Tuesday Open Thread

7 thoughts on “Tuesday Open Thread”

1. Republican Party is a Failed State, and Trump is the Warlord. Noah Smith

   Good article reviewing the power structures of the two politcal parties: Democrats as a strong Party, and Republicans with a weak structure.

   What the heck are a bunch of non-political MAGAts doing at the top of the Republican Party. 

   Who are any of these people? Tulsi Gabbard was a fringe Democratic presidential candidate who has spent most of his career calling herself a leftist. RFK Jr. is a conspiracy-monger who tried to run for the Democratic nomination before he was (predictably) run out of town. Elon Musk, JD Vance, and Vivek Ramaswamy are figures from the tech world who weren’t involved in politics until recently. None of these people — including Trump himself — is a long-standing Republican or a long-standing conservative activist. 

   From where I’m sitting, it looks like the GOP has suffered a hostile takeover. The shareholders (i.e. the primary voters) approved a takeover bid over the objections of the existing management (elected Republicans and conservative activists). 

   Now maybe you think that’s a good thing. Maybe you like outsiders and despite party establishments. But as Trump ventures further and further into the world of conspiracy theories and false accusations, a number of prominent Republicans are starting to rue the fact that their party has been hijacked.

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2. With 24 days left to an election a presidential candidate is going to spend a day in a state he can't win. 

   If you want to sign up every phone you have for 2 tickets and then not show up…

   https://event.donaldjtrump.com/events/president-donald-j-trump-to-deliver-remarks-in-aurora-colorado?

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3. DeSantis Threatening Jail Time for Running Abortion Rights Ads in Florida. Josh Marshall at TPM.

   Florida has become the state where elements of a future second Trump presidency America already comes into view. We’re seeing some of these things happening right now in Florida. The example I’m about to share with you legitimately shocked me. (That’s a high bar.) It’s about the pro-choice ballot amendment which would restore Roe protections in Florida if it reaches a 60% threshold. As in most other states, getting to 50% isn’t that difficult. 60% is much harder. To head off even the chance that the ballot initiative might hit that challenging high bar the state of Florida is already spending a substantial amount of tax payer dollars campaigning against the initiative. Now we learn that the state is quite literally threatening jail time for the employees of stations that agree to run one of the ads for the pro-choice amendment. You heard that right – not sue under some claim of defamation but actual criminal charges.

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   1. With all the trouble Florida has, getting walloped by hurricanes, one would think they would have better things to do, and spend money on than being dragged into court for violating the First Amendment rights of its citizens. Does DeSantis not know the state’s going to be sued for the advertising ban and the threats? 

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      1. Well everything will be fixed in Florida by Oct. 26 for the first day of in person early voting. 

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4. I halfway expect in the next 24 days (maybe Aurora, perhaps) someone will proudly introduce Trump as "America's Next Adolf Hitler!" to the cheering crowd.

   Trump: Migrants have introduced “a lot of bad genes in our country”

   NEW YORK>> Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on Monday suggested that migrants who are in the U.S. and have committed murder did so because “it’s in their genes.” There are, he added, “a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”

   It’s the latest example of Trump alleging that immigrants are changing the hereditary makeup of the U.S. Last year, he evoked language once used by Adolf Hitler to argue that immigrants entering the U.S. illegally are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

   Trump made the comments Monday in a radio interview with conservative host Hugh Hewitt. He was criticizing his Democratic opponent for the 2024 presidential race, Vice President Kamala Harris, when he pivoted to immigration, citing statistics that the Department of Homeland Security says include cases from his administration.

   “How about allowing people to come through an open border, 13,000 of which were murderers? Many of them murdered far more than one person,” Trump said. “And they’re now happily living in the United States. You know, now a murderer — I believe this: it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now. Then you had 425,000 people come into our country that shouldn’t be here that are criminals.”

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5. Hell hath no fury like a woman who has had control of her own body stolen by the Republican Party. Rachel Bitecofer.

   Looking at Trump's closing message. Trump is trying to get the Bro vote to (1) Register and (2) Actually show up to vote. 

   For a political scientist well versed in American voter turnout, it’s a dangerous strategy that attempts to do the hardest thing to do in American politics: get the 50% of Americans who don’t even bother to vote in presidential elections to care enough to register to vote, and then actually follow through and cast a ballot. 

   To find out if there is any evidence this is working I asked Tom Bonier, one of the country’s best voter targeting analysts to take a deep dive in the registration data from Pennsylvania, the swing state the Trump campaign has disproportionately focused on, to see if there is any evidence of a registration surge among the Trump team’s target demographic: dudes. 

   I should note, that men underperform women in terms of turnout both in presidential cycles as well as non-presidential cycles like midterm elections which is why the female gender gap hurts more than the male gender gap. The Trump campaign has strategically committed itself to changing that.

   And, regarding all the anti-trans advertising:

   [It's] performing a very distinct form of “persuasion” messaging: persuasion by disqualification of the other option. 

   The Republican system relies on one messaging strategy that drives strong turnout among their voter coalition while at the same time, pushes swing voters away from voting for Democrats. That is why their model is superior: not only does it meet our ill-informed, apathetic electorate where it is, is saves resources and makes sure the full voter file is exploited by saving a bifurcation of resources. 

   Though its tempting to dismiss these ads as wasted resources spent on an already rapid base, that would be a mistake. The GOP’s persuasion strategy is to make sure swing voters think Democrats are extremists and it is a strategy that will work if it is not offset by a comparable persuasion strategy from Democrats. 

   The Harris campaign gets this, and continues to paint Trump as a dangerous extremist coming for freedom and running counter offense on border security and crime, but these data from Ad Impact makes it clear that in terms of centralizing messaging strategy to be able to compete with the GOP’s sound machine, much work remains. 

   John Lennon imagined a world of peace. I imagine a world where Democrats centralize their messaging strategy from the top of the ticket all the way down to the state legislature and the schoolboard.

   You can call me a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.

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