TRUMP IS BATSHIT CRAZY, BUT IN TWO SEEMINGLY CONTRADICTORY WAYS

If Kamala Harris needs to give voters more evidence that Donald Trump is unfit to serve as president, Trump seems to be helping her out by serving that evidence up on a platter. The problem is, he's serving up two kinds of evidence, and they risk canceling each other out.

Last night, this happened:

Trump sways and bops to music for 39 minutes in bizarre town hall episode

The town hall, moderated by South Dakota Gov. Kristi L. Noem (R), began with questions from preselected attendees for the former president. Donald Trump offered meandering answers on how he would address housing affordability and help small businesses. But it took a sudden turn after two attendees required medical attention....

“Let’s not do any more questions. Let’s just listen to music. Let’s make it into a music. Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?” he said.

For 39 minutes, Trump swayed, bopped — sometimes stopping to speak — as he turned the event into almost a living-room listening session of his favorite songs from his self-curated rally playlist.

He played nine tracks. He danced. He shook hands with people onstage. He pointed to the crowd. Noem stood beside him, nodding with her hands clasped. Trump stayed in place onstage, slowly moving back and forth. He was done answering questions for the night.

That's from The Washington Post. Watch the Post's supercut and try to keep your jaw off the floor. Then show it to everyone you know who's not a committed supporter of Kamala Harris:

Donald Trump’s town hall began with questions from preselected attendees for the former president. He offered meandering answers on how he would address housing affordability and help small businesses.

But it took a sudden turn after two attendees required medical attention.… pic.twitter.com/7PuQoKf8ZZ

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) October 15, 2024

I think a lightly edited version of the Post's video could be a Kamala Harris campaign ad, maybe even with no commentary, or with a single word at the end: "Weird" or "WTF?"

But here's the problem: This image of Trump seems to contradict another side of Trump that Harris and Tim Walz are trying to warn voters about in the closing days of the campaign.

CNN reports:

Former President Donald Trump suggested using the military to handle what he called “the enemy from within” on Election Day, saying that he isn’t worried about chaos from his supporters or foreign actors, but instead from “radical left lunatics.”

“I think the bigger problem are the people from within. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people. Radical left lunatics,” Trump said told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo in an interview on “Sunday Morning Futures.”

“I think it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen,” he added.

At a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, Harris lit into Trump in response to this:

“He considers anyone who doesn’t support him or who will not bend to his will the enemy, an enemy of our country. It’s a serious issue,” Harris said Monday night. “He is saying that he would use the military to go after them. ... We know who he would target because he has attacked them before: journalists whose stories he doesn’t like; election officials who refuse to cheat by filling extra votes and finding extra votes for him; judges who insist on following the law instead of bending to his will.” ...

“Donald Trump is increasingly unstable and unhinged. And he is out for unchecked power. That’s what he’s looking for,” Harris said.

In Wisconsin yesterday, Tim Walz reminded his audience who else is on the target list:

Donald Trump, over the weekend, was talking about using the U.S. Army against people who disagree with him. Just so you’re clear about that, that’s you. That’s what he’s talking about. This is not some mythical thing out there. He called it “the enemy within.” And to Donald Trump, anybody who doesn’t agree with him is the enemy. I tell you that not to make you fearful or anything. I tell you that because we need to whip his butt and put this guy behind us.

Walz is right. Did you join in a peaceful women's march after Trump's inauguration in 2017? Did you join a silent, prayerful vigil after the death of George Floyd in 2020? The next time you exercise your First Amendment rights that way, the guns might be aimed at you.

But how do you get wavering voters to reconcile these two Trumps -- the doddering dancer and the bloodthirsty would-be tyrant?

Trump is both of these people. History shows us that you don't need full control of your mental faculties to be a tyrant. You just need rage, unlimited power, and goons to do whatever your whims demand.

I don't think Trujmp is experiencing full-blown dementia yet, but in that town hall his mental battery had clearly run down by evening. He might be in the condition that people close to President Biden have described -- he's far less able to function at night after a few days of exhausting work or travel, but he's more or less his old self at other times. A Trump in this condition could still do a lot of damage.

But you can understand why, as Shawn McCreesh of The New York Times told us yesterday, there are Trump supporters who don't believe Trump's most inflammatory pronouncements:

Mary Burney, a 49-year-old woman from Grosse Pointe, Mich., who works in sales for a radio station ... did not believe the former president would really persecute his political opponents, even though he has mused about appointing a special prosecutor to “go after” President Biden and members of his family. “I don’t think that’s on his list of things to do,” she said. “No, no.”

Tom Pierce, a 67-year-old from Northville, Mich., did not truly believe that Mr. Trump would round up enough immigrants to carry out “the largest mass deportation operation in history.” Even though that is pretty much the central promise of his campaign.

“He may say things, and then it gets people all upset,” said Mr. Pierce, “but then he turns around and he says, ‘No, I’m not doing that.’ It’s a negotiation. But people don’t understand that.”

That nice guy doing the two-fist dance? He wouldn't hurt a fly!

Republican propagandists know how to serll this kind of double message. They've persuaded their voters that Joe Biden is both a dementia case who can't find the bathroom unaided and the mastermind of a global criminal enterprise. I hope Harris and Walz can communicate a similar idea, because the sometimes addled Trump is still able to keep a sharp mental focus on the people he hates, and if he's elected, he'll have the means and the will to do them -- us -- a lot of harm.

MIKE JOHNSON, J.D. VANCE: WE WON'T BAN ABORTION IN A SECOND TRUMP TERM BECAUSE WE HAVEN'T BRAINWASHED ENOUGH OF YOU YET

I might be making an obvious point, but I want you to notice what House Speaker Mike Johnson tells Kristen Welker of Meet the Press when she asks him whether he'll pursue an abortion ban if there's a second Trump term:

Okay, before you can have political consensus on a divisive issue, you have to have cultural consensus. Remember, politics is downstream from culture. We don't have that right now. There's a lot of difference of opinion out there in the states, and we've got to work through all that.... I believe that that's an important issue. But I've got to build a [culture of] life – I have to build a cultural consensus. We're nowhere near that in this country. We know that. So there's a lot of work to do.

He says this at 2:05 in this video:

Kristen Welker repeatedly grills Mike Johnson about if he will pledge to not hold a vote on legislation that would ban abortion if he's Speaker again. Johnson dodges but makes clear he will not make that pledge. pic.twitter.com/cCRyhxvsnp

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 13, 2024

And then we have J.D. Vance speaking to The New York Times about abortion:

In 2023, we had a big referendum in the state of Ohio. I campaigned on one side; the people of Ohio ... voted 60-40 to go in the other direction. And to implement, I think, a much more liberal abortion regime than certainly the people on the other side were campaigning for. Well, what do you take from that? You can take the lesson that we just didn’t campaign hard enough, we didn’t make the case hard enough. I don’t think that’s right. I think the proper thing to take from that is we have lost the trust of the American people. When we went out there and campaigned for our position, they instinctively mistrusted us, and we need to get trust back.

You know what Johnson means when he says it's necessary to "build a culture of life," and what Vance means when he says that would-be abortion banners "have lost the trust of the American people" and "need to get trust back," don't you?

It means they believe they can -- and are certain they should -- manipulate our minds until we agree with them that abortion should be banned, or at least they need to manipulate enough of us to ensure that they'll survive tough elections if they pass an abortion ban.

They know how to manipulate public opinion. They've driven America very far to the right on immigration in recent years. Twenty years ago, they bamboozled us into believing that Saddam Hussein was an existential threat to America, even though he had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks.

The difference is that we don't need their "expert" opinions on unwanted pregnancy, because most of us know what the fear of an unwanted pregnancy feels like, either through personal experience or the experience of people we're close to. We don't need to watch a Sunday talk show to tell us how to feel about this issue.

I'm worried about a possible Republican sweep this year, or maybe in a future presidential year. I worry that they'll try to finish what they started with the Dobbs decision.

So it's a small comfort that they might think they can't pull this off right now. I say "small comfort" because they might try to go after abortion using executive action (proclaiming that the Comstock Act criminalizes the distribution of abortion pills, for instance), or via federal courts that will become even more right-wing if Trump wins. But maybe -- maybe -- there won't be a bill in Congress, because they fear they haven't managed to brainwash us yet.

TRUMP AND MUSK: WHO OWNS WHOM?

On her Substack, Mary Trump writes:

Donald Trump has always been for sale....

Any person or entity, from Putin to Saudi Arabia’s LIV Golf, willing to throw Donald a few bucks for a licensing fee or a Trump Tower condo has gained access and influence. Given this decades-long pattern, it’s not surprising that the world’s richest fascist, South African jumping bean Elon Musk, would also be interested in purchasing a few shares in a man who is willing to sell whatever he can get his hands on—whether it’s steaks or American national security—because he values money more than anything.

In exchange for Donald’s willingness to throw Musk the keys to the federal government, Musk is throwing a considerable fortune, as well as the weight of Twitter’s influence, behind the Republican candidate. For him, it’s a safe bet because he knows, if Donald is elected, he’ll do anything Musk wants him to do.

She writes this under the headline "Donald's New Owner."

Clearly that should be "Donald's New Co-Owner" -- Vladimir Putin and the Saudis (and Miriam Adelson and various tech/oil/real estate/hedge fund billionaires) aren't giving up their shares in Trump anytime soon. But in the case of Musk and Trump, who's the owner and who's owned?

In this relationship, Musk seems more desperate than Trump. Recall the exchange he had with Tucker Carlson on Carlson's podcast:

“If he loses, man, what...” Carlson said with a laugh, “you’re fucked, dude.”

“I’m fucked. If he loses, I’m fucked,” Musk said as they both laughed. “How long do you think my prison sentence is going to be? Do you think? Will I see my children? I don’t know.”

In the second most famous photo to emerge from this campaign, it's Musk who's clearly subordinate.

He's Trump's hype man. Wikipedia explains that term:

A hype man, typically in hip hop music, is a backing vocalist who supports the primary performer with exclamations, interjections, or ad-libs in an attempt to increase an audience's excitement or engagement.

The Wikipedia entry is accompanied by a photo of a performance by Public Enemy. Compare this to the photo above:

Trump always needs money, but Musk needs ongoing government largesse, which he thinks might be withheld in a Harris administration. (I hope!) Like every billionaire, Musk wants the lightest possible regulations. And he might genuinely be as stupid as Ted Nugent, who incorrectly predicted that he'd "either be dead or in jail" if Barack Obama won reelection in 2012.

There's no question that Musk will get what he wants from Trump if Trump is president. But when Mary Trump tells us that "if Donald is elected, he’ll do anything Musk wants him to do," it's not exactly servility on Donald Trump's part. Being president means he can dispense favors. That's a perk of the job, in his view. Who gets those favors? People who give him lots of money. As he sees it, he's not bending the knee. They are.

While I'm on the subject of how bribeable Trump is, let me make a prediction about his immigrant crackdown. Trump says that if he wins, he'll deport every immigrant in America who's here illegally. I think he'll struggle to do that -- as I've said elsewhere, the Project 2025 plan to stock the federal government with zealots seems likely to be a rerun of the Bush administration's personnel approach to governing Iraq after the fall of Saddam Huseein, with applicants being asked more about right-wing ideological purity than actual job skills. I think Trump won't have capable personnel, infrastructure, and logistics in place to make mass deportation happen, because he's a Republican and so is everyone who'll be charge of this, and Republicans don't do that kind of advance planning. (Again, see post-Saddam Iraq.) He'll certainly deport some immigrants, in as brutal and showy a manner as possible, and that will satisfy his bloodthirsty racist base, but he'll actually deport only a small portion of the immigrants he wants to deport.

But the crackdown will gradually ramp up. When it does, owners of large corporations that depend on immigrant labor will start to see that their ox could be gored soon.

At that point, these rich guys -- agribusiness moguls, meatpacking moguls -- will have talks with Donald Trump. What he'll tell them is this: I'm going to start raiding workplaces in your industry soon. If you don't want that to happen, you know what to do.

And they'll do what he wants. They'll give him money.

In response to their bribes, Trump will make sure his raids will bypass their workplaces and the neighborhoods where their workers live.

Trump was never impeached for taking emoluments, so he won't be impeached for this, if we ever find out about it. He'll get away with it. And he'll feel as if he's the powerful one.

Before I go, here's a story about Trump and his rich backers from The New York Times:

Donald J. Trump took his seat at the dining table in his triplex penthouse apartment atop Trump Tower on the last Sunday in September, alongside some of the most sought-after and wealthiest figures in the Republican Party....

Over steak and baked potatoes, the former president tore through a bitter list of grievances.

He made it clear that people, including donors, needed to do more, appreciate him more and help him more....

At one point, Mr. Trump seemed to suggest that these donors had plenty to be grateful to him for. He boasted about how great he had been for their taxes....

Trump wants to be owned. He demands it. He's abusive if he thinks you're not owning him enough. Who's the dominant one in a relationship like this?

J.D. VANCE: IF NOISY KIDS ON A PLANE ANNOY YOU, YOU'RE A SOCIOPATH

I haven't watched Lulu Garcia-Navarro's New York Times interview of J.D. Vance, but I've read the transcript. I have many thoughts about it, but for now I'd like to talk about Vance's attempts to clarify his earlier slanders of childless people.

The interview reminds us that Vance really doesn't like taking responsibility for his own words and deeds when they're criticized. Garcia-Navarro asks him about his frequent past references to ideological opponents as "childless cat ladies," and he apologizes half-heartedly, implying that anyone could have done what he did:

... look, they were dumb comments. I think most people probably have said something dumb, have said something that they wish they had put differently.

But most people aren't mega-best-selling memoirists contemplating a high-level career in politics, as Vance was when he said these things. Under those circumstances, he should have been more careful when speaking to the media. (Most people never speak to the media.)

Garcia-Navarro asks him about Kamala Harris:

We don’t know why Kamala Harris did not have children, but do you include Kamala Harris in the category of women that you’re talking about?

Vance decides to give what I call the Rob Corddry answer. Twenty years ago, when torture at Abu Ghraib was exposed, Corddry, then a performer on The Daily Show, said this in a mock defense of the Bush administration:

"Remember, it’s not important that we did torture these people. What’s important is that we are not the kind of people who would torture these people."

Here's Vance's answer regarding Vice President Harris:

No. Everything that I know about Kamala Harris, that I’ve learned about Kamala Harris, is that she’s got a stepfamily, she’s got an extended family, she’s a very good stepmother to her stepchildren. I would never accuse Kamala Harris along these lines.

I would never accuse Kamala Harris along these lines. Dude, you literally did accuse Kamala Harris along these lines, in 2021 on Tucker Carlson's show:

"We are run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too," Vance said.

"It's just a basic fact," Vance continued. "You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC. The entire future of the Democrats are controlled by people without children."

"How does it make any sense we turned our country over to people who don't really have a direct stake in it?" he asked.

It's not important that Vance did attack Harris this way. What he thinks is important for you to see is that he is not the kind of person who would attack Harris this way.

Vance goes to great lengths to let us know that he has nothing against childless people, really:

What I was trying to get at is that — I’m not talking about people who it just didn’t work out for, for medical reasons, for social reasons, like set that to the side, we’re not talking about folks like that.

I don't know what he means by "social" here, though I think he means "women who are too unpopular to attract a man who'll marry and impregnate them." Because I can't think of any other "social" reason he'd accept female childlessness. (In other settings, he's criticized childless teachers even though his own Catholic Church runs schools in which many of the teachers are celibate nuns, priests, and brothers.)

Vance works hard to reassure us that he's tolerant. But there are limits. Did you know that if you've ever been annoyed by an unruly child on a plane or a train, your frustration is "pathological"?

What I was definitely trying to illustrate ultimately in a very inarticulate way is that I do think that our country has become almost pathologically anti-child. I put this in a couple of different ways, right? So, there’s one, it was actually when I was in law school — I was on a train between New York and New Haven, I think I was doing, like, law-firm interviews or something. And obviously I didn’t have kids then. And there’s this young girl who gets on the train. She’s probably 21 or 22. She’s a young Black female. I could tell by the way she was dressed, she didn’t have a whole lot of money; she had a couple of kids with her, and I remember just watching her and thinking, This is a really unbelievably patient mother. The reason I noticed her is because her kids, like a lot of kids that age, are complete disasters, especially on public transportation, they turn it up to 11. But she was being so patient. But then everybody around her was also noticing the kids being misbehaved, and they were so angry, and they were sighing and staring every time her 2-year-old made a noise. And that was a moment that stuck with me, and of course I’ve had similar experiences riding with my own kids on various modes of public transportation, and again it just sort of hit me like, OK, this is really, really bad. I do think that there’s this pathological frustration with children that just is a new thing in American society. I think it’s very dark.

So Vance admits that "childless cat ladies" was a bad thing to say, but he says that any person who is even mildly frustrated by a poorly behaved child has a belief system that's "pathological" and "dark." (And this is a new phenomenon -- apparently, no one was ever annoyed by unruly kids in Vance's imagined Golden Age, whenever that was.)

Wait, there's more:

I think you see it sometimes in the political conversation, people saying, well, maybe we shouldn’t have kids because of climate change. You know, when I’ve used this word sociopathic? Like, that, I think, is a very deranged idea: the idea that you shouldn’t have a family because of concerns over climate change. Doesn’t mean you can’t worry about climate change, but in the focus on childless cat ladies, we missed the substance of what I said.

So if you don't want children because you think the planet we're leaving to those hypothetical children will be unlivable -- remember, Vance is speaking after the back-to-back wallop of Hurricanes Helene and Milton -- you're "sociopathic" and "deranged."

This is too much for Garcia-Navarro.

Sorry, I just want to clarify something. So women who don’t have children because they’re worried about climate change, that’s sociopathic? I think that is a bizarre way of thinking about the future. Not to have kids because of concerns over climate change? I think the more bizarre thing is our leadership, who encourages young women, and frankly young men, to think about it that way.... if your political philosophy is saying, don’t do that because of concerns over climate change? Yeah, I think that’s a really, really crazy way to think about the world.

Let's toss "bizarre" and "crazy" into the mix, in addition to "pathological," "dark," "sociopathic," and "deranged."

And while Vance absolutely wouldn't attack Kamala Harris on this subject (even though he did in 2021), he might attack her if it were revealed that she'd crossed his uncrossable line in the sand:

I would never accuse Kamala Harris along these lines. What I would say is that sometimes Kamala Harris, she hasn’t quite jumped over the “You shouldn’t have kids because of climate change.” But I think in some of her interviews, she’s suggested there’s a reasonableness to that perspective. But again, I don’t think that’s a reasonable perspective. I think that if your political ideas motivate you to not have children, then that is a bizarre way of looking at the world.

Sorry, ladies -- he's married!

J.D. Vance hates people who disagree with him politically or culturally. Given the fact that our political establishment believes he'll become our 48th president one way or another, that hatred scares me.

HOW NOT TO WRITE AN ARTICLE ABOUT HURRICANE DISINFORMATION, AS EXPLAINED BY AN ANGRY GOOSE

There's a popular internet meme that features a talking goose chasing someone who's (presumably) wearing goosedown outerwear:

This meme is often repurposed to criticize people who choose not to acknowledge something obvious while making their arguments. Here it's used to chide anyone who thinks it's a gotcha to say that Kamala Harris, the daughter of a Black man from the former slave colony of Jamaica, is descended from a slave owner:

I thought of this meme while reading a New York Times story about hurricane disinformation. Several times, I wanted the goose to ask the authors and editors of the story some obvious questions. I've generated these questions using Imgflip's Goose Chase Meme Generator.

The story begins:

Wildly improbable conspiracy theories about Hurricanes Helene and Milton have spread largely unchecked on social media. The storms were engineered to clear the way for lithium mining. They were sent to help the Democrats in next month’s election. They were formed by weather-controlling lasers.

Conspiracy theories "have spread"?

... The falsehoods, which have been circulating on X, TikTok, YouTube and other platforms, can resemble the conspiracy theories that plague modern American politics. Prominent figures are pushing them, citing unrelated, misleading or outdated evidence.

If you click the links, you see that the "prominent figures" include Donald Trump and Elon Musk. But many readers won't click the links. And the 80-year-olds in my neighborhood who still get their news from the print Times won't know who the prominent figures are.

... On TikTok, millions of users were exposed to conspiracy theories about the storms, according to research from the liberal media watchdog group Media Matters for America.

... false narratives spread in ad-supported YouTube videos with tens of thousands of views and in X posts with millions of views, voiced by public figures including a Christian nationalist podcaster, a former Trump administration official and a Republican congresswoman.

You can find the names if you go to the Media Matters link:

Christian nationalist podcaster Lance Wallnau questioned, “Is the government trying to learn how to manipulate weather” as a way to “stop Trump ... from being elected.” Wallnau also suggested Milton was created by the government in a separate post, writing: “In light of our discussions about the question ‘can the government control or manipulate weather?’ If storms are not caused by nature, why is Florida the usual target? To what extent can weather really be manipulated? Why does the State Dept not use this against Russia?” [Twitter/X, 10/6/24, 10/7/24]

Former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn shared a video claiming that “Hurricane Helene was an ATTACK caused by Weather Manipulation,” and wrote, “Another ‘conspiracy theory’ about to be exposed for the truth behind weather manipulation?” [Twitter/X, 10/7/24] ...

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) blamed Hurricane Helene on “lasers controlling the weather,” a conspiracy theory she has repeatedly espoused. Greene wrote on X, “Yes they can control the weather. It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.” Greene followed up with another post that said, “Lasers.. CBS, 9 years ago, talked about lasers controlling the weather.” Greene also blamed a deadly fire in 2018 on space lasers. [Twitter/X, 10/3/24, 10/5/24; The Daily Beast, 3/6/24; Media Matters, 1/28/21]

Wallnau, as you may recall, previously said that Kamala Harris practices "witchcraft." Last month, J.D. Vance made a campaign appearance at a rally sponsored by Wallnau. The Times reported on this at the time, so it would have been nice to see it mentioned in this story.

(The Media Matters piece also names several other disinformationists who are spreading hurricane lies, including former CBS newswoman Lara Logan and former Bill Clinton accuser Juanita Broaddrick.)

Only in the twentieth and final paragraph of the Times story do we see a disinformation purveyor named:

Mr. Trump ... has made several false claims about disaster-relief funds and Democrats’ support for hurricane recovery efforts. On Wednesday, President Biden accused his predecessor of undermining confidence in rescue and rebuilding work, saying he contributed to the “reckless, irresponsible and relentless promotion of disinformation and outright lies.”

Why not name and shame these people, the way former Timesman Charlie Warzel does in this Atlantic piece?

... Alex Jones ... claimed that Hurricanes Milton and Helene were “weather weapons” unleashed on the East Coast by the U.S. government....

Some of the lies and obfuscation are politically motivated, such as the claim that FEMA is offering only $750 in total to hurricane victims who have lost their home. (In reality, FEMA offers $750 as immediate “Serious Needs Assistance” to help people get basic supplies such as food and water.) Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, and Fox News have all repeated that lie. Trump also posted (and later deleted) on Truth Social that FEMA money was given to undocumented migrants, which is untrue. Elon Musk, who owns X, claimed—without evidence—that FEMA was “actively blocking shipments and seizing goods and services locally and locking them away to state they are their own. It’s very real and scary how much they have taken control to stop people helping.” That post has been viewed more than 40 million times. Other influencers, such as the Trump sycophant Laura Loomer, have urged their followers to disrupt the disaster agency’s efforts to help hurricane victims. “Do not comply with FEMA,” she posted on X. “This is a matter of survival.”

That's the way you do it. It's not difficult.

THE PARTY THAT BROUGHT YOU THE BIG LIE IS HERE WITH THE BIG BRAG (AGAIN)

I see we're at this stage of the election:

Republicans believe the 2024 race is already over and that former President Donald Trump will be elected back to the White House, according to political analyst Mark Halperin.

A significant number of Republicans have declared the presidential race "effectively over," agreeing with Halperin that Trump will "checkmate" Vice President Kamala Harris with a combination of four to five swing states, the analyst said Tuesday on independent streaming platform 2Way.

"Trump is going to lock up the Sun Belt states, probably all four, but at least three. And then he's going to win Pennsylvania, and that checkmates [Harris]," Halperin told the platform. "They may be wrong. But there's a not insignificant number of them who are quite confident of that. And the data they've seen on the absentees and the early votes and the voter registration ... makes them more confident."

Another reason for all this confidence? Private polling, says Halperin.

“... if you want to understand what’s actually happening, we’re here to tell you,” he said. “I just saw some new private polling today that’s very robust private polling: She’s in a lot of trouble.”

This might be true. On the other hand, it sounds a lot like what we heard from unnamed GOP braggarts two years ago. In 2022, the Republicans' stenographer was Benjamin Wallace-Wells of The New Yorker. He wrote:

Why Republican Insiders Think the G.O.P. Is Poised for a Blowout

... The consensus among a number of G.O.P. pollsters and operatives I spoke to this week is that in the Senate races that are thought to be competitive, Republican candidates are heading for a clean sweep.... The word that kept coming up in these conversations was “bloodbath.”

Specifically?

On Wednesday afternoon, I spoke with a leading Republican political consultant about the Senate campaign in Georgia.... The Republican consultant told me that [Raphael] Warnock’s prospects were even bleaker than many recent public polls suggest. “There isn’t a single private poll in America that has Herschel Walker anything but ahead,” the Republican consultant told me. “Not one.”

Warnock won the general election by 1 point and won the runoff by 3.

And the specifics of that predicted "clean sweep"?

Mehmet Oz will beat John Fetterman in Pennsylvania, and not just by a point or two; Adam Laxalt looks pretty certain to defeat the incumbent Democratic senator Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada; even less regarded candidates such as Blake Masters in Arizona will be carried into office by a predicted wave. “He won’t deserve it, but I think at this point he falls into a Senate seat,” one Republican strategist told me.

Fetterman beat Oz by 4 points. Cortez Masto beat Laxalt by nearly a point. Mark Kelly beat Blake Masters by 5 points.

And why was this blowout supposed to happen?

... according to the insiders, Democrats were too trapped in issues—abortion and the threat to democracy—that appealed to their most devoted and best-educated supporters, and had not done enough to reassure voters that they were addressing material concerns. The Republican pollster, who has been regularly surveying Pennsylvania, told me that, when it came to the Democratic focus on abortion, “there just doesn’t seem to be any specificity. You’d want to do it with high-education, high-income supporters. It’s, like, no, they’re running on abortion constantly in, like, Scranton.”

Scranton is in Lackawanna County. Fetterman won Lackawanna County by nearly 16 points. (In 2020, Joe Biden won it by 8 points.)

This is what Republicans do. They tell reporters that they have the real inside skinny and it says that Democrats are doomed. Eventually, a reporter swallows the bait and reports it as fact.

Look, Kamala Harris might be doomed. I wasn't happy to see that Quinnipiac poll yesterday that showed Harris losing Michigan and Wisconsin, while leading in Pennsylvania. (Whether Harris wins or loses, it would be ironic if Pennsylvania is her best swing state, after all the pundits told her she was a fool not to pick the state's governor, Josh Shapiro, as her running mate.) I know we're not supposed to look at crosstabs, but that Quinnipiac survey has Harris losing 18-to-34-year-olds by 8 points in Michigan and winning them by only 4 points in Wisconsin. By contrast, last month's Harvard youth poll showed Harris beating Trump among 18-to-29-year-olds by 31 points.

That Quinnipiac poll is a concern, as are reports that a Democratic internal poll shows Harris trailing by 3 in Wisconsin. On the other hand, I know that new voter registrations have skewed very Democratic since Harris became the Democratic candidate. I know that early voting is skewing very Democratic and female so far (scroll down here). It's anecdotal, but I like seeing the enthusiasm suggested by this short video taken in a blue city:

📍 Tucson, AZ

It’s the first day of early voting and Arizonans are fired up to welcome @Tim_Walz and cast their ballots for Vice President @KamalaHarris! 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/B6DHseN2c8

— Daisy Martinez (@sdaisymartinez) October 9, 2024

And even in blue Cleveland, which is in a state Harris won't win but Senator Sherrod Brown can win:

Pretty incredible display of democracy in action. PACKED line in Cleveland at the Board of Elections for the first day or early voting.

Visit https://t.co/pBBQFYWwUN for voter resources! #VoteToLive pic.twitter.com/n12g8e6PQu

— Quentin James (@QJames) October 8, 2024

This seems significant:

In Pa’s hotly contested 10th Congressional District, our poll out later today shows Harris leading Trump in this GOP-leaning district 46:41. Trump won this district +4 in ‘20. This is not a good trajectory for GOP incumbent Con. Scott Perry. More tweets to follow shortly.

— SP&R (@SusquehannaPR) October 9, 2024

I hope Jamelle Bouie is right about some of Donald Trump's weird campaign tactics, like focusing his get-out-the-vote effort on turning out infrequent voters rather than solid supporters, and his decision to deliver speeches at Madison Square Garden and Coachella, both located in states he'll lose:

everything the trump campaign says its doing — trying to turn out secret trump supporters and campaigning in places he can’t win — looks and sounds like the actions of a losing campaign www.nbcnews.com/politics/202...

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— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) October 9, 2024 at 3:38 PM

Wouldn’t surprise me if he’s going just to go someplace where he’ll get a big crowd again. NY metro area doesn’t have enough Republicans to matter for the EC, but it’s got more than enough to fill an arena.

— CeeEmEss (@ceeemess.bsky.social) October 9, 2024 at 3:54 PM

It might be a mistake for Harris to spend so much time wooing moderates and disgruntled Republicans, as Oliver Willis argues (although Reuters says she's now running strong among suburbanites). It might be a mistake for Harris to do interviews at "non-traditional" media outlets while blowing off The New York Times, which just makes the Times angry and therefore skews Harris coverage elsewhere in the media.

Or it might be that Harris's people are successfully turning out the vote and have generated all the excitement needed for a win that, by next month, might appear to be an upset.

I don't know how this election will turn out. All I know is that reporters shouldn't assume Republicans in nice suits know something the rest of us don't when that something just so happens to make Republicans look unbeatable.

YES, BUT THAT INTIMIDATION OF CITIZENS HAPPENED OUTSIDE THE ACELA CORRIDOR, SO WHY SHOULD WE COVER IT?

So far, neither The New York Times nor The Washington Post thinks this fascist act by Florida's authoritarian governor, Ron DeSantis, is worthy of a full story:

In a move that critics are calling a flagrant abuse of power, Florida’s Department of Health is threatening to bring criminal charges against local TV stations airing a campaign ad to overturn the state’s six-week abortion ban signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis.

That quote comes from a CNN story. Popular Information has more:

On October 3, the Florida Department of Health sent a letter to Mark Higgins, the General Manager of WFLA, Tampa's NBC affiliate. The letter, sent by Florida Department of Health General Counsel John Wilson, claimed that airing the ad violates Florida law. Wilson cites Florida's law against "sanitary nuisance," which prohibits "the commission of any act... by which... the health and lives of individuals... may be endangered." Wilson argues that WFLA's decision to air the ad could "threaten or impair the health and lives of women." Wilson advised Higgins that ... WFLA must stop airing it within 24 hours. Failure to do so, Wilson writes, would be a crime punishable by up to 60 days in prison under Florida law.

So what is this alleged "sanitary nuisance"? It's

a first-personal narrative of a woman named Caroline who was diagnosed with brain cancer while pregnant with her second child. "The doctors knew that if I did not end my pregnancy, I would lose my baby, I would lose my life, and my daughter would lose her mom," Caroline says in the ad. "Florida has now banned abortion, even in cases like mine." Caroline urges voters to support Amendment 4 to "protect women like me."

Is banning political ads the purpose of the law?

The statute deals with issues like "untreated or improperly treated human waste," "[t]he keeping of diseased animals," and the "causing of any condition capable of breeding flies, mosquitoes, or other arthropods capable of transmitting diseases." While the statute includes a catch-all for "any other condition determined to be a sanitary nuisance," there is no mention of political ads.

There's no story on this at the Post. The Times provides a brief mention of what the DeSantis administration is doing starting in paragraph 13 of this story, which is primary about whether the referendum will get the 60% supermajority vote it needs to pass. The Times provides a link to a full story, but it's from MSNBC.

For years, Republicans have used many techniques, primarily gerrymandering, to effectively end democracy at the state level in red and purple states. In many states now, Democrats would need huge majorities to reach parity in the makeup of state legislative bodies.

Our most important newspapers don't think that's a story. To some extent, I think this is because they don't want to offend Republicans -- but I also think it's because they don't really care what happens outside the Acela Corridor (D.C. to Boston, or, more precisely, D.C. to Cambridge), and possibly L.A. and Silicon Valley. They send reporters on safaris to diners and say they're trying hard to understand "flyover country," but they don't send reporters to Republican-controlled state legislatures where deomocracy is being killed.

The Post has been better on this. A month ago, it ran a story about DeSantis's deployment of his election police to the homes of people who signed the petition to get this referendum on the ballot. So maybe the Post will eventually cover this threat to WFLA in a serious way. (The Times reported on DeSantis administration attempts to challenge the validity of the ballot petitions but didn't mention the home visits by DeSantis's election goons until paragraph 14 of this story. There was a further mention in an op-ed.)

The Times is covering DeSantis's hardball tactics, but totalitarian threats to individuals by GOP officials need to be seen as a five-alarm fire in every newsroom in America. Unfortunately, that goes against the long-ingrained habits of most high-level reporters and editors, who mostly care about how politicians battle fellow politicians and other political agents for power. (Even the CNN story cited at the beginning of this post falls into that category -- it's primarily about the response to DeSantis's threat by the Democratic chair of the Federal Communications Commission.)

A governor's threat to jail someone for running a political ad ought to be front-page news in every news outlet in America.

One more point: DeSantis is running. He still wants to be president, and you shouldn't underestimate the odds that he can win the 2028 GOP nomination. Yes, he crashed and burned in the 2024 primaries, but that was mostly because most GOP voters who liked his authoritarian style liked Trump a lot more. In polls of Republicans taken during the primary campaign, his favorable/unfavorable numbers were 62%/22%, according to FiveThirtyEight; Nikki Haley's were 43%/40. He didn't refuse to take Kamala Harris's calls about the last hurricane for no reason. He's planning a comeback -- and because he's both authoritarian and seemingly "mainstream," at least according to the media, he has a shot at winning the primaries. And every Republican presidential nominee has a shot at winning the election.