Sunday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Sunday, November 3, 2024
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49 comments
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About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a retired Professor of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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I’m hoping this is not necessary, or is just a fever dream. Unfortunately, it’s not my meds talking…
https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/02/us/washington-oregon-nevada-national-guard-election/index.html
ETA
h/t to @Cracker, who pointed out the empty storefronts in his downtown PDX neighborhood being boarded up, and sent me the link.
ETA 2 hoping the Nat’l Guard units aren’t needed. I’m not sanguine about a future where we have to bring in Federal troops to keep order in an American election.
Here’s last night’s SNL cold open. Harris shows up around six minutes in.
BTW, the actor they have playing El Felon needs to work on his act. He’s too coherent and articulate.
Tim Alberta’s article in The Atlantic Monthly about the backbiting (although it’s more like frontbiting) and candidate tantrums in the Trump Campaign is out and worth a read:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/11/trump-2024-campaign-lewandowski-conway/680456/
Probably behind a paywall, although I read it for free as it’s my first article this month.
@Not the IT Dept.:
Digby wrote something on it, she included a gift link, here:
https://digbysblog.net/2024/11/02/whats-discipline-got-to-do-with-winning/
I read the piece (Atlantic subscriber, tell me if Digby’s gift link does not work).
The piece struck me as spun a bit to make TFG/TFG campaign look better. For example, it implies Tony Hinchcliffe was an aberration and not typical of all 30 or so speakers at the MSG hate-a -palooza. Alberta obviously had sources in the campaign, LaCivita looks good enough my guess he was one of them.
The MSG hate-a-palooza is what TFG wanted per other sources, all about firing up Trump’s base.
I suppose, in the interest of preserving access, Alberta had to do a bit of spin to make LaCivita/Wiles look better.
Can anyone explain to me what Donny’s microphone blow job means? Is this a “locker room joke”? Because I have never been in a locker room where a guy miming giving someone a blowjob would be considered a joke. Is that it? Has Donny Boy been playing both sides all along, and his decompensating dementia brain finally let out the secret?
@MarkedMan:
He is disinhibited by dementia now to where he is totally letting his freak flag fly, see the hatefest MSG rally for another example.
@MarkedMan:
Long buried, or perhaps only acted on in the down-low, homosexuality coming out. Women and gay men miming giving a BJ is pretty common, but not for an (alleged) straight guy.
Don’t have a link, but the Daily Beast has an interesting hit piece up on tapes by Trump’s biographer interviewing Jeffrey Epstein.
@MarkedMan:
At a rally the other night, Trump got frustrated with his mic – for some reason – and mimicked performing fellatio on the mic stand – for no sane reason at all.
There are clips all over the internet – I saw one but didn’t listen to Trump’s talk because the visual was enough – but to the best of my knowledge the mainstream media couldn’t carry them, apparently because it violated FCC regulations about showing sex. If you google “Trump” and “blow job” with the dates limited to this week, you’ll be able to find it.
It’s still 72 hours to go but this might just be the nadir of his campaign.
@MarkedMan: I’m not saying this makes actual sense, but I think I can track the emotional course of it.
The microphone wasn’t working. It didn’t get fixed immediately. The gain was too low. This means that to be heard, Trump had to bend over and lean toward it.
His free association with that body language was sexual.
Now there are some performers who have the microphone less than an inch from their mouth. I’m guessing Trump doesn’t like this, in all likelihood he thinks a microphone is phallic, and that would make him “gay”, which I am certain he thinks is bad.
And yeah, I kinda feel like I need to take a shower now. I don’t know what is in his mind, this is just a guess.
From the beginning of the Tim Alberta piece:
Steven Cheung, the TFG campaign has its very own Baghdad Bob/Ron Ziegler. What a joke that guy is.
@Not the IT Dept.: There’s a lot to unpack in that article, but I’ll admit this line caught me off guard, considering how much work Ivanka has clearly had done:
The rest is unsurprising. Palace intrigue gotta palace intrigue.
I note harris doesn’t seem to have these problems. Maybe she isn’t too cheap to pay for a good advance team.
Since we were talking yesterday about how Spotify’s algorithm does a poor job of finding new music for you, here’s a better source: Erik Loomis at LGM regularly posts music notes. I’ve found some good music through his commentary and playlists.
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2024/11/music-notes-190
For example, because of the political science reference in their name, the band The Paranoid Style got my attention. I’m enjoying running through their catalog, for which I’m grateful, especially since I might have missed them otherwise.
So, poaching eggs in silicone cupcake liners totally works. Unless you’re me and mess it up. The amazing part is the long series of mistakes* I made resulted in something edible, albeit not particularly enjoyable.
On other things, I tried a different AI for the distim experiment. This time Aria in the Opera browser. I asked if it stroke it as odd that distim sounds like the opposite of ketchup. Here’s the reply:
It reminds me of the Big Bang Theory ep where Sheldon asked penny for acting lessons. At one point they try improvisation, and Sheldon comes up with something ridiculous. Penny plays along, telling him “improv is all about saying yes.”
Next up, if I remember, Google’s Gemini.
*Forgot to grease the liners (it’s hard to wash off the cooked egg white that sticks), overfilled the pan, and overcooked the eggs.
@gVOR10: I am going to straight-up admit how astonished I am at the Harris campaign’s discipline.
She managed to set up a national campaign in WEEKS. I can’t begin to describe how insane that is. Yes, she had the Biden team’s help (and, FYI, this says a lot about how Biden’s campaign structure prioritized the end goal, rather than their candidate; I am beyond impressed) but honestly this is nothing short of amazing.
All of the wailing about her not doing press interviews at the beginning–my gawd, again, she did in a handful of weeks what some cannot manage to do with MONTHS of preparation.
@MarkedMan:
He wasn’t mimicking fellatio, he was was testing the mic’s audio. It just *looked* like a blowjob, hence the memes and mockery.
@MarkedMan:
From the same Digby link I posted above:
https://digbysblog.net/2024/11/02/whats-discipline-got-to-do-with-winning/
@charontwo: Every time I see a Steven Cheung quote, I am reminded of the snarky kangaroo in Horton Hears a Who with the little kangaroo in her pouch punctuating each piece of snark by saying “me too!” I started into The Atlantic article and found it comic how, after each paragraph of anonymously sourced intrigue, there was a single parenthetical of Steven Cheung denying this ever happened.
Trump lost the support of yet another Nazi.
WTF is going on? White Supremacists are now saying that Trump is so bad that they’re going to vote for a Black/Indian Female. Seriously, WTF?
I swear. This last week’s headlines would make a great game: “Real Headline or The Onion”?
Prominent white supremacist Richard Spencer endorses Kamala Harris
@Jen:
Didn’t she just move in her own people at the top to take over the existing Biden campaign – leased staffed offices, ad buy commitments, contracts etc.?
That’s why she was the logical replacement for Biden, because already being part of the Biden-Harris ticket she was the only possible candidate who could do that.
@EddieInCA:
Nick Fuentes has also disavowed Trump.
@CSK:
Yeah, I posted about that last night in yesterday’s open forum.
@EddieInCA:
I’d say it was Jew hatred uber alles, but Doug Emhoff is Jewish, isn’t he?
@CSK:
Answering my own question, Trump is apparently too supportive of Israel for Spencer’s liking.
@charontwo: She was the only one who could legally access the Biden infrastructure and fundraising, yes. But still: they had to retool the entire campaign. The visible stuff like signs and advertising all needed to be redesigned, approved, sent to the printing/advertising and distributed. But also the entire back of the house had to be revamped as well: revising the campaign binders/outreach. Making sure policy papers reflected all of the right campaign priorities. Examining and conducting all of the appropriate polling–and working with all of the vendors to ensure that everything that was modified fed down to every last corner, from the SMS messaging to emails. The fundraising documents had to be updated. Outreach to reporters had to be reviewed. Connections to the state parties, major donors, and campaign offices–all reviewed.
Even with handing over the apparatus of the Biden campaign, there was a LOT that could have gone wrong. Again, that it didn’t speaks to an incredibly high level of discipline and attention to detail.
@EddieInCA: Spencer turned against Trump long ago; he endorsed Biden in 2020.
I find Nick Fuentes’ recent renouncement of Trump to be (very slightly) more interesting.
David Duke in this cycle has endorsed Jill Stein.
It’s always worth keeping in mind that a lot of these people are attention-seeking trolls, who are always in a desperate attempt to grab headlines, which they do by trying to be weird. I remember back in the ’90s, the head of Aryan Nation declared that O.J. Simpson was a hero, because he got rid of a Jew and a race traitor.
@Kathy:
I tried Gemini. This time the “sounds like the opposite of” I chose was “Phalange”
Here’s the answer:
Note the hallucination of a definition for “distim.” This in addition to the plain fact that it sounds nothing like phalange.
And with that, I’m done torturing the LLMs. After all,t hey may take over someday and remember this.
@EddieInCA:
@CSK:
@Kylopod:
I think they’ve all realized that El Felon, like hitler before him, has made bigotry look bad.
https://x.com/KvotheTheArcane/status/1852784938531029448
https://x.com/torriangray/status/1852882026569048165
I never stop being shocked at the intentional stupidity of Republicans. Zero conservatives see any contradiction with the following 2 statements:
“This inflation is all Biden’s fault”
“Companies can raise prices however they want, it’s a free market, they have to get theirs”
There seems to be a rather sudden vibe shift that Harris is likely to win, based partly on the amazing DesMoines Register poll putting Harris up among likely voters by 3% in IOWA. Iowa is now a swing state?! It’s hard to not wonder if the moguls of the supposedly liberal MSM aren’t trying to repeat 2016 by pushing down Dem voter motivation. But, boy howdy.
The Iowa result is apparently driven by a massive gender gap. If so, it’s driven by the reversal of Roe, something we can’t count on being as big a deal in ’28.
“GiftAtlantic”
@Jen:
I can’t get over that same sentence
“Trump, who is generally appalled by plastic surgery”
I mean, it’s obvious his own daughter has had plastic surgery. Same for his wife, i think.
But, hey…apparently nobody told him that.
@CSK:
And isn’t that a surprise.
@Min:
As reported in Vanity Fair, Trump hated his wife Ivana’s plastic surgery, calling her breasts “horrible plastic tits.”
At his Pennsylvania rally this morning, Trump said he wouldn’t mind if would-be assassins shot reporters.
@gVOR10:
It’s largely because the Selzer poll is regarded as one of the best pollsters in the business, if not the best. It not only has a long record of dead-on accuracy, but in several cases anticipated victories that no other pollster at the time did. It picked up Obama’s 2008 victory in the Iowa caucus, after most pollsters showed Hillary ahead. In 2016 when it showed Trump winning the state in the general election by 7 points (he would go on to win by 9.4), it was one of the first signs of real trouble for the Hillary campaign. And in 2020 when it showed Trump once again up by 7 (he went on to win by 8), it correctly anticipated Biden would have more trouble in the Upper Midwest than most other polls were showing.
Her biggest miss was probably 2018, when her poll showed Kim Reynolds losing the gubernatorial race, and Reynolds went on to win by just under 3 points, an error of about 5 points. Most of Selzer’s polls are within three points of the final result. For Trump to do as well in Iowa as he did in 2020, Selzer would have to be underestimating him by 11 points–which is rare for any pollster.
Among the commentary I’ve been seeing over the past day, even those who think the Selzer poll is good news for Harris, and who regard Selzer as the absolute gold standard of pollsters, are deeply skeptical of the idea that she’s actually going to win Iowa. The state has been all but ignored by both campaigns up to this point. The cross-tabs are notable, as they show old female voters going overwhelmingly for Harris, and that could have ramifications in other states. The main caveat is that Iowa’s electorate skews older, whiter, and more rural than any of the swing states, but that doesn’t mean the impact on that demographic will be isolated to that state.
@Kylopod: Three reasons I am optimistic in general:
1. I think there is a high likelihood that the polls are undercounting new young voters. IMO the Taylor Swift thing was a BFD, you can bet any new voters she attracts will not be voting for Trump
2. Trump has done everything he could to lose this election in the last two weeks. I know a lot of the maga nation loves him for his ridiculous behavior, but those people have always been in his camp. Some people on the fence are probably there because of Trump’s behavior, and the last two weeks will not assuage their fears.
@charontwo:
My understanding is she kept Biden’s people in place, including his campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon, who is well-respected. Then added a strategist or two from the Obama camp (Plouffe) and Hillary camp (her sister, Maya).
What did you hear?
This is pretty interesting, Selzer interviewed re races in Iowa, Prez, HOR etc.
“Bulwark Video”
Roevember, Dobbs aftereffect.
This is pretty interesting, Selzer interviewed re races in Iowa, Prez, HOR etc.
“Bulwark Video”
Roevember, Dobbs aftereffect.
@Jen: Ivanka’s plastic surgery improved her looks. Laura Loomer’s did not.
@charontwo:
One of the factors being mentioned is that the over-65 women remember what it was like before Roe v. Wade was decided, and they don’t want to go back.
The other factor, it seems to me, with these older women, is that they probably would like to vote in a woman for president before they pass on. And Harris doesn’t seem like a terrible choice, she has a better favorable/unfavorable than Hillary Clinton did, for instance.
I have been engaged with some of the right wing craziness on job numbers. Their claim is that to make job numbers look better in 15 out of the last 16 months they have announced job numbers then quietly revised them downward later. Looking at monthly BLS numbers it is true that 15 out of 16 were revised down, however, in the previous 19 months they were revised upwards. So the same people trying to help the Dems were trying to hurt them for the 19 months preceding the same period according to this conspiracy theory. Actually, what you see due to the way they calculate the numbers, surveys and insurance claims, they underestimate numbers when job numbers are going up and overestimate when they do down.
A second claim is that the increase is mostly in part time jobs. So let’s look at the numbers (at the link. What you see is that part time numbers go up and down and while that have increase a bit recently, the numbers are lower than through much of the Trump years and in line with numbers during the Bush years.
https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2024/10/10/a-closer-look-at-full-time-and-part-time-employment
Steve
@gVOR10:
Trump may have made a fatal mistake in doubling-down on the crazy to close his campaign. Heck of a lot of people pay little attention until the last few weeks so most politicians deliberately pivot towards the center late.
Trump may have confused the enthusiasm level of the people in his rallies with “winning”. The more vulgar he gets the more they cheer him, but not many old ladies in Iowa are looking for someone to carry on about Arnold Palmer’s schlong.
Very few, in fact.
@dazedandconfused:
My guess would be none.
@Jen: Coming from you, this is high praise.
@Jay L Gischer:
And, to some extent, over-65 men. While senior women voters favored Harris by 35 percentage points in the Iowa poll, senior men also favored Harris, although by just 2 points. Still pretty significant, though, since Harris had a 14-point deficit overall among men.
So maybe we should give *Baby Boomers some credit. Coming of age during the Cold War, Vietnam, the Civil Rights Movement, and the feminist movements may have provided the perspective that led them to choose Harris.
*I know–not all Boomers are over 65 and not everyone over 65 is a Boomer.
@Tony W: I was genuinely concerned. Politics is full of massive egos–witness the Atlantic piece cited early in the thread.
What the Democrats have managed–win or lose–is utterly f*#^ing remarkable. They’ve effectively been able to completely redirect a national campaign from top to bottom in sixteen weeks. (I worked on special elections that were 10 weeks from start to finish and those were flat-out efforts for state representative and state senate elections.)
They’ve done this with NO back biting, NO sniping, NO off-the-record BS. This shows remarkable maturity (contrast that with the opposition) and sense of purpose.
@Jen: You said everything I want to say but better than I could ever hope to articulate it.
I’m still in a bit of disbelief at how well the change over went.