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November 09, 2024 01:39 AM UTC

Weekend Open Thread

  • 37 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

“Let the future tell the truth.”

–Nikola Tesla

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37 thoughts on “Weekend Open Thread”

  1. Maine voters decided they've had enough of dark money.

    Residents of this state overwhelmingly approved a referendum this week to limit donations to political action committees that spend independently in candidate elections, setting the stage for a legal showdown over caps on individual contributions to so-called super PACs that spend freely in elections.

    It's at least a start.  Maybe other states will eventually follow.

    1. The showdown will be quick lived, as under current precedent, Maine's referendum is unconstitutional. Not that I agree with the state of the law, but it is what it is at this point

      1. Unfortunate, but unsurprising.  I really have to wonder how long the judiciary can hold up under this continuing infestation by MAGA senators and the Federalist Society.

    1. F*#king hell they don’t!

      (And, anyway, ignorance may be for some a chronic habit and for many others even a lifestyle choice, but it’s still not a defense.)

  3. 8th District race has tightened a bit – Evans is up on Caraveo by 1,995 when it was closer to 2,500 yesterday. I think I’m seeing more than 14K left to count, but correct me if wrong.

  4. It's the Propaganda, Stupid. Marcy Wheeler at EmptyWheel.

    I want to elaborate on something I said on Nicole Sandler’s show on Friday. There were really two elections last Tuesday.

    In one, politics worked.

    In the other, propaganda worked far better. Trump didn’t even hide that he was running on propaganda. JD Vance said it plainly during his debate: their campaign wasn’t willing to participate in any venue that would fact check. They did not contest this election on true claims about policy. Indeed, hours after Trump’s win became clear, one after another influencer announced that, yes, Donald Trump really does plan on implementing Project 2025, even though he falsely disavowed it as a core tenet of his campaign over and over.

    Trump won with about the same number of votes he got in 2020. But they were different votes: more Hispanics, fewer white people. He will win the popular vote, too, but it’s not yet clear by how much.

    Harris lost. But she lost differently in contested states and uncontested states. In uncontested states, the country moved upwards of 6% towards Trump. In contested states, Harris halved that movement by 3%. That is, where she followed the old rules of campaigning, persuasion, and GOTV, it worked, some, to counter the larger propaganda wave.

    Meanwhile, a lot of people only voted for Trump. That’s why Democratic Senators are on pace to win four swing states that Trump won.

    And Democrats had resilience down ballot in other places, too. A number of democrats in districts Trump won by double digits kept their seats. In several states, less conservative judges were kept. In Montana, the legislature moved left. In addition to most of the abortion referenda, right wingers lost referenda on school vouchers in ruby red states.

    There is no getting around the devastation of Trump’s win. But the down ballot resilience will end up being very important — and also suggests some areas of vulnerability for Republicans.

    Democrats are already at each others’ throat over whether politics could have worked better — who is to blame. Some idiots are arguing that Democrats lost because they’re too “woke,” as if they don’t know that “wokeness” was a propaganda creation the entire time, propaganda created by men waging cultural war on behalf of aggrieved men. We can come back to the two issues — Harris’ silence on Gaza and her cultivation of Republicans — that might plausibly have led Democrats to stay home.

    But given the larger dynamic of the race — that politics worked where it was done, but propaganda worked far better — Democrats would be far better to use the two months they’ve got to inventory their tools (one of which is that down ballot resilience), breathe, and think about how to counter the propaganda, because Trump will be in a position to keep doing what he just did unless Democrats find a way to counter the propaganda.

    I’m not the only one making that observation. Michael Tomasky noted that Trump won on inaccurate perceptions about the economy. Amanda Marcotte wrote about this dissonance at Salon, pointing to a bunch of studies showing that people who get information from non-news sites prefer Harris’ policies but nevertheless voted for Trump.

     

    1. I call BS. Washington Post has an article claiming "The Educateds" don't know how to talk to the "not Educateds"

      The problem wasn’t Democratic policy or messaging. It’s ignorance. As Heather “Digby” Parton wrote at Salon Wednesday, people backed Trump’s “aesthetics and attitudes” but knew nothing about his policies. Before the election, Catherine Rampell and Youyou Zhou at the Washington Post polled voters about policies without revealing which candidate proposed them. Harris’ were far more popular — even Trump voters generally liked her ideas more, as long as they knew they weren’t hers.

      When voters have factual information about the candidates, they prefer Democrats. Polls from earlier this year show that people who consume news from journalistic outlets — newspapers, network news programs, and news websites — overwhelmingly planned to vote for the Democratic candidate. Newspaper readers clocked in at 70% Democratic support, and network news viewers were 55% Democratic. News website readers were only less so because the survey didn’t distinguish between legitimate sites like Salon and bunk outlets like Breitbart, but still: merely being a person who reads stuff makes you more liberal. In states where heavy ad spending helped educate voters a little more on Harris’ plans, she lost less ground than in places where that money wasn’t spent.

      The problem is most people simply do not absorb quality information. Instead, increasing numbers of Americans have a media diet that is mostly a bunch of lies, conspiracy theories, irrelevant diatribes and other such bunkum that right-wing propagandists use to deceive people. A study released by Pew Research in September showed people were exponentially more likely to get “news” from social media detritus than legitimate news outlets. And those results almost certainly downplay the ratio of nonsense-to-real news, since most people taking the poll won’t want to admit that they mostly scroll TikTok all day and haven’t read an actual article in eons. Looking at newspaper sales and news site traffic, we can see that the consumption of reality-based news is plummeting.

        1. ^^ THIS!! ^^

          Mine is paid up for awhile, but will not be renewed. 

          Last number I saw was a subscription drop of over 250,000 — that's about 10% of the subscription base..  3 of 10 Editorial Board members resigned. [David Hoffman, who has been at the paper for more than four decades, Molly Roberts and Mili Mitra],  Columnists Robert Kagan and Danielle Allen resigned (so did Hugh Hewitt, though his appears to be a consequence of other events).  .

    2. This entire article is highly recommended.

      Propaganda didn’t just win the election. It created the malaise that Trump promised he would solve.

      …

      First, Trump was on the ballot. A great many people — often disaffected and less educated — are buying the con that Trump is selling, and they’re buying it because Trump and his allies first made them more disaffected and then offered to provide an antidote. He plans to do more of the same in his second term.

      Second, as the WSJ points out, legacy media has cratered in the last two years. But importantly, as I’ll show, Republicans have already started putting a lot of the fascist crackdown we fear in place, both in individual states like Florida, but also in the way the GOP used their majority in the House starting in 2023. Republicans took out social media moderation in advance, and that played a significant part in the success of GOP propaganda efforts. They started laying the foundation to win on propaganda when they got a majority in the House.

      Finally, a word about Biden’s unpopularity, which is what the wave was against. We’re looking at the election and no doubt the propaganda made the difference there. It didn’t help that legacy media misrepresented Biden’s economic successes.

      But one reason Biden is so unpopular is the same reason Hillary was in 2016: Republicans had led a sustained garbage investigation designed to do nothing but raise her negatives. Republicans tried to impeach Biden for, literally, nothing, and it captured the attention of both real and fake media for two years. And the effort to smear Biden was, as these campaigns always are, about projection. Republicans in Congress spent taxpayer dollars to create the illusion that Biden was the corrupt one, not Trump. (Trump’s unprecedented corruption, which will be one of several organizing principles of his Administration, got almost no attention during the campaign.)

    1. Yup, here's the article in today's Denver Post covering the information voters should have been hearing 6 months ago

      Frustrated Americans await economic changes, stability

      Fed up with high prices and unimpressed with an economy that by just about any measure is a healthy one, Americans demanded change when they voted for president.

      They could get it.

      President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to topple many of the Biden administration’s economic policies.

      The Peterson Institute for International Economics, a leading think tank, has estimated that Trump’s policies would slash the U.S. gross domestic product — the total output of goods and services — by between $1.5 trillion and $6.4 trillion through 2028.

      Peterson also estimated that Trump’s proposals would drive prices sharply higher within two years: Inflation, which otherwise would come in at 1.9% in 2026, would instead jump to between 6% and 9.3% if Trump’s policies were enacted in full.

      Last month, 23 Nobel-winning economists signed a letter warning that a Trump administration “will lead to higher prices, larger deficits and greater inequality.”

      “Among the most important determinants of economic success,” they wrote, “are the rule of law and economic and political certainty, and Trump threatens all of these.”

      The United States is the economic “envy of the world,” the Economist magazine recently declared.

      Trump apparently lives by H. L. Mencken's observation that "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people"

      He's currently recruiting stooges to fill his Council of Quackenomic Advisors to carry out his disastrous economic policies.

      1. Do people not remember that the high prices started as a result of production and international trade coming to a screeching halt? Production and trade in the U.S. stopped because of the damn-demic, which was made so much worse than it might have been because Yammie-pie blew it off for months. It was bad news and he couldn't blame it on the previous administration. By the time he decided it needed attention, (after he got it), it was rampant and people were dying in droves. This is what people wanted to return to? I don't get it. And tariffs? All I can figure about that is that they existed when he was young and making (and losing) money. He must see them as a return to the good ol' days. And the other country will pay for the tariffs makes about as much sense as "Mexico will pay…"

        1. Cook, many who post in here remember the China Virus Hoax and its impact on the global economy. But most of the world exists out there where the average person has an attention span equivalent to that of a bag full rats in a burning meth lab. You're talking about ancient history.

           

  6. Thanks Parkhill, for posting these. 
     

    Hiw do Dems counteract propaganda? I think that the ONLY thing that works at a small scale is respectful conversation, ex:

    "I'm voting for Trump because he's such a warrior. "
    ""It doesn't bother you that he's also a criminal? "

    it would really help if respectable news outlets would cover actual news like that Trump's tariffs will race crisis, and that mass deportation would deprive the agriculture industry of 90% of its workforce, raising food prices exponentially

     

    1. How to counter propaganda, that is the hundred dollar question.

      The problem is not "messaging. It is not even truth vs falsehood. It is the dominance of falsehood and distraction to the point where the truth can't penetrate. This is intentional. Musk, Steve Bannon the Russians and MAGA and Lauren Boebert all know this. That's the purpose of "They're eating the cats and dogs". It isn't about truth vs falsehood; it's about making it impossible to know which is which.

      Also, it is designed to dominate the news cycle, and prevent any traction for Democrat's or Harris's ideas to be communicated.

      This tsunami of propaganda is not addressed by the establishment political press Wapo, NYT, Axios, Politico. They start writing stupid articles about "Democrats need new messaging" or Democrats are too woke" or "Democrats don't know how to talk to White Working Class people or "How to talk to incels". (I made the last one up, but who knows, it's probably the next phase of lunch counter conversations in rural Pennsylvania.)

      We know that's bullshit because whenever people are asked about Kamala Harris's policies (without knowing they're hers) they are strongly in favor

      Kamala Harris actually worked to reach beyond the establishment, but got swamped by disinformation and misinformation.

  7. Romney was right.  Remember when in 2012 he said migrants would "self deport" if they couldn't find US employment because of EVerify?  We all mocked him without really understanding the accuracy of this.  Well,this is what's coming under Trump.  And, a conservative economist just said on Zakaria's show that it won't lead to inflation because it will be offset by the miracle of productivity gains(!)

    For decades, the country failed to implement reasonable immigration policy.  That triggered the racist instincts of the working class leading to where we find ourselves today.  Now Trump will reverse this all at once with an economic apocalypse to follow.

    To paraphrase the 1980s Denver bumper sticker: "Please God give me another 2008 economic crash and I promise to buy up all of the homes at a 50% discount."

     

  8. We may want to rethink these exhortations to people to turn out to vote. 

    Ezra Klein had an excellent piece in the Times today.

    Opinion | The Democratic Blind Spot That Wrecked 2024 – The New York Times

    For those of you who are too cheap to subscribe, or worse, refuse to read the Times because you believe it to be too right wing (hee hee hee), I will summarize.

    Harris lost because the Dems did not have their wake-up call in 2022 like they had in 1994 and 2010. He explained that after Clinton and Obama got their asses handed to them, they went to work figuring out what needed to be done to right the ship. And it worked each time.

    In 2022, the Dems dodged a bullet for a number of reasons including:  Dobbs decision, recent memory of Trump chaos, COVID and some really problematic candidates running on the GOP ticket (Hershel Walker, Dr. Oz, Kari Lake). We mistook dodging a bullet for being bullet-proof. As a result, we sleep-walked in 2024. When Dean Phillips tried to warn us, he was brushed aside.

    I do not blame Kamala Harris. I liked her, voted for her, and donated money to her campaign. I think she ran the rest race she could under the circumstances. (I wasn't too thrilled with Coach Walz but I don't think that Mark Kelly or Josh Shapiro would have changed the outcome.)

    Imagine where we would be if Biden had stayed in the race. YIKES! Trump would have gotten over 400 electoral votes and more than 55% of the popular vote. 

    As for those who have long taken the position that "the more who vote, the better," you may want to rethink that. At some point, the quality of the vote cast should matter. Alexander Hamilton got it right when he said, "The masses are asses."

    Some of you want to blame propaganda and fear-mongering but those things work when you are dealing with people who are stupid. And the average is stupid. We have a horrible public education system which rewards failure. Sixty years ago, television was considered a big threat because it led to stupidity. Well the internet is television on steroids.

    Who the fuck should give two shakes of a rat's ass over who Hulk Hogan or Taylor Swift endorses for president. This is what it's come. 

    After Obama, there was this foolish belief that Dems would win forever as long as people of color, women, and young people voted. Well they did last Tuesday. How did that turn out with those groups?

    Trump wins in blue collar, working class Pueblo County, 51% to 46%. Yet in my neighborhood of Jefferson County (which is mostly white, upper middle class and well educated), Tammy Story was re-elected 52-48%. And I live in what used to be one of the most right-wing Republicans parts of metro area. Go figure.

    Big turnout have historically hurt the part in power because people who are angry are more likely to vote than people who are happy. If Trump and Vance deliver on what they have been promising and it results in another Great Depression (think the Smoot-Hawley tariffs as our late friend Voyaguer used to like to mention) – then a big turnout in 2028 might bode well for the opposition party candidate.

     

      1. I fully expect the Dems to take the House in '26 – unless they do something incredibly stupid – because the GOP will be defending a paper-thin majority in January.

        In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if the Dems took the House before November '26 based on vacancies and special elections.

        The Senate will remain in GOP hands for at least the next four years. In '26, there are only two seats that are competitive:  Susan Collins in ME and Jon Osoff in GA. Colins has been targeted by Dems in several election cycles but always unsuccessfully.

        Osoff is history if Brian Kemp runs against him. 

          1. My guess … yes, she will.  She'll be concerned, of course, but rationalize that she can have more influence within the Republian conference than outside of it.

            1. Yes, like the ditz did when she rationalized her vote to confirm Kavanaugh by saying, "He told me that he respects precedent."

              Well, Senator Moron, he was an intermediate appellate court judge. He HAD to respect precedent in that position.

              But guess what? Supreme Court justices only have to respect precedent until they overrule it.

              1. For a deep analysis of the hole the Democrats find themselves in in the Senate—and it may very well be a near-permanent hole—I urge you to read this reddit thread including all of the comments by the OP (original poster):

                Much Like the Supreme Court, Few People Realize How Screwed the Democrats Are in Their Chances to Take Back the Senate

                Excerpt:

                The GOP winning Montana, Ohio and West Virginia was huge. Now Republicans start every election cycle with 48 guaranteed Senate seats and only have to retain 3 of the 16 remaining battleground seats. Dems should have made DC and Puerto Rico states when they had the chance.

                Republicans are going to have a 53-47 edge. Now look at 2026 to see how they can make up for it. There is only one Republican incumbent from a state Trump lost: Susan Collins in Maine. In her last election, she won by 8.5 points. Even if Collins loses, any other pickup is tough. North Carolina is the only swing state where a Republican incumbent is defending a seat.  Democrats also have to defend two swing states: Michigan and Georgia. Democrats run the table on all these races, they’re still down 51-49.

                "Let’s go to 2028, and assume things went perfectly in 2026. Republicans are now defending two swing states: North Carolina and Wisconsin. Meanwhile, Democrats are defending four swing states: Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Georgia. Democrats would need to win all 6 races to get a 51-49 advantage. If they win 5 they can have the majority if a Democrat also wins the presidency.  Basically, everything has to go right the next two election cycles just for Democrats to get a bare majority.

                This isn’t about the accidents of maps in one or two election cycles. It’s a natural consequence of geographic polarization. Republicans have a slight edge in the electoral college, but an absolute massive advantage in the Senate.

                Democrats could hope to hold on for a while because they had popular incumbents in deep red states, namely Tester, Brown, and Manchin. All of those are gone now, and they have try to win places like Montana, Ohio, and West Virginia as challengers. When Tester, etc first came into office, things weren’t as partisan as they are now. With a large rural-urban divide and the decline of split ticket voting, Democrats are all but frozen out of the Senate under our current political alignment.    . . .

              1. You're leaving out Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK). Trump doesn't like her since she won't take any of Trump's bluster and b.s. Unfortunately, the influence of Murkowski & Collins may be limited in the new congress unless somebody else steps up to join them at least occasionally.

  9. Everyone on this thread is assuming there will be a vote in 2026. I wouldn't bank on it.

    President Biden has the authority and immunity to do what it takes to save the Union. Does he have the nerve? What would Abe Lincoln do?

    1. In 2002, some of the drama queens on the far left were screaming that Bush and Cheney had plans to cancel the 2004 election due to the ongoing threats from al Queda and the need for us to avoid divisions in the War on Terror.

      The more things change, the more things stay the same.

      If you want to worry about something, worry about a federal election integrity act which will allow the federal government to set guidelines for “safe and secure” elections conducted at the state level.

      A new type of federal agency will be charged with monitoring compliance and will probably be staffed by people like Mike Lindell and Tina Peters (out on work release).

      I would worry more about that than a cancelled election.

      1. 1. I am not a drama queen. No one who knows me would accept that description.

        2. I am hardly a far left nut job. Your perspective from the Mugwump chair pegs anyone left of Tom Cotton as "far left".

        When the SCOTUS gave the presidency to George Bush, some were rightly concerned where Cheney and Rumsfeld would stop.

        This is different. Did you miss Trumps' promise to the evangelicals? Did you read ANY of Project 2025? Do you think the Heritage Foundation is joking?

        Continue with your head in the sand. It matters not at all.

         

        1. You're the mirror image of those pathetic, right wing nut jobs who were convinced ten years ago that Obama was coming to take their guns away from them.

          1. And you are an equivocating fool.

            The concerns of such "pathetic, right wing nut jobs" were never based on any real threat. Trump, however, has told you repeatedly of his PLANS.

            YOU are the problem.

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