The (no longer) much too early 2024 election thread

[N.E. Brigand]

"This is the fourth debate . . . in which you would be voted the most obnoxious blowhard in America."



And it doesn't stop there.

[narya]

They were all pretty obnoxious, both in their platforms, and their ad hominem style of "debate". That said, it was a horrifyingly entertaining 2 hours.

[N.E. Brigand]

Melania Trump thinks her husband should select former Fox News host Tucker Carlson as his running mate.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Correction: Axios reporter Alex Thompson claims without any evidence that Melania Trump thinks that her husband should select former Fox News host Tucker Carlson as his running mate.

[Sunsilver]

Either way...

What a match that would be!

[N.E. Brigand]

Correction: Axios reporter Alex Thompson claims without any evidence that Melania Trump thinks that her husband should select former Fox News host Tucker Carlson as his running mate.

Thompson and Jim VandeHei attribute the claim (part of a fairly lengthy article on a 2025 President Trump's possible staff, to which the Biden campaign is already responding) to "a source close to Trump." My guess is that means that either Donald or Melania Trump has told them this (directly or via a regular intermediary) as a negotiation tactic between the couple. Note the reference to Melania's near-absence from the campaign trail this year as compared to 2015-2016 and 2019-2020 and the suggestion that this move would bring her back on board. Donald Trump did tell a different reporter last month that he would consider Carlson for this role.

Josh Barro today noted that Carlson lives in Florida, so he'd have to establish residency elsewhere like Dick Cheney did in 2000, because the Constitution makes it problematic if a presidential candidate and his running mate live in the same state. This 2015 Politifact article explains the facts even as it finds Lawrence O'Donnell's statement that "The president and vice president can't be from the same state" to be false. If O'Donnell had only said, "The president and vice president won't be from the same state because it's too risky," which is effectively the same thing as what he actually said, Politifact would have let it pass.

[N.E. Brigand]

Yesterday, Donald Trump said that if returned to the White House, he'll require that immigrants take a religious test: "If you don’t like our religion… then we don’t want you in our country." That would violate the Constitution, of course, and since Trump is nominally Christian, which therefor must be "our religion," it's also Antisemitic.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Also anti-Hindu. Among other things.

[N.E. Brigand]

Semafor reports that the Trump campaign has been pushing a campaign ad that falsely purports to show an NBC reporter mocking other Republican candidates. NBC has demanded that the campaign take down the ad.

[N.E. Brigand]

Former vice president Al Gore urges Americans to take Donald Trump seriously when he says he wants to be a dictator.

Some people say Trump was joking, but if any prior presidential candidate had "joked" like that, that would be the end of his or her campaign.

[N.E. Brigand]

A new New York Times column opines on swing-state and swing-district polling of 2,500 voters in early November by a "Democracy Corps, a Democratic advisory group founded by Stan Greenberg and James Carville" which found that "Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, LGBTQ+ community, Gen Z, millennials, unmarried and college women give Trump higher approval ratings than Biden." Color me skeptical, but if it's true, it has to be due to ignorance, because Donald Trump and the Republicans worked pretty hard to ruin the lives of people in those groups.

Some details. Respondents were polled on 32 subjects, and:

Biden and the Democrats led on six: women’s rights (ahead by 17 percentage points), climate change (15 points), addressing racial inequality (10 points), health care (three points), the president will not be an autocrat (two points) and protecting democracy (one point). There was a tie on making democracy more secure.

Donald Trump and the Republicans held leads on the remaining subjects, including being for working people (a seven-point advantage), standing up to elites (eight points), being able to get things done for the American people (12 points), feeling safe (12 points) and keeping wages and salaries up with the cost of living (17 points).

Particularly worrisome for Democrats, who plan to demonize Trump as a threat to democracy, are the advantages Trump and Republicans have on opposing extremism (three points), getting beyond the chaos (six points) and protecting the Constitution (eight points).

Surely this is ignorance and can be addressed by a thorough informational campaign, right?

As for economics, public perception about inflation may be changing. Perhaps because gas prices are falling? And while gas prices fluctuate in large part due to external factors U.S. presidents don't control, it is undeniable that the U.S. is drilling like never before, so I agree with the commentator who says: "Do a photo op with an oil rig, Biden!"

[RoseMorninStar]

I often wonder how these polls are conducted. If they are phone polls those are shown to be way off due to people no longer answering their phone (now THAT is something useful our elected representatives should work on.. phone scams and robo calls). Polls were off in the last election for that reason. I also think fear works and the Republican/right wing news media is pretty good at it.

[N.E. Brigand]

A CNN poll released yesterday found that Donald Trump is more popular than Joe Biden in Michigan and Georgia, two states that Biden won in 2020.

But an Ipsos/Reuters poll released today found that Joe Biden leads Donald Trump by 4 points in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Biden won six of those states in 2020; Trump won North Carolina that year. Somewhat confoundingly, this poll also finds that Trump leads Biden by two points nationally.

[Frelga]

I do wonder how one goes about reliable polling these days. Land lines are dying out and most people do not answer cell phones unless they recognize the number. And the area code of the cellphone is just the place where you got the phone. My son has a Bay Area number in New York.

Mail? Grabbing random people on the street?

[Voronwë the Faithful]

A little pro-Democrats gerrymander news. I have mixed feelings about this because I think gerrymandering is wrong no matter who does it, but I also think that having GOP continue to control the House of Representatives is scary.

[N.E. Brigand]

It's getting harder and harder to differentiate the real Donald Trump (as in the video below) from his parodists.

[N.E. Brigand]

At a campaign event tonight, Donald Trump said (1) that the current cost of gas is anywhere from $4.00 to $8.00 per gallon;'* (2) that until he as president restored loyalty to the American flag, the National Football League "had a sit down problem: they were sitting down; we didn't like that";** (3) that by December 2024, i.e., in what he hopes is the last full month of Joe Biden's presidency, the U.S. economy will be "roaring back",*** and (4) that Jack Smith is seeking a "guilty plea from the Supreme Court."****

Back in September 2020, two months before he lost the election, Donald Trump championed a stock market that had closed at 29,000 points and said that if Joe Biden***** were elected, the economy "would crash." And yet today the stock market closed above 37,000 points.

Meanwhile some Trump supporters are embracing the idea that he would be a dictator.


*The national average for gas now is $3.12 per gallon.

**While there were some NFL players who sat during the playing of the national anthem, the reason Wikipedia's article on the phenomenon is titled "U.S. national anthem kneeling protests" is that the overwhelming majority of participants "took a knee." Also as that article notes, the kneeling protests continued into 2020.

***And I quote: "With your vote by Christmas, we're gonna have it. By Christmas 2024, that's just shortly after the election, because of the momentum of our victory, we will have a eunuch's****** economy roaring back and in 2025 we'll have one of the greatest economic years this nation has ever recorded."

****Huh?

*****Trump called him "Joe Hiden'" which doesn't really work, because the apostrophe must be eliding a "g" and "Hideng" isn't a word.

******Trump stumbles a bit with his words. This is probably "U.S." but it's not really clear, and I'm not the only one to hear it that way.

[N.E. Brigand]

Some people seem to have forgotten that there was a toilet paper shortage when Donald Trump was president.

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Nikki Haley explains why she would vote for a ban on abortions at six weeks.

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Donad Trump is doubling down on his stated desire to be a dictator, saying this at a fundraising event:

"He asked me a question: 'Please say you don't want to be a dictator.' I said, 'No, I won't say that.'"

In the same speech, Trump acknowledged that his audience consists of "people that have a lot of money. You’re rich as hell." He also told them: "We’re gonna give you tax cuts."

[N.E. Brigand]

Florida governor Ron DeSantis said at a New Hampshire campaign event today that the three people Donald Trump appointed to teh Supreme Court -- Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett -- are too liberal. He adds that as president he would appoint justices like Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

This is interesting, so far as it goes.