What if the polls are distorted by bull-bleep?

I try not to ride the poller-coaster prior to an election that I care about. That is, the rare election in which there are polls; in many there are too few polls to pay attention.

But a month out from the presidential vote when we're drowning in polling news, I think it is worth passing along Simon Rosenberg's analysis of what may be going on amid the deluge. Who is Rosenberg? -- he's one of the few Dem analysts and activists who got the 2022 Congressional contests more or less right. He didn't believe there was going to be a "red wave" sweeping Democrats away and there wasn't, except perhaps in a few districts in New York State and Cali where Dems weren't paying much attention.

He has a theory about what leads to dire polls for Dems as we approach the vote. Republican operatives can buy them ...

... Given what happened in 2022, it would have been wise for the polling aggregators and forecasters to acknowledge the rise of an entirely new type of polling, right wing “narrative polling.” There are independent media and academic polls, partisan polls by campaigns and party committees, and now a third kind, right-aligned polling. While there is a smattering of polls from Democratic and progressive aligned sources, they aren’t many, nowhere near the level of what we are now seeing coming from the right. 

This close to an election spending money on anything other than things that help you win is an extravagance. Thus the right must view spending so much money on these polls as something that helps them win, which makes them a new form of partisan political activity not “polling” as we understand it.

It is time for national political commentators to acknowledge this new third type of poll - the right wing narrative poll - and to start breaking their data out from the independent polls. To be clear breaking out the right wing polls from the averages in 2022 was a central way I got the election right when so many got it wrong. The late independent polls in 2022 showed a close, competitive election. 

The right wing narrative polls showed an election 2-3-4 points more Republican - a different election - and there were enough of those polls in the battlegrounds to move the averages to a red wave not a close election. Without those polls it is very unlikely we would have been talking about a red wave in the closing weeks of the election.

Given that the project to move the averages and create a narrative the election was slipping away from Democrats was successful in 2022, we should anticipate that the right will try it again this year. 

What would that look like? We get a series of polls from these pollsters showing the election moving towards Trump perhaps 2-3 points in key battleground states, maybe nationally too. The polling averages will then start to move a little ... The right then declares their strongman is using his “strength” (not money, ads, debate performance, ground game, external events, the early vote or any other plausible explanation) to win the election, and that it is slipping away from [Harris]. The whole right wing noise machine then amplifies, and presto - another red wave! Trump is winning and strong, Harris is losing and weak. Energizing for them, demobilizing for us.

My emphasis. They want to scare and depress us and since they aren't very good at on the ground campaigning, they have figured out how to render polling averages unreliable. We just need to dig in and work this campaign in all our various ways.

A mixtion and a puzzlement

Looking for how to get involved? Sign up to knock on doors in Nevada and Pennsylvania with Seed the Vote. Or contact me to phonebank along with the worker-members of the hospitality union UniteHERE.

A winner meets a loser

As my friends know, for me there are two seasons, Football and Not-Football. Unfortunately, every two years election season intrudes on Football, but somehow I get through it.

I'm happy to see our presidential candidate getting into the spirit of the season:

Now that does my seasonal heart good. This played during the Georgia v. Alabama slugfest yesterday.

New voters?

Did you know that Elon Musk is a naturalized American citizen? Born in South Africa in 1971, the tech tycoon apparently thought, correctly, that his prospects would be improved by acquiring citizenship here. Good for him; in this respect, he's ordinary. (One doubts that actually...)

 

He's not only ordinary but also, as is common, butt-ignorant about his adopted country and the truths about immigration. 

 

It's neither easy nor fast for immigrants to become naturalized citizens who can vote.

The underlying US immigration legal framework has not been thoroughly overhauled by Congress since 1986 (regular order path) and 1990 (asylum process). There have been multiple administrative and court-ordered adjustments; both paths are barely functioning, starved (mostly by Republicans) for funding and strategic vision. Of course people want to come here -- for all our manifold faults, the country is both richer and safer than a lot of their home countries.

 

The most recent failed legal reform effort was this past year. Republican US Senator James Lankford hammered out an immigration compromise which could have passed with bipartisan support and which President Biden agreed to sign. Candidate Trump wanted to keep the existing immigration mess and successfully pressured Republicans to kill it, to the disgust of all parties.

There have been times in my life when my political work consisted of trying to encourage naturalized citizens -- yes, these folks are full citizens -- to join the voting pool. Despite excited headlines claiming "With an election looming, the U.S. is approving citizenship applications at the fastest speed in years," only a small increase in new citizen registrations has become normal in especially fraught elections. I think this phenomenon may date to the California anti-immigrant panic of the mid-1990s. But, just as for other Americans, turning citizens into voters is a slog, taking years to become habitual. And legally eligible non-citizen residents don't rush into the naturalization process; it's expensive, complicated, and sometimes emotionally wrenching.

The Pew Research Center presents some fascinating facts:

Most naturalized citizen eligible voters have lived in the U.S. for more than 20 years. About three-quarters of immigrant eligible voters (73%) have lived in the U.S. for more than two decades. Another 20% have lived in the country for 11 to 20 years, while relatively few (8%) have been in the U.S. for a decade or less.

Among naturalized citizen eligible voters, more than half (55%) live in just four states: California, Florida, New York and Texas. These four states are also the country’s most populous when looking at eligible voters overall. Combined, they’re home to roughly a third of the U.S. electorate (32%).

 The naturalized citizen share of the electorate differs widely in some potential battleground states in the 2024 election. Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are widely considered to be among the swing states this fall. ...

In Nevada and Arizona, naturalized citizens make up 14% and 9% of all eligible voters, respectively. They account for 7% of eligible voters in Georgia, and about 5% in both Pennsylvania and Michigan. In Wisconsin, they are just 3% of the electorate.

In overall numbers, Georgia’s naturalized citizen electorate is the largest among these swing states at 574,000, while Pennsylvania is not far behind at 546,000. Both of these states were among the closest in the 2020 presidential election.

 What do I take from this statistical picture of naturalized citizens? 

• Like Americans born here, naturalized Americans don't vote automatically. If you want their votes, you have to talk with them and turn them out. Voting can be intimidating, even when Republicans aren't spreading lies in immigrant communities.

• It's not very clear that naturalized citizens have different issue desires and preferences than anyone else. (Well maybe Ukrainian-origin immigrants might be especially urgent in seeking aid to their relatives under siege.)

• This is still a country enriched by immigrants many of whom choose to become citizens. Immigration by ambitious strivers is what makes this country unique and interesting. It always has been.

It's more than a little sick that so many Republican pols are willing to beat up on some of the best of us.

Walz rocks

Yesterday I wore this t-shirt (a product of the Lincoln Project, a para-campaign by disaffected Republicans supporting Harris-Walz) while walking laps around a small San Francisco lake. It was a lovely, warmish day and there were lots of other exercisers and strollers doing the same. 

The t-shirt reproduces a moment in Tim Walz' VP speech at the Democratic Convention: 

When it comes to reproductive rights, Walz says Minnessotans have a golden rule: “Mind your own damn business.”

Reactions to the shirt were interesting. Folks coming the other way don't always appear to read what you've got on your chest -- but some do. (I do read them, routinely.) 

The first woman who appeared to read it grimaced scornfully. That's interesting I thought -- and continued to tune in. 

One of the features of walking around a lake is that you start seeing the same people repeatedly going the other way if you are moving a smidgen faster than they are. As people came by on second and later passes, I began to receive smiles. It was clear that some groups had chatted about what this slightly dire message might mean. I was a little surprised that quite a few recognized the quote.

Tim Walz is a fine communicator and he's demonstrated a way for an older white man to speak out on reproductive freedom. Go Tim!

Friday cat blogging

So far, the curtains Janeway loves to claw are intact. Will they survive having them both in the same sunbeam?

Evangelical women lay bare ...

... perversions of the teachings of Jesus that condemn young women to assaults on their bodies and their self esteem by men empowered by church authority.

The filmmaker, Kristin Kobes Du Mez, has followed up on her best selling book Jesus and John Wayne by collecting these testimonies on film. It's well worth the time of all of us, even if not part of this religious tendency or any religious tendency. This is a short [29 minutes] video that unmasks the intense misogyny which goes along with Christian nationalism and abuse of power. You don't have to be evangelical to know about that.

I am reminded of what South African women sang against apartheid: "You have struck a woman; you have struck a rock ..."

Economy insight

Okay -- maybe I begin to get it. For the last couple of years, economic surveys have reported that a majority of Americans feel positive about their own financial position, but think "the economy" is going to hell. (That link is a couple of years old, but current opinion research largely agrees.)

Yes -- there has been inflation, but, in general, wage growth has been exceeding price increases to consumers for months so we ought to feel better. And housing has become insanely expensive. But most of us, most of the time, aren't really in the market for housing. So what's the beef?

Today the shrunken San Francisco Chronicle passed along some local data that might be a contributing cause of our discontent. In much of the city, too many neighborhood businesses have not come back from the pandemic. 

Businesses in most S.F. neighborhoods are still struggling to bring back customers. ...

Four years after the beginning of the pandemic, consumer spending in most San Francisco neighborhoods still hasn’t recovered to anywhere near pre-pandemic levels, according to city data.

Citywide, sales tax revenue from April to June this year was down 34% compared to the same period in 2019, adjusting for inflation. In over half of neighborhoods, revenues are down more than 25% compared to before the pandemic, according to a Chronicle analysis of city data.

Actually my home turf, the Mission, is doing a little better than the city at large, down only 25 percent. But it is dotted with empty storefronts like the one pictured above, steps from my house. It sure doesn't feel as if small businesses are thriving.

So, even if we're personally doing okay, we are constantly visually reminded that something is amiss.

Not quite my take

It feels petty and even a little silly to wish that an author had written a different book. It is, after all, his book. But I found John Ganz's When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s a surprisingly unsatisfying account of its time.

His subjects -- David Duke, Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot and their tiresome intellectual mentors and apologists like Rush Limbaugh and Sam Francis -- remain just repulsive clowns, part of the long tradition of right wing grifters who've played on racism and grievance to assume an unmerited central role in our lives. Rick Perlstein has chronicled earlier incarnations in Goldwater's and Reagan's eras. These guys and their movements fight the full realization of the country's egalitarian potential. They will do so as long as doing so remains profitable, and beyond. So does Trump today. I see no point in dignifying them; they are unserious figures as a contemporary politician has observed.

Taking them seriously means more than telling their stories for drama; what in American society makes us suckers for these characters? That's the difficult subject.

I lived the early '90s as a politically active progressive. There were plenty of countervailing events and trends that find no significance in Ganz's telling. In particular, the international campaign against apartheid came to fruition with the release of Nelson Mandela from prison and the beginning of democratic majority, African, rule. The GOP's St. Ronnie had opposed the South African freedom struggle -- with plaudits from Pat Buchanan.

Those years were also a pivotal time for the emergence of LGBTQ+ full participation in American life. A decade of Republican neglect of the toll of AIDS on the community helped launch gays as a political force and we've never stopped since. Though gays sang "Ding, dong the witch is dead!" on Castro Street when Clinton was elected, we did not look to national Dems for our progress. The same day, we elected an Asian American lesbian to the San Francisco school board, one tiny step in a long march through the institutions of democracy. We understood, as marginalized people always must, that we had to make our own path forward. Establishment pols will follow.

Many of the themes of that era arose from Black demands for full human dignity in American society. Right wingers thrived on pointing to the riots after a southern California jury acquitted Los Angeles police thugs who beat up Rodney King. But a combination of subsequent community organizing and prudential reforms encouraged by big business actually laid the ground work for a Black president 15 years later. Though racial atmospherics of the time were awful, the movement was forward.

Little as I liked this book, I find Ganz's substack, Unpopular Front, vital reading. I'm curious where he goes next.

Plight of Haitians in the news again ...

I feel as if all my life the misery of Haiti and Haitians has grabbed attention in this country -- and then receded without having improved in any material way the condition of the citizens of that nation. So now we have the story of the Springfield migrants who seemed to be making a success until Trump and Vance got involved.

• when I was a child, my Episcopal parish church had a relationship with a Haitian parish. Haiti is home to a fast growing diocese of Episcopalians. 

• through coups and counter-coups, Haiti was an obsession of Bill Clinton's presidency. 

• Dr. Paul Farmer drew on his experience doctoring in rural Haiti to found the international Partners in Health.

• as North Americans working to improve conditions for Nicaraguans in Nicaragua, we over and over would emphasize that the country is the poorest in the Americas -- "except for Haiti".

I have no doubt that Haiti continues to suffer for its original sin -- having been the one country in the Americas to throw off European domination by way of an African slave revolt. We don't talk about this much, but that history has lurked under two centuries of North American meddling and neglect.

The influx of legal migrants to work in Springfield, Ohio, is one way Haitians are coping with their current misery. These graphics -- by way of Adam Tooze -- add some depth to that story: 

Click to enlarge

Whilst the number of Haitians in the USA increased by 75 percent, hard work, entrepreneurial success and savings generated a more than sevenfold surge in remittances to Haiti.

Click to enlarge

It's no way to grow a country, but at least the continuing flow of cash remittances to the island nation helps keep many Haitians alive.

Don't erase the women who made this possible ...

The excitement, shading toward euphoria, of this unlikely campaign season seems to have settled into something more like a dedicated slog toward November 5. After the Biden withdrawal, the Harris-Walz coming out party at the convention, and anxious anticipation of a debate at which Kamala demonstrated she could wipe the floor with Donald, many of us are just working away at ensuring she wins. It's not a sure thing, but we are on track to elect Kamala Harris our 47th president so long as we do the work.

But before it gets lost, I want to share snippets of Rebecca Traister's thoughtful account of "How a women-led movement, born in the devastation of 2016, put Democrats on the brink of making history." Many women have worked for years laying the groundwork for the Harris groundswell.

... Harris is benefiting from the intense ground-level electoral engagement provoked by Clinton’s loss. It’s worth noting how much of the 2016 result, in which Clinton did win a majority of American voters, stemmed from the certainty on the part of those running her campaign, the Democratic Party, and the political media that she would take the White House and that Trump could never. Millions of Americans didn’t act in advance of November 8, 2016, in part because no one had made clear to them that they had to, that this was an emergency — and they then awoke on Wednesday morning to an emergency. At which point legions of them began to change their relationship to politics and civic participation.

The Women’s March took place the day after Trump’s inauguration, and the sea of ordinary people was so much larger than Trump’s party that it became the original trigger for the former president’s obsession with crowd size.

Kamala Harris, having been sworn in for her first Senate term not three weeks earlier, spoke at that march. “Even if you’re not sitting in the White House,” she said, “even if you’re not a member of the United States Congress, even if you don’t run a big corporate super-PAC … you have the power. We the people have the power. And there is nothing more powerful than a group of determined sisters, marching alongside with their partners and their determined sons and brothers and fathers, standing up for what we know is right.”

... “Women-led grassroots organizing gets dismissed by the Beltway class,” texted Katie Paris, who founded Red Wine & Blue in advance of the 2020 election. The group organizes multiracial suburban women, a Democratic response to the Moms for Liberty groups driving Republican turnout; Red Wine & Blue now has 500 groups nationwide, compared with Moms for Liberty’s 310. “But they really may have no idea what’s been going on in the middle of America,” Paris said. “Do they have any idea that we organize in our communities year-round and not just around elections? That we pay attention not just to presidential races but to school boards and school levies and whatever else needs tending in our communities? I was just listening to NYT Nate [Cohn] on The Daily and it’s like they have no comprehension of any dynamic outside of the candidates and their campaigns. It’s like they’re trying to report on the storm without checking the weather.”

It’s true that too few in the upper reaches of American politics take this level of organizing seriously, even as these efforts have, more than once in the past eight years, saved the Democratic Party in elections that everyone predicted it would lose, corrected its long-term failures to build state and local power, and ushered a new generation into office — composing a Democratic winning streak that stretches back not just to Dobbs but to Democrats flipping 15 seats in the Virginia House of Delegates in 2017.

... It’s hard to stress how unprecedented it is for a presidential campaign’s official launch to be powered by Black-sorority and abortion-related groups. There was no elaborate advance planning for this, but that’s sort of the point: Where was Harris when the music stopped and she became the nominee? Already talking to Black women and abortion providers and storytellers. ...

Yes, the joyous hope that we might, finally, rid ourselves of the felon and rapist who incites so much hate unites a multitude of improbable allies. But the women have been here from the beginning ...

• • •

Sign up to help Harris win in a battleground state with Seed the Vote. And if you can't travel, contact me; I'm good at pointing people to what they can do that might help.

GOP ground game? Is it real?

'Tis the season ... the moment in election campaigns when major media try to report on the field campaigns being mounted by the various electoral combatants. For many of the reporters sent out for this purpose, the ground game is mysterious foreign territory.

I focus this post on several articles about the Trump/GOP efforts, largely on door-to-door canvassing apart from TV, other media ads, and even phoning, texting, and GOTV postcards. 

In August, Semafor reported: 

Donald Trump’s unconventional ground game is making Republicans nervous.

The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee are betting the race on an unconventional approach, opting to outsource much of their turnout operation to dozens of conservative groups like Turning Point Action, America First Works and the Elon Musk-backed America PAC.

Interviews in swing states did not encourage GOP commentators:

A ... Republican strategist in a swing state said they’ve seen “no ground activity at all” and complained more typical volunteer work had been crowded out by “election integrity” efforts.

“They’re really only focused on recruiting folks to volunteer to be poll watchers,” the third Republican strategist said. “I mean, they do a lot of that shit. But what’s the point of watching the vote if you haven’t turned out the vote?”

The Washington Post pointed out that Republicans seem to be shaping their efforts based on a new Federal Election Commission ruling which allows closer cooperation between the legal Party and candidate campaigns and outside supporting groups.

... In March, the Federal Election Commission issued new guidance that opened the door for campaigns and outside groups to collaborate on turnout efforts. In the past, campaigns and official party committees, which are subject to contribution limits, generally observed a firewall that blocked information-sharing with super PACs and nonprofits that accept unlimited contributions.

Now, campaigns and outside groups are free to share messaging and exchange data. That new opportunity has allowed the Trump campaign to supplement a bare-bones in-house field program with allied programs fueled by megadonors.

Hence the Trump campaign's reliance on the likes of Turning Point USA to do its door knocking and to Get Out the Vote -GOTV.

Meanwhile, the Democrats -- the state parties and the Harris-Walz campaign assisted by unions like UniteHERE -- are not changing their past practices.

What could go wrong for the Trumpists? Plenty.

Philip Bump is a rare experienced observer of these things:

... Like the Trump Organization before it, the GOP is mostly just a collection of brands under the control of Trump himself.

This brings us back to voter outreach efforts. Such efforts, generally categorized as “get out the vote,” or GOTV, has not traditionally been one of the Republican Party’s strengths. The Democratic Party, bolstered by labor unions, had a history of strong GOTV efforts in part because its voting base was less likely to turn out of its own accord. Only in more recent elections did the national GOP match that push, investing in GOTV and in building a database of voters that could be used over multiple cycles and by multiple candidates.

For the party, this offered two benefits. It made their candidates more likely to win, given the increased ability to target specific low-propensity voters and push them to vote. More importantly, it built the party. It allowed Republicans to collect new data on voters and on volunteers. It gave them something to offer to candidates — data and resources — that could help them shape candidate campaigns and policies. This increased the institutional power of the Republican Party.

But since Trump first became the front-runner for the Republican nomination in the 2016 presidential contest, he has made obvious that he intends to suck every drop of institutional power out of the GOP for his use. ...

If, because Donald is cheap and perhaps needs the money for legal expenses, parallel organizations are left to do the door to door canvassing, do they really have the same institutional interests as the campaign? Bump doubts it.

... Who benefits from outsourcing GOTV efforts to Turning Point Action (TPA)? The youth-focused group can send its data ... back to the GOP, but it’s safe to assume that won’t be a priority. TPA is interested in building its own institutional power, and is using its strong relationship with Trump to do so. It’s building its database of volunteers and using the lure of volunteering to help Trump to do so. And, importantly, its effort will be an institutional success even if Trump loses. The central incentive is on raising and spending the $100 million Turning Point Action is budgeting for this year.

Because of the financial incentives for the organizations running these things, these para-campaign canvasses are more likely than the Dems to depend on a random collection of paid canvassers who have little personal commitment to the project. The head count becomes an important metric, regardless of what canvassers accomplish. 

This work is hard. It is exhausting. It's a lot easier to just hang door hangers and count doors reached than to engage with voters. Sometimes it is easier to just go out for coffee and still get paid. And very often, that's all Republican canvassers actually do. 

And now Elon Musk thinks he can buy an off-the-shelf field operation for North Carolina. A Republican is doubtful:

Whether the committee is targeting the North Carolina voters that Trump needs to carry the state is less clear. The mailers and door-hangers obtained by The Post were delivered to a longtime conservative operative in the state who was already committed to Trump and votes regularly in federal elections.

“It’s a little screwy that I’m on their list,” said the individual, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss campaign tactics candidly. “Stupid to waste money on someone who is a guaranteed Trump vote.”

Color me extremely skeptical that the affiliated PACs and parallel organizations can do the job as well as the organized Democratic field offices and unions can. 

We saw something like this in Albuquerque during the 2004 presidential cycle, John Kerry running against George W. Bush. Some quirk of the campaign finance rules that year allowed big foundations, for the first time, to pour money into nonprofits working in parallel to the Democrats. And they did.

And it was a mess. Multiple organizations failed to communicate; door knockers carrying different flyers ran into each on the same blocks. Other areas, especially Spanish-speaking neighborhoods, never saw any campaigners at all. Groups running canvasses competed to hire from the small pool of people available to do the work; the daily rate for walking in the city climbed; canvasses had huge employee turn over. And in those early days of computerization, it was never very clear that what information canvassers collected about voters and their intentions could or would be made useful for getting out the vote. 

I am reminded that that was the last year when Dems lost New Mexico at the presidential level. No one fears that any longer. The New Mexico Democratic Party has made itself enough of a coherent force that they have made a true blue state. 

As Simon Rosenberg always insists, "I'd rather be us than them."

You can sign up to get involved in canvassing for Harris-Walz alongside community partners in battleground states at Seed the Vote.

Friday cat blogging

 

They look out.

 

They check out the view to their rear.

Just another day in the front window.

Harris calls out Trump, Vance and the GOP for their hate

 She tells you what she really thinks -- and feels.

pic.twitter.com/UudOeI5fV5

— janinsanfran (@janinsanfran) September 18, 2024

The assault from Donald Trump and JD Vance on the community of Springfield, OH, got to her. I don't usually post videos of this length. But, in an interview at the National Association of Black Journalists, meet our next president.

"... my heart breaks for these children ... a whole community put in fear. ... your words have meaning. ... when you are bestowed with a microphone that big, there is a profound responsibility that comes with that. ... you are responsible for your words, [for] how you conduct yourself. ... it's a crying shame what is happening to those children in that community ... the American people deserve better than this. ... I know that regardless of their race, their gender, their location, that people are deeply troubled by what is happening to that community in Springfield,Ohio ... We have got to say that you cannot be entrusted with standing behind that seal of the President of the United States of America and engaging in that hateful rhetoric .. that is designed to divide us. ... I think most people in this country are beginning to see through this nonsense and to say let's turn the page on this. It's exhausting and it's harmful. ... Let's turn the page and chart a new way forward and say that you can't have that microphone again."

This is presidential.

We get junk mail

No, not the masses of candidate flyers and fund appeals of years past. Obviously San Francisco is not a presidential battleground, but the local candidates have often flooded our mail boxes.  Maybe data on voters has become so accurate that campaigns already know who we will vote for in this hyperacive electoral season and don't waste their money on us?

 

However, I can't say that for national nonprofits. These two envelopes soliciting funds arrived the same day. I hope they didn't pay much for whatever list of targets they are working off of.

I suspect random direct mail is pretty much dead.

He's got it ...

... I could not love this more. A 93 year-old man in Oklahoma bought a billboard declaring, “Women, the Republican party does not respect you…vote Democrat.” When a local news outlet asked Burt Holmes why he bought the billboard, he said, “Because I think women can win the next big election in the country if they will get out and vote.” Burt knows what’s up! -- via Jessica Valenti, Abortion Every Day

If warming stalls, thank China

 

If David Wallace-Wells is right, in the increasingly possible world in which climate change is halted by a rapid transition away from burning fossil fuels, we'll all have to thank China. 

In climate world, something that once seemed almost unthinkable may now be happening. Preliminary data shows that while global carbon emissions are continuing to rise, China’s emissions may already be peaking — the longtime climate villain turning the corner on carbon before the planet as a whole does.

Forecasts like these are not perfectly reliable, but already China has completely rewritten the global green transition story. You may be familiar with the broad strokes of that story: that thanks to several decades of mind-boggling declines in the cost of solar, wind and battery technology, a new wave of climate advocacy and dramatically more policy support, the rollout of various green energy technologies is tracing an astonishing exponential curve upward, each year making a mockery of cautious projections from legacy industry analysts.

But while this is often hailed as a global success, one country has dominated recent progress. When you look at the world outside of China, those eye-popping global curves flatten out considerably — green energy is still moving in the right direction, but much more slowly.

Consider solar power, which is presently dominating the global green transition and giving the world its feel-good story. In 2023, the world including China installed 425 gigawatts of new solar power; the world without China installed only 162 gigawatts. China accounted for 263 gigawatts; the United States accounted for just 33. As recently as 2019, China was installing about one-quarter of global solar capacity additions; last year, it managed 62 percent more than the rest of the world combined. Over those same five years, China grew its amount of new added capacity more than eight times over; the world without China didn’t even double its rate. ...

He goes on to survey similar progress in China in wind, batteries and other technologies. 

While American politicians argue about tariffs to try to protect an anemic manufacturing capacity for the green energy transition, Xi Jinping saw Chinese green tech as an economic driver replacing China's collapsing real estate bubble -- and the rest is history.

The full article is at a gift link and well worth reading.

The vibes are getting better

 

When I've been told by news media that US majorities believe Donald Trump will be better for "the economy" than Biden and now Kamala Harris, I'm gobsmacked. 

 

And when I'm now shown, by the Financial Times via economic historian Adam Tooze that we now, slightly, think Harris would be better at the economic job, I'm also gobsmacked.

 

By the sorts of measures used by economists, the American economy has been chugging along happily for at least 12 months with something close to jobs for everyone who wants one, rising wages, low inflation, even a happy stock market (though how much this last has to do with the economy I don't know.) 

But for all that time, many survey respondents have been insisting that Trump would be better for "the economy." I can only conclude that mostly what people mean by "the economy" is confidence that they'll able to eat and have shelter, all with some degree of comfort and expectation for a future. 

Maybe sign boards advertising gas prices and perhaps boarded up storefronts figure somewhere in that, as well as Joe Biden's weak communication capacity and his age.

But the change in the polling tells me that surveys on "the economy" don't solely measure an economic reality. Apparently, in some part, they do heavily measure vibes. If we feel hopeful about the future, the world around us looks better. This can't entirely hide material realities, but it actually does help change our perceptions. (I'm sure some physicists have thoughts about how this works.)

In light of what's happening with current economic opinions, I can finally make sense of this amazing chart from last spring: 

Majorities of people polled in the electoral battleground states have thought their personal economic well-being had been getting better for a couple of years. Yet something was also convincing them that the country at large was doing poorly. I always was gobsmacked by this finding too. (As far as I know, no one has published an updated version of this question.)

Kamala Harris's attractive candidacy is apparently measurably restoring confidence in our future.

Not soley for transport ...

 

This one appears strictly decorative -- and decorated.

She seems abandoned. Why do I default to the female pronoun?

Masculine with a pox? I wonder.

It's happening ... the clean energy transition

California hit 100 days this year with 100% carbon-free electricity for at least a part of each day — a big clean energy milestone. 

And it's happening with only the most concerned and attentive citizens talking about it.

David Kurtz laments:

Climate change got short shrift in the [Harris/Trump] debate, a single question framed in the most unsophisticated, open-ended way:

The question to you both tonight is what would you do to fight climate change? And Vice President Harris, we’ll start with you. One minute for you each.

It’s a measure of the degraded state of our public discourse about climate change that the debate question would be so general and non-specific – with an entire 60 seconds to respond.

But maybe that's just how it has to take place. What is happening is just too novel, too fast, for most of us and our information systems to assimilate. 

Bill McKibben, prophet of both climate doom and climate hope, has lots more. 

Statistics numb the brain so let me say it another way: we are on the cusp of a true explosion that could change the world. We are starting to put out the fires that humans have always relied on, and replace them with the power of the sun.

... Bloomberg predicted last week that global installations of new solar modules would hit 592 gigawatts this year—up 33 percent from last year. The point is, when you’re doing this a few years in a row the totals start to grow very very fast. When something that provides one percent of your electricity doubles to two percent, that doesn’t mean much—but when something that supplies ten or twenty percent goes up by a third that’s actually quite a lot. And more the next year. 

... That is, the use of natural gas to generate electricity has dropped by almost a third in one year in the fifth largest economy in the world. In 2023, fossil gas provided 23% more electricity to the grid than solar in that six month period. In 2024, those numbers were almost perfectly reversed: solar provided 24 percent more electricity than fossil gas, 39,865 GWh v 24,033 GWh. In one year. That’s how this kind of s-curve exponential growth works, and how it could work everywhere on earth,  

For McKibben, this is how the election matters: 

... if Trump wins, there’s tons that he can do to slow the transition down. He can’t “kill wind,” as he has promised. But he can make it impossible for it to keep growing at the same rate—right now there are teams in the White House managing every single big renewable project, trying to lower the regulatory hurdles that get in the way of new transmission lines, for instance. A Trump White House will have similar teams, just operating in reverse.

Again, he can’t hold it off forever—economics insures that cheap power will eventually win out.

But eventually doesn’t help here, not with the poles melting fast. We desperately need clean energy now. That’s what this election is about—will Big Oil get the obstacle it desperately desires, or will change continue to play out—hopefully with a big boost from the climate movement for even faster progress.

The bold type here is McKibben's except in that last paragraph. We citizens are not focused on climate and energy; for most of us, it's all just too big and too scary to contemplate. But it's happening; this election will help determine how fast and even, perhaps, how equitably.

Time to push this guy into our past

Trump is crumbling. What he speaks to, the id of our society, is going strong.* But Kamala Harris unmasked his increasing personal weakness. 

Some of my favorite summations of what happened to that whining man on Tuesday: 

Anita Chabria, Los Angeles Times:  

What struck me most about Trump was how tired he looked — and acted. Seriously. Not being snarky here. I’ve been noticing this when watching his campaign stops.

Something of the raging fire that helped ignite the Jan. 6 insurrection is just gone. Yes, he’s got his well-worked lines and his delivery retains his huckster polish. But he seems deflated, almost like he’s bored with it. Like the only time he really cared was when it turned personal.

Tuesday night, he was hunched over, scowling, easily led into traps by Harris that devolved into rants when he felt slighted.

At one point, after she baited him that world leaders were laughing at him, he came back with Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban (who has cracked down on freedom of the press, LGBTQ+ rights and immigration) as proof that wasn’t true.

“Look, Viktor Orban said it. He said, ‘The most respected, the most feared person is Donald Trump. We had no problems when Trump was president,’” Trump said.

It wasn’t a dumpster fire performance. But it seemed sad, a refreshing change from scary.

Charlie Warzel, tech and media reporter, The Atlantic:

What Harris’s campaign and debate style propose, however, is a different view of Trump, not as the central figure in American politics but as a vestigial element of a movement that’s so curdled by grievance and enmeshed in an alternate reality that it is becoming not just culturally irrelevant, but something far worse: pitiable.

David French, New York Times columnist on Xitter:

It's like she's debating MAGA Twitter come to life. Victor Orban, dead pets, Ashli Babbitt, "J6." She's debating Catturd.

Josh Marshall called it before the debate even began:

... I do think there’s a decent chance a lot of people will get a wake up call tonight not only about how weird Donald Trump is but about how much he’s deteriorated. It’s been many years since he’s shared a debate stage with anyone who could be called a young and dynamic figure. But if you’re really sensitive to signs that Donald Trump is a sundowning degenerate freak, you wouldn’t be a swing voter. Tonight’s about Kamala Harris. That means risk but also opportunity. ...

•  The DOJ has indicted a fly-by-night "media company" for funneling millions in Russian money to right wing media personalities to stir up that American id.

There was a debate

I could natter on about the debate, but I think I'll leave it to Jamar Tisby, author of a new book pitched to evangelical Christians about heroic Black Americans: 

I prefer Frederick Douglass’ approach.

In a letter responding to a question about race and politics in 1873, he wrote,

Tell your wants, hold the party up to its profession, but do your utmost to keep it in power in State and Nation."

Douglass encouraged voters to hold their party accountable to its promises and to progress—but to first keep that party in office.

Only the most extreme ideologues approve absolutely everything a party or candidate says and does. Your vote should not be considered tacit agreement on every action that a politician takes or every statement they make.

The country doesn't love a whiner and that's all the former president offered last night.

On getting out of the way

Today on Tom Dispatch, Erudite Partner offers "A Personal Meditation on Growing Old In a Catastrophic Age." She wonders are we, still healthy Boomers, "old and in the way"? She reports for herself, feeling of "shame" about retirement and also "fear of disconnection."

Yet, in this vital campaign season, she's far from disconnected. She's once again in Reno, NV, training volunteers to canvass voters for Harris-Walz, alongside the labor union UniteHERE. Those cooks and room cleaners are banging on doors for decency and democracy once again. You can join that work by signing up through Seed the Vote.

She explains:

The other fear that keeps me working with my union, joining political campaigns, and writing articles like this one is the fear of the larger threats we humans face. We live in an age of catastrophes, present or potential. These include the possible annihilation of democratic systems in this country, the potential annihilation of whole peoples (Palestinians, for example, or Sudanese), or indeed, the annihilation of our species, whether quickly in a nuclear war or more slowly through the agonizing effects of climate change.

But even in such an age, I suspect that it’s time for many of my generation to trust those coming up behind us and pass the torch. They may not be ready, but neither were most of us when someone shoved that cone of flame into our hands.

Erudite Partner also explains in this article that, unlike her, I have drawn back, that I am accepting that I'm retired from the immediate fray, just doing a little volunteer recruitment from home. After all these years during which I've made periodic forays into the center of the work of progress, this time I get to watch and cheer those who can and should struggle in a more central arena. It's a shock, but it feels right and realistic.

 New folks -- get out there and win!

From the streets of San Francisco

Reporter Heather Knight, along with photographer Loren Elliot, offers a largely sympathetic account [gift article] of some of what the city of San Francisco is doing to care for asylum seeking families who turn up in our midst. 

They huddled in the cold on a graffiti-covered bench last November, the twin girls dozing in their parents’ laps while the older children buried their heads in their phones.

Most nights, the family of six waited like this outside a San Francisco school gymnasium until it could be converted into a homeless shelter. Once inside, they slept each night on a small patch of the floor, then rose early each morning to secure a spot in one of the three showers shared by 69 people. They had to leave by sunrise so the school gym could be returned to its intended purpose.

Margarita Solito, 36, sometimes wondered if the 3,200-mile journey to San Francisco from El Salvador had been worth it. The family left as international migrants, and now they were migrants of a different sort, moving around their new city all day with nowhere to call home.

A year after arriving in the city, Ms. Solito’s fight for housing would pay off, and her family would be able to put down roots. But their journey shed light on the larger crisis of family homelessness in San Francisco and revealed the daily uncertainty that hundreds of schoolchildren face there. ...

Knight reports that 2403 children in the San Francisco Unified School District, 5 percent of total enrollment, are unhoused!

No wonder teachers and school staff wanted to use what space they could find in their building to shelter the children they serve. Neighborhood meetings averted most fears about using the Buena Vista/Horace Mann campus for this purpose. I live nearby; the nightly shelter residents have not discernibly upset the area.

San Francisco is relatively friendly to this work thanks to the tireless agitation of community and migrant groups. 

Today Bay Area Faith in Action rallied outside of the public San Francisco General Hospital in support of another resident of this shelter, Carmen Marquez, who contracted meningitis, spent 6 days in a coma, and then had to have 9 fingers and her lower leg amputated due to the disease. 

The City Department of Homelessness wants to send her and her teenage daughter back to a shelter. They say that despite her medical condition, she does not have enough points in the computer system to qualify for more permanent housing.

If wealthy San Francisco remains at all friendly to our poor neighbors, it's because of tireless agitation from organized people in community groups.

Truthtelling

We know the only thing he gives a damn about is saving his own guilty hide. He's coming apart mentally. But if he thinks beating on women will help him, he's happy to go there. 

I'd call this a pretty good ad, shared here because most of us don't live in contested states where it is being broadcast.

Kamala Harris: a long road to a new way forward

As I look at the presidential race, I wonder if I'm seeing an emerging majority coalition that has been inching its way into being for all the decades of my active election experience. We've come a long way.

The Washington Post's Philip Bump observed:

The country clearly exists in a moment of flux, in which, as Obama observed at the Democratic convention last week, we are fully testing the idea that a democracy built on pluralism can succeed. 

But part of the surge in enthusiasm for Harris’s candidacy is clearly rooted in her overtly representing the diversity of America. Conservative White Americans often see America’s non-White population as a unified entity colluding to strip the power of Whites. 

The shift from Biden to Harris at the top of the Democratic ticket allowed for a shift in strategy, too, from treating Trump as an opposing force to treating him as a historic outlier. Waving off Trump as “weird” has a knock-on effect, uniting those opposed to Trump’s candidacy and politics as the true inheritors of the American tradition.

... It may be that Trump helped bring to fruition the political shift predicted with Obama’s 2008 victory. His win proved to be a potent organizing force for White conservatives.

The election of another Black president in the face of that force, an election powered by a coalition strengthened by opposition to Trump, might in fact turn the page that began being written 15 years ago. It is a page, though, that has appeared in American history books multiple times before.

This reminded me of observations I made in early 2008, while watching the Hilary Clinton/Barack Obama primary.

It looks to me as though the Obama candidacy is trying to birth a national coalition which, like the Democratic one in California, doesn't quite have a secure demographic base though such a base seems visible on the horizon. This coalition must, at present, attract enough support outside its obvious members to win an election. Naturally, its leading edge is young voters, folks who live closer to that diverse and difficult demographic future older folks can envision but do not so nearly inhabit.

As Historian Bruce J. Schulman [original link is dead, unfortunately] of Boston University notes, Obama is not the first to try this. In addition to RFK, it's only fair to mention Jesse Jackson in 1988 -- at the end of 2008, will Obama have exceeded Jackson's total of wins in 11 states? ...

A long-term national progressive coalition must somehow hold together most African Americans, most Latinos, probably the majority of various Asian-origin voters, and enough whites, probably predominantly female, to make a majority. ...

Republican overreach, robbing women of our control over our bodies, has hastened the movement of many white women into this coalition. And these white women definitely vote, as do Black women.

On the other hand, it's taken long enough to get here that more and more Latinos and Asian-origin voters are beginning to vote as other immigrants have learned to before them: making electoral choices divided more on their class position in the new country than by ethnic affinities. Think Italians or Irish moving beyond hyphenated status. That's too a kind of American progress but it adds to today's progressive challenges.

But in a general way, the potential Democratic Party coalition visible in 2008, and in California fifteen years before that, may finally be coming to fruition nationally in Kamala Harris' candidacy, if we can push this candidate over the finish line.

MAGA backlash replicates birtherism in response to Obama and California reactionary nativism of the 1990s and before. Anyone else remember when California was Ronald Reagan's launch pad based on bashing hippie students? 

Coalition pluralism was the challenge in 2008; it's still the challenge today. But it can happen. It's no accident that today a Californian leads a Democratic ticket capable of confirming the possibly of a new way forward.

Friday cat blogging

Mio enjoys an evening sunbeam. When you are a nearly 20 pound cat, you apparently aren't shy or cautious about exposing your furry belly.

Simple statement of fact

 

Snapshot of sign beside the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Pennsylvania, thanks to the vagaries of the Electoral College, is probably the most important state in the presidential election. The winner there is likely to win.

 

Everything suggests the contest will be very close.

As anyone who has worked in elections knows, the presence of lots of signs doesn't win the vote. But they sure do encourage supporters. This one is bold.

Tumultuous political failure

Rory Stewart is brilliant, charming, singular, and thoroughly obnoxious. His memoir, How Not to Be a Politician, would not be to many reader's taste, but I found it fun and informative.

Stewart is a Brit/Scot from an upper class professional family. I first became aware of Stewart when he served in various military and administrative roles among Brits allied in our Iraq and Afghanistan wars in the '00s -- and became a smart and vocal critic of the U.S. occupation's absurdities and dysfunction. As well he might have -- before these wars, he had famously walked across Iraq, Pakistan, India, Afghanistan and Nepal. He knew something about these people and places, unlike the North American bumblers with the guns and his own British politicians.

On returning home, he decided he needed to do something about all this. In 2010, he declared himself a Tory (that's the Conservative Party) and through luck and accident managed to win the opportunity to contest and win the remote district of Penrith and the Border adjacent to Scotland. He was now a Member of Parliament. Through a series of kerfuffles, policy controversies, and administrative misadventures, he survived as a Tory Member through 2019 when he ran for party leadership in a failed effort to avert a Boris Johnson government and a chaotic implementation of Brexit.

The policy strands of this memoir are what political memoirs usually center on, concerns like rural development in his isolated home constituency, an effort to extricate Britain from America's Middle Eastern wars, whether to leave the European Union via Brexit, and once his Remain position lost the popular referendum, how to carry out the people's will with the least damage to the country.

That's all important, but what made this an interesting account for me was his picture of how the accreted quasi-system that is Britain's unwritten political constitution was functioning. Not well. Now -- Americans have nothing to crow about as we struggle to preserve popular democracy within a written Constitutional framework constrained by such immovable absurdities as the Electoral College and the rule that every state gets two Senators regardless of the size of its population. But Stewart argues convincingly that British government is even more irrational.

He recounts his orientation to his new job from his Party legislative leader:

We should not regard debates as opportunities for open discussion; we might be called legislators but we were not intended to overly scrutinize legislation ... 'I always try to get consensus as chief whip,' the chief whip concluded, 'and the consensus is that the prime minister is right.'

... Even the most rebellious MPs, famous for their obstreperousness, voted against the government in perhaps only five votes out of a hundred. All of which raised certain questions about the theory that MPs were independent legislators ...

Finding that his job as a backbencher was to be an automaton, Stewart worked on improving the lives of his constituents (notably by increasing broadband in the countryside) and finagled to get into one of the junior ministerial positions open to MPs. In this respect the system is very different from the United States.

Ambitious Members from the governing party are chosen by the prime minister to exercise executive authority in the various departments of government. But unlike cabinet members in the U.S. who genuinely attempt to direct the departments to which they are appointed by presidents, MPs continue as legislators; their sub-cabinet and cabinet appointments are add-ons. No particular expertise in the actual work -- such as preserving the environment, running prisons, or foreign aid -- is expected or required to become a minor minister. In fact, expertise was the reverse of what was sought; Conservative leaders sure didn't want Stewart having any authority over anything about Afghanistan or central Asia where he knew the ropes and the languages.

Stewart quickly learned that the permanent civil servants, accurately, figured that uninterested junior ministers came and went and could be ignored, politely. He recounts perhaps instituting some interesting reforms in the under-funded, under-appreciated prison system -- until he was abruptly moved on. Insofar as Stewart is fair and accurate, this seems a hell of an undemocratic way to run a government.

The stresses of governing after the destabilizing Brexit vote eventually did in Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May; ushered in the frivolous, self-aggrandizing leadership of Boris Johnson; and led through short prime ministerial tenures to this year's resounding replacement of the Tories with a Labour government. By then, Stewart was long gone. But his account of the early stages of the Tory self-immolation is cutting.

[In 2019] for eight and a half years, the government had been an elective dictatorship run by the prime minister, and Parliament an elderly, smelly Labrador, asleep by the fire. Once a year, perhaps, someone would step so hard on our tail that we would snap, and in doing so stop the redesigning of the House of Lords, or the Syria bombing; but generally we were entirely passive. We, the Conservative MPs voted loyally for the government day in and day out, late into the night.

But Brexit had transformed the conventions of British politics. The generally loyal, if grumpy, mass of Conservative MPs had been turned into warring Brexiteers and Remainers. ...

... authority was leaching away from all of us. The referendum, by giving a direct say to the general public, had made Parliament a low-lying island in a rough and rising sea. And many of the people, having 'spoken', began to perceive parliamentary debates and votes as just different forms of obfuscation, delay and betrayal.  ...

When the Party deposed Theresa May, Stewart felt he had to run for leadership because the more obvious candidates would not dare to state what to him was obvious:

... none of them was prepared to say that Boris Johnson was manifestly unsuitable to be prime minister. ... to put an egotistical character like Boris Johnson in the heart of a system that was already losing its dignity, restraint and seriousness was to invite catastrophe...

Stewart was proved right, of course. Often being right does not lead to popularity. 

His memoir has a supercilious tone that I am sure was endlessly grating to his colleagues. The guy is the opposite of a team player. He comes across as pretty sure he knows it all -- and sometimes he does. But the result is an delicious record of tumultuous political failure. I'm glad to have read it.