2024 presidential election, it definitely helps to have had 1,000 conversations with American voters before Election Day. That’s why I take more from Hall’s experience than most pundits without that experience who tend to be pushing arguments that support their values and agenda more than dispassionate accuracy.

Of course, Hall ultimately offers a pretty unsatisfying answer for why Trump won. He may be correct that the explanation is that people are just drawn to him and are more inclined to believe his lies than to credit or weight his detractors and faults. But other than some secret sauce charisma Trump may enjoy, we still want to know why people voters “just didn’t care” about arguments made against him.

There are a lot of statistics to examine from the election, but two things immediately stand out. The first is that Harris did considerably better in the states she seriously contested, the so-called battleground states, than she did everywhere else. Yes, she still lost them all, but she saw less slippage. What this means is that her campaign was effective at pulling the electorate back in her direction. Perhaps part of the explanation is that left-leaning voters were more inclined to show up and less inclined to register a protest vote in states where they felt their vote might actually matter. But I assume the same is true for right-leaning voters too, even if not to the same degree. Overall, I think Harris made headway where she put resources, just not enough.

The second thing that stands out is that downticket Democrats often outperformed her. This happened all across the country, as well as in some battleground states like North Carolina where she was the only statewide Democratic candidate to lose. This is something the Democrats should find encouraging because it bolsters the case from 2018, 2022 and many special elections, that the Republicans fare poorly when Trump isn’t on the ticket. It’s true that Trump was on the ticket for all these downticket races in 2024, but his GOP brethren proved much less popular. This is why the Democrats won Senate races in Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin and Michigan even as Trump pried those states away from Joe Biden. The universe of people willing to support a generic Republican is significantly smaller than the universe willing to support Trump.

Of course, this is a source of his power. Precisely because he’s so much more popular than his party, he can keep his party in line. And people are attracted to that power. They want that kind of power in a leader even when they’re somewhat doubtful about that leader’s agenda. Maybe their program will work out and maybe it won’t, but at least they’ll have the wherewithal to give it a try.

Harris couldn’t produce this kind of confidence in the electorate. As a vice-president, she’s a second fiddle by definition, and I’ve already mentioned the obstacle of gender. A lot of people don’t think women can “build skyscrapers,” let alone run the country. We’ll never know how many more votes Biden won than Clinton or Harris simply because he was a white man, but I am sure it was a substantial number. Even Biden’s Catholicism was probably a factor that helped him hold the Blue Wall, and it didn’t hurt at all that he has deep roots in Pennsylvania.

There is much more to examine. John Della Volpe, the director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, argues that the election was “an eminently winnable race” that Harris blew by not focusing enough on selling the administration’s record to the youth vote or emphasizing a fresh agenda focused on their concerns. Relatedly, 30 percent of black men under 45 and about half of Latino men in that age range voted for Trump, primarily for economic reasons. Inflation rates during the Biden administration were clearly the biggest problem, but perceptions about the economy were also shaped by the media environment and plenty of disinformation. I believe one reason that Harris, and Biden before her, didn’t spend more time trying to talk-up their economic performance is that it tested so poorly and did not move the poll numbers. My belief is that inflation is just deadly and is almost impossible to overcome, even by fixing the problem. But there’s no question that the administration lost the information war over the economy, and it wasn’t helped by giving up.

The reality is was it is, and too many Americans felt worse off financially and were worse off financially. Taming inflation, producing robust, historic job growth, and a booming stock market didn’t change that enough, and many people found arguments in support of the administration to be insulting and out-of-touch. Another factor was the focus on student debt relief. It was a godsend to many people, including some of my closest friends, but I always knew it was a political albatross to relieve debt for the college-educated and not for people who borrowed to buy a home or truck. It definitely contributed to the continuing trend of Democrats losing support in rural and small-town America, which was once again deadly for the Democratic nominee for president.

I think this last aspect of the election is the most troubling because it’s likely to be the most enduring. There’s a steady pattern in American politics of the president’s party taking a shellacking in the first off-year midterm election. There’s a constant anti-establishment, anti-incumbent vote that just switches back and forth largely irrespective of record or conditions. And there’s always a blowback reaction against whatever an administration accomplishes or fails to accomplish. It’s unlikely that the GOP’s gains in the suburbs or with minority and youth voters will evade this pattern in 2026. In fact, considering the radicalism of Trump’s stated agenda, as well as his penchant for controversy, it’s likely this blowback will be furious and have little to nothing to do with any decision the Democratic Party might make between now and then. But as long as the GOP is getting three-quarters or more of the vote in countless lightly-populated counties nationwide, the Democrats’ electoral prospects will be severely limited and it will remain difficult to win the Electoral College.

I’ll have more to say about a strategy going forward as I digest more of the data, but one thing I’m already clear about is that restoring the urban/suburban alliance that powered Obama and Biden into the Oval Office isn’t going to be sufficient, and shouldn’t be the goal. There’s also plenty to panic about as Trump resumes his place in the White House, but his party’s electoral prospects in the next cycle are almost bound to weaken no matter what we do or don’t do. This is a positive and a reason for hope, but it’s not a solution.

 

 

 

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the Grand Canyon scene. The photo that I’m using (My own from a recent visit.) is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 6×6 inch canvas panel.

When last seen, the painting appeared as it does in the photo directly below. Since that time, I have continued to work on the painting.

Small changes for this week. I’ve revised the main and distant buttes. Note the darkened area on the right side.

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.

As with any election cycle that goes badly for the Democratic Party, writers, pundits, activists, blowhards, intellectuals, and party leaders immediately start doing post-mortems on what went wrong and who is responsible. And that’s fine. Somewhere in there you’ll find something more helpful than spiteful and self-serving. But it’s always useful to look at analysis from before the results came in. This is the reason I bookmarked the piece Nate Cohn published in the New York Times on November 2nd: Why Are Democrats Having Such a Hard Time Beating Trump?

It wasn’t making a prediction that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz would lose, but it explained why they very well might. The starting point was that people were unhappy with the Biden administration and the direction of the country.

Democrats clearly face headwinds in this election. In the last New York Times/Siena College poll, only 40 percent of voters approved of President Biden’s performance, and only 28 percent said the country was heading in the right direction. No party has retained control of the White House when so many Americans were dissatisfied with the country or the president.

It’s always been somewhat of a mystery why Biden never was popular. I don’t think he ever had good poll numbers after the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, but I really don’t think the American people cared all that much about that mess, at least not in a way that would sustain disapproval for years afterward. Pandemic restrictions were probably a big factor, but nothing seems to have soured the American people more than inflation.

But we should be careful about looking for things that are too specific to America.

The Democrats’ challenge appears to be part of a broader trend of political struggles for ruling parties across the developed world. Voters appear eager for change when they get the chance. The ruling parties in Britain, Germany, Italy, Australia and most recently Japan all faced electoral setbacks or lost power. Mr. Trump himself lost four years ago. France and Canada might well join the list.

The real consistency is that in the post-pandemic world, incumbent parties lost badly as soon as people went to the polls. In some places, like the United Kingdom, the right was wiped out. In other places, it was the left that suffered a bloodbath. In France, it was Emmanuel Macron’s centrist party. Ideology did not seem to matter, as the voters were not responding to ideological overreach or unpopular party platforms. They just wanted to punish whoever was in charge.

Knowing this, the Democrats had a very good reason to replace Joe Biden on the ticket. This is irrespective of his record, his age, his debate performance, his race, his gender or his religion. The mere fact that he was the incumbent almost ensured he would lose. I think we should give the party credit for not waddling into the threshing blades without making a change.

My personal opinion was that Harris wasn’t enough of a change since she was the vice-president. I also had concerns that she would not be a strong candidate, based on her campaign for president in 2020. On that score, I was pleasantly surprised. I think she did a fantastic job of presenting herself. I think she ramped up Biden’s pre-existing reelection machine in an impressive way. I have no complaints about how she did on the stump or with the media, and her debate performance was outstanding. It wasn’t enough. Would a different candidate have fared better? Perhaps, but the process of choosing someone else would have ripped the party apart, making it hard to present a united front. And it would have been harder to finance a new candidate.

There are some things specific to America that Cohn noted:

In the United States, post-pandemic disillusionment and frustration took a toll on Democrats. The party championed a tough response to the virus, including mask and vaccine mandates, school closures and lockdowns. It had backed the Black Lives Matter movement, argued for a more liberal border policy, sought to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and spent trillions on stimulus. As the pandemic ended, all of this quickly became a liability.

I think people need to take seriously the pendulum swing Cohn describes here:

Since 2008, Democrats and liberalism have been dominant in American politics.

Democrats won the popular vote in four straight presidential elections. When they held full control of government, they enacted the Affordable Care Act, Dodd-Frank and the CHIPS Act; they saved the auto industry and spent billions on renewable energy, infrastructure and more.

Liberalism has been ascendant in the culture as well. The period was marked by a series of popular movements on the activist left, from the Obama ’08 campaign to Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, the Bernie Sanders campaign and calls for a Green New Deal and Medicare for all.

The election of Mr. Trump didn’t stop this outpouring of liberal energy. Instead, it accelerated it. His election alarmed and outraged millions, who saw him as racist, sexist and a threat to democracy. The murder of George Floyd and the pandemic only added to the outrage, leading to a vigilant and righteous new left that preached antiracism and coronavirus restrictions. It culminated in a wave of protests and so-called “woke” progressive activism on race and gender.

Over just the last few years, all of this liberal energy suddenly seemed to vanish. The backlash against pandemic restrictions and the woke left gradually went mainstream, and even divided liberal institutions. Trust in the media, “experts” and scientists plunged. Younger Americans took to social media — perhaps with the help of algorithmic changes — to vent their frustrations with an aging president, high prices, lost opportunity and anger at a system that wasn’t working for them.

At the same time, the events that followed the pandemic took a serious toll on the case for liberalism, whatever the precise merits of the arguments. Inflation and high interest rates could be blamed on high government spending stimulating excessive demand. High gas prices could be blamed on suspending drilling permits and the termination of the Keystone pipeline project. A surge of migrants could be blamed on the administration’s looser border policy, which became politically untenable; homelessness, crime and disorder made the case for “law and order.”

On issue after issue, Democrats have responded by moving to the right.

It’s important to not get bogged down on the merits of these critiques but rather to acknowledge that there was a shift in the mood of the country and that the Democrats noticed and reacted to it. The zeitgeist was unmistakably moving to the right, which put the Democrats on the defensive. The ad I saw the most during the campaign here in Philadelphia had a clip of Harris from her time as California attorney general saying she supported allowing prisoners to get sex changes on the people’s dime. It was part of a broader anti-Trans campaign that exceeded $215 million dollars, and it reportedly tested so well that it shocked the people running Trump’s re-election effort.

As Cohn notes, young people were displeased with high rents and an overall housing shortage, as well as inflation generally, and young men appear to have joined the backlash against some of the so-called “Woke” agenda.

Against this, the Democrats were facing an historically bad candidate with every kind of liability conceivable. But that was only enough to put them about even in the polls once Harris replaced Biden. It gave them a fighting chance not enjoyed by incumbent parties in other countries, but it proved insufficient.

There is no doubt that as a woman of color, Harris faced additional challenges. And there’s no question that she didn’t run a perfect campaign with optimal messaging. There’s always room to improve, and there are theoretical scenarios where she could have done marginally better.

If the law had moved more swiftly against Trump after January 6, it’s possible that he wouldn’t have been the candidate or would have been too damaged to win. But the truth is that if he had not been the candidate, this election would have been a much bigger slaughter for the left. His glaring weaknesses are the only reason it was competitive.

Having said that, the Republicans not named Trump often ran behind him, which shows up in several Senate races where Democrats prevailed even as Harris lost the state. I think Harris was the only Democrat who lost statewide in North Carolina. The anti-incumbent mood was much more focused on the Biden administration than the state or local politicians. Does this mean that Trumpism is more popular than the Republican Party? I think that question is a bit tricky to answer. Trumpism is definitely more popular than McConnellism with the Republican base, but generally speaking I think both lack robust support from the electorate at-large.

Before I conclude, I want to address a couple of things from Jeet Heer’s article in The Nation entitled: This Time We Have to Hold the Democratic Party Elite Responsible for This Catastrophe. First, I want to introduce some analysis that I largely agree with:

The key to understanding the Trump era is that the real divide in America is not between left and right but between pro-system and anti-system politics. Pro-system politics is the bipartisan consensus of establishment Democrats and Republicans: It’s the politics of NATO and other military alliances, of trade agreements, and of deference to economists (as when they say that price gouging isn’t the cause of inflation). Trump stands for no fixed ideology but rather a general thumbing of the nose at this consensus.

The main fact of American politics in the post-Obama era is that an ever larger majority of Americans are angry at the status quo and open to anti-system politics. Trump won as the candidate of anti-system anger in 2016. In 2020, he suffered the liability of being the status quo even as Covid was ravaging the world. But by 2024 he was able to return again as the voice of change, bolstered by the fond memories many Americans have of the economy under his presidency—and of the temporary, but generous, expansion of the welfare state under Covid emergency measures.

I think the pro-system, anti-system formula is quite good and instructive, and I believe it applies globally, not just to our specific experience in America. And that’s largely why I disagree with much of the rest of Heer’s analysis which focuses on Harris’s efforts to win over Never Trumpers and suburban college-educated women as a cause of her downfall. Frankly, as I’ve already mentioned, I don’t think tinkering with the message was likely to have much effect.

If you’re familiar with this blog, you know that way back in 2017, I wrote a Trump/Clinton post-mortem feature piece for the Washington Monthly called How to Win Rural Voters Without Losing Liberal Values that talked about the flawed strategy of relying on an unstable urban/suburban alliance against Red America. So, I’ve been making a version of Heer’s argument for economic populism for a long time. But a main plank of my argument has been the Democrats need to deal with the monopolization of the economy. As my brother points out, the Biden administration has by far the best record on that in recent memory, and it didn’t break through. Sure, this was in part a failure of messaging throughout Biden’s four years in office, and Harris should have done more to highlight their record, but I just don’t believe she could have won if only she’d hit this harder in the 100 days she had to introduce herself and campaign. If it was going to win back rural voters, it needed to be a sustained message originating with the president, not a last second adjustment by his replacement.

Additionally, I don’t really believe Harris focused too much on Never Trumpers or suburban women. Abortion was her strongest issue, followed by Trump’s record and personality, which was best critiqued by the people who worked closely with him during his time in office. She leaned into these strengths, but not exclusively or at the expense of other messaging on entitlements, tax cuts for the rich, and other economic issues.

I still think the suburban/urban alliance is unstable. It has failed in two of the last three presidential elections, and there are signs of erosion with the urban working class that may grow. Suburbanites are highly sensitive to taxation and crime, and are not natural or inevitable Democrats in an economic sense and even in some cultural senses. To win consistently, there’s no way to avoid the need to do much better with rural voters, and the only way to do that without sacrificing liberal values is to organize and message against the hollowing out small businesses by monopolization. Having someone like Elon Musk in charge, will help with that messaging.

The truth is, as frustrating and terrifying as our situation is, pointing fingers isn’t likely to be that productive. This was an almost impossible election to win for reasons that were mainly out of our control. I had hope that the people would choose sanity over fascism, but inflation is fascism’s best friend, and now we have the worst crisis on our hands we’ve faced since the Civil War.

That’s really my main takeaway. Inflation kills democracy.

If you saw the film Civil War earlier this year, you heard this song. I still have Suicide’s first album. Brilliantly disturbing stuff.

I don’t know how you all are doing or processing this clusterf*ck of an election. I’m doing my best. Try to hang in there.

There’s some controversy about whether or not great apes can ask questions. They can certainly ask for food, for example, just as your household pet can ask to go outside. But your household pet can’t learn sign language and have conversations with humans. In particular, gorillas and chimpanzees are not known for asking ‘why’ questions. For example, they don’t ask why a banana is yellow or smells the way it does. They might recognize sadness and make a sign for it, but they won’t ask why you’re sad. And they’re good at learning things, like how to use a stick to gather ants, and they can transmit knowledge this way to create unique cultures within their population. But they don’t seem to inquire about why ants live where they live or if there are better ways to collect them.

Some people say great apes are incapable of asking questions, but many researchers think that’s an overstatement. Either way, this lack of inquisitiveness is a notable feature of how great apes and humans communicate with each other. One theory is that the apes simply don’t think the answers are available. Either they don’t have a conception of some other being having knowledge they don’t possess, or more likely, in my opinion, they don’t expect complex answers because they can’t voice complex speech. In this theory, you can teach them your language, but that doesn’t mean they’ll suddenly expect that language to have the power to answer deep questions. They have evolved to communicate with sounds, gestures and actions, and this is also how they teach each other. It works well enough for their purposes and so they haven’t had enough natural selection pressure to improve their ability to communicate by sign or speech.

By contrast, in humans, the youngest toddlers are wired to ask ‘why’ questions. Most parents eventually are humbled by this. Try concisely explaining why the socket in the wall can make a light turn on. But even among humans, there’s a vast difference between the inquisitive powers of the average person and those of the people who figured out genetics and evolution, calculus and physics, plate tectonics, and climate change. Most humans can only understand these things in the most rudimentary way, as if they were an ape learning the sign for blue eyes or mountain or storm. Other humans can learn all these sciences in perfect detail, but could never have come up with them on their own.

The truth is, we’ve reached the point where humans can launch a probe from Earth and have it slingshot around the moon and land on a dime on Mars. But when I say humans can do this, that doesn’t mean I can do it, or you, or probably anyone you know or have ever known. If you put us in a Time Machine back to the Middle Ages, we wouldn’t be able to tell people how to launch satellites or even gather and forge the materials needed to make bicycles, let alone space probes.

We all carry computer phones, but we could never make one without someone smarter telling us what to do. Our limitations aren’t due just to a disinclination to ask the right questions. We know on some level that we’re not capable of understanding the answers. And, in any case, we don’t need to know why the wall socket can make a light turn on or how to create a computer chip in order to scroll on our phones in a lighted room. It’s a variation of what every parent of almost every math student has heard at some point: “Why do I have to learn this when I’ll never use it in real life?”

So, we happily go about our modern lives with our modern tools and toys with the conceit that we’re part of the club that made these things possible. Generally, though, we’re not. At best, we maybe worked on assembling these toys after being trained by others. Some humans are capable of amazing intellectual accomplishments that lead to astonishing technological developments, but it’s a vanishingly small percentage.

The tiny group of humans that made modern life possible are probably not the best natural leaders. They might not have the best sense of right and wrong. And I would never recommend that we form a society led by scientific and mathematical geniuses. But I do think that natural leaders should employ uncommonly smart people to help them understand things and to assist them in solving problems.

That’s why we should want trained scientists and mathematicians, if not necessarily unique geniuses, to warn us about bad weather and its causes, to study viruses and how they are transmitted, to examine crop yields, to monitor complex financial systems, and all down the line. And when they tell us things, all things being equal we ought to believe them. We shouldn’t resent them because they’re smarter or because we don’t like the implications of what they’re telling us, But, really, we’d prefer simpler explanations that we can understand and explain to our children.

And there’s plenty that the common ordinary human can explain to their children very well. This doesn’t include electricity, the Rocky Mountains, greenhouse gases or how humans and apes diverged genetically, but it does include most of what a person needs to grow, survive and thrive. Regular people are often far better than “intellectuals” at understanding how things work, whether it’s a carburetor or a nail gun. Whether you call this common sense, practical knowledge or something else, it’s important and valuable. And when it comes time to build that space probe, you’re going to want a bunch of people whose main skill is fixing things.

I’m not saying that we should assign different worths to different intellectual capabilities, but we ought to have people in roles where they’re best suited to be productive and make good decisions. We don’t necessarily want an astrophysicist fixing our car and we definitely don’t want a car mechanic doing surgery. We normally know this, but when it comes to politics, it has broken down.

It’s fine to have two political parties battle it out over different values and ideas, but both sides should be roughly equally informed by expert advice. Our state and federal governments should be staffed by people who are exceptionally good at figuring out big, complex problems. We need this for our national defense, obviously, but also for almost everything else. We don’t want to live through global pandemics overseen by bureaucrats who can’t understand the science. We can’t mitigate the effects of global climate change if we don’t have people who understand how it works.

Of late, the problem has been the leaders of the Republican Party simply don’t listen to these experts. Instead, they tell the American people that they shouldn’t be trusted. But the next step, which is now coming, is to start removing these experts’ influence entirely. Party hacks will oversee them and they’ll be fired. Their budgets will be slashed. Their findings will go unpublished.

And this will mean that people who are hardly better prepared than apes will be in charge of public health, of environmental science and protection, of our food supply and developing our weapons systems. They won’t ask questions because they won’t understand the answers, don’t like the answers, and are part of a movement invested in sidelining these kinds of answers.

We can see now that educational attainment is one of the best predictors of partisan preference. The more educated you are, the less likely you are to support the Republicans. This is one of the most unhealthy developments in America’s political culture. And it’s largely explained by failures of the political elite who could have benefitted from some more down home practical knowledge and common sense when making decisions about invading Iraq, permitting credit default swaps, and allowing the monopolization of the American economy. There’s a difference between the elite political class and the elite scientific class that is supposed to underpin their decisions. And if the success of Trumpism is attributable to the failings of the former, the latter are going to be next victims.

We don’t know for sure why apes are disinclined to ask questions, but we can be sure it’s partly because they don’t feel like they need the answers. When humans govern humans under that assumption, the results will be disastrous. We won’t be even be fully human anymore.

Only a couple of more days to go til the election! If you have an opportunity to canvass or phone bank, now’s the time! I’ll be out for a few hours this afternoon here in sunny Philadelphia.

We have a new episode of The Progress Pondcast to get you through the next few days.

In this, our final show before the election, we share some long-awaited schadenfreude as Rudy loses everything (even a precious and beloved family heirloom).

We also riff on the right’s new take on married women voting differently than their husbands—it’s a “disaster,” I tell ya!

Finally, Marty discusses the plot hatched by TFG and Speaker Mike Johnson to steal the election. Check it out!

We encourage your likes, follows, and subscribes wherever you get your podcasts—we’re on Spotify, Apple, Castbox, Amazon, and Iheartradio—but the best way to support our work financially is on Patreon.

Two more days, folks. Let’s win this thing.

-Brendan

I don’t know what Donald Trump’s internal polling is showing, but insiders on his campaign, including those willing to spill dirt to anti-Trump outlet The Bulwark, are saying they think they will win. Yet, they also noticed with some alarm that, on Sunday, their candidate acted like he believes he will lose. This was especially the case at his first campaign stop in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where Trump seemed to be despondent and in full-blown blame game, as he excoriated pollsters and said he wouldn’t mind if an assassin’s bullet killed a member of the assembled press instead of him.

He toned it down a lot for later appearances in North Carolina and Georgia, so much so that his performances lacked energy. He really seems to be limping to the finish line, while the Harris-Walz campaign appears vibrant and confident. There’s more to this than just my perceptions. If there’s any late movement in the polls and especially in the betting markets, it’s headed Harris’s way. All the important states are still polling within the margin of error, but Harris is in a slightly better position in the critical blue wall states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. If she holds those and wins the Omaha, Nebraska congressional district, she doesn’t need to win anywhere else. Everyone, on both sides, seems to think she’s got a real shot at North Carolina, too, which is why Trump is spending time there every day in the home stretch. Harris seems most concerned about Michigan and Pennsylvania.

What has me most concerned is that it looks like the Republicans have really succeeded in mobilizing their base in Republican counties, as reflected in the early vote in many states. The rural areas of Georgia and Nevada in particular have me spooked, even though neither state is a must-have for Harris. Offsetting this are indications of  late deciders moving to Harris, which seems right to me both because of the general tenor of the campaign since Trump’s appearance at Madison Square Garden and because I think she’s succeeded in being more of a change candidate than Trump.

I’m not putting any stock in Ann Selzer’s final poll out of Iowa that shows Harris winning that state. Could she be right? I suppose so. She has a pretty strong record for being accurate even when she’s an outlier. But for now I’m treating it as an outlier. If there’s anything in her internals that I have some hope is correct it’s that women over 65 are voting heavily against Trump. This could be more pronounced in Iowa than in other places because Iowa has adopted one of the most restrictive abortion bans in the country, and without heavy investment in messaging from the Trump campaign to counteract this, maybe it’s really having a huge effect. If so, I’d expect something similar, but smaller to show up in the upper Midwest battleground states, including Pennsylvania, where Trump has invested in getting his message out.

I do think Harris has an advantage on the ground. Here in Pennsylvania, the ground game is outstanding, and there’s no question it’s adding numbers to her column. I have first hand reports on this because CabinGirl spent Saturday and Sunday knocking doors for the campaign, and they’re already done with their first go-round and hitting doors for the second time. They are squeezing every last drop of juice out of the fruit and leaving nothing on the field, while the Trump field operation is mostly invisible, at least here in the eastern part of the state.

I’ll also say, as a former county organizer for ACORN in neighboring Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, that their walk lists are incredible. They have plenty of independents and some Republicans on their lists, and yet the door-knockers are encountering almost no solid Trumpers. And, believe me, there are plenty of those in these parts even if they’re badly outnumbered. This shows me the Harris campaign knows who to approach in a way that wasn’t even possible when I was compiling walk lists in 2004.

These things give me optimism.

Now is not the time to let up. I would tell you if I was confident in a Harris win. I am not. I am more hopeful that I was in early October, but this really could come down to an impossibly small number of votes in a single state, so don’t just sit there reading this. Find a way to help push Harris over the line.

 

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the Grand Canyon scene. The photo that I’m using (My own from a recent visit.) is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 6×6 inch canvas panel.

When last seen, the painting appeared as it does in the photo directly below. Since that time, I have continued to work on the painting.

For this week’s cycle I’ve made changes to both the clouds and the distant rocks.

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

In 2020, I did something I had never done before. I voted early in a presidential election. There was more than one reason for this. The first and most important is that it was an option. Prior to 2020, we did not have no-excuse absentee balloting in Pennsylvania. If we had had that option, I might have utilized it to help the Democrats narrow the field of people they needed to contact as part of their get-out-the-vote efforts. In 2020, I gave them that benefit. The other reason I voted early is because I had no plans to show up in person at my precinct on Election Day and possibly expose myself to the COVID-19 virus. There were people in my life with asthma, high blood pressure and other preexisting conditions who were at high risk of dying from COVID-19, and I didn’t want to be the cause.

So, instead of waiting for Election Day to go to the elementary school where I normally vote, I went early to the central municipal building in West Chester, which is the county seat, and I put my ballot in a dropbox. This meant that my vote wasn’t counted on Election Night when the early returns showed Trump winning Pennsylvania. My example was repeated by hundreds of thousands of Democrats throughout the Keystone State in 2020, and as the early votes were tallied in the days after the election, Trump’s lead very predictably narrowed and then completely disappeared. He lost.

This year I am going to revert back to how I voted in 2016, in person on Election Day at that elementary school. Even though I’m tempted to vote early to help GOTV efforts, I like voting in person on Election Day and I especially like knowing my vote will be counted right away, and everyone will see it on their television screens on Election Night.

I tell this story because it will help you understand the significance of this article in Politico. The main theme of the article is about the early vote with Pennsylvanians over 65, and I’m not that old yet. But there are two things about the elder vote here that are encouraging to the Democrats. The first and most important is that several polls are showing Harris winning the elder vote, where Clinton and Biden lost it. The second is that pollsters are asking people they contact who have already cast a ballot who they voted for, and they’re seeing an advantage for Harris here, too.

This is positive news, but it’s not why I’m writing this.

As people try to read the tea leaves of the Pennsylvania early vote, the challenge is that it didn’t really exist in 2016 and in 2020 it was really, really distorted. The first reason it was so distorted in 2020 was the Republicans were less likely to take precautions about COVID-19, which meant that they died in much higher numbers than Democrats but also that they were much more willing to vote in person. The second reason is that Trump relentlessly attacked early voting in Pennsylvania and discouraged Republicans from using that method. The final tally of early votes was 1,702,484 for the Democrats and 623,404 for the Republicans.

So, with over a million more Democrats voting early than Republicans in 2020, you’d expect to see things like more women voted early than men. Pick any demographic group from 2020 that favors Democrats and they are overrepresented in the early vote.

Now, all of this presents two problems for examining the 2024 early vote. The first is that Trump is no longer discouraging early voting among Republicans (at least, not consistently), and therefore we should expect a higher percentage of them to use the option than in 2020. The second is all the people like me, Democrats who voted early last time but will revert back to voting on Election Day this time. It’s like loosening the tension on a rubber band, with both sides meeting closer to the middle. This time around, the Democrats’ early voting lead should not exceed a million votes, but they won’t take the same drubbing on Election Day either.

Now, looking at the early vote, a lot of Republican analysts and campaign spokespeople are encouraged to see the Democrats banking less of an advantage. But since this was always baked in the cake, the challenge is to know how much of a difference is required to signal a better outcome.

In Pennsylvania, the biggest battleground in the Blue Wall, Republicans are encouraged because the partisan gap in ballots returned so far has narrowed significantly since 2020. Democrats hold only a 25-point advantage, compared to nearly 50 points four years ago. That is a sign that GOP efforts to encourage their voters to bank ballots early have had success.

The Democrats, on the other hand, are emphasizing something different:

Roughly 35 percent of Republicans who have cast ballots so far in Pennsylvania are voters who cast ballots on Election Day in 2020, according to a POLITICO analysis of the state’s early voting data.

By contrast, around 8 percent of Democrats who have voted in the state voted on Election Day in 2020. Those figures suggest that the early vote in Pennsylvania is likely to be redder than four years ago — and the Election Day vote is likely to be bluer — based on how voters are switching the timing of their votes.

This is exactly what we expected to see, with the Republicans cannibalizing more of their Election Day vote than the Democrats. Now, put that together with the data on the elder vote, and the Democrats are feeling good. That’s because “voters over the age of 65 have cast nearly half of the early ballots” and “registered Democrats account for about 58 percent of votes cast by seniors, compared to 35 percent for Republicans.”

Then there’s survey data on the elder vote as a whole. The most recent Fox News poll of Pennsylvania has Trump “running 5 percentage points behind Harris among voters ages 65 and over.” That’s troubling for the Republicans because elders have the highest percentage turnout of any demographic, and 53 percent of them voted for Trump last time in a losing effort.

If Harris actually wins the elder vote, Trump will have to make up for it with big gains among younger voters compared to his performance against Biden. The early elder vote does show some serious promise for Harris carrying their support. Remember, the early vote as a whole is less distorted this time, so a lead is more significant because it’s harder to close. It’s true that offsetting this is a smaller lead, but a 23-point advantage for elder registered Democrats over elder registered Republicans is still a good starting point.

So much of the outcome will depend on how independents split that I need to warn against focusing too much on numbers based solely on partisan registration participation. Other factors could be decisive, like how many young men of all races vote for Trump, and how many Republican women cross over (secretly or not) to cancel out their husbands’ votes.

Hopefully, this explanation will help you with the unique factors in Pennsylvania you need to understand the early vote and the results when they begin to come in next Tuesday.