The (no longer) much too early 2024 election thread

[RoseMorninStar]

I dunno--it's hard for me to believe that Trump's worshipers could overlook the fact that he's a convicted felon and rapist who attempted a coup, only to abandon him for being rude and violating protocol. But I also accept that there's a gulf between the things that matter to me and the things that matter to most everyone else. I hope you're right, but I'm not prepared to count on it.

I've been seeing more & more 'Proud to be voting for a Convicted Felon for President' signs. It's crazy.

As I said upthread, the cult members will stay loyal, because to an authoritarian mentality, the leader defines what is wise and virtuous.

But there may possibly be enough people outside the cult who always voted Republican, or who don't follow politics, who may be persuaded. That's why the media treatment of him as a normal candidate is so dangerous. An average voter may skim the headlines of major publications, see "Trump gives a speech about economy," and say, oh, ok, good.

Agreed. Religion, especially fundamentalism/fundamentalist thinking, often goes hand-in-hand with authoritarianism and politicians use it to their advantage. Religion and Authoritarianism

[N.E. Brigand]

Meanwhile, J.D. Vance mocked Kamala Harris by likening her to Caite Upton, a one-time beauty contestant who gave a famously incomprehensible answer in a 2007 pageant. Upton is an election denier, a vaccination/lockdown conspiracy theorist, and a Trump supporters.

Her uncle is Fred Upton, one of the very few GOP congressmen who voted for impeachment. And who, by sheer coincidence, chose to retire at the end of that term.

Edit: Nope, that’s a different model named Kate Upton. Weird.

The two former-model Uptons are fairly close in age too: just three years apart. Kate Upton, the younger of the two, has appeared in a few mainstream movies.

J.D. Vance was informed today that the scorn heaped upon Caite Upton for her unfortunate pageant answer was so great that she later said she had thought about taking her own life. Vance said he didn't know that, and had he known it, he wouldn't have shared the video of that moment yesterday, but he also said he won't apologize for having done so.

[N.E. Brigand]

Silver says what I've been thinking. With every wind blowing in her favor, polls that consistently underestimate Trump's support show her slightly ahead, in *some* of the swing states, maybe. I still see Trump winning unless something dramatic changes, and replacing the opposition candidate doesn't seem to have been dramatic enough. ...

The big question -- and unfortunately we won't know the answer until November -- is whether the pollsters, who do have motivation to want to be as accurate as possible, have figured out what was wrong with their methodology before and fixed it this cycle. The New York Times / Siena poll this year started including in their totals the people who hang up after saying they'd vote Trump but don't complete the poll. In past cycles, those people weren't counted. Doing so does hurt their polling in other ways, but should make the top line more accurate.

I read Silver's justifications and I was not impressed. It read to me like he was looking for every possible excuse to downgrade Harris' chances, despite what the polls actually are saying (and polls that have come out since then continue to say). Harris has a lead nationwide that is comparable to Biden's winning margin in 2020, maybe a little lower. ...

If Silver has his thumb on the scale, it could be with the intention of motivating Democrats. He said explicitly when he rolled out his model earlier this summer (before the debate, I think) -- and it predicted that Trump would defeat President Biden -- that he thinks it would be a bad outcome for the U.S. to have Trump as president again. Like many mainstream journalists, Silver may be overcompensating for what he believes are his pro-Democrat biases, and I've certainly had my problems with his blind spots (remember what I wrote to him about the pandemic in April 2020), but I think he's telling the truth that the forecast advantage that Trump got yesterday was a function of how the model was set up in the first place. It's there that his biases may show (for instance, hid model may be too glum about the economy).

Although I'm not sure it directly affected his forecast, as the same time that Silver noted Trump had taken the lead, he also said that Pennsylvania was in doubt for Harris, there having been no quality polling showing her in the lead there for some time. But then a few hours later, Morning Consult found her four points ahead in Pennsylvania, and then Emerson found the race there tied, and now Redfield & Wilton has her up by one point. So it's close, but not (yet) tilting to Trump.

Note that 538.com also downgraded Harris's odds of victory for a time yesterday: they dropped from 59% to 58%. They're back up to 59% now. By no means a sure thing! And remember: Hillary Clinton led Trump in the 538.com polling average throughout the 2016 campaign. On this date that year, she was ahead by 4.9%, which is more than the margin by which Harris leads Trump now in the 538.com average, which is 3.4%. Even on Election Day that year, Clinton led by 3.9%. And she led in the swing state polling averages that year too, which is why all the forecasts had Clinton strongly favored to win (albeit 538.com was more bearish than the rest, only giving Clinton a 70% chance).

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Meanwhile, in Georgia, there appears to have been a big upswing in voter registration since Kamala Harris entered the race by people who are 17 now but will turn 18 by November 5th. As further noted at that link, voter registration overall in states reporting to this point has seen a large jump compared to the same period in 2020, but I don't know if that's a function of registration having been lower earlier in the year when the race seemed less exciting.

[N.E. Brigand]

Here's my transcription of one actual minute from Donald Trump's speech in Michigan yesterday:

"She destroyed the city of San Francisco. It's--and I own a big building there--it's no--I shouldn't talk about this, but that's OK, I don't give a damn, because this is what I'm doing. I should say 'It's the finest city in the world'--sell and get the hell out of there, right? But I can't do that. I don't care, you know? I lost billions, uh, billions of dollars, you know? Somebody said, 'What do you think you lost?' I said, 'Probably two, three billion.' That's OK, I don't care. They said, 'You think you'd do it again?' And that's the least of it. Nobody--they always say, that, uh, I don't know if you know, Lincoln was horribly treated. Uh, Jefferson was pretty horribly--Andrew Jackson, they say, was the worst of all, that he was treated worse than any other president. And I said do that study again, because I think there's nobody close to Trump. I even got shot, and who the hell knows where that came from, right?"

[RoseMorninStar]

:shakes head: How can anyone think that is Presidential material?

[Voronwë the Faithful]

This is an important legal victory (of course, by Marc Elias and his team).

[Maria]

[N.E. Brigand]

Meanwhile, J.D. Vance mocked Kamala Harris by likening her to Caite Upton, a one-time beauty contestant who gave a famously incomprehensible answer in a 2007 pageant. Upton is an election denier, a vaccination/lockdown conspiracy theorist, and a Trump supporters.

Her uncle is Fred Upton, one of the very few GOP congressmen who voted for impeachment. And who, by sheer coincidence, chose to retire at the end of that term.

Edit: Nope, that’s a different model named Kate Upton. Weird.

Caite Upton (not Kate Upton) today posted a tweet that reads as follows:

It's a shame that 17 years later this is still being brought up. There's not too much else to say about it at this point. Regardless of political beliefs, one thing I do know is that social media and online bullying needs to stop. HAVE A BEAUTIFUL AND SAFE LABOR DAY WEEKEND!

But as noted at the link, a little while after posting that, she deleted her Twitter account (which I reviewed yesterday to confirm claims that her political positions were pro-Trump before I described her that way here.)

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How can anyone think that is Presidential material?

I tend to speak in an osgiliating style, interrupting any story I'm telling with multiple digressions. But if I were running for office, I would be able to recognize how confusing that could get for an audience whose support I need and would have the self-control to avoid doing so. And of course, Trump tops off the disconnected rambling in this case with some complete nonsense about which presidents suffered the most. What hardships does Trump believe Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson -- both of whom served two full terms and lived to old age -- suffered as president? Hardships worse than Abraham Lincoln faced? Lincoln was shot to death! As was James Garfield, William McKinley, and John F. Kennedy. Trump was alive for the last of those assassinations! Trump was of course also alive during the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan, which kept Reagan in the hospital for twelve days. If we're including former presidents, like Trump, then next in infamy would be the shooting of Theodore Roosevelt, who was also more seriously injured than Trump: the bullet lodged in his chest muscle and was deemed too dangerous to remove. On top of that, William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Warren Harding, and Franklin Roosevelt all died in office. Woodrow Wilson suffered a major stroke with 18 months remaining in his second term and though he lived another five years, he never fully recovered.

(Trump, perhaps anticipating my comment, today said this: "You know, I do the weave. You know what the weave is? I'll talk about, like, nine different things, and they all come back brilliantly together, and it's, like--and friends of mine that are, like, English professors, they say: 'That's the most brilliant thing I've ever seen." But the fake news, you know what they say? 'He rambled.'" Has he been talking to Tom Shippey about J.R.R. Tolkien's narrative "interlacement"?)

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The New York Times had an inane story today claiming that Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have both put forward housing plans that may be economically wanting. Harris has proposed a policy to increase the amount of housing in this nation; it's fairly detailed. Trump has not proposed a housing policy, but his running mate, J.D. Vance, has said that the mass deportation of 10 million people that Trump proposes is also a housing plan, because the homes those people now occupy would be vacant, thus lowering housing costs. The Times has previously and correctly written that Trump's deportation plan would be an economic calamity, but in this article, they take at face value that it's a policy for homes!

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The leader of Moms4Liberty, the far right conservative group that's been trying to fill up school boards with anti-vax, anti-trans, book-banning members, says she disagrees with J.D. Vance's complaint about childless Americans: "We have a lot of members who don't have kids. I don't think you have to have children to love kids."

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This analysis examines the 2020 election but presumably offers lessons that apply to 2024. Writing at Split Ticket, Andrew Hong and Leon Sit explain their research into Latino voters in Texas who voted for Bernie Sanders over Joe Biden in the 2020 Democratic primary and then switched to vote for Donald Trump in the 2020 general election. You can never be sure how any one person actually voted, but they've been able to get granular enough to say that even "if it was not pro-Sanders Latino Democrats who shifted towards Trump, it was their neighbors and family members. These voters live in the same communities and face the same economic realities and were subsequently attracted to both economically populist candidates." What Hong and Sit find is that these voters, "especially in rural, south Texas, are disproportionately working class, making them receptive to populist economic messages ... LULAC leader Domingo Garcia explicitly named economic populism as a strategy necessary to win Latino voters, and this is confirmed in the data: studies by polling firm Equis suggest that economic issues were front and center among Latino voters in 2020." Kamala Harris appears to be heeding this message and is crafting policies and messaging to reflect a more populist approach to governing than Joe Biden offered. Here's hoping it works.

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The New York Post is trumpeting a new poll that finds Kamala Harris and Jill Stein tied among Muslim voters as "damning," but as noted here, that's actually an improvement on Joe Biden's standing with that group.

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A new West Virginia poll finds Donald Trump leading Kamala Harris 61%-34% in that state. This would actually be an improvement over past Democratic results: Trump beat Hillary Clinton 69%-26% in 2016 and he beat Joe Biden 69%-30% in 2020. It also shows you just how good a politician former Democrat (lately turned independent) Senator Joe Manchin is to have won twice in that environment.

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A new study finds, as past analyses have also shown of Democratic advertisements, that "positive ads worked far better for the Harris ticket than negative ones ...[the research] found voters unmoved by anything solely about 'Trump's extreme plans to gut affordable healthcare and Medicare.' What played were 'contrast ads and positive Harris ads' that led with her plans, and included footage of her with popular Democrats, like Barack Obama.'"

Obviously I hope we never end up there, but I wonder what those voters would say if Donald Trump were to win the election (with their votes) and Republicans then were to take away their health care coverage and slash their Medicare benefits.

The study's summary goes on to note that the Biden/Harris swap "reliev[ed] voters from a rematch they dreaded" and that the tested message that worked best with independent voters was this: "Kamala Harris will fight to restore Roe v. Wade and save our fundamental rights. Donald Trump will allow the extremist allies to pass a national abortion ban -- and attack IVF and birth control next."

Trump's campaign has presumably done some similar research, which probably explains why Trump yesterday implausibly claimed that he will arrange for IVF treatments to be funded. The Harris campaign doubtless needs to counter that lie.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I don't always agree with Mehdi Hasan but I sure do here.

[Túrin Turambar]

I read Silver's justifications and I was not impressed. It read to me like he was looking for every possible excuse to downgrade Harris' chances, despite what the polls actually are saying (and polls that have come out since then continue to say). Harris has a lead nationwide that is comparable to Biden's winning margin in 2020, maybe a little lower. ...

If Silver has his thumb on the scale, it could be with the intention of motivating Democrats. He said explicitly when he rolled out his model earlier this summer (before the debate, I think) -- and it predicted that Trump would defeat President Biden -- that he thinks it would be a bad outcome for the U.S. to have Trump as president again. Like many mainstream journalists, Silver may be overcompensating for what he believes are his pro-Democrat biases, and I've certainly had my problems with his blind spots (remember what I wrote to him about the pandemic in April 2020), but I think he's telling the truth that the forecast advantage that Trump got yesterday was a function of how the model was set up in the first place. It's there that his biases may show (for instance, hid model may be too glum about the economy).

I think this is actually an often-overlooked point. The mainstream media is run and managed by university-educated people in major cities, a cohort which is generally anti-Trump. They are also hyper-aware of allegations of bias. As a result, I think they can struggle to report on him. On one hand, he isn’t a normal candidate. On the other, he has been nominated by one of the major parties and is supported by tens of millions of Americans.

On the polling as it stands now, I would say that Harris wins if the polls are accurate or off in the way they were off in 2022, and Trump probably wins if the polls are off as they were in 2016 and 2020. We’ll see if the pollsters have been able to correct their models.

Meanwhile, J.D. Vance mocked Kamala Harris by likening her to Caite Upton, a one-time beauty contestant who gave a famously incomprehensible answer in a 2007 pageant. Upton is an election denier, a vaccination/lockdown conspiracy theorist, and a Trump supporters.

Her uncle is Fred Upton, one of the very few GOP congressmen who voted for impeachment. And who, by sheer coincidence, chose to retire at the end of that term.

Edit: Nope, that’s a different model named Kate Upton. Weird.

The two former-model Uptons are fairly close in age too: just three years apart. Kate Upton, the younger of the two, has appeared in a few mainstream movies.

J.D. Vance was informed today that the scorn heaped upon Caite Upton for her unfortunate pageant answer was so great that she later said she had thought about taking her own life. Vance said he didn't know that, and had he known it, he wouldn't have shared the video of that moment yesterday, but he also said he won't apologize for having done so.

I admit that my fascination with J.D. Vance continues.
1. He takes what would otherwise be a normal political point, that Harris has flubbed interviews in the past.
2. He manages to make it sexist.
3. He manages to make it through a joke that lands flat.
4. It subsequently emerges to have been a self-own.
5. Rather than brush it off as Trump does, he tries to awkwardly explain himself in an interview, having made the entire episode about his own political misjudgement.

[Frelga]

I don't always agree with Mehdi Hasan but I sure do here.

I feel that it's missing the point entirely. The problem is not the quality of journalism, it's that the media, including Politico, is actively working to elect Trump. The problem that a brilliant journalistic piece that helps Harris is unlikely to get published in many of the previously respected publications.


Túrin, I am myself becoming fascinated with Vance, because how is it possible for an Earth-born person to be so bad at presenting as a human.

PS Meanwhile, the Harris/Walz campaign is trolling Vance by going to bakeries and being normal and enthusiastic about food.

[Frelga]

Update: SLIGHTLY better

20240830_202237.jpg (123.82 KiB) Viewed 778 times

[N.E. Brigand]

I don't always agree with Mehdi Hasan but I sure do here. ...

Politico has deleted that tweet Hasan had flagged, which read "'Next question': Harris evades questions about her identity" -- surely one of the ten worst tweets a news organization has published in the history of Twitter -- and replaced it with a slightly better tweet reading "Harris sidesteps the spotlight when it comes to her identity." That's still a crap tweet, because Vice President Harris's racial identity is not an issue.

(Edit: cross-posted with Frelga.)

[Frelga]

My favourite comment on the original headline

This headline makes it sound like Kamala doesn’t want to admit to being Batman.

But also,

Screenshot_20240828-204114.png (145.39 KiB) Viewed 760 times

Boar Head is trending because of a Listeria outbreak that killed 9 people. The outbreak was linked to a Virginia plant described as having leaky pipes and mold growing on the walls. The kind of things that is more likely to happen when oversight and enforcement are gutted.

[N.E. Brigand]

Forty-six U.S. servicemembers were killed in action in Afghanistan during Donald Trump's presidency. Why didn't he visit their graves?

[N.E. Brigand]

Donald Trump spoke at a rally in Pennsylvania on Friday, and about half an hour into the event, a protester was detained. Trump mentioned it from the stage.

For context, here's what Trump was saying before he noticed the hubbub in the back of the room. He had just shown video of Kamala Harris from 2019:

But that's her. And now she's changed everything. In fact, I think she is going to soon apply for [unintelligible] application for joining[?] MAGA. She's going to be wearing a MAGA cap. No, that's her. She can't do anything about it, because that's the way she is. And with a politician, when they come out with something, that's where they end up. And she will destroy the great commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Just remember that. And we should win a blowout. We should blow 'em—you know, we win this state, we win the whole thing. And we won it in 2016. And we did much better in 2020. You know that: much better. With the whole election. Actually with--in 2016, we did great, but 2020, we did much better, generally. Since Kamala and the media don't want to talk about her radical record, we will.

It was at this point that Trump responded to what was happening near the back of the venue as follows:

Beautiful. [pause] That's beautiful. That's all right. That's OK. No, he's on our side. Heh, we get a little uh, itchy, David, don't we, uh? No, no, he's on our side. You know what he's showing? At Butler, an amazing thing happened. You had two American flags very far apart, held up, I think by different cranes. They were very big flags, beautiful flags, and they were waving, and as that horrible event was taking place, the wind blew the flags together, and they formed a perfect angel. I don't know if we have it, but it was a perfect angel was formed. I'll tell ya, a lot of uh, a lot of things happened. If we have it, put it up. If we don't have it, that's all right. [Apparently something is shown on the video screen.] That's it. That's it. That's it. He had the angel. He held up the angel, and our people went after him. No, no. He's on our side. He's on our side. Thank you very much. That's very nice. I've never seen banners so beautiful, right? No, he's on our side. I mean, the problem is, if he was on our side, you know, we could have thirty-five, forty thousand people trying to get in, and if one person stands up, says, 'I don't like you, Trump,' it becomes a headline. Major problems, right? No, but he is on our side. Thank you very much. That's nice.

He then returned to his prepared speech: "For nearly four years, Comrade Kamala Harris has overseen a nation-wrecking border division flooding our communities with twenty or twenty-one million, and it could be much more than that. And don't listen to "fifteen or sixteen." You're way gone, those days are gone. Twenty million illegal aliens from 158 different countries as of now."

But then there was some further noise, and he paused, and the audience chanted "USA" repeatedly, and then he said "Is there anywhere that's more fun to be than a Trump rally? Right? There's nowhere. There's nowhere. It's nice, Friday, you know what, and we have plenty of time. Friday afternoon. Steve is here, David's here, all my friends are here. We have the best son in the world here. But all my friends are here, and, uh, let's take our time and have a good time, right? Or should I hurry it up? Should we give you the short version or the longer version?" The audience yells "long."

I wonder which son he was referring to. Anway, he then returned to his prepared speech (but quickly rambled off of it):

Harris lost—listen to these numbers, though, seriously. If this, if this were a Republican, they'd be stringin' him up. Now listen to this number, 'cause you have to understand what it means. 325,000 children have been lost. They've been allowed to be trafficked all across our borders. She flew in illegal aliens by the hundreds of thousands, and many of these were young children. But we have no idea where three—think of the number: 325,000 children are missing. Many are dead. Many are involved in sex operations. Many are working as slaves in different parts of probably this country and probably many others. But she was the border czar. Now she says, 'I wasn't the border czar.' But she was. There was headlines: 'border czar, border czar,' but now she doesn't want that term. But what she--whether she was the border czar or not, she was in charge of the border. 325,000 children are missing. She created a fast pass entry program to speed the admission of illegals into all of our ports of entry. And remember when they said, 'No, no, we're [unintelligible],'? Now they have a new line! 'We created a strong border.' No, no. They keep saying it over and over. The worst border in history. But they think if they keep saying it over and over—you know, most people aren't like us. They're not that—you know, they drive a cab. They're carpenters, they're electricians, they're accountants, they're lawyers—they're not, like, into it, other than they like Trump. They like me, and they like our policies. It's not about me. This is not about me. I had a nice life. You can ask my friends. I had the greatest life. I could go to the most beautiful places with ​​the most beautiful oceans in the world [he slowed down leading up to "oceans" as if he was going to say something else and thought better of it], and instead here we are, and I'm happy as hell to be with you, because I like it much better. I like this much better. I like it much better. You know why? Because we're doing something: we're saving our country. I wouldn't do it just 'cause I like it. We're saving our country. Our country needs saving. We're a failing nation, in case you have any question. We're a sadly failing nation, and we're gonna make America great again. It's very simple, so—we're a failing nation. We're gonna make America great again, and I think we have a chance to make America greater than ever before, and remember this: if we don't do it this time, you're never gonna have another crack at it. November 5th is the single most important day in the history of our country. I believe that with all my heart. 'Cause our country's going bad.

And then once again he was back to the teleprompter, and I stopped transcribing there. (I watched the video after learning of this incident here.)

Here is a helpful video edit that someone made of this moment. As you can see, the detained person had breached the press area:



I have bolded and underlined above what he says in this video.

Observers have interpreted Trump as endorsing this attack on the press. I'm not so sure. When he talks about the "angel" at Butler, he's referring to this image:



And when he's praising a protester, he seems to be looking at someone holding else up a flag which is hard to make out clearly but which I think shows that image. I'm not sure Trump could even see the protester, but as he's saying, "Beautiful," the protester has already been on the ground for a few seconds.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

AOC, speaking truths about Jill Stein and the Green Party

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Lashes Out at 'Predatory' Jill Stein

Ocasio-Cortez, responding to a question from an Instagram follower about Jill Stein's candidacy, said that "this is a little spicy, but I have thoughts."

"If you run for years in a row, and your party has not grown, has not added city council seats, down ballot seats and state electives, that's bad leadership. And that to me is what's upsetting," the congresswoman said about Stein.

[N.E. Brigand]

At Friday's rally in Pennsylvania, Donald Trump pointed out Rep. Bryon Donalds of Florida and called him a "superstar," before adding, "That one is smart. You have smart ones and then you have some that aren’t quite so good." Who are the "some" that he was referring to? Other members of Congress?

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Donald Trump actually said this yesterday:

"But, uh, the transgender thing is incredible. Think of it: your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child, and you many of these childs 15 years later say 'What the hell happened? Who did this to me?'"

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At the same event, Trump also said he had wanted to appoint his daughter Ivanka as the "United Nations Secretary," which is not a thing, but then he clarified, sort of, indicating that he meant Ambassador to the U.N. -- the position to which he appointed Nikki Haley. Remember that Ivanka was unable to pass a background check.

(The event was hosted by Moms For Liberty, a far right group, one of whose chapters once deliberately quoted Hitler* in a press release.)

*Edited to note that, per this AP story, the Indiana chapter of Moms for Liberty said that they quoted Hitler as a warning of what America could become not as an endorsement of Hitler. I guess maybe? But they were thus implying that liberals or the American or Indiana governments are Nazis, because the quote says that those who control what children read control the future. And Moms for Liberty's most famous action is to ban books.

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These are useful thoughts on the Afghanistan withdrawal, which has lately become a point of political contention again because of Donald Trump's political stunt (and his aides' alleged violence) at Arlington cemetery.

Republicans are hoping to make a new Benghazi out of what happened at the Abbey Gate, but Donald Trump is not helping the argument that he was just there to support the parents. Yesterday, he was asked about what happened. Here's the exchange:

Q: "Should your campaign have put out those videos and photos?"

A: "Well, we have a lot of people. You know, we have people, you know, Tik Tok people, you know, we're leading the internet. That was the other thing, we're so far above her on the internet--"

Q: "But on that hallowed ground, should they have put out the images--"

A: "Well, I don't know what the rules and regulations are, I don't know who did it, and, uh, it could have been them. It could have been the parents. It could have been somebody--"

Q: "It was your campaign's Tik Tok, though, that put out the video."

A: "I really don't know anything about it. All I do, is I stood there, and I said, 'If you'd like to have a picture, we can have a picture.' If somebody did it--this was a setup by the people in the administration, that 'Oh, Trump is coming to Arlington. That looks so bad for us.'"

So Donald Trump is blaming the parents for sharing images of the event, and he's claiming that the Biden adminsitration somehow set him up.

Separately, this cartoon catches the spirit of what Trump was doing:



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There's yet another gross video of J.D. Vance bizarrely criticizing childless women. Specifically, he says that a person who strives to achieve gender and racial equality has a "value set has made [her] a miserable person who can't have kids because [she] can't have kids because [they] already passed the biological period when it was possible".

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"It's been weeks since Trump promised to release flight records about his (mythical) helicopter flight with Willie Brown and threatened to sue the New York Times for saying the story was false, and days since he promised to release video of the incident at Arlington. He will never do either. Imagine this stonewalling from Kamala Harris."

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In the possible crucial second Congressional district of Nebraska, a new poll finds Kamala Harris leading Donald Trump 47%-42%. (Joe Biden won that district by 6.5% in 2020. Trump won the district over Hillary Clinton in 2016 by 2.1%.)

Recognizing the importance of this race, the Republicans who control Nebraska's government recently blocked a new law that would have restored the voting rights of former felons, and worse:

"On July 17, less than 48 hours before LB 20 was to take effect, Hilgers issued an advisory opinion stating that the new law was unconstitutional. But Hilgers didn’t stop there; he also declared unconstitutional a 2005 reform law ending lifetime disenfranchisement of anyone convicted of any felony; the 2005 law, Legislative Bill 53, allowed Nebraskans to vote two years after completing their sentences, a waiting period that LB 20 was set to eliminate."

In other words, thousands of people who could vote four, eight, twelve, sixteen years ago, now are longer permitted to so.

Of the seven swing states, if Donald Trump wins the sunbelt states (Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina) and Kamala Harris wins the "blue wall" Great Lakes states (Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania), then whoever wins NE-02 wins the presidency.

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Also in Nebraska's U.S. Senate race, a lot of voters are undecided: the incumbent Republican, Deb Fischer, only leads the independent, Dan Osborn, by 39%-38%, with 23% undecided. Independents who have decided favor Osborn (but Nebraska overall is Republican, so Fischer is still quite likely to win.)

[RoseMorninStar]

(...)
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There's yet another gross video of J.D. Vance bizarrely criticizing childless women. Specifically, he says that a person who strives to achieve gender and racial equality has a "value set has made [her] a miserable person who can't have kids because [she] can't have kids because [they] already passed the biological period when it was possible".

I saw this the other day and it made me sick, and angry. As if roughly half the population on this planet is nothing more than a uterus and otherwise worthless and miserable. I looked up Vance's benefactor, Peter Thiel. I had no idea he was gay (and childless). I don't hear Vance remarking that Thiel is a valueless miserable childless man.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Of the seven swing states, if Donald Trump wins the sunbelt states (Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina) and Kamala Harris wins the "blue wall" Great Lakes states (Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania), then whoever wins NE-02 wins the presidency.

One of the few positive points for Harris that Nate Silver made in his most recent update (despite the fact that Harris continues to lead nationally and in most of the swing states), is that she had a particularly good poll in NE-02, though she was already favored there.

https://www.natesilver.net/p/nate-silve ... olls-model