Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Let the trolls come, and then ignore them. that’s the worst thing you can do to a troll.

This blog will pay for itself.

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

Oppose, oppose, oppose. do not congratulate. this is not business as usual.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

Usually wrong but never in doubt

This must be what justice looks like, not vengeful, just peaceful exuberance.

Donald Trump found guilty as fuck – May 30, 2024!

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

Everything is totally normal and fine!!!

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

Many life forms that would benefit from greater intelligence, sadly, do not have it.

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

“Until such time as the world ends, we will act as though it intends to spin on.”

They punch you in the face and then start crying because their fist hurts.

Prediction: the gop will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

They are not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

Imperialist aggressors must be defeated, or the whole world loses.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

Let me file that under fuck it.

You are here: Home / Elections 2024 / Friday Morning Open Thread: FORWARD!

Friday Morning Open Thread: FORWARD!

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Josh Marshall at TPM — “Kamala, A Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery Inside an Enigma, Many People are Saying”:

… I actually got in a minor spat today with a reporter who I’d dinged for an article description which presented Harris as a sort mystery candidate verging on a Manchurian Candidate, with unknown views and barely detailed ambitions. Are we kidding with all of this?

On the one hand, journalists press for information, details, answers. That’s what they do. It’s their job. It’s part of their job to be annoying. They press for things that people aren’t going to volunteer. But there is something uncanny and vaguely absurd hearing this mix of complaints, demands and warnings of electoral disaster leveled at a campaign which is finishing up what has to be at least among, and quite possibly the, best single month of any presidential campaign in at least half a century. Campaign success isn’t what journalists are or should be concerned about. But it defies belief that Harris and her campaign would shift gears when what they’ve been doing is working this well…

The deeper story is that most campaign reporters simply don’t know what to make of Harris’ campaign and can’t figure out how it has managed, at least for the moment, to be so successful. That’s not a criticism: I think many of Harris’ supporters are equally mystified. But they’re just happy with the results. They don’t need an explanation. But for reporters the inexplicableness requires a storyline. And this is that storyline: the substanceless campaign, the lack of interviews, yada yada yada. As Kate noted in today’s pod: Biden started doing a bunch of interviews when his campaign started to tank. Trump’s been doing a spree of them because he’s floundering and he’s trying to regain attention. Candidate do these when they need to, not when reporters demand it…

The final part of the story is rooted in official Washington’s view of Harris. To put it baldly, most elite DC journalists treated Harris with a kind of breezy disdain that could scarcely rise to the level of contempt. For the first year of her vice presidency there was an ongoing series of critical reports about issues in the Office of the Vice President, staff drama, mean bossism, general turmoil. I don’t know how much reality there was to those reports. But they set a dismal tone. You’ll remember that when Ezra Klein and others got together the calls for a Thunderdome convention, Klein referred delicately and painedly to “the Kamala Harris problem,” a problem so obvious that it scarcely required explanation: how to usher her out of the way for others from the vaunted Democratic bench.

I’m not trying to pick on Klein here. I’ve done enough of that. I note this simply because it was such a deep conventional wisdom that it hardly required explanation. Everyone in that world knew what he meant. That certainly figures into this, and in both directions. It is not only that there is this great appetite to find out just what it is Harris must be doing wrong. That backstory must have left Harris just utterly uninterested in what these folks have to say. They treated her as something between a punchline and a nonentity and now she’s the odds-on favorite, if only by a small margin, to be the next President. Why should she care?


Gift link (FWIW):

… Ahead of Harris’s speech in North Carolina, her campaign announced her support for more than a dozen economic policies aimed at “lowering costs for American families,” including some that went beyond what President Joe Biden had promised.

The most striking proposals were for the elimination of medical debt for millions of Americans; the “first-ever” ban on price gouging for groceries and food; a cap on prescription drug costs; a $25,000 subsidy for first-time home buyers; and a child tax credit that would provide $6,000 per child to families for the first year of a baby’s life…

The flurry of policy positions — just days before the Democratic National Convention in Chicago — represented the clearest articulation yet of how Harris, who has only had a relatively brief time on the national stage, would handle economic policy if elected this fall. Harris has thus far surrounded herself with many former aides to Biden, and her team had made some overtures to business leaders that they hoped reflected a more centrist approach. But the policy positions she embraced Friday suggest she will continue, if not deepen, the party’s transformation under Biden, who pushed for more aggressive government intervention in the economy on industrial, labor and antitrust policies…

 
I was gonna save this for the weekend, but that seems to be a jinx, so I’ll let y’all individually bookmark it for later:

Reader Interactions

183Comments

  3. 3.

    Baud

    But the policy positions she embraced Friday suggest she will continue, if not deepen, the party’s transformation under Biden, who pushed for more aggressive government intervention in the economy on industrial, labor and antitrust policies

    As opposed to more aggressive government intervention in the bodies of women.

  5. 5.

    rikyrah

     

    🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

    The Biden Accomplishments Guy (@What46HasDone) posted at 2:44 AM on Fri, Aug 16, 2024:
    My Beloved Claire,

    I am writing you from the front lines of the race war. Today, we, the whites, have taken what perhaps is a deadly blow. Tim Walz, a fellow white, has committed a devastating insider attack, by making a joke about white people not liking spicy food. This may be the end. I don’t know if we shall ever recover.

    If I do not return home, please continue to train our boys, Connor and Tanner, to withstand the ways of the enemy by making sure they each have one Taco Bell Mild Sauce Packet every time you bring home drive thru for them.

    Forever Yours,
    David Marcus

  6. 6.

    Jeffro

    I watched that whole conversation yesterday – fantastic stuff!

    FYI Doug Sosnik wastes a lot of time and electrons today in an interactive piece about winning swing-state EC combinations that tells us nothing new: this election will be close, Harris is likely ahead by a bit, and trumpov isn’t helping himself one bit (especially in Georgia).

    In the past three weeks, Ms. Harris has set the terms of the campaign as a choice between change versus going backward – a positive view of the future compared to a dystopian view of the present with a desire to go back to the past.

    But even though Ms. Harris’s favorability has gone up significantly since she announced her candidacy, the increase in support is soft. That is the reason that the Democratic convention is such an important opportunity for her to close the deal with key swing voters.

    Mr. Trump, on the other hand, is fully defined in the minds of most voters, and has elected to double down on catering to his MAGA base despite alienating the key swing voter blocs that will determine the outcome of the election. During the last hour of his convention speech, and every day since then, Mr. Trump has offered words and actions that remind Americans why they voted him out of office in 2020.

    Mr. Trump has increasingly looked like a washed-up rock star who can play only his greatest hits for his dwindling group of fans. If he loses in November, he will have been a one-hit wonder who led the Republican Party to four presidential and midterm election-cycle losses in a row.

    So what else is there to say but…GO BLUE!!!  (and happy Friday, too!)

  7. 7.

    Jeffro

    also, I posted this last night, but I’m extremely interested to see how it all plays out: FBI raids Rappahanock estate of key Putin contact w/ trumpov campaign:

    Dimitri Simes, 76, has been well known in the Washington, D.C., diplomatic world for decades and is considered an expert in Russian affairs. He was the longtime president and chief executive officer of the Center for the National Interest, a public policy think tank founded by former President Richard Nixon. Simes left the center in 2022. 

    Simes had close ties to the presidential campaign and administration of former President Donald Trump. Simes was among those who figured prominently in Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe of potential Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 election. The report* concluded that Simes did not act as an intermediary between the Trump campaign and Moscow.

    *the report itself…or Barr’s cover-up memo??

  8. 8.

    rikyrah

    😢😢😢😢🥺🥺🥹🥹🥹

     

    Kamala for PA (@KamalaforPA) posted at 4:11 PM on Thu, Aug 15, 2024:

    Meet Angie, a 95-year-old delegate from Allegheny County.

     

    She’s ready to make history and nominate @KamalaHarris in Chicago next week. #DNCinPA2024

     

    “Before God takes me, this woman’s going to be the pride and joy of the United States of America.” https://t.co/KvcYaDc7WR

    (https://x.com/KamalaforPA/status/1824192211623481644?t=sJ8_vlhPD8X4bSMDlOoVTw&s=03)

  9. 9.

    Chief Oshkosh

    @Baud: Beat me to it.

    Related, Harris is clearly signaling that she’ll continue spending where it’s needed, short-term and long-term. Yet the headline on my newsfeed is that, paraphrasing, “Harris apparently planning to cut costs (but we’re not sure because she won’t talk to us).”

    The national embarrassment that is our national press continues…

  12. 12.

    TBone

    Break the narrative thingy like it’s a glass ceiling.  Make hackney diamonds.  Smash their ability to frame things. Just. Do. It.

  13. 13.

    Princess

    I dug into that Trashelle Odom/Corey Lewandowski harassment story. What a vile pig he is — and she came off as quite brave for speaking up. Her husband is the sort of awful human you can imagine supporting Trump. A guy killed someone at a big flashy party he held. Some reports seem to suggest they’re divorced but she seems to have vanished. Tbh I ended up feeling concerned for her safety.

  14. 14.

    oldgold

    Trump last night sucking up to big time donor, Miriam Adelson, who he gave the Medal of Freedom to, said:

    ”But civilian version, it’s actually much better because everyone [who] gets the Congressional Medal of Honor, they’re soldiers. They’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets or they’re dead. She gets it, and she’s a healthy, beautiful woman, and they’re rated equal, but she got the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and she got it for — and that’s through committees and everything else.”

    Almost unbelievable.

  18. 18.

    TBone

    @Jeffro: good eye!  Please keep us abreast of the situation as developments unfold.

    This bullshit caught my eye:

    “…the estate, named “Patria…:

    Smash the patria-rchy

  19. 19.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    So, Harris doesn’t fit the MSM narrative so according to the MSM Harris has to be wrong.
    They really are a pack of mediocrities, aren’t they?

  20. 20.

    Ken

    The post title reminds me of one of my language peeves.

    The Harris campaign is looking forward.

    JD Vance wrote a foreword to a book by a racist POS who called people “unhuman”.

    Lots of people using forward in the second.

  22. 22.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @Jeffro: 2016 wasn’t a Trump win, it was a Hillary loss, and Trump just happened to be the one on the ballot who wasn’t Hillary.

  23. 23.

    cmorenc

    The press barking at Harris for details should maybe consider what “details” Trump was giving back in 2016, beyond “I am the talented-ist business guy on the planet, cause I had a teevee program playing one” and a slogan “Make America Great Again” that *wink* *wink* was implicitly understood to mean back to some unspecified time when men were men, women were still real women-like, and blacks and other minorities stayed in their lane, vaguely 1950s, but details, shmetails, who needs details?

    …and regardless of any criticism members of the MSM might have occasionally directed at Trump about lack of details, he managed to eke out a win precisely because of MSM focus on the vibes about but-her-emails and Ben-Gazzi instead of substance.

  24. 24.

    Soprano2

    So OT, I may have found my next cat. We’re pet sitting for the neighbor this week. She’s a black cat whose name is Half Pint because she’s a small cat, although when I picked her up I realized she’s “dense” like my last black cat was. She’s small but heavy! She and our dog get along fine. This poor cat belonged to a woman who was homeless for awhile; that’s how my neighbors ended up with her. The cat has been living in his shop where he keeps his motorcycle because they have another cat and aren’t sure how the two would get along. I told him that if we like the cat and she gets along with everyone we might keep her. So, the Cat Distribution System is working as intended. So far she loves my husband; she was already lying in his lap last night.

  27. 27.

    TBone

    Hubby came outside earlier with his little, lopsided, crooked grin that lets me know he’s up to something in his head.  He looked at me and said “Radical Cop Kamala” so I know that one’s not going to stick.

    Now he’s inside yelling at the TV about the MAGA ads running against our down ticket PA Dems.  “If you don’t think America is great right now, you are welcome to GTFO of here at any time!” He told me he’s hoping the rumpy neighbor guy who’s outside in his garage right now can hear him (all of our windows are open).

  28. 28.

    ArchTeryx

    So glad that Harris is just ignoring the political press. They’ve been in the tank since Day One and the entire “He’s old” narrative was meant to allow Trump to romp to victory. That’s what their billionaire and oligarch owners wanted, that’s what the millionaire pundits wanted. The rest are just following orders from the first two. All this “horserace” crap was a pure smokescreen this time around.

    They got themselves a real horserace now, and instead of stopping to gab to hostile media microphones, the Queen Yeen is campaigning like nobody’s campaigned since Obama. She’s, as they say, in this to win it. And the media gets as petulant as my rabbit when he’s throwing a fit, footstomping, grunting and turning his back. Far as I’m concerned, that’s a Tell.

    And Trump’s still spouting off about how the media hates HIM. If he was more of sound mind I’d say it was all kayfabe – it certainly was in 2016. But since his brain turned into a foul-smelling lump of Limburger cheese, it’s probable he genuinely believes it this time. The whole thing is a circus with no ringmaster, and I’m so glad Kamala Harris knows not to go into the tent.

  29. 29.

    RinaX

    I’m seeing some concern on Twitter (always and forever) about Collin Allred’s lackluster campaign in Texas. I know anything statewide in that place is always a long shot, but is he really not putting in much effort? I thought he raised a ton of money.

  30. 30.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Enhanced Voting Techniques: I don’t entirely agree. Trump managed to beat the entire Republican primary candidate field, not narrowly, but by a mile, while the entire pundit world stared in disbelief and concocted fantasies that his massive polling lead was some kind of illusion and he was going to collapse any moment now, because a winner could not be this absurd. He apparently offered something to millions of people that excited them. I think his status as a TV celebrity was a large part of it.

  31. 31.

    sdhays

    @Enhanced Voting Techniques: “The narrative” is such an arrogant and patronizing thing. It’s not enough for reporters to just report what they see; they must explain it for us idiots, their audience, because we’re too stupid to figure it out ourselves from their reporting. And they all have to agree on the story they see, like a herd of lobotomized sheep.

    If you want to write a narrative, write a fucking book, not national political news!

  32. 32.

    jonas

    Good God, who is that Ben Jacobs asshat? The 24 year-old Jefferson was already VP of the non-existent United States in 1767? Who knew?

    Meanwhile Trump’s out there speculating about Tic Tac inflation or whatever and the only people fact checking him these days are late night comedians.

  33. 33.

    Another Scott

    [ sigh ]

    Oh well, I cannot vote for Harris now, given she is gaslighting us about growing chili peppers.

    Similarly, I retract my previous votes for the Clintons as there was already a Funkadelic Clinton who served as VP and I’m bigly against political dynasties.

    [ groucho-roll-eyes.gif ]

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  34. 34.

    Steve LaBonne

    These fuckers studiously ignored her for 3 1/2 years and now pretend they don’t know anything about her. Fuck them. There’s a reason why many of us wanted Biden to choose her as his running mate. (Not that many of us expected her to be this excellent as a candidate.)

  35. 35.

    TBone

    More good news from my beloved Commonwealth of PA 🥰

    https://digbysblog.net/2024/08/15/latinos-come-home/

    …a poll by TelevisaUnivision’s Strategy & Insights provided to WHYY News prior to its publication reveals that shift may have been particularly significant among Hispanic voters in the state. Whereas 39% of Hispanic voters in the Commonwealth said they definitely planned to vote for Biden just before his announcement, 49% now say the same about Harris.
    That checks out, according to Sarina Torres, 23, of Allentown.
    “I think a lot of that shift comes from Latina voters,” Torres, a college student and movement politics organizer, told WHYY News. “It’s more exciting to vote for a woman of color.”

    I don’t put stock in polls, but I think this is true.

  36. 36.

    Anonymous At Work

    Fear the daughter of Jamaica and India wielding peppers.  They compete to see whose peppers can strip paint from houses at a distance.

    She needs to do a curry cookout for teh DC press corps.

  37. 37.

    sdhays

    @Matt McIrvin: I had a colleague who I think didn’t vote for Trump, but he was convinced that Trump was actually a successful businessman, and while I don’t think he would admit it, it was almost certainly because Trump had a show playing a successful businessman and owned lots of property (who cares if it was all bought with Daddy’s money or mortgaged to the hilt?).

    My colleague liked to “balance” his news intake by reading both Huffington Post and Breitbart, without appreciating that even assuming they were mirror images (which they obviously aren’t), he’d just be taking in competing propaganda…like, that’s not a good plan for being informed.

  38. 38.

    Another Scott

    @Jeffro: When I first saw the Simes news yesterday, I thought, is he still alive??

    I remember seeing him, as the “sensible Soviet/Russia analyst everyone serious listens to” on the political talking heads shows on the TV during the Reagan days.  I can’t remember anything specific that he said, he was just part of the default Blob conventional wisdom as far as I remember.

    I wonder if he was in VVP’s pocket back then as well, or if VVP later got some dirt on him and caused him to turn in some way…

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  39. 39.

    Chris

    The final part of the story is rooted in official Washington’s view of Harris. To put it baldly, most elite DC journalists treated Harris with a kind of breezy disdain that could scarcely rise to the level of contempt.

    Note that elite VSP opinion of Tim Walz is going to be the same.  He’s a white Midwesterner without an Ivy League education or the military equivalent, without the accepted career in law or business, and with military credentials that don’t check the “officer” or “elite combat troop” boxes.  He spent a big chunk of his life working with kids, like some kind of girly man.  And despite his heritage he’s a Democrat, so you know he’s just a low-watt bulb that the Democrats keep around as a Hick Best Friend token, because he’s too dumb or too naive or too friendly to know they’re supposed to be blood enemies.

  40. 40.

    Frankensteinbeck

    The OG describes the crossover of racism and misogyny perfectly.  Invisible and assumed to be incompetent.  Beneath notice.  The pundits looked past her for white man options as if she were invisible.  Those are the stereotypes right there.

    The current situation really has the press putting their bigotries on display.

  41. 41.

    cmorenc

    I’m down at our house on the NC coast @Sunset Beach for a couple of weeks, which is definitely in a red-leaning county – sights of boats bearing “Trump” banners are (so far) much rarer at this point than they were in 2020, and the incidence of Trump signage in yards or docks is also noticeably much less (so far).  They are noticeably absent from some houses that had them prominently displayed hanging from upper decks in 2020.  OTOH, the real test will be whether they start coming out of the woodwork (to hang on the woodwork) after Labor Day, or during LBD weekend itself.

    Most likely explanation is that the majority of folks who were Trumpy in 2020 are still Trumpy, but the fervent passion of 2020 has gone a bit flat.  And there are probably a few Harris converts mixed in, but only way to really tell how many will be to compare vote % in November 2020 vs 2024- Trump won Brunswick County 62-38%, how many local voters will have actually seen the light this time around?

  42. 42.

    Chris

    @Enhanced Voting Techniques:

    So, Harris doesn’t fit the MSM narrative so according to the MSM Harris has to be wrong.

    No Democrat who’s successful can ever fit an MSM narrative.  The MSM only has one narrative, which is that it’s always 1972 and every Democrat is always George McGovern.  Anyone that doesn’t fit the mold has to be forced back into it by any means necessary.

  43. 43.

    O. Felix Culpa

    @RinaX: A BJ commenter who lives in Texas remarked yesterday that they’re not seeing signs of life from the Allred campaign. Disappointing, especially since the campaign has raked in tons of money, as you noted.

  44. 44.

    sdhays

    @jonas: All he had to do was change his framing, and it becomes an interesting historical tidbit, tying Harris with a consequential (though, problematic) founding father in a nice way.

    “Harris may be the first US VP to grow chilis at the Naval Observatory, but she shares a love for the spicy vegetable with Founding Father and Second US Vice President Thomas Jefferson…” etc.

  45. 45.

    3Sice

    The denouement was the Four Seasons fiasco. That was how it was going to go if the GOP kept on with their false prophet.

    Anyone still scratching their heads four years later is a propagandist, not a journalist.

  46. 46.

    raven

    @oldgold:The name of the Medal is simply “Medal of Honor” — the word “Congressional” is sometimes mistakenly used because the Medal was created by Congress; however, the Medal is purely a military award.

  51. 51.

    Chris Johnson

    @Jeffro: Oh GOOD. I love the kind of thing where it’s like… I eagerly await further developments knowing full well that the media WILL NOT carry any such developments or any reference to any of this.

    There’s the saying ‘a hit dog hollers’ but by contrast there’s the story of Christopher Lee playing Saruman. Lee’s been in the British Secret Service and would not talk about what he did there. Peter Jackson was directing him in a death scene, saying ‘so, you get stabbed, and you cry out ‘waugh!’ and fall down etc etc’.

    So, Christopher Lee contradicts him. ‘That is not what happens when a man gets stabbed. It is a sort of sudden indraw of breath, it doesn’t make an outcry…’ and Jackson’s sort of like ‘okaaaay, I’m not going to ask how you know that, you go ahead and you do you, action!’

    I earnestly believe that the stuff that goes down, in terms of FBI raids or other such activity, that really hurts the traitor faction of the Republican Party, does not produce an outcry. They yelp and squawk when they are offended. If you REALLY hurt them, they impose a media blackout to the best of their ability (which is kind of substantial though perhaps not complete).

    I look forward to mysteriously never hearing anything more about THIS one, and also mysteriously not having huge agita over Kamala Harris’s progress to the White House. As if the world worked normally and was not a giant evil clusterfuck.

    Let’s have more days where the world is a reasonable and normal place. I’ve had enough weird for one lifetime.

  52. 52.

    jonas

    @sdhays:  but he was convinced that Trump was actually a successful businessman

    Trump is now the third “businessman” president over the past century to have successfully run the country into the ground during his term. Hoover gave us the Great Depression. W gave us the Great Recession. And then Trump gave us the COVID debacle and ensuing socio-economic chaos, before also trying to launch a coup to stay in office illegally. I think we’ve had about as many “successful businessmen” as President as we can take.

  54. 54.

    Percysowner

     

    @O. Felix Culpa:

     Well shoot. I’ve thrown a little money his way, hoping he could make it work, but if he’s not trying, I need to spend my money better. I have been spreading my contributions around, and I’m willing to see if things ramp up after the convention. I hope they do, but there are a lot of races that I can support.

  55. 55.

    rikyrah

    @RinaX:

    I’m not impressed.

    Beto came up 2% short in an off-election years.

    THIS is a Presidential Year, with enthusiasm on our side, and I don’t see it. I don’t hear it.

    I see COngresswoman Jasmine Crockett doing event for Kamala Harris is Georgia, but not Allred IN  TEXAS?

     

    Ask Beasley and Mandela Barnes about how running away from the Democratic Party head of the ticket worked out for them.

    I don’t see him reaching out to those groups in Texas , that work with the Democratic Party BASE.

    Roland Martin, a native Texan, who has his ear to the ground, has been talking about this for a few weeks.

    He needs to run up his numbers in the Blue areas, but, doesn’t seem to understand that. That middle of the road bullshyt will only take you so far. You have to go to DEMOCRATIC PARTY VOTERS AND ASK FOR THEIR VOTES.

  56. 56.

    Chris

    @ArchTeryx:

    So glad that Harris is just ignoring the political press. They’ve been in the tank since Day One and the entire “He’s old” narrative was meant to allow Trump to romp to victory. That’s what their billionaire and oligarch owners wanted, that’s what the millionaire pundits wanted.

    Technically, what their billionaire and oligarch owners and the millionaire pundits wanted was for Biden to get rid of Trump in 2020, then for Trump to go away without a trace, then for Biden to step down for 2024 leaving the party in disarray with no front-runner, then for a Presentable Republican Candidate to win the 2024 election and restore the nation to its rightful rulers.

    It’s why they were furiously printing “DeSantis 2024” stories for two years, to the point that it’s almost certainly what single-handedly convinced him that he had a shot.

    Trouble is, Trump didn’t go away, and neither the media nor the Republican politicians who want him gone were willing to actually do any of the necessary work to make him gone, because that would mean challenging the kind of people the NYT loves to interview in Ohio diners and they simply don’t do that.  So we ended up with another Trump candidacy, as I knew we would as early as January 2020.

    So that puts them right back at the problem of Weird Howling Orange Fascist vs Democrat, and, well, you can’t just be down with the Democrat.

  59. 59.

    Belafon

    @RinaX: I’ve only seen a couple of ads, and haven’t heard much about his campaign. But I am frustrated at his campaign because he’s decided to avoid Harris and Walz and attempt to run as a middle of the road person, which is weird because they represent the two things he could win on here: abortion and school spending. He wants to run on choice and freedom, but isn’t standing with her. And Republicans here are trying to push vouchers, and he could be doing events in small towns with Walz to tell them that he will fight for their schools (small towns, even though they are Republican, are against vouchers because they know what will happen to their schools, which are often the smallest employer in the towns).

  60. 60.

    Matt McIrvin

    @TBone: I think the “polls are garbage” talk around here in the late days of the Biden campaign was mostly whistling past the graveyard. Polls have gotten harder to take than they used to be, but they haven’t actually been that bad at calling races over the past few years, and when they fail, it’s because something changed about the turnout environment.

    Just to take the most obvious instance, the demographic pattern of turnout in the Great Lakes region in 2016 was not the same when Donald Trump was running against Hillary Clinton than it had been previously, so all the state polls missed there. Eventually pollsters adjusted for it, so there was not that big a systematic miss later on.

    My gut says that the effect of this is to understate “vibes” fluctuations–that is, it’ll probably underestimate the win of a candidate who has a lot of enthusiasm behind them. But we don’t really know. Aggregated state polling was freakishly good at calling presidential elections during the Obama years (which led people like Sam Wang to get overconfident about it), but it undercalled the red wave of 2010 and underestimated Trump in 2016. Then in 2020 it was actually pretty good again. And polling was also pretty good at calling the missed/tepid red wave of 2022, though you wouldn’t know it by reading pundits gassing on about the situation and presenting cherry-picked polls.

  61. 61.

    Another Scott

    @RinaX:

    Allred and Cruz have raised similar amounts of money, as of a month ago, with more of Cruz’s money coming from PACs.

    Transitions are scary and hard. Allred is trying to thread the needle. Beto’s “you’re right I’m going to take your AR-15” approach didn’t work when he ran for President. I’m not going to criticize Allred’s approach. I’m sending him money occasionally, and I’m hoping that he and Democrats in Texas find a way this time.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  63. 63.

    O. Felix Culpa

    @rikyrah:

    If this pattern continues with Allred, I’m thinking he’s a plant. At best, he has really bad advisors. It’s Texas, so of course his campaign has an upward climb, but in THIS election year, his chances have just improved. If he puts in the work.

    ETA: And if he runs as a Democrat. Running as R-Lite rarely works. Ask Senator Tim Ryan. And Rep. Torres-Small.

  64. 64.

    Kay

    @cmorenc:

    We have a house in Oceana County, Michigan on Lake Michigan. Over the last 25 years I’ve regularly gone to the village “homecoming” parade in mid-August. The “village” is purple but the county is not – it’s sort of light red. I went this year and the local Democrats had a float in the parade. I have never seen as much enthusiasm when the float appeared as I did this year. Such a pleasant surprise. There was actual hooting and hollering :)

    I don’t think the enthusiasm is manufactured or faked, although Ohio Republicans are all convinced it is.

  65. 65.

    Chris Johnson

    @Another Scott: I have always assumed the behavior of people ‘in VVP’s back pocket’ has traditionally been for them to do as they would normally do, while sneaking in bits of sympathy and directedness where it’s most useful.

    This is based on the known tendency of those people to pursue ‘horseshoe theory’ behavior and back notables on ALL sides of all political aisles, for better chaos and confusion, as an ongoing policy. If you’re doing that on purpose you do not seek to make all those people talk and act the same, because it’d defeat the purpose.

    That’s really why I freaked out after the Biden debate. Suddenly it was a full-court press without any attempt to retain plausible deniability. It smelled like a desperation move, and it risked blowing everyone’s credibility.

    So normally, and especially ‘back then’, I would not look to somebody controlled by Putin, to ACT like they were. They’d normally get a lot of license to establish their bona fides, and the whole point would be to get a bunch of people from all perspectives that had their own bona fides but would drop little hints or bits of narrative that would help. Such as trying to mainstream the idea that NATO was persecutory and picking on harmless Russia, that sort of thing. You could be anti-NATO from lots of different directions as long as it wasn’t your country getting the Russian tanks rolling in.

  66. 66.

    jonas

    @oldgold: Right. So all MoH recipients have to do is get shot or killed or something. Losers. But people like Adelson, they actually have to *do* something and it goes through a committee and everything!

    A comment like this would have ended someone’s career ten times over in the Before Times. Meanwhile, CNN.com is breaking through a brilliant new frontier in political journalism: the Black Cletus Safari wherein they track down and interview Black Trump supporters.

  67. 67.

    SatanicPanic

    @Chris: the DC pundit class is really struggling this time around. Who is this authentically Midwest man? Where does Kamala Harris come from that she doesn’t take Republican BS seriously?

  68. 68.

    brendancalling

    Dammit, the Harris momentum was too good to last. Peppergate is gonna bring her down for good.

  69. 69.

    Unabogie

    But I was given strict assurance that Kamala Harris needed to release some policies! And after that, the press would spend days explaining those policies to the public!

    (Scrolls CNN)

    I’ve just advised that Trump has another “press conference” from his porch so we’ll be going live to an empty driveway podium.

  70. 70.

    Belafon

    @O. Felix Culpa: he beat Pete Sessions when he ran for the House, so I just think maybe he’s either waiting until after Labor Day, or maybe he doesn’t realize how big Texas is and what change he could be making.

  73. 73.

    RinaX

    Thanks for the info, everyone. I’m not optimistic about anyone unseating Skeletor here in FL, so I hoped prospects were better in the Texas Senate race.

  74. 74.

    UncleEbeneezer

    Welp, in gathering my paperwork for the mountain-sized hill of stuff needed to get a part time job with my local school district (as a tennis coach), I realized that I have somehow misplaced my SS card…ugh…

    Already went online and requested a replacement but it will take 10-14 days to receive it so I’ll be in a holding pattern until then because I can’t get my background check done.  Which is, of course, the most important step for working with kids/school.  Frustrating.

  76. 76.

    sixthdoctor

    @Another Scott: Well, I’m hoping Allred can thread the needle…it’s Ted Cruz. You’d think that all he would have to do film himself pointing to a big picture of Ted Cruz and yelling LOOK AT THIS DIPSHIT! and then buy ad time.

    My pie in the sky donation is to Lucas Kunce in Missouri; it’d be like hitting the lottery, but at least he’s going after Hawley in a satisfying manner.

  77. 77.

    Soprano2

    I listened to the Harris/Walz conversation. That’s interesting about the football team. My band teacher did the same with our band – we had about 20 people in band when she started (I was in 7th grade, our band was students in 7th thru 12th grade). She actually went to 1st period study hall and found kids who had played instruments, and got them to transfer to band. By the time I was a freshman our band was becoming a powerhouse that aways got “1” ratings at contest. By the time she left when I was a junior, there were around 70 students in band (this was in a school where the average class size was 30 students!). She’s the teacher who we had the appreciation party for several years ago, because she was a positive influence on a lot of us. Kids remember and love those teachers so much, and Walz is a teacher like that.

  78. 78.

    Chris

    @ArchTeryx:

    And Trump’s still spouting off about how the media hates HIM. If he was more of sound mind I’d say it was all kayfabe – it certainly was in 2016. But since his brain turned into a foul-smelling lump of Limburger cheese, it’s probable he genuinely believes it this time.

    Oh, I think it’s always been sincere.  You gotta remember just how little it takes for people like this to perceive “disloyalty” or “unfairness” or “hate.”

    The first six months or so of Donald Trump were a great example.  James Comey had to do some kind of investigation of Russiagate.  And it was clear that for months, the guy was just trying to put a nice little “the country can’t afford another scandal!” bow on it – maybe prosecute one or two low-level people, give Trump a public chiding to be a little more careful in his associations, then pronounce that there’s just not enough evidence to warrant a prosecution of Trump so that everybody can agree that Trump Is Innocent and the nation can move on.

    Trouble was, Trump is such a pathological narcissist with a god-king complex that even that kind of Potomac two-step, which any other Republican would have understood and accepted, was perceived as a betrayal and a personal assault.  Comey wasn’t supposed to run a bullshit investigation to preserve the illusion of integrity in the system.  Comey was supposed to scream from all the rooftops with tears in his eyes that Trump was his great friend, a great man, the manliest man who ever lived, that he would not be opening any investigation into him, that the very idea that anyone could investigate Trump is unthinkable and treasonous, because Trump is a great man, the greatest American who ever lived, he’s the President for pete’s sake!  You can’t investigate the President!  Not when it’s Trump, the manliest man and the greatest American who ever lived!

    Likewise, to Trump, that’s what a loyal media would be doing.  And since they’re not, they’re not loyal, and they hate him, and they’re his enemies.

  79. 79.

    Another Scott

    @rikyrah: Good points.

    But, ultimately, people are elected to represent their constituents.  Texas is a big oil and gas state.  Talking about an “all of the above” energy policy and “preserving existing jobs” is probably necessary to win the race there.  Similarly, showing some independence from the national Democratic party on energy and other issues is probably necessary to win.

    Yes, running up the score in Blue areas is essential.  But doing that while doing the other thing is not easy.  And carrying Blue areas alone probably won’t do it.

    Running in a House district is usually much easier than running state-wide – especially in a complicated state like Texas.

    Will Allred be able to do it?  Dunno.  But we shouldn’t give up on him.  Especially when Dobbs and the SCOTUS should help a lot.

    FWIW.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  80. 80.

    Matt McIrvin

    …Of course, aggregations are also subject to data-quality effects.

    There’s a strange example of this going on at 538 right now: Kamala Harris’s “favorable/unfavorable” is a lot better than her “approval/disapproval”. Why is that? Well, I thnk it’s that there are way more of the first type of poll than the second, so their rolling average for “approval/disapproval” goes back further in time, and these numbers are rapidly rising.

  85. 85.

    Soprano2

    @rikyrah: In states like TX you have to do both – load up the votes in the cities and try to increase your margin a little bit in the rural areas. That’s how McCaskill got elected in MO. It sounds like Allred is only working one of those, and that’s a mistake. If he’s counting on being a football player to carry him to victory, that’s a mistake too.

  86. 86.

    satby

    Good morning take 2, since I fell back asleep after commenting on the early thread. Buddy should by now be out of his surgery but I haven’t heard for sure. Fingers crossed.

    And huge thanks to O Felix Culpa for sharing the GFM link. I don’t like to ask when there’s so much fundraising going on, but I’m already on a payment plan for the ER vet for the next few months. Normally Buddy would be triaged out and put to sleep, but his prognosis is good, and I wanted to give him a chance. These vets are the ones who were honest about the late Duke cat’s poor prognosis after the other vets used his illness as a profit center and tried to hold him hostage until we paid the bill. So I trust their instincts.

  87. 87.

    Starfish

    @Chris: Having no front runner does not mean that the party is in disarray. Having a wide bench of possibilities is actually exciting. But when it is a bunch of gray-haired white dudes, it is confusing because it is hard to tell them apart.

  88. 88.

    UncleEbeneezer

    In better news I went grocery shopping yesterday and the checkout dude (an older, white guy) saw my shirt and said “Go CAM-ala!  It would be so great to see a Black Woman beat Trump since he’s such a racist jerk.”  I was surprised again.  Annec-data, obviously, but I’ve been wearing pro-Dem (and provocative, anti-racist, progressive etc.) tee shirts for years and nobody usually says anything, especially white men.  Now I’ve had two older, white men in two days show their support for Harris.  It feels like the enthusiasm for Harris and the Walz pick, really opened up a permission structure for my people to finally start being openly liberal in public.  I love it.

  89. 89.

    Another Scott

    @Matt McIrvin: The Kansas abortion polling is a counter-example.

    ;-)

    Good people are still trying to do good polls.  Trouble is, too much of the polling in the popular press are garbage polls because the responses are highly skewed and the “adjustments” are based on the pre-Dobbs universe.  The true error bars on lots of them are much, much bigger than “+/-3%”, especially when they’re broken-down into sub-groups.  But readers don’t see that unless they spend 30 minutes digging into the details.

    Tracking polls of the same people can be useful, but AFAIK they’re rare these days (USC Dornsife doesn’t do them anymore).

    Ultimately, what matters is turning out our voters.  Garbage polls that kill enthusiasm are an impediment to that and need to be countered.

    FWIW.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  90. 90.

    Suzanne

    @Anonymous At Work: LOL, a curry cookout is a great idea.

    I used to bake for clients a lot. Bring cakes and muffins to meetings and such, give homemade cookies at the holidays. It actually advanced me in my career.

  92. 92.

    Matt McIrvin

    @ArchTeryx: The media love to mock Donald Trump’s clowning–they always have. Donald Trump really hates that. Being laughed at is the worst thing in the world to him–he openly says this all the time, and “they’re laughing at us, they’re laughing at you, they’re laughing at me” is a constant theme in his rhetoric.

    The thing is, to the media, a major politician who is a complete clown is a good show. So they’re going to present their mockery in a kind of affectionate way and emphasize that the other side is boring… unless some shinier object comes along. Kamala Harris stepping in to replace Biden is a huge dramatic story, and Trump’s clowning is yesterday’s news. So he can’t just ride the wave, while hating it, any more

    …The other thing is that a lot of the mockery and laughing is actually coming from the Harris campaign this time around–they don’t consider themselves above it.

  93. 93.

    Suzanne

    I kind of look back on the days when we thought “Republicans are weird” referred to Dr. Oz talking about crudité with tequila, and not driving me back into the home, barefoot and pregnant.

  95. 95.

    Falling Diphthong

    @Kay: I think it’s a sad fable of coming into something as an outsider asking if we can make this more fact based and mathy. Then he had built a business to sustain as polls became less accurate, and Nate went down the hole of writing about his vibes. Just like the folks he criticized when he decided to get into prognosticating.

    I quite liked his The Signal and the Noise

  97. 97.

    Barbara

    @Steve LaBonne: ​They either ignored her or tried to make her the Dan Quayle of Democratic VPs. Megan McArdle was particularly dismissive — referring to Harris as inept and ineffective nearly anytime she mentioned her by name. VPs never find it easy to forge an identity — unless like Biden they had been around for a long time. In Harris’s case, the casually dismissive attitude reeked of misogyny and racism, and it was probably lucky for her that mostly they just ignored her. Their desperation now shows that they know they have lost the opportunity to define her for us.​
    ​
    ​

  98. 98.

    mvr

    From the Quoted WaPo article:

    The flurry of policy positions — just days before the Democratic National Convention in Chicago — represented the clearest articulation yet of how Harris, who has only had a relatively brief time on the national stage, would handle economic policy if elected this fall.

    Since when does 4 years as Senator and 3 1/2 as VP count as a brief time?  Did anyone watch the Kavanaugh hearings? Or her many recorded/broadcast sessions with constituents across the country on various topics?

  100. 100.

    SatanicPanic

    Trump’s little hissy fit sounds like he’s admitting she’ll win

    “As far as the personal attacks, I’m very angry at her because of what she’s done to the country. I’m very angry at her that she weaponized the justice system against me and other people —- very angry at her,” Trump said. “I think I’m entitled to personal attacks. I don’t have a lot of respect for her. I don’t have a lot of respect for her intelligence, and I think she’ll be a terrible president.”

  101. 101.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Another Scott: I do think the AP Statistics fact everyone needs to understand is that when you see “margin of error” stated for a poll, that’s random sampling error and it’s just a function of the sample size, nothing more. It says nothing about the possibility of a systematic polling miss from a fundamentally misconceived sample or a bad turnout model. It’s just the margin of error you’d expect from a bad sample happening by pure chance, if you otherwise did everything right.

    So it’s both too big and too small. It’s too big in the sense that you can in principle reduce the collective random sampling error by aggregating many polls of the same population. It’s too small in the sense that if there’s a systematic miss, the MoE doesn’t say anything about it and even that aggregation exercise may not eliminate it.

  102. 102.

    Baud

    @mvr:

    I’d let that one pass. I think that’s a fair way to describe her presidential run and she’s not going to adopt wholesale the policies she’s advocated for in the past.

  104. 104.

    Dave

    @oldgold: It’s almost amazing that he manages to be at his worst when he’s being the most genuine. He genuinely doesn’t get it.  Never mind that the vast majority of CMOH holders would have preferred not to be in a position to receive it but he is absolutely unable to process both the idea of sacrifice and honoring that sacrifice.

    And yet somehow the media won’t latch onto this and put in every headline for the next month or two.

  107. 107.

    Kay

    @Falling Diphthong:

    Sliver left 538 in 2023. Or they left him- I don’t recall. The new person uses a different model that relies more on “fundamentals” early on and then gradually incorporates polls. I just think if actual politicians used that model they would be like “fuck! I’m losing!” but it would then be the middle of October and too late to do anything about it :)

    Timely. It’s like how the NYTimes political team only releases information when they’re selling a book. That information is no longer useful.

  108. 108.

    kindness

    It is my sincere hope Kamela continues Uncle Joe’s position and never sits for an interview with the god damned NY Times.  A Rolling Stone one would be a nice In Your Face move for her.

  109. 109.

    Anonymous At Work

    @Suzanne:  I meant it more like a Red Wedding situation, only using Scoville units rather than arrows and knives.  I can’t imagine there are that many pepper-people in the DC corps; nor is the (albeit limited selection I have tried) cuisine in DC of true terrifying heat.

  111. 111.

    Leto

    @NotMax: “Do you use spice?”

    ”Black pepper”

    Hahahaha; I just love the joy they have. Can absolutely bring the fire when needed, but they have such genuine joy.

  113. 113.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Kay:

    The new person uses a different model that relies more on “fundamentals” early on and then gradually incorporates polls.

    Didn’t Silver’s model always do that? I recall him talking about it in the early days of 538. The “fundamentals” weight may be heavier now than it was then.

  118. 118.

    Kay

    @Matt McIrvin:

    Maybe you’re right. I never minded Nate Silver until he became a bitter pundit. Sadly I think he’s another white middle aged male casualty of covid, BLM and Me Too. Those folks just weren’t resilient and they didn’t hold up well under stress. Brittle. The rapid changes broke them.

  119. 119.

    Leto

    @kindness: I saw a suggestion that she and Tim do Hot Ones. That’s the spicy wing show. You want to talk about melting the DC press corpse? Maximizing your exposure to a broad audience, but especially the youngs? The contrast between Kamala and Tim doing the challenge would be a hoot, but I know she’d move through them with zero issue, while also giving an amazing interview on a wide range of subjects.

  120. 120.

    Leto

    @NotMax: I’m about 10 mins away from there. I learned recently, when I watched his documentary, that Gene Wilder served his Army sent in Phoenixville, PA. We used to live a few mins from there. Phoenixville is also where they shot the theater scenes for The Blob. They have an annual Blob festival every year celebrating that.

  122. 122.

    Kay

    New
    @njhotline
    #PA10: DCCC internal shows Janelle Stelson (D) and Rep. Scott Perry (R) statistically tied. Stelson 48 Perry 47

    Wasn’t on the GOP competitive list but now it is. I’m interested in the blue shift in congressional races. I keep wondering when it will kind of break thru to mainstream media. Maybe has to be more sustained.

  124. 124.

    MomSense

    @Kay:

    I know some of his friends from a weird reconnection with someone I worked with on a campaign almost 40 years ago now.  Silver took over my fantasy football slot years ago.  I haven’t dared to ask what’s up.  Part of it may be that he took a lot of abuse for his polling in 2016 when he felt he was sounding the alarm and it was taken as trolling.

  125. 125.

    Kay

    It really doesn’t matter if it ever breaks thru to mainstream media (if indeed it is real) – doesn’t matter a bit if it just stays off their radar. Surprise! :)

  126. 126.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Kay: We can say in hindsight that Nate Silver (and other people doing similar things, like Sam Wang) benefited from a lucky coincidence: in the 2000s and 2010s, his method of aggregating state polls was unusually good at calling presidential elections. (Not so much midterms.) This was most famously true in 2008 and 2012. But you could extrapolate back and show that it was also the case in 2004. Sam Wang was actually doing it then and would have called the outcome correctly if he hadn’t been tempted to put in a pure fudge factor based on a feeling that undecideds would break for Kerry at the last second.

    Wang had all kinds of hypotheses about why aggregated state polls were better at this than you’d really have reason to expect, but it turned out the answer was “they’re not, it was just a coincidence.” In 2016 they missed badly.

  127. 127.

    Chris

    @Dave:

    It’s almost amazing that he manages to be at his worst when he’s being the most genuine. He genuinely doesn’t get it.

    You know who else was like this?  Mitt Romney.  The most revealing thing about the 47% moment wasn’t even what was being said.  It’s that moments like these were the only ones where he ever actually seemed to come alive, like this was a topic that he really believed in, cared about, and got worked up about.

  128. 128.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @Chris:

    neither the media nor the Republican politicians who want him gone were willing to actually do any of the necessary work to make him gone

    The thing that did surprise me was how absolutely, utterly pathetic Trump’s 2024 challengers were.  He’s wounded.  He had a consistent 20% ‘no Trump under any circumstances’ vote.  Look at the enthusiasm, it’s gone.  But the field against him was too garbage to take advantage of it.  I guess I shouldn’t be surprised after Jeb! but I was.

  129. 129.

    Captain C

    @Anonymous At Work:

    She needs to do a curry cookout for teh DC press corps.

    FTFNYT headline the day after:  “Harris tries to murder DC press corps with un-Americanly hot food”

    Subhead:  “We’re totally neutral and with it”

  130. 130.

    Betty Cracker

    @RinaX: I’m not particularly optimistic about ousting Skeletor either, and it’s a pity because I do think he’s beatable this year. He also seems to be running a little scared. He recently dumped nearly a million of his Ill-gotten fortune into his campaign and has ads up on my streaming channels ensuring everyone that aw-shucks, he’s not an extremist but just a nice grandpa. As if.

  131. 131.

    Matt McIrvin

    @MomSense: Yeah, and that was a case where Nate Silver’s gut feeling actually did better than his mathematical model (though you might have been able to make a guess based on where the trendline was going). Anyway, I think it did drive him to trust his gut more.

  132. 132.

    nevsky42

    @sixthdoctor: Interesting thoughts about your stretch donations.  I’ve been trying to allocate resources to GOTV efforts in swing states.

    I’ve just thrown an extra $25 to one of the postcard organizations on BJ because I’m a very undisciplined writer so I can at least buy them for others.

  133. 133.

    Chris

    @Frankensteinbeck:

    I don’t think he was really all that wounded.  His cult is the majority of the Republican base, especially the Republican primary voter base.  There was absolutely nothing any other Republican candidate could do that was going to pry the nomination away from them.

  134. 134.

    Kay

    @MomSense:

    I do think that was unfair. He had Clinton losing as 1 in 10, right? 1 in 10 happens sometimes.

    I once wrote a post here where I said he was depressing Ohio Dem vote with his gloomy forecast and manipulating the race (I’m a competitive person and I get paranoid) but his gloomy forecast was actually right and I was wrong. So that learned me! The hardest thing is not to lie to yourself.

    I just hate his lack of generosity and bitterness and I do think the people who freaked the fuck out over covid and BLM and Me Too are weak people. Things happen. Everyone did their best with the available information. Adapt, deal and move on.

  136. 136.

    Booger

    @Chris: The George McGovern who flew B-24s at 22 and won the Distinguished Flying Cross, and was dismissed by Republican Chickenhawks as a feckless pansy liberal? That George McGovern?

  138. 138.

    JML

    @Kay: Silver’s problem is really that he had One Good Idea as it related to political reporting (poll aggregation as a way to smooth out the noise). After that he was just a data guy trying to play in a field he never truly understood.

  140. 140.

    Dave

    @Frankensteinbeck: That’s my hope for when he is gone is that while the media will be ready to celebrate a republican who can present more normally that none of the current crop has that and that a solid portion of their base not only doesn’t want that but will see it as a betrayal.

    So they will be stuck in weird middle ground that no one really loves.

  142. 142.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Chris: Another one was when Romney talked about how much he liked to fire people.

    Trump, of course, had “you’re fired!” as his literal TV catchphrase, since he was supposed to be a hard-charging businessman, but I don’t think he really much cared about it either way–his underlings had to go WAY off the rails before he’d actually fire them.

  143. 143.

    Kay

    @JML:

    And he brought that awful know-it-allism to punditry. No one needed that. I mean, just find your lane and stay there, buddy. There are more than enough pundits.

  144. 144.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Betty Cracker: Tim might do better than people expect.  The German influence in the Upper Midwest can have people putting very spicy mustard on their brats and eating ground horseradish with their cabbage rolls. 

  146. 146.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Kay: I think the Trump win probability was up to 1 in 3 by the end. So he was doing better than most of the field.

    And the reason he had it that high was actually correct, too–it was the adjustment he put in to account for possible correlated systematic error. That was, in fact, what made the polls miss. Sam Wang got high on his own supply and assumed the chance of that was so small as to be nearly negligible.

  147. 147.

    TBone

    @Leto: my mom brought a date home to our grandparents’ house in Drexel Hill, PA in the late 60s or very early 1970s who looked exactly like Gene Wilder.  I still think it was him.  The hair, the bowtie, the face, it was all a match.  I can’t believe I didn’t ask her about that when I was older…

    Oops, I’m thinking of Gene Shalit 😂

  149. 149.

    Booger

    @Anonymous At Work: There’s an apocryphal story about a Thai restaurant somewhere on Connecticut Avenue that offered five levels of heat on their menu, but they’d only prepare level 4 or above if you came into the kitchen and proved your bona fides, like you had been stationed overseas in an appropriate South/Southeast Asian country, or had the proper skin tone.

    Had too many dinners rejected by overconfident pasty white people.

  150. 150.

    bluefoot

    All this is great policy! Retailers and others learned during the first years of the pandemic that they could get away with price gouging and they’ve just expanded it since then. Medical debt is one (if not the) leading causes of bankruptcy – finding ways to eliminate it or pay it down is excellent.

    And from the video Kamala Harris is a Prince fan. That has nothing to do with her ability to govern, but it speaks to her good taste. :) More seriously, it really resonated for me in that video that both Harris and Walz have a commitment to people being able to live safely and without fear.

  151. 151.

    Mousebumples

    @Soprano2: If he’s counting on being a football player to carry him to victory, that’s a mistake too.

    I am not from Texas and am open to being corrected, but I think he and Walz should tag team football/sports media this fall.

    NFL GameDay?

    Monday Night Football/Manningcast

    College GameDay

    High school football (which is HUGE in Texas, I believe)

    Just go nuts and try to pick up some normies who like football.

  152. 152.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Booger: There’s a Nepalese restaurant in Portsmouth, NH, Durbar Square, that has a 10-point scale. 4 is about as far as I can go. My sister-in-law ordered an 8 once and it was profoundly difficult for her to eat.

  154. 154.

    Gin & Tonic

    @Matt McIrvin: ​
    I really like spicy food, and have a high tolerance, but still remember a Thai place I went to in L.A. I think I was the only round-eyes there, and I left thinking “my esophagus isn’t supposed to have nerve endings, is it?” One of my most unpleasant dining experiences.

  156. 156.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Gin & Tonic: I think it’s one of those things that just varies over several orders of magnitude. Many Americans can take characteristically Mexican levels of spicy. Szechuan “mala” is another step beyond that–I still dig it. But food from Thailand, Laos or the Indian subcontinent can just get to whole other levels.

  158. 158.

    LadySuzy

    @Frankensteinbeck: Chris Christie was a strong candidate. But the base is still in love with Trump.

    If the GOP was still “normal” Christie would have won the nomination, and would have been very difficult to beat.

    Republicans are fools.

  159. 159.

    Chris

    @Matt McIrvin:

    @Chris: Another one was when Romney talked about how much he liked to fire people.

    Yeah.  Romney’s whole thing was “I am a Creator, I and people like me carry the entire country on my back, the peons are only fed and clothed and housed and employed because of people like Me, but the peons are ungrateful and restless and forgetting their place, it’s deeply unfair to Me and people like Me, and someone should stand up and put them in their place.”

    And you could tell that, like universal health care for Ted Kennedy and bombing Middle Easterners for John McCain, this was the thing that made him passionate, that got him out of bed in the morning, that he’d go to bat for even if it wasn’t the most politically savvy thing to do.

    The fact that Republicans chose to run a guy like that at the height of the Great Recession (and then double down on it by making the VP a virtual clone of Romney who reinforced all of his weaknesses and compensated for none of them) was fucking mind-boggling.  (And the fact that he was still competitive was a spectacular indictment of the American public).

  160. 160.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Chris: Mitt Romney could do a decent impression of a reasonable man of character when he thought people were paying attention and it would benefit him.

    That won him the governorship of Massachusetts, once upon a time, and I still know scads of Massachusetts moderates who seem to genuinely like the guy, are convinced that the Mitt Romney of Massachusetts circa 2003 was the real Mitt Romney, and wish we could have more politicians like him and that we could have a Mitt Romney Republican Party they could support instead of a Trump Republican Party.

  162. 162.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Chris: Come on, McCain would have been happy bombing just about anyone.  Middle Easterner just happened to be the flavor of the day.

  165. 165.

    Ken

    @Trivia Man: Guess what the state motto of Wisconsin is… FORWARD.

    Introduced in 1851. That gives us a revised lower limit for the range of Obama’s time machine.

  166. 166.

    Soprano2

    @Dave: He cannot envision any situation where he would sacrifice himself for another person. That concept doesn’t exist in his worldview, so he can’t understand Medal of Honor winners at all.

  167. 167.

    MomSense

    @Matt McIrvin:

    I think that’s right. I also think that podcasting causes some problems just because you end up talking about all the topical things and the listeners you develop expect a certain take.  There is also the issue of marketing.  You have to use social media to market your product and then you can’t piss off your market so I think it creates an unhealthy self reinforcing system that would benefit from more exchange and broader views. There is also clout chasing and that is a related and worse problem. If you piss off your old circle you have to adapt your opinions in order to market to a new circle.

    It would be nice if we could be more tolerant of divergent views but I don’t see that happening in the near future.

    I have some major differences of opinion with some podcasters that I really like and support financially (a pittance) but I enjoy hearing opinions and challenging my assumptions.  I’ve been with them for years and will stay even if I have to occasionally sigh at my phone.

  168. 168.

    NotMax

    @Matt McIrvin

    Friend and I, both are enamored of spiciness, went once to a Mongolian restaurant. (Memory somewhat hazy, may have been an Ethiopian eatery.)

    They brought out a little shallow bowl with a powdered spice mixture to sprinkle to your taste on the food, accompanied by the server’s warning, “Careful, it’s very spicy hot.”

    Same server was astonished when several minutes later we called him over to request a refill as we’d quickly gone though the original bowl.

  169. 169.

    Bupalos

    I think Harris’ surprising success is some near 50/50 mix.

    1. Becoming a better candidate, probably from what she learned from 2019 and from the gravitas and experience she gained in the VP slot.
    2. The Democratic Party delivering an “impossible” seismic shock to the system that cleared away clouds of underlying dread and paralysis and just made people feel better about the possibilities of politics. I think we were weighed down with  vibe-based political feelings that had much deeper effects than we were aware.

  170. 170.

    karen gail

    Horseradish and peppers have different chemical properties that make them hot; I can handle horseradish (grew and used grandma’s recipe to make own sauce and ground) but not peppers, even the milder peppers burn in my stomach and habaneros have disastrous effects. I found that having had and recovered from cancer makes it even worse when it comes to hot peppers.

    As for chemicals hot peppers contain capsaicin while horseradish contains allyl isothiocyanate.

  171. 171.

    Another Scott

    @Chris: +1

    The way he spit “ENTITLED!” at that 47% gathering was the real Rmoney.  And the MotUs there with him just ate it all up.

    “My job is not to worry about those people,” …

    Corn says that Rmoney had a sad when it came out, and even thought about dropping out of the race.

    Poor, poor Rmoney. So very sad that people don’t know their place anymore and hurt the feeling of such a giant of American politics like hisownself.

    :-/

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  172. 172.

    MomSense

    @Bupalos:

    One of the reasons I was optimistic about how she would be received is because I was following her speaking engagements at colleges and universities post Dobbs and after the school massacre in Nashville and the treatment of the Tennessee 3.  Her speeches to those young people resonated.  She spoke to their trauma and their cause for freedom from gun violence and freedom over their own bodies.  Without the media noticing she was speaking to overflow crowds for two years with a message that she got from actually listening to them. She would start by asking the audience how many had participated in active shooter drills and every hand went up.  It’s just massive trauma that we have been subjecting our young people to from the age of 4 or 5 on and no one was going to them to affirm that they had a right to freedom from that kind of trauma.  Incredibly powerful organizing was happening and the pundits had no idea.

  174. 174.

    Betty Cracker

    @karen gail: I didn’t know the technical differences in the heat properties of peppers vs. horseradish, but that makes sense. My husband’s family is from Western NY and can stand the hottest horseradish but most cannot stomach really hot peppers.

    BTW, hubby made homemade horseradish once, and the fumes were like tear gas. I had to flee the house with our then-infant. It was powerful stuff!

  178. 178.

    Ken

    @NotMax:  went once to a Mongolian restaurant. (Memory somewhat hazy, may have been an Ethiopian eatery.)

    Does this work like Rule 34, so that suddenly there are a bunch of trendy Mongolian-Ethiopian fusion places serving (googles furiously) fried barley balls with a fermented mare’s milk dipping sauce?

  180. 180.

    karen gail

    @Betty Cracker: As a side note; horseradish is in the same family as mustard. The leaves smell the same when crushed.
    Mustard gas was used during war and has been used to put down riots.
    If you do make horseradish the best thing is to do the grinding outside. I can’t do by hand it burns too much but know so many grandmothers that managed to sit outside and hand grate horseradish. Also, don’t lean over bowl once you finish grinding; the fumes can burn your lungs.

  182. 182.

    Chris

    @Another Scott:

    In the same way that a lot of white people think the values of things like the civil rights movement are just rhetoric, and sure, we mouth them in public because that’s the socially acceptable thing to do, but behind closed doors, just between us, c’mon, we all know it’s just propaganda and we’re not really equal…

    … A lot of rich people, likewise, think that the values of the labor reforms and the universal suffrage reforms and even the American Revolution are just feel-good bullshit.  Sure, we say all men are created equal, in the same way that we still recite all the right prayers when we go to church at family reunions because it makes grandma happy.  But c’mon, we all know that the best and brightest at the top of society are the ones that make everything happen, and everyone else is just an NPC.  Behind closed doors we don’t have to pretend.

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