When Kanye West* first announced he was running for president about a month or so ago, I noted in a comment that this was a planned operation intended to provide a landing place for voters. Specifically, that West’s run, if he could get on the ballot in enough of the actual states that will count – Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan – that his stunt candidacy had the ability to spoil the presidential race, which would allow the President to once again lose the popular vote while eking out a very narrow victory through the Electoral College. Because this is Balloon Juice, and despite the fact that I have a PhD in political science (as well as criminology) and have provided some inputs to some candidates in the past (don’t ask, I have NDAs in place), hilarity ensued. And by hilarity I mean: let’s explain politics to the political scientist. Or as we call it here at Balloon Juice a day ending in day.
We’ve had ever more specific reporting over the past several days that not only is West’s attempt to run for president an actual attempt to spoil the election, but that it is one being directed by Republicans. West gave an interview by text to Forbes today where he confirmed that his candidacy is indeed an attempt to spoil VP Biden’s chances of getting elected (emphasis mine).
Amid various reports that Republican and Trump-affiliated political operatives are trying to get Kanye West onto various state ballots for November’s presidential election, the billionaire rap superstar indicated, in an interview by text today, that he was in fact running to siphon votes from the presumptive Democratic nominee, Joe Biden.
Asked about that directly, West said that rather than running for president, he was “walking,” quickly adding that he was “walking . . . to win.”
When it was pointed out that he actually can’t win in 2020—that he won’t be on enough ballots to yield 270 electoral votes, and that a write-in campaign isn’t feasible—and thus was serving as a spoiler, West replied: “I’m not going to argue with you. Jesus is King.”
And West was eager to criticize Biden, and expressed comfort with the idea of doing damage to the former vice president’s White House chances. “I’m not denying it; I just told you.”
I know that Kanye West is mentally ill. I also know that he needs serious, long term help that most likely includes some custodial care. I am pretty sure that the people who are taking advantage of him don’t care. None of that actually matters. If he can get onto the ballot in the states where the Electoral College battle will be fought, then he can spoil the election on behalf of the President. It won’t matter if by that point his family has finally been able to intervene and he’s in custodial care. It won’t matter if he’s so decompensated that he’s wandering around Wyoming claiming to be Vince Clortho, Frodo Baggins, the Bodhidharma, or the second coming of Jesus as Christ. Because he’ll already be on the ballot and that’s the way to achieving the objective of this influence operation.
If West is on the ballot in these states that are key to winning the Electoral College and he can peel off a few percent of the vote in each of them, he has the ability to create the opening for the President to once again eke out a very narrow Electoral College victory. The reason for that is not because he’s a serious candidate or have serious ideas on how to deal with America’s and American’s problems, but because he becomes a landing pad for those who are left of center and are in perpetual search of purity. And this isn’t just for low information voters or the poorly informed, it is for the highly informed who are searching for something radical. For instance, Professor Ricky L. Jones (emphasis mine):
Let’s start off with clarity. I am NOT a Republican! With that said …
It was ONE minor social media post from ONE man about his ONE vote. I wrote, “I’ve voted in every election since I was 18 and will vote this year as well. But I won’t be voting for Mitch McConnell OR Amy McGrath in Kentucky’s senate race. I’ll be writing in Charles Booker’s name. I encourage you to do the same.”
No big deal, right? WRONG!
The post certainly inspired some. Almost immediately, a number of Kentuckians chimed in that they were having difficulty accepting the milquetoast, fickle McGrath as well. They were looking for options and a potential Booker write-in movement seemed like a good one.
One of my own fraternity brothers, who garnered no traction in his obscure bid for McConnell’s seat, fired off an angry missive, “Dr. Ricky L. Jones attempts to HIJACK legitimately elected U.S. senate candidate Amy McGrath …” Oh my! Hijack?
“Get over it. Booker lost!” they said. “Even Booker wants us to support Amy,” they lectured. “We have to vote for the Democrat, no matter what!” Really? The hell I do!
Upon his death, many are now revisiting one of the most famous quotes from John Lewis, the Prince of Troy (Alabama), “We do not want our freedom gradually. We want to be free now! We are tired.” Lewis was 23 years old when he uttered those words at the 1963 March on Washington. He could have spoken them yesterday and they’d still be relevant.
I have nothing against Amy McGrath personally. I don’t know her. From what I’ve seen, she doesn’t really endeavor to connect with many people who look and think like me. She’s a symptom, not the disease. My issues are with the type of politician the Democrats repeatedly shove down our throats.
Since the 1960 presidential election, Black people have been the Democrats’ most loyal constituency. In return, they’ve been given little to nothing. At best, the Democrats demand we support gradualists of the sort Lewis and his mentor Martin Luther King Jr. railed against. At worst, it is expected that we religiously trot out and vote for candidates who don’t give a damn about us at all.
If the Democrats were plied with bourbon and truth serum they’d say, “Yes, our candidates are terrible and are, for the most part, status-quo oriented. We continuously try to get them through by using the tired argument that we aren’t as bad as the Republicans. Therefore, you should be scared as hell and keep voting for us even though we’re gonna screw you. We cool? Good. We’ll see you in two, four or six years when we need those Black votes again, OK?”
It’s truly amazing. The Democrats’ core arrogantly refuses to change but accuses citizens of good conscience who finally get to the point where they can no longer stomach supporting their woeful candidates of “handing elections to Republicans.” The argument would be amusing if it weren’t so insidious.
More at the link.
I have no idea who Professor Jones will vote for on November 3rd, he certainly doesn’t explicitly indicate one way or another in this op-ed, and I’m not particularly sanguine about McGrath’s chances to defeat McConnell, but Professor Jones is one of the people that a Kanye West candidacy is intended to target. The exceedingly diverse group of candidates that the Democrats fielded in 2018**, as well as again in this year’s congressional election appear to have escaped Professor Jones’ notice. As did the most diverse group of presidential primary candidates this year. But for people like Professor Jones, specifically highly educated left of center to far left Americans the sorting functions of primaries is not democracy at work. Nor is the recognition that politics is the art of the possible, of getting what you can when you can, then building off of it when the opportunity arises. Instead, the Democrats are really not much better, if they’re better at all, than the Republicans. A spoiler third party candidate is intended to provide a landing pad for the votes of Professor Jones of Michael Moore of Brianna Joy Gray of David Sirota of Susan Sarandon and all of those who will listen to them that the game is rigged, that both sides of the political coin are the same, and that positive chance, even if all that is possible is incremental, is unacceptable unless every demand is met and every ask is fully filled.
Kanye West’s candidacy is one part of a Republican influence operation, which will be paired with the Black PSYOP to dirty up Vice President Biden and his senior advisors and aides and attempts to paint whomever he chooses as his running mate, especially if that running mate is a woman of color and specifically an African American woman, which will be micro-targeted at young African American voters via social media in the attempt to both discourage them from voting or move them on to a third party protest vote.
Professor Jones and everyone else has the right to vote for whomever they want. That’s not the point to my highlighting his op-ed. The point is to highlight his understanding and beliefs about the Democratic Party, how it functions as a party, and politics. Professor Jones’ own description of these things make him the ideal target for the influence operations I’ve been documenting here for several years. His own words demonstrate that he’s the perfect target. It is not my place to tell anyone how they should vote or who they should vote for. But my job here is to explain what the influence operations, as well as the lines of effort and operation of those influence operations are so that we can be aware of them and be able to combat them. It will only take moving a couple of percentage points of voters to a third party candidate to spoil the 2020 election, which is why the Republican Party is using a vulnerable African American celebrity as one of the ways to achieve that end. It isn’t the joke, but it is the point.
Open thread!
** Congresswoman Omar drives me nuts with a lot of her positions, or, perhaps more accurately, with how she articulates them, but having the voice of an actual refugee who fled from danger through danger to reach the safety of the United States in the US Congress is something we desperately need and if I lived in her district I’d vote for her for just that reason.
Martin
3 candidates, one that isn’t mentally ill.
What a country!
Adam L Silverman
@Martin: It won’t be only three. You’ll have a Green Party candidate and a Libertarian Party candidate on the ticket in some places. But the key to using West this way is because he’s famous. He’s got name recognition.
JustRuss
@Adam L Silverman: Pffft, no one’s going to vote for a clearly unqualified candidate just because they’re famous.
I’ll come in again….
West of the Rockies
Seems there are a few hundred thousand voters who think like this: “The Republican is really, really bad. The Democrat isn’t quite as perfect as I’d like. Oh, well, voting Republican it is!”
And West may be mentally ill, but he is also an idiot.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
No thanks.
Martin
@Adam L Silverman: But everyone thinks he’s bonkers. Entertaining, talented, sure, but nobody thinks he has a good idea or can lead. It’s dangerously cynical and unfair to Kanye to abuse what clearly looks like a manic episode for political gain.
The Thin Black Duke
Bottom line, the jerks who would vote for Kayne West never had any intention of voting for Joe Biden anyway.
Baud
@The Thin Black Duke: But will claim they would have voted for Biden if only….
Adam L Silverman
@Martin: All of that is true, but none of that is the point. Do you really think anyone thought Jill Stein could actually be president? Sure, a few true believers, but the vast majority that voted for her did so because having her on the ballot gave them permission, because it gave them an option, to cast a protest vote on behalf of their ideals of purity.
TaMara (HFG)
@The Thin Black Duke: This.
gwangung
Like I said, I fear voter suppression much more.
In the face of a pandemic, a third part candidate doesn’t have the power it would have in better times. Good times give permission to be foolish. Bad times does not give permission to be stupid.
WaterGirl
@The Thin Black Duke: Exactly.
Adam L Silverman
@gwangung: This is a type of voter suppression.
TaMara (HFG)
@Baud: I have friends who were Sanders or nothing in 2016. I KNOW they did not vote for Hillary or Trump. I don’t know if they voted third party or left it blank. But I suspect they voted 3rd party to make a point. They said, “I would have voted Democrat if not for Hillary.”
That’s all Kanye will get. People who weren’t going to vote Biden anyway.
Adam L Silverman
Starfish
The Swifties will defeat this Kanye candidacy.
Adam L Silverman
Collins missed the neo-NAZI and white supremacist reference in this one. The 14 in Truth14 is a reference to the 14 words.
piratedan
gotta love the reasoning of the Purity Ponies on the left (am happy to note that their days of violence seem to have passed along with the 60’s and 70’s) where they state that change isn’t happening quickly enough for their liking so they will vote for a candidate that ensures that none of the things they desire out of a political system may ever come to be, unless as a potential end result of the collapse of what we call civilization (or so it seems to be implied).
These guys aren’t concerned about you roasting sparrows on a curtain rod under the overpass, they’d just as soon the overpass never exist to be able to say, “now maybe you’ll listen to us”…….
Jeffro
I’m sorry, I just can’t get too worked up about a bipolar rapper who’s conducting this fake candidacy in the full glare (including public self-disclosure that he’s getting help from the GOP and doing it to hurt Biden) of our national snooze media.
And as so many have said above, anyone who’d vote for Kanye was never going to be a Biden vote anyway.
Actual voter suppression, the intentional slowing down of the USPS, armed election day intimidation…those are things I worry about. And even then, as I have said in other threads: Biden is WAY up, trumpov continues to golf while thousands die daily…
…never let up, but also perhaps don’t stress too much about Kanye. Or even at all about Kanye.
featheredsprite
I suspect that Mr. West is being generously compensated for his efforts. Maybe he isn’t entirely nuts.
Jeffro
@Adam L Silverman: Who will be voting for Kanye on the basis of “purity”?
Baud
@TaMara (HFG):
I wonder how many neverTrump votes Kanye will get.
Omnes Omnibus
@Starfish: And is it a coincidence that she just dropped a new album? I think not.
opiejeanne
@Adam L Silverman: I appreciate your posts, I honestly do, but I am going to email my doctor and ask for something for anxiety. I’m not blaming you, your reporting is great, but it’s also the cherry/turd on top of the shit sundae of living in this timeline.
I hope you’re very wrong, but I fear that you might be right.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@The Thin Black Duke: Yup. They either wouldn’t have voted or voted for the Green.
TaMara (HFG)
@Starfish: OMG, I was thinking this earlier, but didn’t want to say it aloud. LOL
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Adam L Silverman: We’re Americans, most of us aren’t very pure.
CaseyL
I realize I may sound like a crank, but “Jill Stein” in 2016 may only have been on the ballot as a place to which to divert Hillary votes – by which I mean, the vote totals were screwed with, Hillary votes being counted as Stein votes. Stein had enough credibility as a candidate that a few tens of thousands could be diverted to her and it wouldn’t be obvious that’s what had happened.
I think they’re gonna do the same thing with Kanye. Enough people make a point of saying they’ll vote for him, raising his profile as a “protest candidate,” it doesn’t matter whether they actually do. Votes will again be diverted, from Biden to West.
If they did it in 2016, there’s no reason to think they won’t in 2020.
Baud
@TaMara (HFG):
They made a point. Not the one they wanted though.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Adam L Silverman: Who are they targeting, you say the left and far left, wouldn’t that pull more from the Green Party candidate?
?BillinGlendaleCA
@piratedan: Nach Trump, uns.
Hildebrand
I would guess Professor Jones voted for Jill Stein last time – and will vote for the equivalent this time. He doesn’t need an elaborate scheme to peel off his vote, it was never in the Democratic column in the first place – because no Democrat will ever live up to his ridiculous standard. He would have voted for Gus Hall back in the 70s and 80s.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@featheredsprite: Oh no, he’s quite nuts.
bluehill
No doubt there will be even more stuff. Thiel probably has Palantir analyzing all of Facebook’s data along with voting records and figuring out the best ways to peel off votes, discouraging voting, mislead dem voters. Each tactic doesn’t need to get to this year’s 80k. They just need add up to 80k. I hope dems have their own skunk works efforts to counter.
TaMara (HFG)
@opiejeanne: It may not be enough, but I drink valerian tea with regularity. I can feel it lower my BP.
I appreciate Adam’s post, too. The more the light is shined on this blatant attempt to manipulate voters, the less likely it is to work.
Omnes Omnibus
@CaseyL: How did they divert these votes? What was the mechanism used?
gwangung
@Jeffro: Yeah, not a lot of bang for the buck with Kanye.
Thoughts of impending plague have a wonderful way of focussing one’s thoughts.
Up until this election, Democrats vote for a candidate. Republicans voted against a candidate; specifically the liberal apostasy.
As we’ve seen in 2018 and 2020, Democrats are voting out of a revulsion for Trump; they’re finally tasting the anti-candidate wine that Republicans have drunk from for decades.
Adam L Silverman
@Jeffro: It isn’t that they’re voting for him because he epitomizes their ideal of purity, he on the ballot in 2020 is like Stein on the ballot in 2016. He provides a safe landing pad to cast a protest vote because the Democratic candidate isn’t pure enough for them.
Jinchi
I agree, it’s perfectly clear that Kanye West threw his hat into the ring in order to be a spoiler candidate, he’s lobbied repeatedly for blacks not to vote for Democrats and it’s also clear that Trump can’t win if it’s a two-man race. He needs a third party candidate to pull votes from the Democrats.
But I’m not sure West is the right candidate for that, any more than Herman Cain would have been. He’s pulled more than a few stunts that have annoyed black Democrats, not the least of which is wandering around wearing MAGA gear and trashing Harriet Tubman. It’s not obvious that he’ll pull away anyone who intended to vote for Biden. If anything he’ll probably draw more from the roughly 24% of black men who approve of Trump.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Hildebrand: I California, he’d vote for the Peace and Freedom candidate.
different-church-lady
For crissake, he’s actually going to win this thing, isn’t he?
different-church-lady
@featheredsprite: Not mutually exclusive.
TaMara (HFG)
@Hildebrand: Adam sent me that article this morning and I fumed over it all day. That professor makes me stabby.
WaterGirl
@opiejeanne: Maybe this comment from Omnes
from last nightfrom late this afternoon will help provide some perspective:Adam L Silverman
@opiejeanne: I hope I’m wrong too. I want to be wrong. But that doesn’t mean I have to be willfully blind to what’s going on.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Adam L Silverman: The point is, they were never going to vote for the Democrat in the first place. As a wise woman said, “What difference does it make?”.
sanjeevs
@CaseyL: That’s my suspicion too.
Hack the vote totals and use a last minutes surprise and unexpectedly high third party votes to explain the discrepancy between the polls and the results
Omnes Omnibus
@Adam L Silverman: If they don’t vote Stein or West, would they vote Clinton or Biden? Or would they stay home or write in Susan Sarandon? IOW are these people actually lost votes?
CatFacts
I believe you. Now, what do we do with this information? What are some steps to take to combat spoiler candidates like this?
Jinchi
@CaseyL: Stein didn’t really pull enough votes to make a difference in 2016, although Gary Johnson probably did. But yeah, she was probably another Putin plant intended to help out Trump’s candidacy.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I think the real danger of third party candidates is less when they run for President, as when they run against one of the two party candidates. I think the economy and “Saddam still has his job. How about you?” would’ve sunk Poppy in ’92, but Ross Perot really seemed to hate Bush. Ralph Nader directed his free-floating hatred at Gore. I can think of another example… I don’t know if Kanye can/will keep it up the way Perot and Nader did, and if he does, I don’t know if he’ll draw the same kind of attention. I hope he won’t.
different-church-lady
@Adam L Silverman: OK, fine: n candidates, and only one that mentally ill. Happy now?
Craig
Can someone explain how you go from being $53 million in debt to being worth a billion dollars in 3years? How does that work?
Adam L Silverman
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Anyone know who the Green Party candidate is this time? Nope, nobody does unless you go look it up. But if you’re looking to peel off the younger African American voters who were supporting Bernie and aren’t happy that Biden is now the nominee, then you go with someone with name recognition. You won’t get most of them, but you don’t have to. This election is going to be one by small margins in states that are key to the Electoral College.
different-church-lady
@JustRuss:
Or don’t . Don’t is also an option.
Omnes Omnibus
@WaterGirl: That was earlier today, and now Adam is going to beat me up.
Adam L Silverman
@Omnes Omnibus: Sluice gates.
WaterGirl
@opiejeanne: People cope in very different ways.
We saw this with COVID when it first appeared. Some people needed to read every single thing they could about it.
Some people couldn’t read about it all day, every day.
Looking at every possible way that this could go wrong may be constructive for some people, or even calming in some way.
For others, it’s overwhelming and is the opposite of constructive. Neither way is right, or wrong.
Just go with what works for you. I can’t read some of Adam’s threads because it starts to make me feel anxious and that is not constructive for me.
I really liked Omnes’s description that I quoted above. That was particularly helpful for me in getting some perspective.
Take care.
Bill Arnold
@Adam L Silverman:
Assuming it was an actual troll farm (haven’t seen the evidence/technical details), it would be nice to quickly nail down the funding actor(s) through financial sleuthing.
Trump campaign? Russia? Israel? UAE? a US PAC? a US or non-US billionaire? Some less obvious actor? Interesting that facebook is becoming more likely to react to these. It makes spinning up influence networks much less reliable.
Adam L Silverman
@different-church-lady: Given the way America works?//
WaterGirl
@Omnes Omnibus: Dear god, that seems like a lifetime ago. Just this afternoon. Time warp, covid style.
piratedan
@Omnes Omnibus: send in the clowns?
gwangung
@Jinchi: Yes, exactly.
Stein had some legitimacy and some progressive bona fides as the Green Party leader. All the asshattery and Russian connections came out after the election.
There’s no legitimacy, no true appeal to peel off potential Biden voters. with West. They’re playing the same game as they did in 2020 as they did in 2016, but the pieces aren’t as strong and the playing ground is different.
They’re pulling a multitude of tactics to fuck with this election, but not all of them are going to be effective.
Besides…the effect of a Stein in 2016 COULD have been counteracted with a strong GOTV effort to counteract the suppression tactics. Given the primary voting efforts earlier this year in WI and elsewhere, that GOTV effort is likely to be powerful.
Jinchi
@TaMara (HFG): I knew a lot of people who skipped the vote or voted Nader in 2000. None of them repeated the same mistake.
I have a feeling that we’ll see the same thing in 2020.
different-church-lady
@piratedan: “When nobody has curtain rods, everyone is equal!”
Adam L Silverman
@Omnes Omnibus: Some are most likely lost votes. Based on what we know about how Duverger’s Law actually works, it would have forced them to choose whichever of the two major party candidates are closest to them ideologically and politically if only those two candidates were on the ballot with no third party options.
Adam L Silverman
@CatFacts: Being informed. Making sure everyone you know is informed. That’s the point of doing the post.
WaterGirl
@Starfish: Oh my god, I had heard something about that at the time, but oh my god. He really did that. Wow.
Adam L Silverman
@Craig: Ask Associate Justice Kavanaugh. Seems like the same kind of concierge treatment he got to retire his debt, which had been accumulated buying Washington Nationals’ season tickets.
Adam L Silverman
@Omnes Omnibus: Nope. I hadn’t seen it when you posted it.
I went to a Jesuit high school and a Methodist university, so I can be ecumenical enough to make this analogy work.
CatFacts
@Adam L Silverman: Got it. Thanks.
Jinchi
@gwangung: Right. Someone like a Stacey Abrams could be a legitimate spoiler candidate. Someone who has credibility with people inclined to vote for the Democrat. West isn’t that guy.
different-church-lady
@Adam L Silverman:
“Christ, if only there were an insane vanity candidate on this here piece of paper!!”
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Starfish:@WaterGirl: I believe that was what inspired Obama to call him a jackass, which observation may not be completely unrelated to what we’re seeing now.
Adam L Silverman
@Bill Arnold: My guess is that it was Russia. The actual folks in troll farms are separated from the paymasters by multiple levels of unidentified business organizations (UBOs). The key to actually understanding what is going on here is to track back through the UBOs until you get to the originating paymaster.
Omnes Omnibus
@Adam L Silverman: I guess that my takeaway from this is that my efforts will be better directed at ensuring that people in Milwaukee have voter IDs and access to polling stations than in combating Kanye’s candidacy. We may lose some to him, but we can get more by making sure that all people can vote.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Adam L Silverman: I disagree with your premise, that 2020 will be a repeat of 2016. There are significant differences: Trump is a know incumbent, the economy is fucked, and Hillary isn’t the Democratic nominee. When the economy is good, folk can say “hey let’s try this guy, what could go wrong?”, it’s much more difficult to take that attitude when you’re worried about being evicted and possibly dying.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Omnes Omnibus:
You know what you did.
Adam L Silverman
@different-church-lady: Take it up with Duverger, it’s his law, not mine.
Adam L Silverman
@Omnes Omnibus: I think that is a reasonable course of action.
Omnes Omnibus
@WaterGirl: I really felt bad for Beyonce in that situation. She was just like “WTF?”
Mart
I spent half a day writing several short novels on Facebook trying to get two 30-ish men to vote for Biden. End of the day Joe has no policies in general and none like Bernie. They were exactly the same with Clinton / Sanders. These assholes are everywhere, and you can’t change them. If Soros wants to drop some money, start a party to the right of Trump. Bet grifters Glen Beck and Sarah Palin would do it for $500K each. Cheap. Wait, what am I saying, they could win.
Baud
If you google Kanye West, Google makes you prove your human.
Citizen Alan
@Adam L Silverman:
As I’ve said before, probably the greatest source of personal embarrassment in my entire life is that I voted for Nader in 2000. It doesn’t matter that I voted in Mississippi where Bush beat Gore by double digits. It doesn’t matter that I thought at the time that a vote for Gore in Mississippi would be wasted but a vote for Nader might in some small way force the Dems to move to the left. I am still humiliated by how naive I was.
Because here is the truly insidious thing about 3rd party candidates: It’s not about the people who actually vote for Nader or Stein. It’s about all the people who bought into the premise of their candidacies — that there is no difference between Democrats and Republicans — but who simply stay home rather than take the time to drive across town and stand in line just to make the utterly pointless gesture of voting for someone who won’t break 5%. I am convinced that for every actual Green voter, there are five people who the Greens persuaded not to vote at all. And that’s why I fucking hate them.
sanjeevs
@Adam L Silverman: In the Philippines the troll farms accept cash or bitcoin only. No tracing that way.
Mike in NC
I’d be astonished if Kanye Fucking West could garner 1000 votes nationwide.
Another Scott
@The Thin Black Duke: +1
Cheers,
Scott.
Jinchi
I think most analysis of American elections forgets that there is a third, commonly taken option. Not voting at all. That’s about 40% of the American electorate and the difference accounts for the bulk of the swing from one election year to the next. In my opinion, Democrats spend too much time trying to coax Republicans to switch sides and not enough motivating non-voters to get to the polls.
different-church-lady
BTW, anyone wanna help me reconstruct some small scrap of belief that it’s possible to find meaning in my life?
mrmoshpotato
I don’t know what to say to this aside from I wish he’d take care of himself mentally.
Baud
@Mart: You’d probably have better luck talking to the Patriot Farmers.
These people exists and they are largely ungettable. That just needs to be internalized in our thinking.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
Haven’t the filling deadlines in pretty much every state passed at this point?
WaterGirl
@Omnes Omnibus: Worse to be Beyonce or Taylor Swift in that situation? Humiliating for both, that’s for sure.
Were Beyonce and Kanye West together at that point? I pay not attention to stuff like that so I have no idea.
If they were, that might tip it to Beyonce.
sanjeevs
What happened in Tennessee?
Marquita Bradshaw beat Mackler for the Senate race.
Bradshaw raised 8 thousand dollars, Mackler 2 million.
I dont know if this was genuine good politics or the work of a Romanian troll farm and I hate feeling this way.
piratedan
@different-church-lady: you could go the Hedonistic route, good food, good beverage and time spent in pursuit of personal pleasure (and however you choose to define that)
Bill Arnold
@CatFacts:
No mercy. Early and often.
E.g., and I’m not a marketing person, an aggressively negative 1 page dossier (maybe linking a longer dossier), linked by a flashy negative tweet or whatever, spammed wherever there is a positive or neutral mention about the candidate. Savage any reporters who have anything positive or neutral to say about the candidate. Full spectrum media. Be willing to damage them financially if possible (boycotts, whatever), if they appear to care a lot about money.
Kim Kardashian West addresses Kanye West’s mental health and asks for compassion (Chloe Melas, July 23, 2020)
Yeah, nope. He does not deserve mercy. He can have any compassion and empathy allowed by a lack of mercy. He supports fascists. She is guilty for asking.
Ed Marshall
Here in Illinois his signature drive included 16 scratches in a row where the person signed their name using little circles to dot their I’s.
In Wisconsin they submitted entire petitions consisting of scratched off names.
I don’t think he is getting on the ballot very many places….
Omnes Omnibus
@different-church-lady: I don’t know if it will help, but a little Michael Kiwanuka can’t hurt.
Adam L Silverman
@sanjeevs: Someone has to handover the cash or transfer the bitcoin.
piratedan
@Mart: you could shorten that and make them justify why they should vote for Trump… saves you time and lets them self-flagellate on a social media platform for all to see. If nothing else, you may get them to stop being attention sucks.
Yutsano
Welp…Biden had a gaffe moment and the MSM has a new chew toy.
Ed Marshall
I understand being alarmed and disgusted at the nature of the attempt, don’t get me wrong…
SiubhanDuinne
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
Describes one of my relatives.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
If Newt Gingrich is a stupid person’s idea of a smart person (and he is), Dinesh D’Souza is Newt Gingrich’s idea of an intellectual
Ascap_scab
The way to make this boomerang on Trumpers is to put up an ad that sez, “You voted for crazy in 2016, vote for super-crazy in 2020!
And if you want to tag it, show a clip of Trump saying “What do you have to lose?”
Omnes Omnibus
@WaterGirl: You would have to go to the Bey Hive for that info.
Emma from FL
Can anyone tell me why there’s this weird assumption that African Americans would peel off to vote for Kanye West? AAs are hardheaded folk about politics; they know Mr. West is a billionaire nobody in terms of clout. And no, he’s not Trump in reverse. The Republican establishment wedded itself to Trump; I find it hard to believe that the Democratic establishment would do the same with Mr. West. And to put the cherry on the sundae, Mr. West is flat out telling people he wants to harm Biden’s candidacy.
This is all of a piece with the common Republican belief that African Americans would vote for any Black person, even an obviously mentally ill one, over any white person, even one like Biden, who has been their political ally for decades.
CaseyL
@Omnes Omnibus: I’m not enough of a computer nerd to answer that, but I remember hearing about more than one touch-screen voting machine that registered your vote as for the Republican when you pressed the button for the Democrat.
My theory is there was an algorithm in the ballot reader that went something like “For every X votes for Hillary, take n of them away and put them in the Stein totals.” Or, “when Hillary Votes = X, take the next n of Hillary votes and put them in the Stein totals.” Basically, an if-then loop.
mrmoshpotato
Adam, where are you referring to Congresswoman Omar in your post. I can’t find the **.
Kent
Folks. Kanye fucking West isn’t going to flip the election all on his own. And that isn’t the intent anyway. It’s part of a larger throw everything against the wall and see what sticks strategy, just like in 2016
In 2016 we had Comey, we had Russian hacking of DNC emails strategically leaked, we had the fucking NYT covering EMAILZ and fucking non-scandals like the Clinton Foundation, we had Jill Stein, we had widespread and ruthless voter suppression of every kind, we had Facebook troll factories trying to undermine the election. The sum total of which pushed Trump over the top in 3 critical swing states.
They are doing the same thing again. If Kanya pulls a couple thousand votes out of critical states, combined with every other sort of fuckery they have in mind from losing mail in ballots to voter suppression to fake October vaccine surprises, to more Russian fuckery, to undermining the Post Office. It is all part of the same project which is to win by dirty tricks rather than on the merits.
mrmoshpotato
@gwangung:
You can fear both equally. It’s ok. :)
For they work in tandem to ratfuck their common target.
Omnes Omnibus
@CaseyL: This algorithm, of course, would only show up on election day and would not be noticed in pre-election testing or post-election audits?
Punchy
Cant the question be asked: if someone claims to change their vote from Biden to West just because…..was that person really going to vote Biden anyways?
I know of NO ONE that would bother to vote, get into the election booth, and then say “Wow….West is a much better choice!”. Not going to happen.
Adam L Silverman
@Emma from FL:
That’s it.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Kent:
Yeah, but it’s not 2016 anymore. There’s a pandemic that is not going away anytime soon; tens of millions of people are out of work and the economy is cratering. Trump is the incumbent now as well.
If Trump “wins” via the EC we should refuse to recognize Trump as legitimate. And I don’t mean like we have the past few years. The Democratic Party should call on our allies and the international community to condemn the Trump regime and the GOP enablers and enforce sanctions against the US government. There will need to be massive street demonstrations to topple the GOP
Adam L Silverman
@mrmoshpotato: I forgot the second * after the 2018 in the paragraph where I was talking about diversity of the Democratic candidates in 2018.
robmassing
“My ideal candidate would lose to Mitch McConnell by 50 points but it’s the principle of the thing.”
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Adam L Silverman:
Serious question: what if Kanye West were to die between now and the election? Would that throw a wrench in that particular plan?
trollhattan
@mrmoshpotato:
Trump’s secret weapon: Jazz Hands
Ignore them at your considerable peril. “Look here, am I golfing or building a 600-ship Navy?”
CaseyL
@Omnes Omnibus: Would those things happen in a state where the GOP is running the election? Would you trust a GOP-run election audit to be honest?
ETA: I mean, tell me it’s not possible, and be tech savvy enough to know it isn’t possible, and you will relieve my mind considerably. Honest. This has been haunting me.
piratedan
@Omnes Omnibus: hahahahahhahhha!!!!!!!!! you’re assuming in GOP states that the folks in charge of elections actually …
case in point… Georgia, Florida…
West of the Rockies
@Bill Arnold:
Is he pulling an Ivanka and having his clothing line produced in a sweat shop?
trollhattan
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Somebody would be sad. We can research who that might be, but am guessing the wife isn’t in the top 10.
Adam L Silverman
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I do not want to know what you’re planning.
Kent
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Well of course its not 2016. The point is, the strategy is the same. They know they can’t win on the merits because they don’t have any merits. So this sort of random organized fuckery is all they have left. They aren’t trying to win an election. They are trying to steal an election. Kanye is just one of many thieves they have deployed.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Adam L Silverman:
I’m not planning anything. I’m just asking a hypothetical
Darkrose
@Adam L Silverman:
The difference is that Kanye isn’t going to pull Black votes from Biden because the only Black folks who actually support Kanye these days are on the right. His whole “Slavery was our own fault” thing and embrace of Trump got him disinvited to the cookout.
Omnes Omnibus
@CaseyL: @piratedan: I worked for the agency that oversees WI’s elections in 2011-12. Elections are really administered down in the trenches at the polling places. In my experience, they are run by little old ladies who may be racist or Republican (but I repeat myself) but who would be absolutely appalled if their polling place didn’t count the votes that came in.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Kent:
But do you think it will work? Because the impression I’m getting is that we we’re fucked no matter what we do; that the forces arrayed against us are too much to overcome
Omnes Omnibus
@Adam L Silverman: He tried to get me to kill Amir earlier today. Cheap bastard wouldn’t spring for the plane ticket though.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Adam L Silverman: Goku was probably thinking more of what Taylor Swift might do.
trollhattan
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
To which I can only say, “Please proceed, Ms Swift.”
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Kanye is more likely to be at UCLA’s NPI than dying. Kind of hard to mount a campaign when you’re locked up at the nut house.
NotMax
@opiejeanne
Every dark cloud has a Silverman lining.
;)
gwangung
@Emma from FL: It’s part and parcel of the Republican mindset that blacks would vote for Kanye: sexist and racist.
And with some the anti black messages he’s put out recently, the only folks that’d peel off for him would be anti-black white people. Nobody black would do that except those who were as crazy as he is.
Kent
No, I don’t think it will work because I don’t think (hope) that the election isn’t going to be this close. But I do think the sum total of every manner of election fuckery on the part of the GOP from Russian collusion to Kanye to post office fuckery to voter suppression to Facebook trolling will cost Dems hundreds of thousands of votes. I just gotta believe that it won’t be nearly enough.
And if Dems win the White House and Senate then Agenda Item #1 (after curing Covid) needs to be a massive new voting rights act that puts into place permanent tools to deal with all of this fuckery at every level.
Jinchi
@Ed Marshall:
scratched off names?
Omnes Omnibus
@Kent: Yep.
mrmoshpotato
@Craig:
It can be done. Probably along similar lines as Brett Kavanaugh’s 200k of credit card debt and his 1.5 mil mortgage disappearing.
Adam L Silverman
@Omnes Omnibus: If you don’t pay for professionals, you won’t get professional results.
trollhattan
So what have you accomplished today? Anything meaningful? The answer is NO, you pale in comparison to this.
And that’s okay.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Omnes Omnibus: Again, I agree with you.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Adam L Silverman: “Dirty Deeds, done dirt cheap”.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@trollhattan:
That’s scary.
are those symptoms of drought? I haven’t heard anything about Alaska recently
Calouste
@Omnes Omnibus: Volkswagen had software in their cars that cut emissions only when the cars were subject to an emissions test, so having software behave differently in testing and production environments is certainly possible.
West of the Rockies
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
That is the feeling one comes away with of late.
We need to be vigilant, we need to GOTV. We must not be complacent or naive enough to believe that no one will try to ratfuck this election (or use gerrymandering and voter suppression).
I was recently (in a spirit of earnest interest, I assume) asked here, “What makes you think Biden will win?”
Wariness begins to feel like pessimism. Pessimism leads to resignation. Resignation leads to failure. (And, yes, hate leads to suffering.)*
Edit: repaired an unforgivable error in quotation.
Bill Arnold
Anyone else remember this from 2018? (I might know of such things, and their dragon-slavemasterscaretakers are at best Goomies. :-)
Kanye West proclaims his love for Trump: ‘We are both dragon energy’ (Adam Gabbatt and Ben Jacobs, 25 Apr 2018)
Darkrose
What you don’t do is go with someone that’s already burned his bridges with younger African American voters.
I spend a fair amount of time on The Root. A lot of folks there are really unhappy with Biden. Most have said they’re going to hold their noses and vote for him anyway. However, the one thing that the commenters agree on is that Kanye West has no constituency. He’s not that popular with Gen-Z–he’s not their generation. Most Millenial Black folks who dislike Biden are also not going to vote for the Black guy who disparaged Harriet Tubman and said slavery was a choice, especially now that he’s also anti-abortion.
Jill Stein had the advantage of “Dr.” in front of her name, and her stated positions were nominally on the left. Right now, Kanye is best known for being an on-again, off-again Trump supporter who thinks he’s Jesus and is known to be bipolar and off his medication. I’m much more concerned about fuckery with the USPS and people being prevented from voting than I am about a groundswell of support for Kanye West.
Omnes Omnibus
@Calouste: How does the voting machine know that whether it is a test or an election day?
piratedan
@Omnes Omnibus: most likely with a timestamp check and for most systems, there’s a variable toggle setting to know if you’re running in either a test mode or a test environment.
NotMax
@Darkrose
Indeed. That African-Americans would flock to him is on a par with Howard Schultz assuming anyone who ever sipped a latte at Starbuck’s would rush to support him.
Neither is worth thinking about as having an impact of any import for the time spent saying their name out loud.
trollhattan
@Jim, Foolish Literalist
I haven’t either, but will not be surprised if drought, shorter winters and the massive boreal forest fires they’re routinely having are diminishing the bears’ habitat and food supply.
So we should totally give the green light to that Pebble Mine.
Calouste
@Omnes Omnibus: Pretty easy to work out whether it’s Election Day is it? It just looks up the calendar. And in a proprietary machine it’s pretty easy to add a small chip with it’s own power that stores the real date, which only get accessed by the bit of code that determines whether the results are going to be “adjusted”. Any test is also not going to be the same as an actual election day. It’s most likely a lot shorter, people will be pushing the buttons faster, voters would follow each other quicker, all kinds of things that could be detected and used to determine whether it’s a test or not.
RobertDSC-Mac Mini
I wonder what the Lincoln Project will do with shitbag West.
Frankensteinbeck
Kanye is a non-issue. He’s not even a tiny issue. African-American voters, bluntly, are not as stupid as whites. They don’t like Kanye. They don’t want Kanye. I have never heard anything except that he’s an embarrassment. Kanye peeling off a couple of percentage points would be a disaster, but he won’t. He’s not a legitimate alternative. No frustrated Sanders voters that would have settled for Biden will go to him. No NeverTrumps that would have settled for Biden will go to him. Kanye is a nut job and he’s highly conservative and he’s a joke. He appeals to no one who would even have had to hold down their lunch as they pulled a lever for Biden. He might siphon a few votes from Trump, but I doubt enough for anyone to care.
Yes, Republicans are throwing everything at the wall they can. It’s all turning out to be much weaker retreads of 2016. They won 2016 on a hair, and Biden is doing 6-8% better than Hillary was.
Biden is going to win in a blow-out. When your enemy is being incompetent in front of you, don’t try to twist it around to pretend he’s secretly a genius.
Omnes Omnibus
@piratedan: This is a link to the voting security page at the WI Election Commission website. While I can’t prove that machines in WI haven’t been hacked, I would say that the procedures in place make it very unlikely. One of the factors that make it unlikely in WI is that there are too many moving parts for it to be feasible. I can’t speak to other states.
piratedan
@Calouste: true, it all comes down to simply modifying the decision tree in the code to perform a date/time check and drop into a different module for execution if criteria are met, if you wanted to be sneaky, you set up an internal counter to only siphon off a percentage of votes (like one in 10 or 23 or whatever criteria you wanted) to plausibly cover your ass. Hell, depending on the language that is used, you could even direct all of your “dirty deeds” in a different module in a different executable program and then return that “modified result”, if you’re just not looking for it, or know implicitly where your decision tree side track could be applied, it takes a certain amount of qa/peer review checking to uncover this. To be fair, if you’ve already penetrated a company to hack it’s software storage, you’re probably good enough to manipulate the code within it.
It takes some specific skills to do this, but shit, we’ve got high schoolers hacking twitter, so I won’t discount the possibility.
Ian
@gwangung:
She went on RT way before the election and gave Putin a proper tongue bath. It was pretty clear who she was trolling for and how little of a F*** she gave about the environment.
Omnes Omnibus
@Calouste: @piratedan: Fuck it. You win.
piratedan
@Omnes Omnibus: that could all be well and true for Wisconsin OO, and I’m not gonna say that your experience isn’t valid. What I am saying that while the old ladies of Wisconsin lay somewhere on the spectrum, I don’t believe that they comprise the entirety of that spectrum.
a whole lotta softare companies operate in the white, but to deny the existence of folks like Facebook and other social media conglomerates who try to initiate and persuade us to consume (be the product a political affiliation or shoes), there are some talented black hats out there too… nor do I discount the ability of people, who do not have what we consider to be our best interests at heart, to be able to fuck with things.
Kent
@trollhattan: Hey, I used to live in Juneau Alaska!
We would see bears in our back yard frequently but they never tried to get in. I remember on incident when a black bear was strolling along in front of Bartlett Hospital, which, like most buildings in Juneau is backed against the woods. When the bear walked by the front door the automatic hospital doors opened wide open (they are like grocery store automatic doors for easy wheelchair entry. So the bear looks in, smells the cookies and coffee from the little espresso cart in the lobby, and walks right in with the door closing behind him. They had devil of a time chasing him out because he wasn’t going to chase out through a closed door and they couldn’t get the doors to stay open without someone standing there next to them. They had to finally figure out how to get them permanently opened before they could chase him out.
I forgot the name they gave him, but they still sell stuffed bears in the gift shop in memory.
Ed Marshall
@Jinchi:
https://twitter.com/OldBullTV/status/1291074699523432448/photo/1
Sig 311 on the Wisconsin Petition was Bernie Sanders who doesn’t seem to live in Milwaukee…
Kent
I’m FB friends with a ton of old NOAA work colleagues in fisheries and wildlife biology in Juneau, some of them now retired full time naturalist types. No one has said anything about unusual climate or fisheries patterns in SE Alaska this year. I was just up there last August and it seemed pretty normal aside from the constantly retreating glaciers.
The Pebble Mine is 1000 miles from Juneau give or take. Completely opposite side of the state.
The story was in the Sacramento Bee. I went to the Juneau Empire (local newspaper) and they had nothing on this bear attack: https://www.juneauempire.com/ so who knows.
dopey-o
@Omnes Omnibus: the software checks the date before it loops into vote-switching mode.
Nov 1? Record Biden tally. Nov 3? Time >= 15:00. For Biden tally = ****00, -10. Time >= 18:00 Record Biden tally.
Biden ‘s totals would peak long before the polls close.
(It’s midnight, i don’t have time to game it all out, but a clever high schooler CS kid could do it. it’s trivial.)
Ed Marshall
https://oldbull.tv/k-west-doc-and-nomination-petition/
That whole WI petition is something to behold in all it’s glory if you have ever actually worked a signature drive to place someone on a ballot (or even if you haven’t really).
frosty
@TaMara (HFG): I have a very lefty friend who voted for Stein. In Maryland. He said if it was a state where his vote would have made a difference he would have voted for Clinton.
Just a contrarian comment.
frosty
How many of these guys are there? Seriously, it doesn’t seem like a big cohort to me. And the 3rd party is going to need more than 10,000 votes in PA to swing it, based on the polls.
Nevertheless, I appreciate your perspective, terrifying as it may be.
prostratedragon
@Omnes Omnibus:
And from there, maybe follow with a little Gregory Porter (“Revival”); you define “you.” I’d been wondering what Mr. Porter was doing lately.
Heywood J.
As unlikely as it is, it’s still dismaying beyond belief to think that, despite a clear majority of responsible citizens showing up and doing the right thing, the whole process could be derailed by a handful of suckers and shitheads.
I just hope karma finds them first and hits them hardest. And I wish Kanye West would just go away already. He may or may not be mentally ill, but he’s definitely an asshole with daddy issues, which is why he sucked up to Trump and took a nice paycheck to sabotage the country. Hope it was all worth it, buddy.
Captain C
@Ed Marshall: I wonder if we’ll find out at some point that a high percentage of the Kanye signature drive was pure grift and fraud.
prostratedragon
@Emma from FL: Never is the idiotic simplicity of their minds better displayed than in reference to Black people.
Heywood J.
@Frankensteinbeck: I hope you’re right, and your argument makes sense. I’d still like to see Kanye and his wife go broke though. I can’t boycott something I’d never buy to begin with, but it’d be nice to think that this tedious little stunt of his might cost him some fans.
Ed Marshall
@Captain C:
Based on the work they turned they turned in what they *should* have done was paid actual people like $100 to sign to the petition instead of paying vols $10 per signature and have them show up with stuff they forged out of the phone book.
Calouste
@Ed Marshall: Didn’t they use some GOP signature gathering outfit? Maybe states should pay some extra attention to the signatures in the future whenever those folk are involved. And maybe in the past as well.
Ed Marshall
I mean, that runs afoul of the law, but so does making a pile of childish forgeries and trying to submit them to the election authorities.
frosty
@Citizen Alan: My personal embarrassment is my vote for John Anderson … and for Gerald Ford, too. But after 1980 I learned my lesson — straight D.
Can I get points for Shirley Chisholm in the 1972 California primary?
frosty
@different-church-lady: Hmmm. I’ll have to give that some thought. No, wait!! You’re meaning in life is to make me laugh with your comments.
This one didn’t need all caps though.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
I don’t see any Dem leaning voter standing in line for hours for West.
I do see Dumptards, brain washed by Fox into thinking Dump will win in a cake walk, voting for West to make Dear Leader’s obvious scheme look good.
frosty
@Omnes Omnibus: Thank you. That’s been my observation as a poll watcher. The election judges (all R in my neck of the woods) are serious.
opiejeanne
@WaterGirl: Thank you for reminding me. I saw that and it did comfort me quite a bit last night. Omnes is a good egg.
slightly_peeved
@Adam L Silverman:
Kanye’s inability to get enough legitimate signatures to get on the ballot doesn’t speak well to his ability to convince anyone to vote for him.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
Must have been thinking of Stormy Daniels
Calouste
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch:
Prayut is more or less a military dictator. Of course the shitgibbon likes him.
Brachiator
Biden will be running against two mentally ill candidates. It will be an interesting challenge.
I don’t know whether the media will actually cover much of Kanye’s “campaign.” But they will probably give time to other people who will echo his sentiments.
What a mess. It will cause some confusion, but I don’t think that the GOP will gain as much as they think.
James E Powell
@Jinchi:
I want to agree with you because I think talking to Republicans is a waste of time, but I also know from experience working on campaigns that had as their main goal getting non-voters to turn out that it is a Sisyphean task. It’s like the quadrennial claim that this time, the kids are gonna turn out because [ —– ], but it never happens.
rikyrah
There are those of us who told you this about Koonye when it first happened.
we told you that it was all about helping Dolt45.
That this is so obvious right now, means that we are ahead of the game than 2016.
This is not a legitimate choice. A vote for Koonye is a vote for Dolt45.
Period.
we can say it loudly and with our chests.
Gvg
@different-church-lady: Make something. I find a project with a tangible result helps my self esteem and good humor the most. Fix something. Fix something for someone else. Home repairs are good. I get more from refinishing an antique dresser than cleaning up that has to be done weekly. The dresser looks great and every time I look at it I feel good. The shed I helped my dad build last summer looks great. It’s done right and sure is better than the old rusted metal kit shed it replaced.
Jinchi
Here’s a presidential election where it happened
2008: 69,498,516 59,948,323
2004: 59,028,444 62,040,610
That’s over 10 million more Democrats for Obama than Kerry, and 3 million more Republicans for McCain than Bush. So Obama wasn’t converting Republicans, he was bringing in new voters.
And here’s a midterm election example:
2018: 53.4% voter turnout
2014: 41.9% voter turnout
And here is where that midterm turnout came from
JR
I mean, fuck Kanye and all, but he has higher favorability among republicans and it’s not particularly close (he has terrible favorability overall).
MomSense
@Omnes Omnibus:
Brennan said in an interview with the author of a book called “Rigged” that there were states with unencrypted systems and that Russia had the capability to change vote tallies and voter registrations.
lowtechcyclist
I’m going to be the turd in the room once again.
1) Yes, anyone who doesn’t want another four years of the disaster and nation-wrecker that is Donald Trump needs to vote for Biden. Period.
2) BUT:
It also surely hasn’t escaped Professor Jones’ notice that, in the visible cases where the Democratic Party takes sides between genuinely horrible safe-seat incumbents and more liberal primary challengers, it goes to the mats to protect the horribles (Cuellar, Lipinski, Neal, etc.) and blackball vendors who would help the challengers. Meanwhile, party leaders like Hoyer support a vacuous Kennedy challenge to a very good liberal Democratic Senator in Ed Markey, and are hands-off at best with respect to challenges to AOC and Tlaib.
It certainly gives the strong appearance that the Democratic diversity here is happening in spite of the Democratic Party institutions and leadership. Maybe these cases are outliers, but they’re all unforced errors on the part of the Democratic Party. They’re basically anti-salesmanship to the younger generation of potential Democratic voters.
Now I’m old enough to be on Medicare, and my voting habits are well formed. I’ll show up and I’ll vote Dem, period. But that’s not the case with voters who are 40 years younger than me, and who are by and large much more liberal than my generation. And as much as you can hope that twentysomethings would think more maturely and strategically about voting than they do, hope is not a plan. On the other hand, the Democratic Party leadership – well, it’s their job to think strategically about things like this, and I don’t see them doing it.
As always, sorry I can’t be more rah-rah-Dems, but I’m this way because I want the Democratic Party to be better than it is. It’s the only non-evil major party we’ve got, so I want it to be as good at being an opposing force to evil as it can possibly be. And being all rah-rah and overlooking its faults won’t help get it there.
debbie
First, there have got to be more stringent qualifications to run for the office of President. Second, I’d bet West intends to turn his votes over to Trump. He has to be stopped.
SFAW
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch:
According to Crypt-Keeper Conway, most of the English-speaking world pronounces it “Thighland.”
She forget to mention that most of the English-speaking world pronounces “p-r-e-s-i-d-e-n-t t-r-u-m-p” as “that fucking moron traitor who stole the 2016 election.”
[I was tempted to write “Throat Wobbler Mangrove,” but I didn’t want to sully the Pythons.]
AxelFoley
@WaterGirl:
Beyoncé and Kanye were never together.
Morzer
The notion that the preposterous Kanye West is going to achieve anything except a very bright light shone on his various issues and beliefs seems … implausible. I suspect that his wife knows this better than anyone, which is why she’s been very obviously deeply unenthused by the whole pathetic nonsense-fest.
AxelFoley
@Emma from FL:
Thank you!
Morzer
@lowtechcyclist: If it’s a choice between a Republican and a Democrat, put me down for the Democrat every time. That said, the Democratic party’s leadership and organization is one hell of a mess. They seem incapable of learning from their mistakes and unaware that they’ve ever made any. There’s something deeply wrong with the way the party handles campaigns, the way it plays the game in Washington and its apparent inability to think through its remarkable run of losses to a Republican party that has no credible policies and no ability or willingness to govern.
slightly_peeved
One thing assumed without evidence in the original post is that West will draw more voters away from Biden than Trump. One poll conducted about a month ago found the opposite:
https://twitter.com/PpollingNumbers/status/1282768444484734978?s=20
I can understand the assumption that West would help Republicans, given that Republicans are trying to get him registered. But it’d hardly be the first time the Republicans made a counter-productive campaign decision.
Geminid
Kanye West may be a joke, but his candidacy gives a him small platform that can be a fulcrum to lever all kinds of propaganda from domestic and foreign sources, so it has to be taken as a real threat. Hopefully there will be prosecutions for petition forgery. This happened in 2018 in the Virginia 2nd Congressional District race, when members of Congressman Taylor’s campaign staff were charged with felonies after forging names on a petition to nominate a local African American politician to run as an independent. She might have drawn votes from Democratic candidate Elaine Luria, but the independent’s petition was thrown out, and Luria went on to flip the seat. This year Luria faces Taylor again, and the Democrats are making hay out of the fact that the special prosecutor’s investigation has not concluded, and that he has complained in court papers of unspecified non cooperation. The petition gatherers included names of one Republican officeholder who had died recently, and several living who disclaimed them. Their fraud was exposed in a couple of days by local media.
AnonPhenom
@Adam L Silverman:
I agree with all you’ve said regarding this election. At the same time having the Democratic Party recognize and address the dynamics that make spoilers possible and allowing an outlet for them while neutralizing them (such as ranked voting systems) would be more productive I believe.
Mo MacArbie
200 comments, and no Vote for Yeez Nutz jokes? C’mon, man, are you all junkies?
Scuffletuffle
@different-church-lady: if you care for a pet, that is the meaning in your life. Nothing else is needed.
Geminid
One good thing this year is that the Libertarian Party has departed from its recent practice of running former office holders with name recognition and nominated a relatively unknown presidential candidate. She teaches introductory psychology at Clemson, and in 1996 ran to be Vice President on the Libertarian ticket. Their Vice Presidential candidate this year is an internet comedian. Quite a step down from William Weld, who may regret what he did in 2016. Gary Johnson was a real factor in the last election. I believe he recieved 3.6% of the vote. Some of those voters would have voted Libertarian in any event, but I believe some voted for Johnson because they assumed Clinton had it the bag and thought they could cast a “free” protest vote. I think a lot of potential Democratic voters assumed likewise and stayed home. And their enthusiasm might have been sapped by foreign and domestic propaganda sources. Which I guess brings us back to Kanye West’s candidacy.
NobodySpecial
@Craig: I assume the Kardashian marriage (and contacts) didn’t hurt in that respect.
Geminid
@AnonPhenom: Ranked choice voting is now being tested in some states and localities, so we are now beginning to see its consequences. I want to see more before I decide if I want it in Virginia. It could be a good thing in party primaries, whereranked might keep candidates with strong but narrow support from advancing with a small plurality. I know you may not have been talking about the use of ranked voting for a presidential contest, but I gotta tell you, just the thought of that scares the hell out of me. It could open up a Pandora’s box of third parties, celebrity candidates, billionaire candidates, trillionaire syndicates of celebrity and billionaire-backed candidates. Any endorsements for a second place vote would not be binding, but they could still be decisive, so there would be endorsement trading, buying, and extortion. And heavily promoted “reveal” celebrations. It could make our current mess look like a Norman Rockwell picture.
AnonPhenom
@Geminid:
Don’t be scared.
All ranked voting means is if your first choice doesn’t make the top 2 vote getters in a race (of 3 candidates) your second choice vote becomes your new first choice.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_voting
Simple.
Geminid
@AnonPhenom: Yeah, ranked choice voting is simple, and I understand it. My comment above was about unintended but foreseeable problems in using ranked choice voting for a presidential election. If we moved to presidential elections by popular vote, I’d take a runoff over ranked choice voting any day of the week, for the reasons stated above.
Chris Johnson
@Darkrose: Adam’s real point here, I think, is that Ye on ballots is a ‘legitimate-seeming’ target for outright election cheating: never mind that he has no constituency, they will take Biden votes and straight up assign them to Ye and then claim that is reality.
My problem with where Adam is at is this: those people have ALREADY been doing this for half my damn life. What is the purpose of this fearmongering as if all of a sudden they’re going to START doing this and it will fuck us?
They have nothing they didn’t have in 2016. They were doing this in 2016 against a great complacency, and nobody was ready to just flip the table and revolt.
Things are different in 2020, and so part of this is to co-opt what would be a revolt if this shit goes on… but what you’re correctly identifying is just the same old shit going on, against increasingly horrifying odds. The Republicans are fucking themselves, harder and harder, by their horrifying actions. They’re forced to claim the country is an Afghanistan hellscape made up of completely demented black nihilist terrorists just to hold their own and not cave in completely, and the cost of their doing this is that they’re burning out their own people through panic and terror.
This is not that complicated. We’re in a new (ish) form of war, primarily against Russia. Russia’s involved in this Kanye stuff, too. They don’t really want power for the Republicans and that’s a handicap.
Let’s not pretend that all of a sudden they’re threatening to START doing this horrifying, anti-democracy, totalitarian crap. It’s no different than what they’ve been doing all this time. Awareness, yes, but we’re here to fight, not panic.
We have too much to do. There’s no room for freaking out. All hands on deck.
J R in WV
@opiejeanne:
Don’t you live in Washington state? I think cannabis is legal there now. Try edible candies, delicious chocolate truffle with a defined number of milligrams…. And no prescription necessary. Much safer than Xanax, etc.
AnonPhenom
@Geminid:
OK.
You do you.
J R in WV
@Omnes Omnibus:
The VWs were looking for signs that the auto wasn’t on the open road, was the vehicle going around curves, experiencing bumps in the highway, constant engine speed, etc.
A voting machine knows whether it’s using the production database or a test database would be one way to approach this. The poll worker inserts a different key for election work than for testing. For one way… I’m not an election voting machine programmer, but I hear people who work on ATMs are good at fixing voting machines. IYKWIMAITYD
ET…fix thangs
JML
As a MN guy, I really wish no Dem would vote for Ilhan Omar. She sucks so much. The narcissism is strong with that one, and she’s a crappy rep.
Darkrose
@Chris Johnson: The comment I replied to was literally Adam saying that Black Bernie supporters would vote for Kanye over Biden because of name recognition. I’ll just quote Damon Young from The Root here:
something fabulous
For the first time, going to comment before reading the thread!
…surely we call this “Balloonsplaining”?
something fabulous
@something fabulous: aww. thread was already over, anyway.
:( ‘splainin’ to myself.
SWMBO
@Darkrose: He puts raisins in the potato salad.
Ricky Jones
@Hildebrand: Actually, I voted for Hillary and I find these ideological “purity” bifurcations rather cartoonish.