Kamala's closing message

Today, we the people get to decide ...

From her closing speech in Philadelphia last night:

“We have an opportunity in this election to finally turn the page on a decade of politics that has been driven by fear and division. We are done with that. We are exhausted with it. America is ready for a fresh start, ready for a new way forward, where we see our fellow Americans not as an enemy, but as a neighbor,” she said.

“Ours is a fight for the future, and ours is a fight for freedom, including the most fundamental freedom of a woman to make decisions about her own body and not have her government tell her what to do,” she said. And she pledged always to put “country over party and self and to be a president for all Americans.”

“Tonight…we finish as we started: with optimism, with energy, with joy, knowing that we the people have the power to face our future and that we can confront any challenges we face when we do it together.”

“We still have work to do,” she said. “We like hard work. Hard work is good work. Hard work is joyful work. And make no mistake: We will win.”

Now back to the phones to call those harried voters in Philly one more time! 

Here's yesterday's canvassing launch in Reno; these folks are coming to turn out your vote -- with joy!

While we fixate on Trump ... MAGA mess below creates opportunities

The Downballot reports that Democrats are contesting far more state legislative seats all over the country than Republicans.

Across the 85 legislative chambers holding regularly scheduled elections in 44 states this year, Republicans are defending 3,169 seats while Democrats are protecting 2,616. But Republicans have failed to field a candidate in 1,066 Democratic seats, while Democrats have left 1,127 GOP seats uncontested.

While the Democratic figure for uncontested seats is slightly higher in raw numbers, on a percentage basis, they're playing more offense: Democrats are challenging Republicans in 64% of GOP-held seats, while Republicans, conversely, are contesting 59% of Democratic seats.

The totals reflect strong Democratic recruitment in many states, including Wisconsin, North Carolina, Florida, and even Idaho. In total, Democrats are running 2,042 challengers compared to 1,550 for the GOP. When accounting for open seats (which are also tallied in our new data set), Democrats are fielding 2,485 non-incumbents, versus 2,224 for Republicans.

The disparity also arises from the current dysfunction in the GOP. Lots of veteran legislators retired or were dumped by MAGA voters in primaries.

Altogether, 124 GOP legislators who wanted another term were denied renomination by voters, often for allegedly failing to adhere to far-right orthodoxy. Just 28 Democratic lawmakers, by contrast, lost primaries this year.

This is no way to build a political party. Perhaps a mob ... 

Assuming we live to fight another day, there's lots to build on here.

Women making it happen

As any number of commentators are reminding us today, polls don't win elections. Still, the election commentary world is thrown off by this bombshell:

Can it be true? Seems mighty unlikely given all recent past history in the Hawkeye state. Iowa used to be a swing state, but since voting for Obama in 2008 and 2012 has turned solidly Republican. Still, the Des Moines Register-Selzer poll reported out here is thought to be one of the best in the business and now says Harris has climbed into a four point lead.

Jess Piper is a rural Democratic organizer in neighboring Missouri, who lives only three miles from southern Iowa. She's a popular visiting speaker to embattled rural Democrats in both states. And she reports the lay of the land. The DM poll doesn't surprise her.

... I spoke in Davis County, Iowa almost two years ago. We met at the fairgrounds in the building next to the Swine Pavilion. I was asked to come and speak on state politics including Kim Reynold’s school voucher scheme and the Iowa abortion ban. I sat down to another potluck with midwestern sushi — a pickle slathered with cream cheese and rolled up in a piece of ham, sliced into little sushi rolls. I washed it down with lemonade and made sure to snag a Scotcharoo before I spoke.

The abortion ban was the topic of conversation with the women in this group, and I have news for those politicians going around thinking that abortion bans are only relevant to women of child-bearing age…they are wrong.

Women know that abortion bans impact every part of our lives. We know bans drive OBGYNs out of our states making any gynecological care difficult. We are losing women’s healthcare in states with bans. Rural women are hit particularly hard with an abortion ban.

... Here’s the thing that a lot of pollsters have been getting wrong: they don’t think abortion will be the reason that older women choose to vote for a Democrat. And I know that isn’t true. I have talked to hundreds of folks on the ground in places like Iowa. I’ve spoken to so many women.

Abortion may be seen as a political strategy to some, but it is life or death for women and girls.

... I know that the women are making it happen. Boys, look away while I tell a funny story. Recently, I was at an event with [rural podcaster] Fred Wellman…he doesn’t speak at small rural events as often as I do. He said of this particular event: “This is running so well. We are on time and there is a schedule of events and food too.”

I told him. “You know why, right? Women organized the event.” He laughed and then realized how truthful I was. I then told him about the one event I have attended in the last two years that was organized by a man. I knew it as soon as I arrived because there was no water, no coffee, and no sweet treats.

True story.

Women are taking the lead in this election and it’s because we have everything to lose. Our lives are on the line. Our children and grandchildren will suffer the consequences of a Trump win.

Women will organize events and knock doors and make calls and participate as election judges and create GOTV events and we will also feed you. We will give you information and warm your belly. Women are driving this election and it’s being done in a particularly feminine fashion.

This is the year of the woman. The stars have aligned. I am optimistic but a little scared. Excited but pragmatic....

Piper is working to pass the initiative to make abortion legal in her home state. Criss-crossing her own state, she's cautiously hopeful about that proposition too.

All Saints, All Souls, Dia De Los Muertos 2024

Remembering this year, two who've gone before:

Cliff Lichter was a friend from my years as part of the Catholic Worker movement in New York City and San Francisco. 

Cliff wandered the country for decades as an itinerant pilgrim, without fixed home or property, as the Spirit took him. He turned up with little warning at Catholic Worker houses of hospitality, monasteries and various intentional communities. He always helped out with whatever menial work needed doing. He was almost ostentatiously humble, but as you got to know him, you realized his intense piety was not for show; the guy really lived within a mystical universe that somehow sustained his unlikely existence. 

His Catholic Worker friend Brian Terrell wrote of Cliff and provided an epitaph:

Our dear friend and brother Cliff Lichter died on July 11, to continue his pilgrimage on another plane. Cliff had been a soldier and a Jesuit brother and a hospital orderly before finding his vocation as a wanderer. 

... He carried with him a note of introduction from Dorothy Day, dated Sept. 1, ’71, calling Cliff a “dear friend.” “I hope that he finds Catholic Worker friends and receives hospitality wherever he goes.”

In recent years, some of those good Catholic Worker friends in Worcester, Massachusetts, saw that he was well taken care of.  ...

This was Cliff.

“By the grace of God I am a Christian man, by my actions a great sinner, and by calling a homeless wanderer of the humblest birth who roams from place to place. My worldly goods are a knapsack with some dried bread in it on my back, and in my breast pocket a Bible. And that is all.” The Way of the Pilgrim, 19th century Russia

• • •

In 2000, doing his thing at some conference

Unexpectedly, Hunter Cutting died in September from pulmonary hypertension. He had trained legions of justice organizers and climate campaigners in the Bay and beyond on how to interact with media. He was my neighbor in the Mission; he was working down the block from the homeless encampment where the SFPD shot Luis Gongoro Pat in 2016. I would see him at vigils where Luis's family demanded justice from the city. Hunter leaves a shocked family; he left us all too soon.

Halloween on the phone bank

The dialer got into the spirit of the day on the UniteHERE phonebank yesterday.

 

While waiting for someone to pick up in Philly, it displayed screens like this with the phone icon jiggling.

 

Gotta keep the phone crew amused. We'll be on through the election, chasing down voters for Harris-Walz and supporting a couple of thousand canvassers in the battleground states.

Women finding a way; it's traditional

The MAGAs don't like women. In fact, we scare them. We might just think for ourselves.

Note from a public women's bathroom

So contends feminist journalist Jill Filipovic. 

There is ... conservative rage and panic over the prospect of their wives voting for Kamala Harris and simply not telling them. Harris supporters have launched a strategy of telling women that their votes are private, and no one has to know who you cast your ballot for — including your Trump-supporting husband. Fox News’s Jesse Waters griped that a woman voting for Harris and not telling her husband is “the same thing as having an affair... that violates the sanctity of our marriage.” That, he said, “would be D Day.” (Waters, it’s worth noting, divorced after he had an affair and is now married to his former affair partner).

Donald Trump, for his part, has doubled down on his Big Daddy pitch to women: “I want to protect the women of our country,” Trump said at a rally. “They said sir I just think it’s inappropriate for you to say… I said well I’m gonna do it whether the women like it or not.”

Which doesn’t sound so far from “when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”

This is the misogyny election. It’s the election of abortion bans. It’s the election of conservative husbands who are enraged at the very thought of their wives having minds of their own. It’s the election of a man who boasts about sexual assault and demeans women who challenge him in the crudest of terms. ...

Here's hoping women can bring this contest home. The polls show an enormous gender gap between the voting intentions of men and women. It's girls against the boys. And the boys may get all hot up -- but do they vote? In general, women cast a considerable majority of ballots in presidential elections.

• • •

None of this is entirely new. I've written here before about learning how to work elections from my Republican committee-woman mother and her diligently maintained turnout lists. She patrolled her precincts and woe to the Republican voter who didn't show up. "Too busy; went fishing" said one indignant note on a voting record.

Yet in the 1964 presidential contest between Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater, I was always sure she secretly pulled the lever for the Texan. She had dragged me to the kick-off for Goldwater's running mate, the local forgettable Congressman from nearby Lockport, William Miller. He was a small-minded, abrasive McCarthyite. She distributed the Goldwater lit. But Goldwater scared her. She couldn't vote for a man she thought both rigid and dangerous. So I am pretty sure she didn't.

My father dutifully turned out for Barry. But none of this stuff engaged him.

My mother remained a Republican until she died in 1999. I wonder whether she'd still be a Republican today? Upper middle class white women with college degrees in cities, like her, have mostly "evolved," now voting as Dems whether they trumpet it or not.

If Harris wins, a lot of women will have found their own way.

Political action for efficacy: uncoordinated and very well coordinated

Political scientist Lester Spence, who describes himself as an Afro-realist, has observations about the 250,000 people who've canceled the Washington Post in outrage at Jeff Bezos' decision to kill the paper's endorsement of the Harris-Walz ticket.

Political scientists who study comparative politics came up with a term to describe a certain type shift from democratic states to non-democratic ones. "Democratic backsliding." They came up with that term to describe transitions that didn't happen immediately, through a military coup, or something like it, but slowly. And they've recently begun using the term to describe the US. Free press tampering is often something that comes with backsliding--either politicians or oligarchs gradually or abruptly reduce the ability of journalists to report.

What happened to the Post and the  [LA] Times is a sign backsliding is taking a turn for the worse. The Post IS NO LONGER FREE IN THE WAY IT WAS LAST WEEK. Once he makes this move, what prevents him from coming after the news next? Take a look again at the quote above. What prevents HIM from coming after those things now that he's done this?

THIS is what people responded to. And people chose this, WHILE UNCOORDINATED, because this was the best signal to send. Far better than canceling Amazon Prime (although that could be next) because an amazon prime cancellation can be read in a dozen different ways.

Now on that response. You're suggesting that mass cancellation can only hurt. But compared to what? What other action would've been better? If there's an action that could've been better...why didn't Post staffers coordinate it? why didn't you coordinate it? I'm pretty sure a draft of the endorsement exists. Why didn't the board send it out? Anonymously even?

I suggest that we're already down a dangerous path. Instead of telling people "STOP" in the absence of ANY OTHER ALTERNATIVE...the answer should be to tell people "GO." And use that energy to develop the internal institutional strength to contest the changes in the paper. ...

Like Spence, much as I doubt the efficacy of uncoordinated political actions, I am thrilled by the volume of the uncomplicated response to what feels a moral political offense.

We have a few more days to prove that Jeff Bezos bet on the wrong horse. Let's keep working.

• • •

And since I'm sharing from Spence, here are some fragments from the Johns Hopkins University professor's own first experience canvassing Philly for Harris-Walz.

I didn’t know what I’d expect to see because I’d never done door to door canvassing before. But there were about 150 or more of us, and of this group I imagine maybe four or five were paid by the campaign (not the Harris Walz campaign but by the group we were working with). The rest of us were volunteers. The youngest I met were in undergrad. The oldest I met were in their sixties and early seventies. It was a multiracial group, and, tellingly, international.

(Foreign nationals cannot donate money or participate in decision making in any domestic political committee but can volunteer their time in other ways.)

... Although the vast majority of these door knocks went unanswered, maybe about 20 percent of the time someone answered the door. The bulk of these folk were fervent Harris supporters—again this last push is about getting people we already know are likely to vote for Harris to do so. There were a few exceptions.

The white brother who answered the first door our crew knocked on spent twenty minutes telling us how scared he was of the Democratic Party, in part because of their response to the George Floyd Protests, and when January 6 was brought up, he said “that was four years ago.” ...

... Perhaps the best story of the two days happened on Saturday. Near the end of our run one of the crew ran into an elderly voter who wasn’t able to get to the polls because she wasn’t mobile, and she was concerned that her mail ballot wouldn’t get to her in time. I went to talk to the sister myself and collected her information so I could help her. My plan was to talk to people at the top of the food chain because technically there was only so much we could do. Maybe we could get a ballot and bring it back to her.

I ended up running into an election judge around the block from her. She wasn’t on our list—I think she stepped outside and saw us door knocking, and I told her what we were doing. She then told us who she was, what she did. So I took the opportunity to ask her how we could help her neighbor. She gave us permission to go back to the neighbor with her information. We told her the neighbor’s name but she didn’t recognize it.

When we went back to the neighbor, the neighbor laughed. “Oh. I know her. I taught her son!”...

 

That's how elections like this one are won -- one vote scratched out at a time, finding our people. 

This afternoon I go back to this work, calling into Pennsylvania with the UniteHERE national phonebank.

Voting together

The east coast branch of the UniteHERE national phonebank took a short turn through North Carolina last week to help on-the-ground organizers turn out voters to this Power to the Polls festival in a Charlotte park and their march to vote. Looks like they had a good time.

It's great to see our work is succeeding.

This effort, like many across the nation, aims to restore some sense of community to the election process though which we make our national and local democratic decisions.

Not long ago, there was only Election Day voting unless you submitted an excuse to vote by absentee ballot. But states in the Pacific Northwest experimented with mail-in voting and discovered this increased turnout (sometimes). Some states added early in-person voting options. The COVID year further encouraged many states to implement various systems of mail, drop box, and other options which reduced crowding and responded to some people's fears of being around others.

So, really, we no longer have Election Day as so much as Election Month. This year almost all states use some version of voting options distributed over time. 

A friend describes what living through the transition felt like:

When we lived in Colorado, we were some of the very early voters in line to cast our votes on Election Day, and at first I really didn't like that we couldn't have that moment duplicated here in Washington State. But now I have grown to prefer it this way, because we can be assured that our votes will definitely be counted and not manipulated in any way.

Early in the transition to early voting options, I was uncomfortable. An election is the most collective experience we participate in as citizens of a huge, wildly diverse, country. As Karl Kurtz wrote way back in 2007:

[Early voting] eliminates the notion of a national civic convocation of the American people on election day...

We've made voting a solitary action for many of us. Is this good? Certainly it is good for campaigners; we push early voting with gusto and profit by it because it reduces the number of people we have to reach on Election Day. (And early voting relieves voters in contested areas of that relentless flood of calls and texts.)

But I'm glad to see more and more groups creating public events like Charlotte's Power to the Polls march to remind people they are in this big thing together.

After all, voting is a chance to join in a celebration of the best aspirations of this country, even in these terrible times!

We even have election parties in San Francisco.

Going to be a rough season for democracy and rule of law

So why did Donald Trump hold a modern day Nazi hate rally in New York City, imitating the German-American Bund's 1939 pro-Hitler shindig?

Because he knows in his devious heart that he is going to lose the election on November 5.

Let me repeat that:

Trump held his hate rally because he knows in his devious heart that he is going to lose the election on November 5.

If Trump were working on the assumption he'd win the vote, he'd be barnstorming the states where the election is contested. He wouldn't be putting on a show in New York City, a place that not only despises him, but even worse, ignores him.

For the Trumpists, Election Day is just the beginning. We can expect violent disruptions where they can pull them off -- possibly to prevent (some people from) voting, almost certainly during the counting. MAGA folks will do outlandish things we haven't thought of yet, and it won't be good.

But in all the battleground states except Georgia and Nevada, Democrats hold executive power; in the other two, government has been responsibly run. Meanwhile Joe Biden is still in the White House. It will be hard for MAGA to overthrow a free election using the power of the state.

We'll certainly go on to a litigation stage. Will corrupt courts try to turn a free and fair election that goes for Kamala Harris into a Trump victory? Probably not -- though we have plenty of evidence suggesting  not to trust John Roberts and the Supremes. Might they decide that the divine right of presidential appointees trumps the electorate? Roberts likes a bit of monarchy as he showed us in the immunity decision. Still, it would probably have to be very close to let them pull that off.

The current MAGA majority in the House of Representatives will come up with quasi-legal stunts to put a losing Trump in office; it's going to take legal grit to hold that off.

Supposing Harris is still on track to be inaugurated, will there be violence then? I think Merrick Garland's overcautious Justice Department may have done us a solid on this: people are still going to jail for the last time they stormed the capital, reducing the number of hardcore crazies who are willing to take the risk of another go at a half-assed insurrection. And this time, the forces of order will be ready.

And that's only what I can see and imagine from my distant perch on the Left Coast. 

• • •

I can't believe that I am saying this, but what lies ahead makes me glad that our candidate is a prosecutor who has seen degenerates like Trump and his sycophants before. We give her a chance by giving her as large an electoral win as possible. That's up to the people of these disunited States.

• • •

And then we push her to cut oligarchs like Musk and Bezos down to size. That, too, will not be easy.

Dying in Darkness

I had to do it. Jeff Bezos' cowardly veto of his newspaper's endorsement of Harris-Walz was too much. How could I have any confidence in an institution devoted to covering Washington after seeing its leadership  run for cover (ineptly) at the approach of an aspiring fascist?

Historical experience suggests this won't shield Bezos unless he is more directly willing to lick Trump's ample ass; oligarchs lose under fascism. See also Mikhail Khodorkovsky who played footsie with Vladimir Putin to protect his oil wealth but lost it all and ended up in a gulag.

As media observer Nancy Gibbs writes: 

[The Post's] “Democracy dies in darkness” motto now moans like an epitaph. ...

F$%#*@! Philly.

As anyone who knows me probably knows, one of the worst things about our election seasons is that they interrupt my focus on football.

 

I can't resist immediately sharing this delicious campaign ad that speaks to my obsessions. And I'm not even an Eagles fan ...

A threat to religious liberty on the ballot

Kristin Kobes Du Mez is Professor of History and Gender Studies at Calvin University. She is currently a Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Notre Dame. And she is the author of a bestselling account of rightwing evangelical Christian religiosity, Jesus and John Wayne. (Link is to my review.)

Currently on her substack, Du Mez Connections, she tries to figure out how to talk to and with evangelical Christians who are attracted by Donald Trump's promises.

On multiple occasions (and included in the GOP platform), Trump has promised to set up a “new Federal Task Force on Fighting Anti-Christian Bias” that will focus on “investigating all forms of illegal discrimination, harassment, and persecution against Christians in America.”

Promising to “aggressively defend” religious liberty, this plan to go after those “persecuting” Christians will do no such thing.

Instead, the targets of such a task force will likely be Christians themselves.

... Drawing from my own experience, I’ll wager a guess that it will be fellow Christians.

That’s right. If Trump is promising to go after his political enemies, I can only imagine that his Christian nationalist allies will want to go after theirs. And Trump has told them he’ll have their back. At the National Religious Broadcasters convention, he promised his Christian supporters that if he got back to the White House, he’d give them power: “If I get in, you’re going to be using that power at a level that you’ve never used before.”

What does this mean for Christians who aren’t Trump supporters? For Christians who don’t toe the Christian nationalist party line?

Having interacted with more than my share of Christian nationalist types over the past few years, I have a pretty clear sense of what this could look like.

The greatest threat to the Christian nationalist agenda are Christians themselves.

Christian nationalism thrives on an “us-vs-them” mentality in which God is allegedly on their side.

Christian nationalists are not in the majority, but their power depends on convincing ordinary Christians that any who oppose their religious and political agenda are opposing God—and if you oppose God, you are clearly on the side of the devil.

Fellow Christians who speak out against Christian nationalism get in the way of this false narrative, and that’s why Christian nationalists have spent so much time attacking fellow Christians. Those of us who impede their agenda are targeted as “wolves,” “false teachers,” and “Jezebels,” accused of allying with the devil, of destroying “the Bride of Christ.”

I can attest to the ruthlessness with which Christian nationalists treat fellow Christians who get in their way. We’re attacked with vicious lies, slander, attempts at character assassination, threats of spurious lawsuits, and, for those of us who work at Christian organizations, with attempts to get us fired for speaking truth to their power.

When you are deemed an enemy of “the Church,” of Christian America, of God, anything goes.

I know this well. “We can say what we want about her and do what whatever we want to her,” one of their ilk said about me recently. Such sentiments reveal the underlying Christian nationalist worldview, one that thrives on demonizing enemies, often quite literally.

The language of spiritual warfare gives them cover, but scholars of authoritarianism know that dehumanizing rhetoric is the first step toward political violence.

If you care about religious liberty, Trump’s own rhetoric, his campaign platform, and Project 2025 all should be cause for significant concern. So should the behavior of his Christian nationalist allies.

If you are a Christian who cares about religious liberty, not as a mask for Christian supremacy (and a very specific brand of Christianity at that), but as a fundamental right for all Americans and as a protection for authentic Christian faith, then you should be alarmed.

This time around, there is a genuine threat to religious liberty on the ballot. And the threat is aimed at Christians themselves.

Talk about folks who are hard to reach! This author is close enough to them to have more chance than most people I know. Of course, from their point of view, I know the wrong people.