I have also been super mad about a lot of the rhetoric used to pressure Biden out. Nothing would make me happier than his stepping up and being an effective campaigner for her, because it turns out that he isn't demented after all.

And I don't think he needs to resign as president just yet.

Does Harris get the gig by default, or do we have to live through another month of crap while various governors and senators promote their personal ambition? And who should she pick for VP? Someone from a red state? If so, who? If not, why not?

I said this in the other thread but I fully agree with 1, but also trust that Pelosi has excellent judgement and more knowledge than I do so probably Joe needed to go even if all the people whining about it in public were bad.

3: All depends on if someone decides to contest it. Given that no one wanted to run against Biden, I suspect it'll end up being uncontested and Harris gets the vast majority of delegate votes (with some Bernie protest voters even though he won't be running). But if there's someone else who has been successfully lining up support as an alternative, then who knows.

jesus this is stressful.

2: he absolutely should not resign. Harris won't get a VP through and the Speaker's party is full of shenanigans.

Endorsements for Harris are rolling in. Both Clintons. Elizabeth Warren.

5: I hear that she has been supportive of Gavin Newsom, and I really don't like the idea of Newsom as the nominee. But, otherwise, I do agree. I worry that picking someone else would be viewed as a big f-u to the Black community.

Ellie Mystal has been saying this. He also said that we should not ever select Chicago as the convention site again.

8: I thought Warren would be pro Harris from comments she's made. She actually seems to care about winning and not resigning herself to another Trump presidency. I don't give a rats ass about HRC's opinion.

I think Biden at least secured his reputation as a great patriot and probably a great president too.

I am so relieved and happy. I am mostly neutral about Harris, but I am so happy that we aren't going to be frogmarched into a losing election.

Now there's interesting things to hear and work for and hope, rather than a boring ugly re-match. My sister said it feels like the air is coming back into this.

Also, I would be thrilled if this set a good example for three-month campaigns. Also also, every time I suggest something drastic (and progressive), everyone is all "nope, that's procedurally impossible" and I'm all, "can't be, because if Biden were hit by a bus tomorrow, there'd be a way" and everyone's all "nope, you just don't understand the impossibility" and I'm all, "you're right, I don't" and for fucking once, they're just doing the procedurally impossible thing.

You know, independently of any imprecation to do so, I think i might just donate to the Harris campaign. Except maybe a few buck to some local Green candidate a long time ago, I've never made a contribution to a campaign before. But anyone in the Democratic party who thinks that fucking up Harris's chances by backing Newsom or Whitmer or whoever is an idiot and ought to be told so in no uncertain terms. I honestly have no idea about who I would *want* for the VP slot -- Schiff? Swalwell? Moskowitz? Klobuchar? Baldwin? There doesn't seem to be a really obvious choice.

Short campaign cycles would be a great promise to credibly make as part of an amendment to get money out of politics.

I just gave $10 to Harris to add to the small-donor chalkboard tally.

Newsom and Whitmer had apparently already said they will not be running against Harris.

14.3: Oh, I thought they had just said they wouldn't want to be VP

15: At least as reported in Politico two days ago.

Academic in Newsom's case since he couldn't constitutionally be her VP.

Betting markets like Josh Shapiro, Roy Cooper, Andy Beshear, and Mark Kelly for VP.

I was actually just going to wonder what this is going to do to tomorrow's stock market numbers.Futures just opened and are in positive territory, but no doubt the next couple of days are going to have a lot of big headlines and stuff to chew on. Not that any of it matters much for my job. Doesn't matter who the president is, fraudsters are still gonna fraud.

I blame ogged and the NYT for this whole thing.

Mostly the former since more people I know admit to reading here than the NYT.

There was some article a week or two ago saying Shapiro, Beshear, and Cooper were her short list.

Kelly holding a key senate seat is a bit of a problem, unless his identical twin wants to run for his seat.

Academic in Newsom's case since he couldn't constitutionally be her VP.
? Has to be from a different state?

The constitution forbids the vice president from looking like a tool in an 80s-movie villain kind of way. Not the president though.

23: yes, but Bush and Cheney got around this without any difficulties.

Bush and Cheney
? NE-WY, CT-TX

Nebraska?

Okay, now I *really* need to figure out how the FEC limits work.

Dinesh D'Souza says you don't need to worry about it.

Donated! I hope you're right and that immediate signs of coalescing are strong enough that any positioning can be sold as competing to be her VP.

26: W and Cheney were both Texas residents. Cheney was in charge of the VP search committee. When he decided that he should select himself, he established Wyoming residency. I believe he owned property in both states.

22.last: My concern about Kelley as well, but saw several say AZ gov appoints for rest of term. One of them was Norm Ornstein so inlined to believe it. To lazy to look. they say Senate is specific exception to general AZ law.

It's probably harder to establish residency in a different state than the one you're governor of.

I thought 25 was to 24, because Dick Cheney looked like Arnold Toht.

I thought 24 was just another indicator of the Founders' vast prescience.

Thanks BG!

33: Harris has been living in DC the last few years, so she shouldn't have any problem establishing residency in DC. But it's all irrelevant because Mitt Romney is a lock.

I've seen him raise a whole barge.

Beshear is the only Democrat in Kentucky who can hold the governorship.

Dick Cheney was a rootless cosmopolitan (and had been elected to Congress from Wyoming). If Harris or Newsom officially changed their residence that would go against their whole stories.

I'm a white guy from Pennsylvania who is roughly the same height as Shapiro and the same weight as Shapiro if Shapiro were fat. Why not me?

Anyway, I could obviously deliver a swing state.

Newsom has endorsed Harris.

I find that I am relieved especially given that there does not seem to be any possibility of a Thunderdome convention. Of course there might well be other bad things* to come but am relieved that this particular bit of fuckery is over. I like variety in the flavors of shit I have to eat.

And now that it has happened it is clear to me that my main resistance was the assholes who were pushing it so hard. My negativity let me show you a not great characteristic of mine.

But a couple of folks came through like troopers:

1) Brian Stetler someone I used to respect but who has been pushing hard and being an asshole throughout (for instance making a lame and offensive "joke" when the Parkinson's bill was signed):
I expected that Biden would step aside. But I never imagined that he would do it via a paper statement on a Sunday afternoon. Does this timing and format make any sense?

2) Olivia Nuzzi--a known horror who was all over this:
The Democratic Party told its voters that they could not be trusted to select a nominee when they effectively shut down their primary process. Now, they are installing a new nominee. American voters happen to like democracy. I predict some backlash.

3) Jonathan Martin misogynist ex-of NYT now Politico:
The VP is in - and mentions Project 2025 in same graf as the news. Feels more desperate than message discipline in the moment

*For instance the new 538 polling guy who has been about the only semi-tolerable polling guy on this tweeted several days ago asking what the Dens would do if Harris polls better nationally but that is offset but worse Electoral College mix (Biden for instance was better on that than HRC on that). Well dude, then it will be a tough race, you know like 2012 etc. Horserace guys going to horserace of course.

What I want to know is what kind of doofus would call up Joe Fuckin Manchin today and encourage him to run? Manchin couldn't get nominated for dogcatcher at the DNC of he was the last man on Earth.

Joe Manchin is talking about becoming a Democrat again so he can challenge Harris. What a piece of shit he is.

D'oh! Pwned.

If you want a picture of the future, imagine Kamala Harris's lavender stiletto stomping on Trump's orange face --- forever.

I'm into that, I think.

Me too, but it helps if she has feathers.

That always helps. But I'm Catholic and Pennsylvanian if she needs to balance a ticket.

I think the most dramatic yet meaningless shift in polls will be in Biden's approval rating (and may well be transitory).

I really liked Biden. I get that I wasn't supposed to do that. But I do..

I also always liked and trusted Biden and maybe that affects my view of his withdrawal from the campaign, but the timing of his withdrawal seems perfect for boosting Harris.

Now that the theater around Biden will die down, I am pretty curious to know the truth about his well-being.

We were listening to Awakenings the other day, and the beginning has a rundown of typical parkinson's symptoms, and they mentioned the plasticky rigid facial affect. I know the NYT piece about the Parkinson's doctor was a total hit piece, but I think there is something going on with his facial affect. It could just be that he's over-botoxed though.

He's fine and it was all ratfucking.

Am I being WMD suckered all over again? It's really clear that he's fine?

Trump has achance to do the funniest thing.

Biden should shit down Trump's throat before passing the baton to Harris.

I think he would have immunity.

Are we talking about a different Romney than the Senator from Utah?

Like Ronna McDaniel?

Which really sounds like knock-off Ronald McDonald.

Ronna the Romney's Daughter?

Robble robble.

Does Utah even have a senator?

Somewhere in the archives earlier this year,I noted that my mom and her siblings were all speculating that Biden had Parkinson's because of the similarities to their father's symptoms. This was long before the debate and before a lot of public discussion, I think? They were all planning to vote for him anyway, but it definitely spooked me.

I wanted to vote for corpse Biden. Fuck health. It's never done anything for me but make me work more.

Am I being WMD suckered all over again? It's really clear that he's fine?

I never watched the debate, but I saw enough people concerned about what they saw there - not just people on online panic spirals - that it seemed reasonable to doubt that he was up to the presidency. The panic spiral that happened afterwards and how the triangle of elites, donors, and media kept up the pressure was weird in a lot of ways, arguably irresponsible since they didn't have a good idea how they would identify a replacement without kicking up enough dust to tank the election, but that doesn't mean the concerns weren't valid. And now with all the endorsements for Harris pouring in it seems like wiser heads prevailed around the theme "there is no viable replacement but Harris".

Trump is now the oldest man ever to run for president.

I reckon you could eat an entire baguette for every New York Times article between now and the election that mentions his age as a negative, and not break your keto diet.

Next you're going to criticize the NYT for not noticing that the guy speaks gibberish.

Biden's debate was very bad, but if you came into it with no priors, I think Trump's was worse. I don't think he ever previously won a debate, but I think this was his worst performance, and the biggest knock on Biden was that he did so poorly it gave the media an easy excuse to not confront Trump's craziness.

70: true enough. To be fair, though, the problem with Trump has always been that everything about him is so outrageous that he gets a pass on a lot of stuff. Don't you remember when he was President how many awful things Halle ed each and every day? It was just impossible to keep up.

I reread our election night thread from 2016 last night. You can see over the course of the evening how we all went from thinking a Trump presidency couldn't happen to despair. Now we just think, this is who a whole lot of our fellow citizens are.

My father is 85, not demented, and doesn't have Parkinson's. But he's very old, has limited energy, sort of slowed verbal reaction time, and he ends up with words on the tip of his tongue a lot -- he'll be saying something and can't remember the name he's reaching for until I figure it out and give it to him. And if he's got a cold or something he's really wiped out.

My best guess about Biden is that he's somewhere on the same trajectory my dad is; a bit younger and more energetic, but similarly really showing the effects of age, while still being fully mentally competent. I would think Dad is too old for a challenging job, but with good support he could probably still do some useful work.

If I'm right, most of the feeding frenzy about Biden being demented or having Parkinson's was pure ratfucking, and the debate really was a cold that Biden couldn't power through. But the reason Biden couldn't pull out of it was that he is showing the effects of age badly enough that he couldn't convincingly put on a show of not being very old, which is what he needed to do. I'm glad he stepped down, and I think he really shouldn't have run again to begin with, but I am absolutely furious with the Times and the rest of the ratfuckers for how they behaved.

And of course I'm doing armchair diagnosis like everyone else. But everyone out there who merrily conflated "needs to get a regular amount of sleep" with "sundowning" should die in a fire.

I did not see the debate other than a few clips but my anecdata is the contrast between a friend who turned the debate off after 10 minutes and my daughter who started late and saw the last 2/3rds. The former was convinced he had dementia and was furious at the "coverup" (and also wanted a "process" that would land on Johnny Unbeatable so I've been avoiding further communication). My daughter thought it was a poor performance but better on most metrics than Trump.

I do think 73 has it right. And I will note that the "unforced error" of the early debate was probably a godsend. Imagine that debate in September.

Who came up with the phrase "Johnny Unbeatable"? It's been very usefully clarifying for me.

First mention I can find on a quick search is from this comment (wjts, scroll down) on LGM from December 2017,

No idea if that was original. This was where a very large robust time-stamped commenting community like the old Usenet was useful. For the 90s you can pretty reliably track down when something really entered the discourse by time-based searches on that corpus.

And that comment is completely relevant to today.

"Younger Dem" does pretty well (although they're no Johnny Unbeatable) but we're about to have a shit ton of "Younger Dem but not *that* Younger Dem,"

I dunno, it's great that Obama liked to blow off steam with a vigorous game of basketball while he was in the white house, but the job of the president is to sit around all day and listen to people discussing the boring minutae of government and politics while skimming reports. You don't need to be particularly physically fit to do that. And indeed, if your mind is racing from one thought to the next every .00013 nanoseconds, that might actually make the job more difficult. Certainly Trump's propensity for making snap decisions based on the absolute minimum amount of time devoted to consideration of the alternatives didn't seem to serve him particularly well.

Well, right. I think it's perfectly possible that Biden had plenty of capacity left to do a good job of being president; maybe he didn't, but I can't be sure from here. What he definitely didn't have was enough capacity to be demonstratively vigorous enough to shake off the circling vultures, at which point dropping out was the only thing for him to do.

My spiteful but also genuine hopeful daydream is that Biden does have enough capacity left to do a whole lot of effective campaigning for Harris. Both because it could help her for real, and also because all those fuckers who were bullshitting about him can bite me.

You run for President with the media and discourse you have not the one you'd like.

I donated last night. Yesterday morning Cassandane was livid about the Democrats pushing Biden to resign. It was at least twice as bad in the afternoon when she got the news that he actually did. If anyone else is closer to her mood than seems to be the consensus around here, Heather Cox Richardson on Facebook Live seemed to calm her down more than anything else.

I'd rather start a vendetta against the NYT, but thanks.

83: Tell her I am with her in being livid, but that (a) Harris absolutely didn't seem to be one of the cabal, and (b) the cabal seemed to be pushing for the chaotic scramble to find Johnny U., rather than Harris. So Harris succeeding effectively spites them.

I mean, if passing on support from internet randos is a thing you do.

81: him campaigning strongly on his terms is going to be fun.

I do have a distraction post ready to go, but I feel like it's too soon to push this down the page.

Right? I mean, maybe I'm wrong and he really doesn't have much left for that kind of thing, or maybe they sideline him even if he could. But if he's out there I'm going to enjoy it.

Guys, heebie is in the cabal.

I'm at 73 and 85, and was pretty impressed by the sheer amount of Array yesterday. There will always be mean girls trying to make fetch happen, but Harris seems to be getting off to a very good start here.

I'm trusting that NYT readers will bury the paper in 'ok, now do Trump' pretty much every time he utters something incomprehensible -- which is every day. They got him elected in 2016, and as much as they want to get him elected in 2024, it seems to me that readers are going to be onto it this time around.

44: I'm well behind, but that comment from Martin is extra-moronic* because the Project 2025 stuff has turned out to have very good legs (especially on TikTok). As people have noted, it's like a conspiracy theory--you can dole it out in small escalating doses over time, there's plenty of material to apply to almost any situation, you can Do Your Own Research--only it has the possible additional attraction of being actually true.

* Assuming the goal is Serious News Analysis instead of just wanking to pictures of Vance's beard; fact-based reporting is right out.

I don't know. A lot of Biden's past year looked different after the debate, eg, backing out of the Super Bowl interview, the sharp reduction in public appearances and press conferences, etc. Entirely possible that Biden's *doctors* haven't identified a specific underlying condition--that is not uncommon--but something has clearly changed since the first two years beyond just two years of aging.

Apo - what's your impression of Roy Cooper? Do you think he would be a good VP pick? Would that put North Carolina in play?

the Project 2025 stuff has turned out to have very good legs (especially on TikTok).

Even on Onlyfans! Turns out porn performers are willing to warn their fans about who wants to ban porn.

Very little introspection in this thread I see.

that's awesome.

96 to 94, but I'm happy to perform abject indecision if it helps 95.

92: That's fair. He definitely seems much older -- less energetic, verbally stumblier -- than he used to. But just from old people I've known, that doesn't seem to me to necessarily be a progressively worsening condition other than in the sense that everyone is getting older all the time. He might have started a steep downhill to the grave, or he might be like this for ten years.

Bringing my dad into it again, he's seemed very old, in the way I described above, for maybe five years or so. But that was a sort of step-wise change, and then he's been stable for that five years. At some time in the future his condition will worsen again somehow, as it happens to all of us, but that he was a healthy, vigorous old guy five years ago and he's a weaker, frailer old guy now doesn't give you a schedule for what's going to happen next when.

95: Spin that out for us? The obvious issues we're not addressing are in fact not obvious to me.

Speaking only for myself, I agonized for hours yesterday considering whether there was anything I could have done to convince Joe Biden that grumpy Midwestern anarchists still believed in his ability to steer the great ship of state safely through the maelstrom of political turbulence that the next four years will bring.

It's heartening that the hoped-for small-dollar groundswell did become a deluge ($66m raised yesterday, a one-day record) and the Harris endorsements came pouring in squelching fears of a truly contested convention or some half-baked "mini-primary". As of this morning more than 2/3 of Congressional Democrats have endorsed Harris.

There's still a lot of problems with the Democratic Party, but I think the coming generation is a lot better at solidarity than the old guard and donor class.

Bernie and AOC may have a bit of egg on their faces, but they also showed their loyalty and got some policy concessions that may persist. Plus AOC helped clarify the lack of any Very Clever non-Kamala plan to people.

Maybe a get well card and a box of Fanny Farmers would have been just that extra boost he needed to stick it out.

I was actually just going to wonder what this is going to do to tomorrow's stock market numbers.

So far looks like not much? Dow flat since Friday in morning trading, S&P up 0.5%, Nasdaq up 0.75%.

What is the name for that bias where when you poll someone's opinion, then provide new information framed as a counterpoint, a good chunk of people change their minds even if the information is actually irrelevant or a truism or they already knew it?

In a similar manner, I wonder if this feeling of positive change will permeate to give Harris more of a bump in the polls than the hypothetical head-to-heads suggested before the fact.

Finally, a decent parting shot by Biden to announce his withdrawal purely on X, not letting media in on it.

My evidence he let nothing slip to the big outlets: when I first saw people posting "Welp" like something big had happened, I went to the NYT and WaPo and found nothing. But when I found the source, Biden's post, it was 7 minutes old. If they had any advance notice, they would have had an update ready to go the minute he posted.

Cooper is fine but unexciting. NC could be in play only because the GOP nominee in the governor race is an outright lunatic who could drive Democrats to the polls.

103: yeah, certainly not causing any panic, that's for sure. It's not like anyone can reasonably suspect Harris is going to be any less pro-business than Biden

107: Energy stocks down about the same slender amount, which makes sense.

106: I should email you off blog, but do you have any connections to research triangle area GOTV efforts? I should knock on doors someplace where it matters, and I have a place to stay in Chapel Hill.

(Or just random walk.)

106: Cooper being picked for VP does little negative to the NC race, right? Since he's term-limited out and it wouldn't create a vacancy as the same post is up this year.

Also the DNC convention is now going to triple its viewership.

Yeah, he's term limited out.

109: not off the top of my head, but Tia came and stayed here for that four years ago.

the Project 2025 stuff has turned out to have very good legs

As with Biden's "MAGA Republicans," I thought poorly of this until I saw that it seemed to actually work.

Bernie and AOC may have a bit of egg on their faces

Maybe, but AOC's position is identical to mine: Backing Biden 100%, then immediately backing Harris 100%.

I give 110%.

"Look, it's simple. Chairman Biden is in perfect health and fought ten tigers last night. And if for any reason in the future he has to drop out, Chairman Harris is in perfect health and fought fifteen tigers last night." (laudatory)

It's nice to have a presidential candidate who isn't (yet) getting beaten up every day at the top of the front page of every major outlet. I also like that the Harris news is stomping on any potential Republican convention poll bounce.

Yeah, I'm not worried about Biden or AOC looking bad at all. When Harris was supporting Biden, so were they; now that Harris is the candidate, they're with her.

118: Do you mean Biden or Bernie?

I meant Bernie, and I'm not even in my eighties.

That was something that was driving me insane through the weeks of nitpicking Biden. I am a glowingly healthy middle-aged person who successfully does an intellectual job, and I misspeak on names literally all the time. Once you're watching for slips on that level, you are absolutely going to find them.

Yes. And stress brings more of them for me.

My best guess about Biden is that he's somewhere on the same trajectory my dad is; a bit younger and more energetic, but similarly really showing the effects of age, while still being fully mentally competent. I would think Dad is too old for a challenging job, but with good support he could probably still do some useful work.

With some illnesses, my dad can go from being able to walk on a treadmill for an hour to my mom and I needing to lift him up because he can't move at all or even speak or think clearly. This can happen in the space of a couple of days, and so far he's always recovered to use-the-treadmill-health afterwards. He's a bit older than Biden, but started to have these problems when he was 81, and I couldn't imagine Biden campaigning well if he's reached a similar point in his physical health.

121: Remember Obama's 57 states?

A promise I thought I could count on.

123: Yeah, and honestly, nobody wanted to hold their breath for 90 minutes watching Biden try to debate Trump again.

And Pelosi has endorsed Harris.

126: Oh, boy, absolutely. I'm talking about how mad I am at what seemed to me to be a dishonest feeding frenzy around Biden now, and I wasn't before he dropped out, because I had very much gotten to the point of believing he really needed to drop out. Partially because of the frenzy itself, but partially because it really did seem likely to me that he didn't have the energy and good health necessary to get through the campaign.

At which point his stepping aside was a pure relief.

I'm sort of torn about how mad I really should be at the Times and the rest, given that I came around to the goal they were pushing for. But so much of it seemed really dishonest, and so I'm mad anyway.

The tenses in that first sentence got garbled. I meant that before Biden dropped out I was not arguing that he didn't seem that badly deteriorated to me and that the people trying to force him out seemed to be using dishonest tactics. I was mostly keeping my mouth shut, because while I didn't think he seemed demented, it did seem likely that he was frail enough that we'd be better off if he did drop out.

Now that he's out, I can be mad about the tactics.

I'm sort of torn about how mad I really should be at the Times and the rest, given that I came around to the goal they were pushing for. But so much of it seemed really dishonest, and so I'm mad anyway.

One summary that I saw, and agree with, was "I think it was the correct outcome and that Biden got a raw deal."

Biden created the conditions for the raw deal by running again at age 80. The time for him to avoid this was when he was deciding whether to run again.

It crosses my mind that he may have received more than his share of frustration and fury at the gerontocracy but where else can we put it? Ginsberg? Feinstein? McConnell? Hoping it now lands on Trump.

Don't forget Grassley! He entered the Senate a couple weeks before I was born.

I'm struggling to determine whether Neil Young's guidance that it's better to burn out than to fade away was followed in this situation.

I never liked the critique of the "gerontocracy" -- or, for that matter, the complaints about nepotism that were lobbed at Hillary and Gore and GWB. Various politicians aren't problems because of their age or their status as nepo babies. GWB was an asshole. Trump is an asshole. And don't get me started on RFK Jr.

On the contrary, one way that you get decent politics is you get decent people who happen to be born with advantages, or who have survived long enough to accumulate power.

If Biden made a misjudgment, it's one that the entire Democratic Party was complicit in. People talk about how Biden promised (or nearly promised) to be a one-term president. He made some gestures in that direction, but it seemed obvious from the start that he had no intention of being a one-term president.

Gerontocracy seems to me like a real problem because people do get incapacitated as they get old, and that's bad if they're exercising power. Biden was an unexpectedly good president, but this whole mess was foreseeable.

Feinstein, for example, was never a great Senator, but she was a shameful example of elder abuse being propped up by her aides.

I want to distinguish "gerontocracy" from "incapacity." Biden/Pelosi/Clinton et al are so old that people were complaining about them running the party a decade ago -- when they were in fine shape. Pelosi was around Biden's age when she stepped down as House leader, but she's running again and good for her.

one way that you get decent politics is you get decent people who happen to be born with advantages

That's also one way that you get a government run by people who don't know or care about the interests of people who are poor, working class, uneducated, and/or immigrants.

In fairness, our system makes it really challenging to plan to be a one-term president and "the economy will improve, people will notice that they are better off in 2024 than in 2020, and Biden will probably get reelected like most presidents do" seemed like a pretty reasonable prediction two years ago. We don't talk enough about how it's completely outrageous that Trump could even conceivably be a viable candidate at this point. I hardly need to remind people here of this but (a) he's fucking crazy, (b) he did a terrible job, (c) he's a convicted criminal, (d) he was impeached twice! What is even going on in this fucking country?

Woodrow Wilson was completely nonfunctional for weeks and his wife and aides still managed to continue being really racist.

139: We were a country once, a proper country.

91: I'm well behind, but that comment from Martin is extra-moronic* because the Project 2025 stuff has turned out to have very good legs (especially on TikTok).

Per this tweet from last fall, Martin is clearly a big non-fan of Harris (and full of shit). A smart Repub notes that we're on verge of having a soon-to-be-81-year-old potus, a vp w scant experience on world stage (to be charitable) and a vacancy in the speakership

Seeing Martin and Alex Burns blossom into their true asshole selves beyond the mild editorial restraints of the Times has been instructive. They were a key part of the guy brigade at the Times that helped drum out Jill Abramson who was replaced with misogynistic rageaholic Dean Baquet.

I saw the news yesterday morning as I sat down with my first cup of coffee and mashed the donate button in one of the posts from Biden's campaign account. It's heartening to see how very much not alone I was in that. This is a heartbreaking month or two for Joe Biden, but I very much hope that the valedictories coming his way now and at the convention will ease the pain a bit. He's earned that many times over. And the NYT can go fuck itself. I hope very much that Harris will continue Biden's policies of not giving those assholes the time of day.

Wow I'm apparently feeling very much-ish this morning.

I hardly need to remind people here of this but (a) he's fucking crazy, (b) he did a terrible job, (c) he's a convicted criminal, (d) he was impeached twice! What is even going on in this fucking country?

It's hard to overstate how much respect I've lost for the voting public. It wasn't that high before 2016, but I had no idea how high it was.

I thought my respect for American voters had hit rock bottom in November 2004. I was badly wrong.

There is a lot of discussion about how the NYT and its peers are able to report on Trump the way they do. I think one underappreciated aspect of this is that these people are often just dumb as shit.

Here's a roundtable of Times writers offering political advice to Harris. I submit that this from Douthat isn't a lie or misdirection. I think he's really doing his best to analyze the situation and the result is, well, this is the result:

She needs to take the extremely boring, predictable, simplistic step of picking a set of issues and figuring out how to pivot to the center, ideally criticizing her current boss a little bit along the way. And make it specific: If Trump can stand up and denounce Project 2025 on the hustings, Harris should do the same for some unpopular liberal cause.

These, for the record, are two of Trump's "specific" critiques of Project 2025:

"I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they're saying and some of the things they're saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them."

...

I know nothing about Project 2025. I have not seen it, have no idea who is in charge of it, and, unlike our very well received Republican Platform, had nothing to do with it. The Radical Left Democrats are having a field day, however, trying to hook me into whatever policies are stated or said. It is pure disinformation on their part. By now, after all of these years, everyone knows where I stand on EVERYTHING! DJT

OK. So not very "specific." But even beyond that, Douthat can't wrap his mind around the fact that Trump is transparently lying. I guarantee you, none of the authors of Project 2025 took offense at Trump's decision to "denounce" their work.

137: Oh sure, yeah, that's true. But this is the US, and if you're going to denigrate prosperous liberals or nepo liberals or old liberals, you're really giving up the game entirely.

Douthat can't wrap his mind around the fact that Trump is transparently lying. I guarantee you, none of the authors of Project 2025 took offense at Trump's decision to "denounce" their work.

Yglesias has been arguing that it's a politically astute lie.

Donald Trump is in many ways a bad politicians and a bad candidate. His numbers are terrible, his manner is off-putting, and his record is plagued with scandal. But his "be allowed to do that" score is off the charts. If it's convenient for him to start saying nicer things about electric cars in exchange for Elon Musk's money, he does that. If it's convenient for him to pretend the Republican Party isn't deeply committed to banning abortion, he does that.

144-145: Oh god, no kidding.

138: To add to Yawnoc's list: (e) how is it that NONE of his trials have come to fruition and he is not in prison?!

I would absolutely love for Judge Merchaun to give him a light sentence of a month in prison this fall. I know that'd be unusual for his crimes, but I still want it.

The gerontocracy is a problem for other reasons, mostly that they're stuck in the politics of the decade of their prime and try to be non-partisan and don't do popular things like legalize pot.

148: Oh sure. Transparent dishonesty works because our institutions are often run by people with the intelligence of Douthat and the integrity of Musk.

I used to be a lot more critical of the Democrats for accommodating US institutions that have gone off the rails, but I think I'm starting to understand the Democrats' view.

Maybe this is the way it has to be. Once you start trying to undermine our crooked institutions, you are sidling up to language like "fake news" and "deep state" -- and potentially hastening the demise of those institutions. Trump's success is rooted in his ability to persuade people that US rules and processes are bullshit -- that only suckers honor blind justice, a free press, democracy, the rule of law. There is considerable factual support for Trump's view, but for Democratic politicians to acknowledge that truth just pushes us further down the wrong path.

Nice: while the WaPo was tracking Congressmembers' and governors' endorsements, the AP was tracking delegates, and they tally that Harris already has an absolute majority.

I agree with Chil at 90 on the other thread: http://www.unfogged.com/archives/comments_18665.html#2192394

Horrible sense of one of those unanimous Iraq style Media Things, apparently irresistible and invariably wrong (a bit like me, laydeez)

Harris winning the Dem nomination is at $0.88 on PredictIt. So a low-risk 13.8% ROI with 1 month's investment.

154: OTOH I saw a screenshot (from a prediction site) on Twitter of somebody who seems to have put a 2 million dollar bet on Biden to be the nominee, probably at the level of 2 million to win 200k. Oops. "Literally free money" as they say sarcastically.

154: OTOH I saw a screenshot (from a prediction site) on Twitter of somebody who seems to have put a 2 million dollar bet on Biden to be the nominee, probably at the level of 2 million to win 200k. Oops. "Literally free money" as they say sarcastically.

Double-posting makes up for the months I don't post.

154: Picking up pennies in front of a steam roller.

I mean, I wouldn't risk more than perhaps $1k on it, lark money. (PredictIt seems to limit individual contracts to $850 anyway.)

Picking up pennies in front of a golf cart.

Yesterday I sent Harris some money and today the IRS sent me an unexpected check for more than 10 times what I sent Harris. Virtue is rewarded. Also, I suck doing my taxes so much that the IRS is like, "Look, we're going to send you a check. Call us if you want details on why, but you can just trust us and we'll send you a check."

I think I may have been wrong on replacing Kelly in US Senate. Governor (Hobbs) appoints replacement but next election (I think 2025, or possibly 2026 there would be a special election.

I sent Harris some money this morning and this afternoon I got a letter saying that my insurance claim had been denied.

They key was to have sent it yesterday.

The post has "right now" in the title. But good luck fighting with the insurance company.

i am not regularly exposed to audio or video news i did not watch the debate during or after i did check out a post-debate biden video where he was delivering prepared remarks, i.e., v low difficulty setting. & i found it alarming. he did not seem to me to be someone up to a v demanding job let alone combined with heading up a vigorous nationwide campaign. i am immensely relieved he withdrew his candidacy on that basis.

i am in agreement with criticism if the nyt & in general the current abysmal culture & practices of political journalism. but biden should not have run for reelection & i am v angry with those who enabled him to do so.

166.last. I'm sorry. I've learned my lesson and I won't let it happen again.

167: i'm referring to his staff, advisers & close family & friends.

I do think we need to steel ourselves for the discourse when the first polls come in and it is still not looking great. But who even knows what they will show or mean.

Dave Wasserman, a good polls, vote count guy but kind of political naïf otherwise thinks she is still a big underdog "saddled with the unpopular record of the administration." That last makes me want to puke, but sadly he is sort of right on the perception.

152:
https://apnews.com/projects/election-results-2024/ap-dnc-delegate-survey/
Just short of a majority.

Swear to god though, if we have to sit through 3 months of bubba safaris on the question of "will hicks nix chix potus" I'm going to punch a journalist.

JMM has a good piece about how we got here and the pundits' desire for a fight, and he is also lowering the expectations for initial polls.

My bet is that Harris's position improves in the immediate polls. Biden was subject to weeks of the absolute worst kind of press, then the heroic-looking survival of his opponent, and then his opponent's national convention. So yeah, his polls suffered.

Harris comes in as the unifying savior of the Democratic Party, and the media has yet to lay a glove on her -- the big gripe against her right now is that she's too popular and some other Democrat should knock her down a peg. I don't think there's much room for a change in the polls in any direction, but to the extent that there are immediate changes, I'd expect Harris's polls to improve.

It'll be interesting.

It'll be interesting.

Counterpoint: no, it won't. Polls are increasingly inaccurate and therefore increasingly misleading. This is likely especially true given the unprecedented circumstances. Add to that, horserace coverage is always, always, ALWAYS trash. But other than that, it'll be fascinating, I'm sure.

Sorry, I've become as crabby about polls as Stormcrow is about the NYT. But if other people are into numerology, I don't mean to yuck their yum.

I know too much about polls from the before times to feel that I understand how you do them right now when you can't easily do a random sample with any kind of response rate that would have been considered reasonable back before robocalls killed telephone calls. I'm also a bit leery because I do a lot of polls, some of them with names I've heard of, and I'm not sure what I'm representative of.

I agree with all of that (until the end). I'd add the fairly spectacular recent failure of the polls in England, which were previously quite trusted and unusually accurate, to the many reasons that right-thinking people should discourage their friends from discussing or even thinking about polling.

If you know what I'm representative of, please let me know.

I'd tell you, if the situation was reversed.

Polls used to be mainly surveys of the electorate. Now they are mainly models of the electorate. That's a huge change.

I'm not sure what that means.

It means they give the electorate body image problems.

Comfortably clear of the nominating threshold.

178: Related and interesting.

But there is mounting evidence from polling and surveys, demographic trends, and election results that show that high turnout is a gift to Republicans. The rise of Donald Trump has realigned voting blocks - sending college-educated voters who consistently vote into the arms of Democrats while attracting irregular voters to the GOP. For the first time in 2024, polls are showing that the likeliest voters are Democrats, while the ones who are less likely to vote are Republicans. And Democrats have been consistently outperforming in low-turnout special elections - providing dozens of examples of Democrats benefiting when people stay home.

The information all points to a new reality: The fewer people vote, the more likely Democrats are to win. And downstream of that, many long-held assumptions about the impact of things like voter ID laws and get-out-the-vote campaigns may no longer have the electoral effect they used to. This is true even though activists across the political spectrum haven't internalized it yet.

In Montana we learned this the hard way in 2020. Mailed ballots to everone, and got a whole lot of low propensity voters to vote. And a Republican landslide.

178: As a rule? Surely it would vary a lot by electorate?

After 2020 someone here (Doug?) said the Democratic operation resembled a color revolution, with all the many factions and organizations swarming and aligning. The speed of turnaround on Biden and Harris makes me wonder if the hive mind lives.

John Scalzi has a really good post up on the switch that includes this:

"As a rebuttal, however, consider that the announcement was made on the Sunday after the Republican National Convention, and after the Sunday morning political talk shows were put to bed, i.e., after the GOP political capital was spent slagging Biden, and when professional spinners would be caught flat-footed by the announcement. Biden's news was quickly followed by his endorsement of Kamala Harris, which in turn was followed by a flood of endorsements for Harris across the Democratic political firmament, effectively slamming the door on any serious challenge to Harris at the upcoming Democratic National Convention.

If you think something like that just happens spontaneously, well, one, bless your heart, and two, you're wrong. This was a work, a rope-a-dope, and a strategy to energize the Democratic base and to toss what little momentum the GOP had coming out of their convention down a deep, dark hole. And it worked! Harris raised a huge amount of money for her campaign in its first day -- $49 million at least, and I've heard up to $70 million -- and the GOP messaging was in disarray, limited largely to Trump whining on Truth Social, Stephen Miller freaking out on Fox News, and Mike Johnson trying to suggest that the Democrats can't do that, it isn't fair. Which is just what the Democrats wanted out of this."

https://www.ft.com/content/2d850355-cdf8-4c5e-b77e-8fc9e0dec4f8

The Harris campaign said that more than 888,000 people had donated in the day since she was endorsed by Biden, of whom 60 per cent had not given money in this election cycle.

185: I hope I said something that smart. Shows I have some good days after all.

186: I have wondered whether Biden timed/delayed his announcement to ensure that there was no opportunity to displace Harris as the nominee.

I don't remember the source, but I recall seeing what I regarded as pretty persuasive data* to the effect that the Lincoln Project ads -- which I found devastatingly effective -- didn't actually move any votes. The ads were nasty the way that Republicans are nasty, but I'm not sure that sort of viciousness works for Democrats or wishy-washy swing voters.

That said, this from Harris is just brutal, and even if I have my doubts about the effectiveness of it, I sure did enjoy it and am looking forward to seeing more.

* Not that I actually believe in that polling stuff. It's all superstitions, like vaccines.**
** I'm kidding! I'm kidding! But there is real science in social science. Back when Nate Silver had that insight, he revolutionized the accuracy of horserace coverage***.
*** Yes, such coverage is rightly ridiculed the way it is carried out, but the question of who will win an election is important and newsworthy, and deserves to be treated seriously.

The Lincoln Project ads were never aimed at convincing Republicans in the first place. They were intended to raise money for the Lincoln Project. It was fanfic for Democrats to forward each other.

Which isn't to say they weren't great ads. They do make great ads! But mostly preaching to the choir.

162: If it were Kelly, it seems the special election would be in 2026 to fill until regular election in 2028. So it does put the seat into the midterm mix.

Otherwise i do think he is a good fit.

173: Sorry, I've become as crabby about polls as Stormcrow is about the NYT. But if other people are into numerology,

1) My NYT crabbiness may seem like an annoying bit of overkill monomania but I can assure you it is but the publicly visible part of a deep, nuanced yet unvoiced critique of modernity and how we learn about and interact with the world around us ...

2) Somewhat guilty as charged. I do think they are increasingly problematic given incredibly low response rates and other issues and yet I cannot give them up entirely. And issue polls are beyond garbage.

190.***: but the question of who will win an election is important and newsworthy, and deserves to be treated seriously.

Agree, but think the problem is not so much how it is carried out but a question of proportionality. Clinton emails is a story but it received tow orders of magnitude more attention than it deserved.

Polls used to be mainly surveys of the electorate. Now they are mainly models of the electorate.
But really, my cows want to know what this means and what other people think about it.

196: I believe it is in part because with very low response rates and significant differential response rates between electorally significant demographic groups there is a lot of adjustment to raw results. This necessarily involves a lot of assumptions about who will vote etc.

But Spike may mean something different.

195: The problem is that the horserace sets the agenda. The media frame policy discussions in terms of whether a position works politically, rather than examining the question of whether the policy works as policy.

I genuinely think the NYT is gradually figuring it out. Today's edition is very heavy on the horserace -- but that legitimately is the story today.

I'm not sure how the news should address the Republican claim that the Democrats are damaging democracy by dumping Biden, but I can't find too much fault in the story headlined:
Trump, Who Tried to Overturn the Election, Seeks to Flip the Script on Democrats.

The story itself does a pretty good job of focusing on the accuracy of the Republicans' claim, and therefore is able to deliver the correct verdict: It's bullshit.

Democrats and voting rights experts dismissed the criticism as specious, and argued that Republicans lacked credibility on the subject.

I'd be inclined to remove the words "Democrats and" from that sentence, but even as written, it's not bad.

I'm checking in to mark myself safe from the alluded demise of Joe Biden, and remind everyone that I remain aware of all Internet traditions.

I was not aware of that one.

I've read just enough explainers to know the significant of the color and name "brat" in 199.link, but what is the "wurst" adding?

201 Adding breakfast sausage from Wisconsin, taking the meme to/from middle America.

201: Adding sausage makes it a men's hat.

Men are the wurst.

(applause)

I just told Mercury Opinion that I'm voting for Harris. This is what worries me about polls. I shouldn't be in so many of them, should I?

206: Do you pick up to unrecognized numbers all the time? If so I can sort of see it, but I'm also impressed at your stamina. How often is it a poll as opposed to some form of spam, marketing, or an autodialer that hangs up after three seconds of silence?

You can be the only respondent, and also consult on the statistical modelling.

I think of the $100 million Harris raised, she's already spent over $80 million just on ads targetted to me, I estimate. I know you're running now, thanks! But sure, another 100 repeats is OK, if you think that will help.

207: This was a text. But yes, I usually pick up unrecognized numbers.

208: I don't do that kind of model.

This morning I got two calls from an unfamiliar number that turned out to be from a colleague on some sort of connectivity detox, who was calling me from a land line with her phone out of service.

But yes, I usually pick up unrecognized numbers.

I know this is ostensibly a discussion about Biden withdrawing from the race, but this actually is the most shocking news in the thread.

I used to get calls from nursing homes or teachers that were from unknown numbers. So I kept answering.

213: Really? I figure anyone who has dependents in any kind of program has to be willing to pick up the phone to basically any number; people working for those and calling you about your kid scraping their knee or your elderly parent falling and not getting back up could be calling from any random mobile number they brought with them.

I was also shocked by 210. But then I remembered one time M had surgery and I repeatedly declined a call from an unrecognized number. I didn't even think about it, the reaction was so automatic. It turned out, of course, to be the hospital telling me to come pick him up. It's a good thing I don't have kids.

I answer them too. It could be something interesting!

>i>but the question of who will win an election is important and newsworthy, and deserves to be treated seriously.

Indeed, why wait until an election and the tedious counting of ballots? In the future, polls will be the basis for all democratic decisions. They will tell us who will win; we will save greatly in both effort and money.

new-fangled HTML contraptions!

I did some phone polls about a decade ago but they always turned out to take longer than the pollster claimed they would so I started declining them before settling on a policy of submerging my phone in water every time I didn't recognize the number. It's an expensive habit but worth it.

||

On twitter I saw that Jewish protesters of Netanyahu and the War in Gaza took over the US Capitol.

https://x.com/beth_avedon/status/1815835529180479809?s=61&t=gZGbGvk0QOJGHSrYwx6Y3A

There's no coverage in the Washington Post or NY Times.

|>

After a hail storm this past spring, I was getting 5-10 calls an hour. Not overnight, and it tapered off after a week, but it's enough to break me of any temptation to answer calls.

If I get two calls in a row from the same number, I answer it. That means it's Pokey needing to be picked up from somewhere, but it's a good habit for those other emergencies.

But seriously: the hospital or whoever needs to leave a message. Or send a text message.

What about the scam roof repair guy?

If I get two calls in a row from the same number, I answer it.

Ooh, that's a good rubric. It would have helped this morning, in retrospect.

But seriously: the hospital or whoever needs to leave a message. Or send a text message.

I'm even texting with the (very corporate) car repair shop these days.

221: Not really "took over". A few hundred entered the Rotunda, mostly sat down and made noise, some pounded on some office doors. Cleared by 4:30pm.

My very non-corporate car shop texts now.

He calls you "boss" in person but not in texts.

That's just how I am, chief.

223: They do leave messages with the number for the clinic. Then you go through a 20 minute menu. Once you get through to th secretary, they say that they will send a message to whoever called and they will call you back.

226: we'll, about what they did at Grand Central Station but not much coverage.

I just spent all night playing voicemail tag with the surgery center. I finally synced up with the surgeon in dawn's early light, which would be great except that I can no longer have the procedure because I am clinically dead.

232: Bummer.

I don't answer calls from numbers that I do recognize. Sensible people know to text.

Sometimes I want to say something I don't know how to spell.

Since polling is obviously not working, I propose autoprocyonmancy (the reading of omens from the path of raccoons across a street full of traffic). I just saw a big raccoon lead four little raccoons out of a cemetery and across a busy street where they were stopped by a jersey barrier that was put there by Joe Biden to protect a bike lane. Three of the five got flattened. I didn't see which three.

The best is texting back and forth for scheduling with the admin for some sort of medical or dental appointment. Please just type out my options for appointments, and I can consult Jammies or whatever, and not play phone tag, and not have to try to make out what someone is saying over the phone, and then just respond with my chosen time slot. Also I approve of getting text message reminders for appointments. Just great.

My dentist won't schedule a cleaning every six months now. They had no appointments until eight months out.

I miss my old dentist, who was elderly and employed an assistant who hated him.

I love my current dentist, who is Korean and got very gossipy as soon as she found out we were going to Seoul. "I like some of the groups, like NewJeans, but Blackpink they try to make so sexy, it makes me feel like a pedophile! Also, how are all the men in the K-dramas so tall? Korean men aren't really like that! Wonyoung is so beautiful, she makes me feel terrible about myself. It's like she's not human. But then I saw her on TV and she was so funny and nice, it made me even more upset."

"Also, how are all the men in the K-dramas so tall?"

Only their surgeon knows for sure!

https://www.health-tourism.com/limb-lengthening-surgery/south-korea/

234: I answer calls from some people. I ignore most texts unless I am trying to meet up with someone that day. Sensible people know to e-mail me.

237 X we have direct scheduling where you schedule yourself sometime in the next3-4 months but you need to talk to someone when the proper slots for your type of appointment are filled.

238: Same on the 6 months. I have to go every 3 months so I always book my next 2-3 appointments. My hygienist makes sure of it. Try booking your.next 2 appointments to get in. 8 months and athen 1 year or 14 months.

We don't really have a scam call problem here on the same scale, but polls are still very unreliable - AIMHMHB the recent general election polls were an average of seven percentage points off, and that's huge.

241: several of the places we stayed had botox/filler beauty clinics right in the hotel alongside the gym and such, in one case called "Toxnfill." It's all so unembarrassed.

The most bonkers surgery I know of is https://www.reddit.com/r/Transgender_Surgeries/s/pU9r97IMUP .

241: several of the places we stayed had botox/filler beauty clinics right in the hotel alongside the gym and such, in one case called "Toxnfill." It's all so unembarrassed.

The most bonkers surgery I know of is https://www.reddit.com/r/Transgender_Surgeries/s/pU9r97IMUP .

I almost always answer the phone even if it's an unknown number. This is partly because I'm easily distracted and have no respect for my time, but it's also partly because of how my job works. I work from home full time and don't generally have a lot of meetings. Nine times out of 10 an unknown call is telemarketing, but if the 10th time was a serious survey, I'd feel bad missing it because I was editing a document or responding to an email with no particular deadline. Let alone playing games.

Writing that down, it really does seem ridiculous. It sucks that societal changes have made polls less reliable in recent years, but I can't fix that all by myself.

I just took an unknown number call and found out that my son's glasses are ready.

But "easily distracted and have no respect for my time" really hits home for me.

And probably more than half of us.

The problem is that I know with my head that the polls are terribly unreliable, but I don't know that with my heart yet. The effect of having lots of polls all showing Biden trailing Trump all summer long ate away at me more than it would if I thought the polls truly hocus-pocus.

I mean, the polls have problems but I think it's very bad to be behind in them.

Like: are they unreliable in a way that syncs all polls up in the same wrong direction? are they unreliable in a way that cancels out and you get some benefit from overall meta-trends? Are they better than neutral or worse? It's hard to let go of the tea leaves.

It's too far out is the biggest issue right now.

They're unreliable, the trouble seems to be we have no real way of telling which way.

The polls are showing the race has tightened considerably. I know a lot of people don't trust that, so I confirmed it by doing a tarot card reading, casting a horoscope and reading some chicken entrails.

Modern methods call for raccoons.

Probably take another week or so for people to really absorb all the news of the past week before polls reveal much in the way of sustained movement. Probably any change of candidates would initially produce the same bump conventions usually do?

Probably.

Biden's announcement was surely timed to let the air out of any bounce Trump might get from his convention, and Harris' convention is (hopefully) going to be a well choreographed love-fest. Biden has transformed himself into a beloved elder stateman overnight, and he'll do fine with his teleprompter (as he usually does). And any slips he might make will be immediately forgiven. It won't even take extraordinary luck for Harris to be looking pretty good as Labor Day rolls around.

For Stormcrow: https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/an-open-letter-to-the-editors-of

I am not a Democrat. There are parts of their agenda in their cupboard that I do not want to see implemented. But I have to ask: how in the name of all that is holy did that tendentious sentence get put into Cohn's piece?! Are you trying to troll the libs?

Anyone have opinions about Tim Walz?

263: Just one bluesky follow who said that he was carried along on a lot of things by a legislature that's more liberal than he was. Contrast to Beshear who stood up for trans people in a very red state. But of course all of the names floating about have their pluses and minuses.

Charley, do you read Balloon Juice? They're getting involved in funding Four Directions in Montana, particularly to work with turnout in the Blackfeet Nation. Any thoughts on the group?

262 - Yeah, I found Cohn's piece striking too:

there aren't many popular, liberal policies left in the cupboard.

How about democracy? The rule of law? Aren't there a fair number of Americans in favor of those things?

There are people who detest me for whatever reasons they have. It's best to ignore them. This is that kind of deal.

This reminds me so much of 2008. Everyone just wants a breath of fresh air.

I thought I was voting for Andre the Giant.

262: Yeah, I almost commented on that Cohn piece. What really struck me was his reliance o (both explicit and implicit) on freaking issue polling. Polling is struggling but issue polling has always been a mess and is now completely off the rails. Not just "I am doing well but the US economy sucks" but "My *state's* economy is doing well but US's sucks." Or plurality saying unemployment is at an all-time high. And per the stupid Ben Smith interview ofJoseph Kahn (exec editor) their whole coverage of politics is shaped by those beliefs.

My goodness, but aren't people on the internet irresponsible? https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/jd-vance-couch-cushions/

270: But he is on record caring a suspicious amount about mattresses. I think it bears more investigation.

267: Agreed. The general relief at something other than a Trump-Biden rematch in both the public and the media is palpable. Harris' relatively low public profile as VP the past four years may actually help with that. Also, her delivery has gotten way better since the 2020 run. The contrast of energy and coherent complete sentences with both Biden and Trump could hardly be sharper.

264 I don't read BJ; it's been a decade at least. Just a matter of rationing attention.

I don't know Four Directions. I've done voter protection in Native communities (Blackfeet Nation in 2022, Kootenai in 2018) and there are definitely additional votes to be had. Western Native Voice is more familiar to me, but I'm sure there's room in the space for additional players. Blackfeet turnout was quite low in 22; I thought the county election admin there did a great job, with the resources she had, and sent a note to Sen Tester right after the election suggesting he have his campaign people find ways to help her. (She's Blackfeet, and had moved the elections office from the county seat on the edge of the Rez to the Blackfeet capital for the day.) One hopes that there are registration drives aplenty going on now; these can and should be Native led.

273: Super, thanks!

https://x.com/amandawtwong/status/1815854061490720772

270 is great.

270: The best thing about that is the palpable-but-deniable glee the author had while recounting the false memes.

275: Also spot-on.

Real Biden gets to the ropes and tags Harris in vibes.

Back in Obama's term there was a push to reform the USSS, and with that in mind a new director was installed. Soon after, an intruder managed to get shockingly far into the White House (luckily, the Obamas weren't home), and the new director was found responsible and turfed.

Was gonna spin a shooting conspiracy, more as an intellectual exercise, but lost the impulse. Nevermind.

Biden's speech.

I'd be shocked if the polls move much. There's not a lot of evidence that Trump's level of support ever changes much in response to events. The core supporters live in a completely different world from actual events, where whatever's thought to have happened reinforces what they already believe.

Harris definitely can gain, as Biden could have, but enough to make things feel beyond 50-50? How many people are out there who might vote Democratic now who didn't feel like it before (non-voters, third-party, genuine undecided)? Enough to win, I hope, whatever the polls say.

Biden said "sign-in required"? The DNC establishment just can't stop hiding from the average American!

I guess 281 doesn't work if you aren't on Bluesky. But it was really funny.

Hey, AP News and Snopes have already felt it important to debunk the couch thing. Clearly it has legs.

His couch has garters on the legs.

I THINK YOU MEAN TO SAY "HIS COUCH'S LIMBS ARE DECENTLY COVERED FROM VIEW".