Archives for 2024

And they’re ugly:

A new analysis of precinct-level data by the NBC News Decision Desk shows the extent to which President-elect Donald Trump’s wins in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania — and Vice President Kamala Harris’s losses — were driven by weak turnout in heavily Democratic cities.

Going into Election Day, Harris’s clearest path to victory was to win all three states in the old “blue wall.” Ultimately, she fell short in all three, and the nearly completed vote count in those states shows how the number of votes compared to 2020 dropped in some of the most Democratic-friendly areas of those states.

[…]

As the diagonal black lines show, in all three states, heavily Democratic counties on the right side of each panel had worse turnout relative to 2020 than the heavily Republican counties on the left side. The largest county in each state — Wayne County, Michigan, home of Detroit; Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania; and Milwaukee County, Wisconsin — had either the worst or second-worst shift in votes cast of any county in their state.

Wisconsin did a good job raising turnout in Milwaukee County, but it wasn’t enough.

Here are Some Real NumbersPost + Comments (189)

We had a rare November snowfall over here today. I don’t get gators, obviously, but I do get foxes:

I’ve been feeling vaguely concussed since the election. Not really able to think clearly about it, though I know I’ll recover eventually. I’ve avoided most of the postmortems – I really can’t buy that this was a marketing problem. Back on the 8th, British reporter and commentator Ian Dunt wrote up a take that, to me, seemed sensible:

“Most of the commentary attempting to work out what went wrong has focused on the Democrats, for obvious reasons. Did Joe Biden stay on too long? Did Kamala Harris lack a retail proposition to improve people’s lives? These are all totally legitimate questions. But they sidestep the bigger one. Regardless of its deficiencies, the Democrat offer was not grounded in hatred of democracy, love of cruelty and wanton idiocy. The correct choice was obvious, on the level of governance or morality.

The reason this analysis cannot be said out loud is because it blames voters and that has become taboo. The first rule in politics is that voters are never wrong.

That makes total sense for a party strategist. It’s how they need to think. But we are not all party strategists. Some strange process has taken place where everyone is expected to act like they work for a political organisation. But we don’t. . . .

Reporters and columnists have ingested the taboo on criticising voters and now sound more and more like a party communication department.

This twists the morality of the situation until it goes into reverse. The voter behaviour must be blameless so the party they voted for must therefore be blameless too. Cruelty is validated by voters which means it is validated by the press, which means that our moral standards go into terminal decline.”

Hopefully not terminal. But it sure feels that way. On a practical level, the sane wing of my family has been trying to determine which of us are most exposed to damage from potential Trump 2.0 policies, and what can be done in the next 60 days to mitigate that exposure. And I’ve been trying to savor the small joys – wood fires, good meals, the fox in the snow. Hope you have, too.

Open thread!

Sniffing the Air Open ThreadPost + Comments (145)

I went in to a local pharmacy to get vaxxed yesterday and for whatever reason the signup machinery had assigned me the Novovax protein subunit COVID vaccination.  (Here’s a Mayo Clinic article on the different vaccines.)

The pharmacist said that the Novovax vaccine is supposed to have fewer side effects, and I’m here to tell you that I’m feeling better today than I ever have after a COVID vaccination.  Normally it would be at least 12 hours of fever/chills, but I haven’t had much (or any) of that.  The soreness in my arm is almost gone, which is also pretty good for 24 hours post-shot.  (I also got the flu vaccine.)

FYI and FWIW to those who haven’t gotten their Fall shots yet.  Open thread.

This Little Silver Boulder, This Slowly Falling StarPost + Comments (159)

Here’s the Booker piece in Politico that Polis is referring to.

I’m not enough of a Mr. Brightside to think that RFK Jr’s almost-certain assault on vaccines and his plans to downsize the NIH will be made up with his focus on a healthier diet, but I guess I just don’t have the genius insight that allows Jared Polis and Corey Booker to pick a tiny peanut out of the torrent of shit that will certainly come from an RFK Jr. appointment.

I also want to congratulate Chris Coons on getting an approving tweet from Elon Musk’s PAC by going on Fox News and babbling some nonsense about the great potential of Musk and Ramaswamy’s slash-and-burn government-killing commission.

We’re finding out quickly who has some fight and who doesn’t, and it ain’t pretty.

In other news, I wonder who the first Democrat will be to sign on to Nancy Mace’s bill to make sure only biological females use the women’s restrooms in the House.  This bill is aimed at the first openly transgender member of Congress, Sarah McBride, from Chris Coons’ home state of Delaware.

You Know Who Else was a Proponent of a Healthy Diet? (Hint: He Was a Vegetarian)Post + Comments (126)