Republican decodes Democrats and much more: an unlikely oracle

Sarah Longwell listens to voters with a political messaging consultant's perspective and she knows whereof she speaks. How to Eat an Elephant – One Voter at a Time became a best seller because she translated what she learned from hundreds of voter focus groups -- Trump supporters and Trump critics -- into smart, appealing, and graceful campaign wisdom. This is book an easy read and very worth the time of anyone working to defeat MAGA -- and that project won't be over, even if we win a blue wave on November 3.

People out of my world -- folks loosely left of the Democratic Party -- are likely and probably rightly suspicious of Longwell. After all, she's a former Republican operative and the publisher of The Bulwark, the landing spot for Republicans who couldn't stomach their former party's fascist turn. But she's a dyke (that does help; we view our society from slightly outside) and committed to electing even Democrats she can barely stand if that turns back MAGA. I find her determination to ground her politics in listening to infuriatingly muddled American voters a sign of democratic (lower case "d") integrity.

I'm not going to try to summarize this book. Some of it I very much disagree with. But I really do urge you to read it if you aspire to use the Democratic Party to turn back fascism. I will share some charming tidbits. And then I'll take up one of her observations that that meshes interestingly with my experience over 30 years of deep electoral campaign involvement. 

First, some slightly random teasers from the book, not meant to convey a unified message, but to encourage your curiosity: 

• It’s true (sort of) that voters are the problem. But they’re also the solution. Which is why we need to persuade them by developing policy and messaging frameworks that grow the pro-democracy coalition. It won’t be easy. But there isn’t an alternative.

• The irony is, in elite Democrats’ good-hearted attempts to be maximally inclusive, they end up with a set of rituals and language that baffles most Americans and creates a barrier to connecting with voters.

• Trump’s revolutionary effect was that, first, he made his supporters stop pretending to care about virtue. And then he made them embrace vice. ...  Character doesn’t just not matter—bad character is a marker of authenticity when authenticity is the coin of the political realm. The snake who admits he’s a snake is now deemed more trustworthy than the politician who acts—and might actually be—virtuous.

• I’m struck by how personal and visceral COVID vaccine resistance has become. A woman in Alaska told me flatly: “I got the eight shots I got in the ’60s and I have managed to make it this far with those eight freakin’ shots and I am not getting another one pumped into this body.” This isn’t a policy disagreement. This is bodily autonomy fused with institutional betrayal. The grammar of hidden knowledge has colonized the most intimate domain: what goes into your own body. ...

• To do what I’m talking about, Democrats need to toughen up. Stop crying and start sweating. Sorry, you don’t get Fridays off. Democracy’s at stake. Sorry, you can’t work from home all the time. America is at stake. Put on real pants and go to the office. The fascists are outworking you. They’re out-organizing you. Out-communicating you. You’re talking about microaggressions when you need to prioritize the macroaggressions being committed on a daily basis against the American experiment.

• More good news: This is the kind of moment when new leaders emerge. The old guard is exhausted. The appetite for change is overwhelming. The voters are ready—desperate, even—for something new.

If these quotes whet your appetite, pick up this book. 

• • •

Now to one of Longwell's observations, only glancingly developed, which I think those of us trying to preserve the possibility of a participatory US democracy should attend to. She writes:

The Republican operative world I came up in was mercenary and entrepreneurial. We started companies: consulting firms, media ventures, direct mail operations, opposition research firms, PACs. The incentive structure was clear: deliver results, make money, climb the ladder. There was less hand-wringing about process and more focus on outcomes. If something worked, you did more of it. If it didn’t, you moved on. The culture was competitive, sometimes cutthroat, but it was honest about what it was. We worked weekends.  

The Democratic world, as I have observed over the last decade, operates via a different set of cultural norms. People default to starting nonprofits, advocacy organizations, think tanks, and foundations instead of for-profit companies. The culture is mission-driven rather than financially incentivized. There’s a lot of talk about work–life balance, making sure everyone feels included, centering the right voices. The vibe is values first, process oriented, unionized. There’s a lot of talk about mental health. Employees agitate for four-day workweek. ...

I wouldn't say this is a completely fair description of either side as I've observed them over 30 years of (mostly paid) work in progressive campaigns. But I also think there is some truth.

I've seen plenty of Republican campaign efforts which weren't the pure capitalist enterprises that Longwell describes here; they were just rip offs off of candidates and causes by campaign firms that had made a profitable industry of extracting tribute from the gullible and the semi-powerful. I've also seen plenty of the same from Democratic consultants who may have once had their day, but deliver very little value while skating on reputation. (Looking at you, James Carville.) 

Longwell's description of the Democratic side is something I've seen -- but it misses the essential truth of Democratic campaigns which Longwell is now living.  These campaigns, except possibly at the most local level, are inherently coalition efforts, unlike the Republican ones where the base will toe the line. The Dem base -- both funding and activist -- consists of mission driven fractions which agree (or not) to play alongside each other for a season. They are an arena of multiple cultures -- unions, civic groups, religious groups, racial justice advocates, enthralled candidate fans. Getting them to work together productively IS the campaign. 

When Dems win, it looks obvious and easy -- but it never is. And the building of the really large coalitions is largely imperceptible to participants. When it works, we work hard. We exude attractive purpose. We all think our fraction won the day, even when we are vaguely grateful for the larger whole. And the big Democratic coalitions are held together by mission, not primarily money. 

• • •

One other throwaway line from Longwell that I can't resist raising up. 

One of the stranger things about the success of The Bulwark is that it’s basically free. As [her colleague] JVL likes to say, “You can’t save democracy from behind a paywall.” ...  Despite not charging for almost anything The Bulwark puts out, we still have a robust paying subscriber base. What are they paying for?

Long ago, I was part of another movement/community which worked the same way: the Catholic Worker as founded by Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day. The cost for a subscription to its newspaper remained from its Depression era origin: "a penny a copy; more if you can, less if you can't." And the cash flow funded not only the paper, but multiple "houses of hospitality" for a community of the otherwise unhoused.

Some people have always known that financial stability flows from mission; the anomaly is that American society and democracy has forgotten this.

Trump makes all moments feel existential

Day in and day out, Jay Kuo chronicles "the condition our condition is in" at The Status Kuo. (Thanks, Kenny Rogers.) He's good at it, as befits an accomplished lawyer, chair of the Human Rights Campaign, Broadway show composer, and doting father.

Sometimes he waxes reflective -- which isn't easy in these times. In The Violence Is the Point,  he takes a careful long view of our ambitious autocrat in chief. 

... Historians and political scientists reviewing the regime’s recent escalations would recognize a familiar pattern.

In “On Violence,” which grew out of a 1969 essay, political theorist Hannah Arendt argued that power and violence are opposites. Power, as she defined it, belongs to people acting together, and it lasts only as long as the group holds. Violence, by contrast, stands in for power once that cooperation starts to slip. “Violence appears where power is in jeopardy,” she wrote, “but left to its own course its end is the disappearance of power.”

Political scientists have since measured the same dynamic. Governments’ use of repression to answer threats to their power and the status quo is so common that scholars gave it a name: the Law of Coercive Responsiveness. Christian Davenport, the University of Michigan political scientist most associated with the dynamic, notes that dissent “has increased repression in every single investigation of the topic,” making it “perhaps the only law” in the study of how states and dissidents interact. His study of the United States from 1948 to 1982 found something more unsettling. Repression tracked the threats that officials declared through speeches, hearings and laws more closely than anything protesters actually did. When those political threats were present, he wrote, “repression increased, regardless of behavioral threats.” A Somali “takeover” of Minnesota, an “invasion” at the border, two dead citizens branded “domestic terrorists”—in each case, the regime manufactures the threat and the crackdown follows. 

So we're recipients of escalating efforts to rub horrific state violence in our faces -- a home invasion by security thugs at a Somali Congresswoman's residence, a proposed public execution, a "whimsical" invocation of nuclear destruction of Los Angeles and San Diego.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s “Strongmen” follows authoritarian leaders from Mussolini to the present, from their rise through their rule to their fall. She identified Trump’s reliance on violence years ago. In the tradition of the fascists, she wrote, he uses his rallies to “train his followers to see violence in a positive light.” That’s why he’s switched from invoking Mobile, Alabama, as a target of nuclear annihilation to a bit about two blue California cities.

Last August, I wrote in The Big Picture about “sadopopulism,” the term coined by historian Timothy Snyder, now at the University of Toronto. He describes it as a kind of “populism where people actually don’t get anything except more pain.” The regime cannot deliver real gains, so it rations suffering and offers its base the consolation of watching others hurt more. I argued then that public opinion “is a barometer of whether Trump’s policies, including sadopopulism, are working or failing.” The barometer now reads failure, and so the regime has doubled down and is escalating.

... We’ve moved from UFC bouts on the White House lawn, to turning nuked California cities into a crowd pleaser to the ultimate spectacle of a planned public execution. In each case, the audience matters as much as the event, if not more. A Law & Society Review study of American executions from 1833 to 1937 found, for example, that the audience was itself part of the event, and that it could grant or deny legitimacy to the execution and to capital punishment as a whole. That’s the very reason why, in December, Hegseth hopes to give Hasan’s execution an audience of anyone with an internet connection. ...

Trump is flailing; all he can think of to do is kill someone.  On the other hand, he's a total chickenshit. His instinct is to TACO, to shy away from the worst in the hope of living to fight another day. 

If unrest reaches a boiling point, history suggests a TACO moment may follow. But just as we witnessed and endured with Jan. 6, the damage to our democracy and the rule of law before Trump finally backs down could be considerable. ...

There's much reason to worry that Trump can make things worse before they get better. but that's all the more reason to do all we can to strip this evil nutcase of as much power as we can in the present.  Read it all from Jay Kuo. 

No kings indeed

So many outrages ... so much to note with horror. DJT sticking his ugly mug on US passports is nowhere near the Mad Toddler's most egregious offense against our democracy and our human decency. 

But I appreciated Adam Gopnik's restrained reflections on the new image in the New Yorker.  

... The President is not a substitute tyrant or king, whose face, like that of the monarch of England (the enemy in the historic event celebrated this year), appears on currency, coins, and postage stamps, but just one more citizen who happens to have been handed a very big job. As that leftist provocateur Ronald Reagan once said, “You don’t become President of the United States. You are given temporary custody of an institution called the Presidency, which belongs to our people.”

... The absence of a living monarch on our money, or on our travel documents, was not an accident haphazardly arrived at but a declaration of equality meant to be flourished and displayed. In this way, a reasonable case can be made that the constant volley of insults to the dignity of our democracy is as grave as the bad policy choices: policy choices can change; the decorum of democracy, once defaced, can never be wholly restored.

So, pity the poor passport! To see it so reduced by the whims of a would-be autocrat at the soothing of a cynical sycophant [that would be little Marco Rubio] undermines our faith not just in free travel but in freedom itself. A U.S. passport should bear the image and the imprint of no officeholder of any kind; it should merely let us pass on our journey through the world freely and without hindrance, just as the old one does. 

No Kings - October 17. 

Team work and friendship

Odds are, most of my San Francisco friends will have seen this, because they too will have been on Brad Newsham's mailing list for the visual protests he has been creating on our beaches for the last 20 years. But others may not have have seen it and you might appreciate this tribute to community and creativity and one team member that demonstrates the best of this area. You can find the whole story on Facebook under Brad's name.   

She knows

A Honduran friend who lives in Mexico posted this. I think more North Americans, especially folks in the USofA, might find this exhortation from a champion of global justice worth raising up:  

The rest of the world gets it. Many Australians, not the most pacifist or internationalist of Anglophones, get it: 

In 2025 Navi Pillay received the Sydney Peace Prize and in 2026 she received the Nobel Peace Prize for promoting international law and peace. 

Navi could not be a more deserving winner. Born under apartheid, she fought for justice in South Africa, women’s rights across the world, helped establish rape as an act of genocide, worked for victims of the Rwanda genocide and called out a genocide in Gaza. 

This woman, whose career has included investigating and calling out the most horrible things that humans do to each other, nonetheless believes in the possibilities we can make together.

Though there is too much avoidable human and animal suffering, too much exploitation, too much greed and too much repression around the globe, many -- perhaps most -- peoples live and work in hope of better lives for those who come after. They look forward, not backward ...

I grew up in a country which looked forward, even as it was oblivious to its many advantages and riches. We have lost that. We need to be reminded that we can walk together with others toward a more just and peaceful world.

And then continue the project of hobbling the Orange Toddler ... 

The death penalty to front of mind again

Once again, Americans find ourselves unable to look away from our country's erratic and often irrational enthusiasm for legal killings.

The state of Tennessee ineptly tried to execute convicted killer Christa Pike -- and after torturing her with failed poison shots, sent her to a medical center to be resuscitated and she's back in a state prison. Now what? 

Meanwhile, that preening tough-guy clown Pete Hegseth wants to broadcast the execution of military murderer Major Hasan Piker on a livestream. Hip hip hooray for the firing squad!

Opposing the death penalty is something I've put some time into. In 2012, I was field director for California Prop. 34 which would have ended state executions, while consigning the over 500 imprisoned convicts awaiting capital punishment to sentences of life without parole. The measure failed by popular vote, 52-48. Collectively, the voters wanted to continue the option of legal executions. 

We threw a menu of arguments out to the voters:

• Death cases are wasteful and cost too much because of delays and litigation expenses

• Death is irreversible; some innocent people have been condemned, often because of poverty or bad lawyers

• Death sentences are too often bigoted and racist

• Convicted murderers could be held in prison for life ...

These arguments didn't carry the day. Why did many Californians vote to continue state killing?  

Probably the most important reason we lost that campaign was that we didn't have enough campaign cash to force the issue into the voters' attention. It got lost among the plethora of propositions. In California, you can't pass a new idea without enough money to put it in front of voters through paid media. 

But also, there really was a substantial fraction of the people who believed that a free society needed the option to kill offenders against its good order.  

In my role as field director, I had an unusual opportunity to learn what ordinary people who were honestly concerned by Prop. 34 might be thinking. One of our campaign tactics was to offer a series of "telephone town halls." A prominent local leader (then-Congresswoman Barbara Lee was one) agreed to talk in an open forum with callers about the death penalty and the proposition. 

Unsurprisingly, we screened the calls; the death penalty evokes violent emotions. We didn't want to put people in to talk who couldn't keep their cool while expressing their opinions. I did a lot of the screening, talking with callers before we put them on the air. I'm glad I did. 

Though we got plenty of callers who just wanted to say that they thought death sentences were not fairly applied or who had particular beefs with the criminal justice system, there were also many others who just felt that some crimes created such a rupture in communities that the perpetrators had to die. Their entire understanding of justice would be undermined if murderers could not be executed. 

I didn't think this was the sort of society I wanted to live in, but I came to understand that this was how morality worked for some good people. The experience was educational for me. I could disagree without dismissing their seriousness. How do we live in a world with such differing ideas of justice among well meaning people? Keep talking I guess.

After Prop. 34, although it failed, California has not resumed executions. That electoral effort didn't assemble a majority vote. But the campaign did convert and rally most of the print media outlets in the state to the cause of abolition. And by the time we have lived through the Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom administrations, both governors who opposed executions, it looks very unlikely we'll dive back into the practice. There are rumors that Newsom will commute the sentences of the 563 prisoners still living under the threat of execution, changing their status to "life without parole."

I wouldn't be surprised if current events cemented majorities in big blue states against the death penalty. Tennessee's stupid cruelty combined with Hegseth ghoulish (and unpopular) firing squad wet dream are doing their part to change opinions.

It's theft and attempted bribes all the way down

via Nathan Newman

Trump is desperate as the midterm elections come closer. He has reached the bribery stage of trying to hang on to power. He has cooked up ... 

• $90 payments to some 20 million Medicare recipients. I actually know people who got this. The money was heisted from a fund designed to explore ways to make Medicare a better program.

• $500 checks to about one million on people who have Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) insurance. ACA coverage became so popular under Biden that funds put aside to advertise the program were unused. The same recipients will learn when they go to reauthorize their coverage next year that their premiums will have been raised an average of 15 percent. 

• $5000 bribe he offers to all if somehow the voters keep his MAGA minions in control of the House and Senate in the midterms. Anyone who believes Donald Trump pays up on his promises hasn't been paying attention. I doubt if even his MAGA crowds in the GOP states he is now touring believe this one. The cost would be $1.2 trillion with no source specified. Apparently Americans don't believe him.

Dumb and dumber. And when it comes down to it, it's our money he is stealing.

We voted!!

   

Have you voted yet? Now is the time!

 

The California Federation of Teachers offers a neat tool which will tell you where you can deposit your ballot right away! Looks like this; click this link.

Send Connie Chan to Congress

It's an unfortunate trait of some politicians to be able, even when right on a particular issue, to make themselves still in the wrong. Scott Wiener exemplifies the type. If he wins election as my Congresscritter replacing Nancy Pelosi, he'll mostly vote in ways I won't find objectionable. He damn well better -- this is San Francisco. But ambition has long made him not a leader of San Franciscans, but an abettor of our tech plutocrats. They are paying for his campaign. And they want him as a voice for them within the Democratic Party in DC.

I want someone in Congress who stands up for the unique eccentricity of the City by the Bay. Though Nancy Pelosi is a plutocrat herself, she got that. Speaker Emerita Pelosi is now one of Connie Chan's lead endorsers along with dozens of Democratic office holders. 

Connie Chan is an immigrant, born in Hong Kong, arriving here at age 13. Coming out of the westside Richmond District, she's been a practical progressive on the Board of Supervisors since 2021. On the job, she's shown she learned how to navigate the push and pull of being a legislator with opinionated constituents and responsibilities to the city as a whole. 

Chan at a teacher's rally at USF

Chan bills herself as a champion of working people. Her partner is a San Francisco firefighter. She has overwhelming support from organized labor, as well as the backing of dozens of community organizations.

This is not an election I find complicated. Will San Francisco opt for one of its own or for the front man for the tech and real estate bros who want to make the city a rich man's playground?

The President has lost it

 

The truth is simple; he's an ignorant, generally malevolent, old guy who has lost his marbles. The contents of that brain always rattled around a bit, but they've gotten looser. There's little left but greed and id. 

 

And the people need to say so loudly, because the media won't. In fact, to sustain the only business model they know, journalism pretends he's functioning within the bounds of normal when he's batshit crazy. 

Trump on his Iran war: 

They can take out a city. Let them take, let them take out Los Angeles; let them take out San Diego. That’s — this is a very small price to pay, and it’s going to be over with very soon. It’s essentially almost over with.

Jennifer Rubin puts the reality succinctly:  

Legacy media’s sanewashing of Trump’s campaign appearances as “speeches” bears less and less resemblance to the reality of his verbal incontinence...

... Trump was more unhinged in Ohio on Saturday, where Trump blathered about James Talarico: “I see that ‘Tala-freako’ in Texas. So he’s been a vaygan' all his life. He’s a vaygan vaygan, I didn’t even know what the hell a vaygan was. A vaygan is vegetables. A vaygan is eating a piece of lettuce all day long.” Ignoring his apparent ignorance of the word ‘vegan,’ the nature of his obscene, irrelevant insults suggests a complete loss of impulse control. These are not “speeches,” but rather psychological breakdowns. But, unfortunately, you would not know it from mainstream media coverage. ...

... Similarly, Trump’s encounter last week with TIME was routinely labeled an “interview.” But an “interview” denotes responsive answers — not a stream of non sequiturs, insults, and outbursts. A few commentators ventured that the session was “grievance”-filled or “emotional,” but even those descriptions falsely suggest some orderly presentation of reality-based complaints in response to questions. ...

... The Mob boss mentality, lack of logical connection between sentence fragments, self-contradictions, and elementary-school-level vocabulary in a froth of vicious anger reflect a deeply unwell mind — albeit notably less so absent in the sanitized version. Obsessive efforts to explain what Trump must mean are indicative of PR; not journalism....

... Aaron Rupar, who assiduously records and posts Trump’s and his minions’ remarks arguably more thoroughly than any journalist, ... put it, “Trump is either unwilling or unable (or maybe both) to answer the questions he’s actually asked, so he just rants and raves while the interviewers do their best to provide structure to his random brain firings.”

As he ages, Trump’s decline will continue (maybe accelerate), meaning this is likely the “best” version of Trump we will see from here on out. Billionaire-owned media has essentially covered up that national crisis, refusing to acknowledge that he is deteriorating mentally and emotionally, just as he is physically (evidenced by bruising, swollen ankles, consistent somnolence). ...

We see it; long experience has convinced me that when the people lead, our "leaders" will eventually follow. When will the big media admit that he has no clothes?

Midterm elections: who votes

One month out from the midterm election date, it might be worthwhile to share some historical facts about the shape of these contests. Who votes in midterns is not quite the same as who votes in presidential years.

These data come from USA Facts which seems a reasonably unbiased interpreter of census and other data. 

Every four years, a pattern repeats: fewer Americans vote in the midterm elections than did in the presidential race before it. It’s a pattern that’s persisted for decades. ...but in the last two election cycles midterm turnout was higher than it was for much of the past four decades. 

... Since 1980, presidential elections have had an average reported voter turnout of 63%. Midterms averaged 48%. Generally, voter turnout drops by an average of about 15 percentage points between a presidential election and the following midterm.

But the 2018 midterms were an exception: turnout fell eight points, the smallest drop in four decades....

Maybe there is something about a Trump and MAGA regime that gooses some voters to turnout in non-presidential years? 

 • In the most recent full election cycle, young people not only had the lowest presidential vote turnout, but they were also the least likely to vote in the midterms. Less than 30% of 18 to 24 year olds voted in the 2022 election. Conversely, people 65 or older had the highest turnout and smallest drop-off. ...

• The likelihood of voting rose with a person's family income in both presidential and midterm elections. The drop between the two, however, was largest among people in families earning between $40,000 to $75,000 a year.  ...

• Married Americans living with their spouse voted at higher rates in both presidential and midterm elections than any other relationship status ... Among other marital statuses, widowed Americans had the smallest turnout drop, eight points, while those who were never married had the largest at 20 points. ...

I wonder whether this is also true for married same sex couples; we're becoming a larger fraction of the married every year.

• Fewer than 40% of Hispanic citizens voted in the last midterm election. Asian turnout dropped the most, falling 20 points from the presidential election. White voters had the highest turnout in both elections. ... 

• Naturalized US citizens born in Canada or Greenland report voting at higher rates even than native-born Americans. European-born Americans voted at similar levels to native-born, while Latin American- and Mexican-born voted at lower levels.

• While African-born citizens voted at similar levels to native-born Americans in the 2020 election, their turnout dropped by 31 percentage points in the 2022 midterm, the largest drop of any of the demographic groups in the data.

Don't let anyone claim this is "a color-blind society." In the most basic activity of civic belonging, race and ethnicity clearly still matter. 

So does economic well-being.

• Renters and unemployed people voted below the national average in both elections and had steeper drops in turnout in midterms than most other groups.

• Americans with a disability also voted less than average in the presidential election, but their midterm drop-off was among the smallest of any group, 11 points, bringing their midterm turnout close to the national average. 

• Veterans and government workers stood out at the other end. Both voted well above average in both elections with drop-offs at or below the national average.

It's not clear in this data whether blue (Democratic) states had more or less drop off than red (Republican) states. Maybe it can matter whether people feel they have something/someone vital to vote for -- or against?  I sure hope so.

AI leads to brain rot?

I found this New York Times exploration of the implications of AI interesting. You might also. Gift link.

Other findings of this study presented in graphic form are less discouraging about where the AI boom is leading us. AI-native young people may be able to use it to assist solid learning. Or, as seems too common today, maybe not.

 

We seem fated to find out.