Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I have other things to bitch about but those will have to wait.

“But what about the lurkers?”

We are aware of all internet traditions.

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

Every decision we make has lots of baggage with it, known or unknown.

This really is a full service blog.

If ‘weird’ was the finish line, they ran through the tape and kept running.

Not rolling over. fuck you, make me.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

Just because you believe it, that does not make it true.

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

Republican speaker of the house Mike Johnson is the bland and smiling face of evil.

The willow is too close to the house.

We know you aren’t a Democrat but since you seem confused let me help you.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

If rights aren’t universal, they are privilege, not rights.

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

Giving up is unforgivable.

“In this country American means white. everybody else has to hyphenate.”

Jesus watching the most hateful people claiming to be his followers

The most dangerous place for a black man in America is in a white man’s imagination.

Narcissists are always shocked to discover other people have agency.

Do we throw up our hands or do we roll up our sleeves? (hint, door #2)

You are here: Home / Open Threads / We’re Not Dumb Enough to Listen to the Trash Talk, Right? Right?

We’re Not Dumb Enough to Listen to the Trash Talk, Right? Right?

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Steady as she goes, BJ peeps. Steady as she goes.

Something like 3/4 of the polls that dropped this week are Republic trash polls, meant to direct the conversation, not to report accurately.  Ignore them.

Are we really going to let a bullshit article from Politico (but I repeat myself) make us worry or panic about the state of the race?  Ignore them.

Bullshit stories in the FTFNYT?  Ignore them.

We’re gonna get nervous because of something Saturday Night Live put in their Cold Open?  Ignore that.

It’s the political equivalent of trash talk, and we are idiots if we listen to it.  We’re even bigger idiots if we let it distract us from doing the work.  Because that’s their goal.

Fear is contagious.  Don’t spread it.

Have you voted?

Have you talked to all your friends and neighbors about voting?

Have you volunteered somewhere?

Written a postcard?  Phone banked?  Texted?  Donated?  Made food and brought it to a local campaign office?

Encouraged someone else?  Talked someone else off the ledge?  Offered someone a ride to the polls?

Just like in sports, don’t listen to the trash talk.  Play your game.

3 weeks out is not the time for hand-wringing.  It’s the time for working even harder.

We have 3 weeks to play our game.  Uncertainty sucks.  We just have to be smarter than they are, not get distracted, and do the work.

Where is Al Giordano when you need him?  He would kick our chicken-little-ing behinds.

And where is Steeplejack when we need him?  He would have found one of Al’s great rants for me in a heartbeat.

Open thread.

Reader Interactions

84Comments

  4. 4.

    Hildebrand

    Thank you!  The handwringing is terrible right now.

    Trump is decaying before our eyes, and Kamala is doing great.

    Eyes on the prize! We can do this!

  6. 6.

    BeautifulPlumage

    Working on my next set of postcards – will be 100. I picked Debbie Mucarsel-Powell for the second set & was told I was first so am sticking with her. FL may not flip for MVP but maybe Rick Scott can be retired. And WaterGirl sent way too many stamps, but I’m trying to use as many as I can!

    I also received my 1st email as a precinct captain and will be signing up for some Saturday canvassing. Not my fave activity but easier with cupcakes!

  9. 9.

    BeautifulPlumage

    I’d like to see more coverage of the Coachella fiasco where folks got left (again) miles from their cars after the busses never showed after the rally ended. The NYT should investigate.

  11. 11.

    Sphex

    Thank you for this, WaterGirl. Your timing is inspired. Just put stamps on the 100ish postcards I’ve written, and am gearing up to do 100ish more before the 24th, which is my “mail on” date.

  12. 12.

    SpaceUnit

    Typical corporate media overlord bullshit.  That’s the smell of fear.  Fix bayonets and aim for their bellies.

  14. 14.

    frosty

    Knocked on 21 doors yesterday for Janelle Stelson, 7 answered. This is the persuasion phase and I suck at it – I keep thinking of things I could have said three doors later. I’m planning to sign up for election weekend to flush voters. That’s a little easier.

    Today I wrote 53 postcards; wrapped up the 250 addresses for Activate America (200 CA-47, 50 PA) and started in on the 50 Stelson addresses I got from Hopium*. My penmanship is decaying a little.

    * I couldn’t get more from Activate America because all their addresses have been written to!

  17. 17.

    frosty

    @WaterGirl: I haven’t voted and I’m not going to vote early; I’ll go to the polls. PA doesn’t even start looking at mail-in ballots until 7AM on Election Day, which means the count drags out for days. If we can manage a huge D margin at the end of Election Day, it *might* shut down the Red Mirage and whining that goes along with it.

    So I’m planning to be part of that margin.

  18. 18.

    frosty

    @BeautifulPlumage: And WaterGirl sent way too many stamps…

    LOL! Last time I was at the Post Office, after I waffled a little they asked, well, how many do you need. So I said 150. And ordered that many postcards from StoneMavenDesigns. So of course I had to get enough addresses and here I am, trying to get it done before the mailing deadline on Friday.

  19. 19.

    Jinchi

    My partner and I dropped our ballots off  this afternoon, so in my own informal poll Kamala and the Democrats are sweeping the election right now.

    But I’m still curious, how do you know that the recent polls are Republican trash polls?

  21. 21.

    Geoduck

    Politico actually had an article recently that headlined the Shaitgibbon’s further descent into racism and immigrant bashing in his speeches. Doesn’t make them trustworthy or anything, but any chink in the armor is a positive sign.

  22. 22.

    Jinchi

    @frosty: ​  If we can manage a huge D margin at the end of Election Day, it *might* shut down the Red Mirage and whining that goes along with it.

    Wow, people usually accuse me of being overly optimistic.

    I think there is zero percent change that the whining will stop regardless of the state of the race.If TFG is winning when the first few precincts start coming in, he will claim a massive victory and demand they stop the count.If he’s behind at any point, his lawyers and lackeys will be demanding a do-over, possibly monitored by a neutral party like Kim Jong Un (I assume Vlad will be too busy).

    The whining will never stop. We will only stop hearing it when the press gets bored of covering it.​​

  23. 23.

    HumboldtBlue

    I have no idea where all the panic talk is coming from. It seems like a normal election cycle in many ways, the GOP is bug-fuck crazy and the media is feeding the horse race.

    Same as it ever was.

    The GOP is dumping as much shit into the dialog as it can because it can’t win on substance, character or simple basic human decency, so Trump doubles down on the hate, the madness evident but ignored — or worse sane-splained — and the mainstream media gets its fever.

    Check out the podcasts, social media, the independent media, it’s not Pollyanna, but it reflects reality. I am encouraged heading into the stretch, primarily because the work you are doing being done here is being done in a hundred other places by people as devoted as this gaggle.

    I am firmly convinced that the smartest people I know — women — are gonna carry this home.

  24. 24.

    Jinchi

    @frosty: I keep thinking of things I could have said three doors later.

    That’s a sign you’re getting better in real time.

    There’s really no need to worry until you start believing that your pitch is awesome.

  25. 25.

    KrackenJack

    KrakenJill and I have completed 1000 postcards for OH, but they don’t get sent until Oct 26. Our second batch of 300 go out MN(!) in two days. A House race AFAI can tell.

    Ordered stamps online – no rolls or sheets to be had in our part of NorCal. Had to print the last 100 stamps from the post office kiosk. That takes about five minutes, FWIW.

  26. 26.

    Grover Gardner

    As far as I am concerned, at this point the race is decided.  I just cannot see that polls or “undecided voters” or anything else makes much of a difference at this point.  Folks who are determined to vote have made up their minds.  It’s a matter of who makes it to the polls.  In that respect, you just have to encourage women, minorities and young people to get out there and vote.  I don’t mean this in a defeatist way.  I really think there’s a huge reserve of “unpolled” folks who are going to show up in droves and vote against Trump.  I hope I’m right.  If I’m not, we’re in for a bitter four years, and we’ll have to try and survive that.  I suspect we’ll lose the Senate, maybe retain the House, and even in those cases there might be some pleasant surprises–but all that really matters is that Trump is rendered ineffectual and incapable of running again.

  27. 27.

    BeautifulPlumage

    @WaterGirl: ​
     oops, guess I didn’t think about how many sheets that would be! You are correct, as usual. And I’ll keep writing!

    Thanks for all you do at this blog!

  28. 28.

    frosty

    @Jinchi: There’s really no need to worry until you start believing that your pitch is awesome.

    Hah! Then I have nothing to worry about. I don’t actually have a pitch.

  31. 31.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    Is this a repeat of that bullshit the press pulled in 2020 of stop counting people who had voted by mail in the polls because of some bullshit about “well their votes were already cast”?

  32. 32.

    RevRick

    I appreciate your post WaterGirl.
    I understand where all the anxiety is coming from. The stakes of the election have ratcheted up to a degree that didn’t quite exist ten years ago. We could have survived a Mitt Romney Presidency. The possibility of a second Trump Presidency is terrifying. I know I’m playing out nightmare scenarios in my mind and though I’m a bit old for war games of the civil variety, I would do my damnedest to sabotage a fascist regime.

    My wife and I drove to a restaurant a dozen miles south of Allentown for a wedding rehearsal, and we were quite clearly passing through Trump territory. I was muttering to myself the whole way. But I’m home and I read Simon Rosenberg’s Hopium Chronicles and he noted if you carve out the crap GOP polls, the race is still moving in a positive direction for Harris. That and 12 year Glenfiddich mellowed my harsh.

  36. 36.

    Chris T.

    Spousal Unit (S.U.) and I are waiting for Washington State to mail out the ballots (this will be on Friday). Meanwhile I am near the end of my paxlovid days, thank FSM (the horrible paxlovid mouth is horrible) and I feel fine other than paxlovid. Unfortunately S.U. has come down with something, probably also COVID. Perhaps our vaccinations are helping as my fever topped out at 101 and S.U.’s is currently below 100, but still, bleh.

    Once we vote, I drop the completed ballots in the ballot drop box at our community area entrance (super convenient since I drive past it every time I go anywhere).

  37. 37.

    Jackie

    This absolutely the time to refuse to look at polls, and to plug our ears when polls are brought up on the news. I record so I can fast forward. I’m already speed scrolling past the Debbie Downers here on BJ.

    The polls have been consistently WRONG since 2018 and we need to keep reminding ourselves POLLS DON’T VOTE!

  39. 39.

    WaterGirl

    @Jinchi: their chart that I’ve seen that shows a very large percentage of the recent polls are strongly Partisan. I don’t have a link to share, but it’s been linked on BJ.

  40. 40.

    FelonyGovt

    I think we all needed that, WaterGirl. I’ve written numerous postcards, tapped out my donation budget, am making sure everyone I know is registered and voting. Husband, daughter and I have voted and been notified that our ballots were received and counted.

  41. 41.

    Redshift

    I’m glad I’ve been too busy to catch whatever people have freaked out about the past couple of days.

    I had lovely weather for my canvassing shift yesterday. I was in a neighborhood with bigger yards, and ended up walking 2.8 miles!

  42. 42.

    Redshift

    @WaterGirl: Yeah, one thing that has definitely been established by reviews of the past few election cycles is that GOP BS artists have adapted to the new era of poll averages and poll reporting by producing highly partisan polls so that averages of “all the polls” and straight news that just reports “the latest poll” will get slanted results. So this isn’t some Dem equivalent to the conservative “unskewed polls” delusion. It stands to reason they would do it again, and there’s evidence they are.

    The intent could be to depress turnout on our side or goose it on theirs, or it could be to create a phony narrative for the Big Lie when the results end up being different; it’s hard to say.

  44. 44.

    FastEdD

    Yarr, Cap’n. I like the cut o’ yer jib. We knocked on 19,000 doors of dems on our neighborhood, before the ballots dropped, and every Dem and NPP for the first time ever. We be poll watchers too. County ROV texted me my vote was received and counted. I should be like my brother and be out of the country for awhile after the election, to keep my fingers firmly in my ears when there’s finally nothing else I can do.

  45. 45.

    hotshoe

    @Redshift: ​
    100% agree with the idea that Repug polls are designed to front-load the idea that of course he’s the voters’ choice — if/when Mango loses, then obviously there must have been terrible fraud because he was “winning” by such a great margin.

    Anyway the cult will never believe he lost, no matter what, but where the polls show their side up, the polls will be taken as hard evidence of their win, not as mere opinion.

    Just one more thing we’re gonna have to fight against.​

  46. 46.

    gene108

    @Hildebrand:

    Trump is decaying before our eyes, and Kamala is doing great.

    I don’t think Trump’s mental state or rhetoric or anything he does will dissuade people inclined to vote for him to change their minds.

    Trump outperformed the consensus polling in 2016 and 2020. He’s good at rabble rousing and getting the politically disinterested knuckle draggers to turnout. His recent eliminationist rhetoric, which has largely flown under most people’s attention, will help him get these fuckers interested in voting for him.

    Trying to turnout votes in CA and NY is Trump trying to win the popular vote. Democrats do better than Republicans in the popular vote because Democrats put effort into turning our Democratic voters in TX and FL. Republican margins in those two states are less than Democrats margins in CA and NY.

  48. 48.

    Yutsano

    Polls don’t vote.

    People do.

    We just need to make sure our people are voting more than their people are.

    Three weeks.

    We got dis.

  50. 50.

    West of the Rockies

    Think about how lovely, blissful, and schadenfreude-ish it will be on Thanksgiving to be among loved ones and lifting a glass to toast, “To Donald Trump… long may we enjoy his humiliation and misery!”

  51. 51.

    ArchTeryx

    I think the fixation on polls speaks to a very human, very deep desire to not have to sit in suspense any more. After all, if the polls show your candidate with a clear lead, then you don’t have to be quite so terrified. And believe me, TCFG’s endless fear-mongering is for exactly that: To drive all his people to the polls, just as he did in 2020.

    In a weird way, the Republican partisan push polls flooding the zone work as much against as for the goal of getting the MAGAts out to vote. They’re mainly for the consumption of the mainstream media, who WANT people as terrified as possible. That gets them more eyeballs, more ad revenue and more profit. The horse race sells. So they’re actively working against trying to lower the anxiety level, and they also are quite directly complicit in the attempts to discourage the Ds to stay home.

    The only real solution is to accept… as hard as that is… that the polls are just so much crystal ball reading at this point. The picture you get is hazy, incomplete and sometimes dead wrong, and being manipulated by hostile forces. All we can do is keep GOTV and otherwise, we’ll know after Election Day what the future of the country is going to be.

    It will be an awful few weeks. But one or another, at least the waiting is almost over.

  53. 53.

    Citizen Alan

    The SNL opening actually pissed me off. For those who didn’t see it, it was a parody of Family Feud with Trump and Kamala and their “families.” On the Trump side, it was Trump, one of this sons (Eric, I think), and Couch Fucker. Three people. On the Harris side, it was Kamala, Doug, Tim … and Joe Biden. They added a fourth person to the Dem side just so that they could make some utterly gratuitous and horribly ageist jokes about Joe.

    Also, it is just me or is Maya Rudolph’s Kamala impersonation getting colder and more dislikeable while James Austin Johnson’s Trump impersonation aiming for “lovable scamp” instead of Nazi monster?

  55. 55.

    Dangerman

    They be talking smack; we be teeing up a smackdown.

    How crazy will TFG be if he loses to an African American Woman? I have an emergency firehose for all head explisions

  56. 56.

    Ishiyama

    I just watched the tape of Bill Clinton speaking in Georgia. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBMZHn7LZIs

    Man is a genius! Speaking without a teleprompter, laying out an excellent argument – I had forgotten how smoothly that man can talk a hind leg off a mule. He’s got some kind of hand tremor, visible as he holds the mike, but he is still impressive.

  57. 57.

    Jinchi

    @Dangerman: How crazy will TFG be if he loses to an African American Woman?

    It will be even better if he goes on to be successfully prosecuted by Fani Willis and convicted by Tania Chutkin.

  58. 58.

    K-Mo

    Spot on WG.  When we fight, we win.

    Oh, and I never did get what FTFNYT stands for, but fuck em.

  62. 62.

    eclare

    @Ishiyama:

    After Bill’s speech at the 2012 DNC, Obama said that he should appoint Bill to be the secretary of explaining stuff.

    Thanks for the link!

  63. 63.

    TooManyJens

    Knocked 57 doors and wrote 20 postcards today. I’m trying not to freak out by channelling all that nervous energy into work.

    I knocked on several doors where the occupants only spoke Spanish, so we didn’t get very far on those. But the one guy who looked at the lit I was carrying, beamed, and said “Kamala! La presidenta!” made my day.

  67. 67.

    EngineerScotty

    One problem with all of this, is that most of us are firmly in “Allegory of the Cave” territory.

    I am a middle-aged software professional living in a progressive suburb of a progressive city in a solid blue West Coast state.  My personal and professional associates vastly support Harris over Trump, and there is no question how Oregon is going to vote.  I can drive into the countryside, which is Trump country, and see Trump signs (and the occasional Trump-flag-bearing pickup in town), but the visible signs of support for him seem to be far less than there was in 2020.

    But I know nothing of the “facts on the ground” in Pennsylvania or Georgia or Nevada, other than what the Internet brings into my cave.  And it’s a mess of contradictory information.

    Da Polls tell me the race is within the margin of error recently, with the swing states on a knife’s edge.  Some other signs of voter engagement seem to be leaning our way–early votes, GOTV efforts, etc.  Many states report lots of new Democratic registrations–but then I hear the same thing for the other side; both claims often coming from the various sides’ respective partisans.  Tay-Tay, arguably the most popular entertainer in the world, is on our side.  Generic ballot still favors Democrats (though not by much), and Harris has a positive favorability rating, whereas Trump is still about nine points underwater–about where he’s been since the GOP convention.  Lots of old-school Republicans have abandoned Trump and even endorsed Harris, and there are reports that many of them will not vote for Trump (though how many is unclear).  On the other hand, there are lots of tales warning of a shift of men to Trump, and/or Trump successfully marshalling more morons to the polls with a below-the-radar social media campaign.

    So what is the True State Of The Race?  I have no fucking idea, honestly, though it seems to be somewhere between “comfortable Harris win” and “narrow Trump win”.  But the latter is still within the realm of possibility, if one believes the polling.  And there are reasons to not trust the polling, given Dobbs, but all the other post-Dobbs elections didn’t have Trump on the ballot, and in the past two that have he has overperformed his polling, a phenomenon that seems to be unique to him.

    That said–the evidence that there has, in the past week, been a profound shift in the race seems to be rather thin.  Polling has been fairly steady nationally.   There’s some reason to be concerned about the swing states–but high quality polls of those have been fairly rare of late.  One of the reasons that low-quality partisan polls can be effective at flooding the zone is that these things–assuming they aren’t entirely fabricated–are done on the cheap, whereas the big media pollsters that I at least think are trying to get it right, have to spend a lot of money doing so.

  68. 68.

    Ksmiami

    Americans are idiots. They’ll probably elect the gd fascist. Ah well, I’ve done my part to fight. Too bad Merrick Garland didn’t prosecute earlier.

  69. 69.

    EngineerScotty

    @Ksmiami: While I’m not going to spend much time defending Garland, I’m curious–given that SCOTUS gave Trump pretty much a get out of jail free card; do you think that they would have done differently had the Jan 6 case came before them a year earlier?

    I mean–they could have simply just kicked the can down the road, which is what most people were expecting they would do.  Instead, they basically not only gave Trump a wide grant of immunity, but also made a ruling that seemed calculated to torpedo the other three criminal cases against him, by retroactively declaring much of the prosecution’s case to be off-limits.  I see no reason that such a ruling wouldn’t have come earlier, had things come to pass.

  70. 70.

    Ksmiami

    @EngineerScotty: if the prosecution trials had come in year 2, there’s a good chance the Supreme Court would have taken a pass. Time was not on our side and here we are.

  71. 71.

    Ksmiami

    And a double fuck to the MSM. Hopefully when they’re loaded onto the trains, I’ll get to wave goodbye to the worthless pundits.

  72. 72.

    EngineerScotty

    @Ksmiami:

    I’m not so sure.

    John Roberts is a fascist, though a careful one: he tries not to boil the frog too much, and occasionally makes errors (such as Dobbs), though he may well have failed at retraining Alito, who is the sort of bull who wants to run down the hill and fuck one cow rather than walking down slowly and fucking the entire herd (see the movie Colors if you don’t understand the reference).

    But the Court under his watch, has not hesitated about making rulings that are necessary for the project of the Heritage Foundation, no matter how much legal nonsense they may be, nor how much they disregard precedent.  If Donald John Trump is seen an indispensable part of the MAGA movement, I don’t think that John Roberts and company are going to let the Biden Administration throw him in prison.  And given that the GOP has declined/squandered multiple opportunities to throw him under the bus, I think it’s entirely fair that they have so concluded.  (Or else they are being blackmailed, I suppose).

    So… I think the fix was likely in, no matter when the charges are brought.  And I think it’s fairly likely that the DOJ knows the score.

  74. 74.

    Chris Johnson

    I don’t buy the ‘Trump win’ narrative. He pulled way, way larger crowds in 2016, and more people believed him in 2016. None of all this had happened yet.

  76. 76.

    SuzieC

    My Indivisible Central Ohio group finished 25,000 Vote Forward letters yesterday.  They are getting mailed this week.  Of course, our group is just one of hundreds across the country doing the same thing.  All this grassroots activism flies beneath the radar of the media and pollsters and is a big reason why I believe we will win.

  77. 77.

    pabadger

    @frosty: Thank You! Thank You! Thank You! I also live in PA 10 (sorry if I have says thus before to you, my memory for stuff like that is terrible).

    I was happy to see all the PA addresses were done. My wife and I got some Michigan ones.

     

    LFG!

  78. 78.

    TerryC

    My wife and I turned in our ballots at the township hall yesterday! My neighbor is running for township supervisor and has an entire slate of 6 running against the incumbent Republicans. It has been two decades or more since they had this sort of opposition. It’s quite exciting even though quiet and low-money; I am his biggest donor!

  79. 79.

    Papa Boyle

    One way I FTFNYT is by not talking about the FNYT, reading its content, or forwarding FNYT links.

    And something I do now that has brought down my levels of anxiety bigly is not clicking on content that includes some variation of the phrase “Trump said” in the title.

  81. 81.

    frosty

    @pabadger: Actually, I’m now in PA-11 after the districts changed. My rep is from Lancaster and doesn’t bother with us here on the wrong side of the Suskie. No chance of ever unseating him but Perry’s close and vulnerable.

  82. 82.

    MadamZorba

    I’m a long time lurker, and currently live in Pensacola, FL, which is a bastion of MAGA, and so far in this election, I’m seeing a lot of Harris enthusiasm. I see more Harris/Walz yard signs than Trump signs in most places I go. My own neighborhood is 50/50 Harris/Walz and Trump signs. Last election is was 4 to 1  Trump signs. The Harris people were out on a street corner across from the Cordova Mall on Saturday and they got a great reception. It may not mean anything, but at least I don’t feel alone in a sea of MAGA.

  83. 83.

    silvery

    Mr.  silvery & I got our Colorado ballots on Saturday & dropped them off yesterday. Fastest we’ve ever voted!

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