One year later, somebody has to break the cycle

Can the back and forth, the trading of atrocity and revenge, go on until they are all dead -- until we are all dead? Perhaps. Certainly nothing in the news -- from Palestine, from Israel, from Gaza, the West Bank, from Lebanon, from Iran -- suggests any end ...

Maybe these folks -- Israeli Jews and Israeli Palestinians working together in Standing Together -- seem the only sane voices around. Or maybe they are charlatans. But if so,  they are the kind of charlatans the world needs.

... For as long as we can remember, people who called for peace and non-violence were considered “naïve,” stupid, or even traitors. If the past year has taught us anything - it is that there is nothing more naïve than believing that this cycle of bloodshed and wars is sustainable. There is nothing more naïve than believing that the path we have been on until now is a path we should stay on.

The truth is that on this land live millions of Palestinians and millions of Jews, and nobody is going anywhere. Working toward a sustainable peace that guarantees everyone freedom, safety, equality and independence is imperative for anyone in this land who wants to see a future here. The fates of Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Arabs, are tied. So no, we are not naïve, and you are not either.

In the face of decades of bloodshed and a year of unfathomable violence and destruction, we are insisting on Jewish-Palestinian solidarity, and insisting on calling an end to the bloodshed once and for all. We are calling on our society to fight for life, in the face of our leadership that only speaks of death. We are calling on everyone around the world to pick a side - but for that side not to be Israelis or Palestinians - for the side to be all of us, the Israeli and Palestinian people on the ground who all deserve a real future, against our leaderships that are only dragging us further into the abyss.

There can be no justice, but can there be peace?

California state ballot measures: a whine and opinions

First, let me whine a little. I hate the profusion of ballot measures on which we are asked to vote every election. 

Many involve complex issues which the legislature and governor have been unable to resolve. Most of us know nothing about the matters they concern. To our elected leaders I say -- damn it, do your jobs! Sorting these interests out is what we hire you for.

Another sort of measure is something that somebody had enough money to pay signature gatherers to qualify for the ballot. Now I love quite a few signature gatherers; it's a hard job. And then we get hit with the TV and social media ads. I'm often disgusted by seeing money set the campaign agenda, even when I care about the issues.

• • •

Enough -- here's how I voted on the state props ...

Prop. 2 is a $10 billion school bond measure to fund repairs and upgrades to public schools. ... Statewide, 38% of students in California go to schools that do not meet minimum facility standards, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.

Opponents of the bill include the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn. Dems and Reps for it. Voted YES.

Prop. 3. Repeals 2008 hate measure that outlawed gay marriage. Clean up time! YES

Prop. 4. The Safe Drinking Water, Wildfire Prevention, Drought Preparedness, and Clean Air Bond Act of 2024 would have the state borrow $10 billion to pay for climate and environmental projects — including some that were axed from the budget because of an unprecedented deficit. There's little bit of something for everyone in this: water, coastal protection, fighting wildfires.

Probably not perfectly designed, but a product of the legislative process and the Governor's druthers. Okay. YES

Opponents of the bill include the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn.

Prop. 5: According to the LA Times:  

Currently, most local bond proposals require a two-thirds vote of the public to be approved. If voters pass Proposition 5, this threshold will be lowered to 55% for bonds supporting low-income housing, road and transit expansions, parks, wildfire resilience and other public infrastructure projects. The existing supermajority requirement for local bond approval was written into California’s Constitution in 1879.

I think I'm against supermajority provisions wherever they exist. That includes the US Senate filibuster rule. We need to grow up. YES

Opponents of the bill include the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn.

Prop 6. Would end mandatory work requirements for state prisoners. Most prisoners who work in the system earn .74 cents an hour. Yes. .74 cents an hour! YES, YES

Opponents of the bill include the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn.

Prop. 32. Raise minimum wage to $18/hour. Current law, signed by Jerry Brown in 2016, gradually lifts the minimum but in many locales and many jobs, pay is not keeping up with living costs for California workers.

I used to say that, if you could raise the cash to pay signature collectors enough to put a minimum wage raise on the ballot, you barely needed a campaign. But that was in the sub-$10 minimum wage era.

Apparently, no longer. California Chamber of Commerce, the California Restaurant Assn. and the California Grocers Assn. oppose it; unions and anti-poverty groups don't like some of its complicated architecture.

YES. I'll vote for it because, hey, people got to live. But this one may be close.

Prop. 33: Basically would make it possible for municipalities to impose rent controls if they wanted to. Would give housing advocates a fighting chance of shaping the local rules.  This one is a good fight and good trouble. All the TV ads are lies but the principle is simple. Millions will be spent to sway our votes. Vote YES, YES, YES!

The opponents are the real estate industry. They will spend like drunken sailors to kill this. Proponents include the AIDS Healthcare Foundation and hospitality workers in UniteHERE Local 11 in L.A.

Prop. 34: This claims to be about spending on drugs by healthcare systems, but is actually an effort to get back at the AIDS Healthcare Foundation for putting Prop 34 on the ballot. It is funded by the California Apartment Assn. NO shit! Get over it!

Prop. 35: This tinkers with how the state assesses managed care health insurance groups to generate tax revenues.

• the California Hospital Assn., the California Medical Assn., the California Primary Care Assn., Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California, labor unions, emergency responders and community health centers. Both the California Democratic Party and the California Republican Party support it.

• the California Pan-Ethnic Health Network, the League of Women Voters of California, Courage California, and the California Alliance for Retired Americans oppose it.

This is an example of measures we never should have to vote on if the legislators and governor were doing their job.

Prop. 36: Will jack up the penalties for some non-violent felonies that we recently cut back on, like shoplifting. Look, I'm as pissed off as the next person that I have to get a clerk to unlock a plastic door in a Walgreens in order to buy my vitamins. But the idea that we can lock up addicted perps and thereby end crime is madness. It only leads to high costs for useless prisons that breed more crime. NO,NO

No, there is no Prop.37 this year. But just you wait ...

Coda: Note the numerous mentions of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn. opposing various measures above. As a general rule, if those cranky old men funded by billionaire tax cheats don't like something, you can at least give it a look.

• • •

California state ballot measures here.

• • •

Meanwhile, you can help Harris-Walz get elected by joining the hospitality workers of the union UniteHERE on a national phonebank. Sign up here.

Ballots arrived in San Francisco yesterday

 

Time to get this done! The complex California ballot makes this urging to "Vote on Day One" a little daunting. But I've been pushing this principle all over social media because Simon Rosenberg has convinced me that getting people to vote as soon as possible makes a material contribution to the campaigns we're working on, even in this blue state and city.

Here's how he explains the value of voting as soon as we are able:

• when you vote early, on Day 1 of the early vote, for example, the campaign knows you voted and will remove you from their GOTV/field targets. ...

 

• It creates a very public permission structure and social pressure for voters who are not sure about voting, of when they are going to vote, to vote. “Hey other people seem to be voting I need to vote too.”

 

•  It is a daily affirmation of the health and vitality of our democracy, something desperately needed today. All these people voting, and voting successfully, is in itself a sort of repudiation of MAGA and Trumpism. ...

• A heavy early turnout leads to stories about “hey everyone is voting” ...

Over the next few days, I'll roll out commentary on how I dealt with California's maze of ballot measures and local propositions and make a very few candidate comments.

Let's get this done!

The scandal we've learned to ignore

The economic historian Adam Tooze is becoming a naturalized American citizen which makes a certain sense since he teaches at Columbia in New York. He used to be a Brit and grew up in Berlin. He's a pragmatic leftist, escaped from youthful Trotskyism. His historical writings exploring of 20th century Europe and his current writings on the global economy show him to be a cosmopolitan guy.

All of which background makes reading his short description of the election we are currently enduring so broadening to a jaded American perspective.

If we imagine the US as one giant constituency of 160 million voters and arrayed all the voters from right to left along an ideological spectrum one can imagine a hotly contested election in which the country split, 80,000,001 voters v. 79,999,999. In that case you might say that the struggle came down to a handful of undecided voters in the middle of the ideological spectrum who ultimately picked the winner.

If that were the case, it would be no scandal. On the contrary it would be the logic of democracy in action. But that is not the kind of political contest that is going on in the USA today. The “scandal” of the US election is not that it is a titanic struggle for tens of millions of votes that will ultimately be decided by a fine margin. The scandal is that tens of millions of votes barely attract any attention at all. Only a few places matter and those places are determined by no obvious, larger-scale logic. Furthermore, their votes are often influenced by highly idiosyncratic local conditions. It is a few thousand voters, often in out of the way, “backwater” places, that decide the future of the USA and with it, the future of the world.

... If states were similar in their political make-up, all states would be swing states. The 18th century constitution provides the frame, but what creates the weird shape of US democracy today are further processes of differentiation, polarization and sorting, as Americans have increasingly migrated and congregated into communities that are relatively more uniform in political terms than the nation viewed as a whole.

That tendency has been reinforced as politics have become more polarized and have begun to color more and more areas of life, meaning that we can now meaningfully talk of “red” and “blue” states with different politics corresponding to very different modes of life. On a question like abortion rights it is no exaggeration to talk of the USA as one country with two systems.

Put all these factors together and it means that in most parts of the USA the local outcome of the US Presidential election is a foregone conclusion....

That means that the final outcome is decided by a handful of battleground or swing states. Many states in the US have small electorates of a few million or so. And then, at the state level, the same logic repeats with sorting and the formation of solid Blue or Red constituencies, in big cities and small towns and rural areas, which means that in the end the entire election comes down, not tens of millions or millions, but a few hundred thousand voters in “battleground counties” dotted around the country. If the true number is 150,000 decisive voters, that is one tenth of one percent of the entire electorate. ...

This is not a picture that flatters the wisdom of our Constitutional system. Yes, the survival of the Electoral College framework is a scandal in a modern democracy. Might the task of Americans who care about democracy be to figure out the daunting project of replacing it?

Friday cat blogging

I think this was about a leaf. When she's curled up demurely, Janeway looks a little thing ... then she extends.

Meanwhile, Mio, the nearly 20 pound monster cat, tries to sneak up on me enticingly.

The crux of it all

Walz is criticized for not being as slick as the other guy. But he knows how to call out a lie. Pass it on!

Might we have to admit that this is an agreement with Hell?

These are "times that try our souls" wrote revolutionary agitator Thomas Paine in 1776. And the sentiment speaks to current times as well, while also demanding of us unrelenting patient pragmatism while we strive to push MAGA and their 2025 Project to the fringes of national life.

Michael Podhozer is a former political director of the AFL-CIO. And he suggests, to use another antique expression, we will have to someday "grasp the nettle," take the pain, and accept that our current anti-democratic, Constitutional,  national election framework in the electoral college is Legal but not Legitimate. If this is a country whose system is supposed to mean that the people rule, the Electoral College must be reformed. This is not optional.

One reaction to my last post [writes Podhozer], “Kamala Harris Will Win the Popular Vote,” has been some variation of a smug suggestion that I take a civics class because the next president will be decided by the Electoral College. Another has been a bit less condescending, something like, “Sure, but what matters is the Electoral College.”

I have a respectful suggestion for anyone who had those kinds of reactions (other than “read the post”). I ask you to consider what it means that we collectively shrug off such an anti-democratic structure as “just the way it is.”  

Because when we do that, we align ourselves with those who in their times scoffed at the abolitionists, the Radical Republicans, the suffragists, the modern civil rights movement, and those who called for the direct election of senators and “one person, one vote” in legislative districts. All of these people had the courage in their own time to call out the ways in which American elections were legal but not legitimate, either by universal standards of democracy or even by the Declaration of Independence’s central claim – that governments depend on the consent of the governed, legitimately ascertained.

... But, as long as systematic reform is so easily swatted away merely by embarrassing those who would wish otherwise as being too naive or insufficiently “realistic,” we’ll bounce around the room like a Roomba, with serial diversions like “Democrats need a better message.”

This is as true now as it was in the 1960’s when James Baldwin wrote:

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

Which is why I would rather count myself with those who, in their times, had to acknowledge that enslavement, the disenfranchisement of women, the indirect election of senators, egregious gerrymandering, and Jim Crow were legal – but never conceded that they were legitimate.

Here Podhozer places himself in the proud tradition of William Lloyd Garrison who, in the 1830s contemplating the curse of enslavement, insisted that the Constitution was a "covenant with death" and "an agreement with Hell."

Rule by popular majorities is what the people of this country want. We cannot forever note that fact and shrug, thinking getting there is just too hard. In previous eras, we found ways to make impossible, unthinkable, improvements in the structure of government. We need to do this once again or the country will die.

Good news for women in Georgia and beyond

Via Jessica Valenti at Abortion Every Day:

A Georgia judge has struck down the state’s 6-week abortion ban! In an absolutely epic ruling, Fulton County Judge Robert McBurney didn’t just repeal the law—but eviscerated it as forcing women to be “human incubators.”

“Women are not some piece of collectively owned community property the disposition of which is decided by majority vote. Forcing a woman to carry an unwanted, not-yet-viable fetus to term violates her constitutional rights to liberty and privacy, even taking into consideration whatever bundle of rights the not-yet-viable fetus may have.

…It is not for a legislator, a judge, or a Commander from The Handmaid’s Tale to tell these women what to do with their bodies during this period when the fetus cannot survive outside the womb any more so than society could–or should–force them to serve as a human tissue bank or to give up a kidney for the benefit of another.”

I mean, wow. (McBurney even added in a footnote, that “it is generally men who promote and defend laws like the LIFE Act.”)

We needed our occasional win, especially in a state where women can't put abortion on the ballot for a popular vote. It may take a little while to learn whether Judge McBurney's rule survives appeals.

Ten states will be voting on reproductive freedom this year. Wherever abortion has been put to vote, so far we win.

• • •

The apparently tireless Jessica Valenti has a book released today from Penguin Random House  on the ongoing struggle: Abortion: Our Bodies, Their Lies, and the Truths We Use to Win.

We are incomplete if we cannot control out bodies.

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.