Big trouble ahead

The presidential election just past was a very close contest. Oh sure, Trump wants to overwhelm us with his claim that he won by a landslide. That's just authoritarian bombast. Because he won all the projected swing states, his win looks huge, especially on a map. And across the country, he did actually dig out a one percent plus actual majority. But if only 115,000 voters distributed across Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin had gone the other way, we'd have a President Harris.

Since the election was so close, everyone gets to have their own plausible theory of what happened. I'm sticking with mine: COVID put us in a nasty mood and Trump was able to capitalize on this. (That's the only thing he knows how to do: turn venomous emotions into profit for himself.) I read the deluge of explanations for Harris' loss, but remain conscious that even vast quantities of data -- and there is more every day -- can't definitively account for the narrow outcome. Eventually many pundits and commentators will settle on some theory -- and then historians and political scientists will come up with their alternative takes. The 2024 election lends itself to interpretation and reinterpretation.

All that is introduction to sharing excerpts from the leftish economic historian Adam Tooze's take on our American predicament. Although I am not sure I buy it completely, I find his Olympian draft of contemporary history quite intriguing. 

... The essential fact about US politics in the current moment remains that the two party system anchored in the ancient constitution divides the country almost half and half. Those cleavages run through society including through the working-class and the business interest. ...

... If the class analytic of workers v. owners is not helpful in making sense of Trump’s victory, the idea of a revolt against the Professional Managerial Class (PMC) may be more so.

The PMC was a term coined in 1977 by Barbara and John Ehrenreich. The term designated the rising mass of college-educated white collar professional and managerial workers whose ambiguous role in modern Western politics the Ehrenreich’s were trying to explain.

In the 1960s and 1970s many professional and managerial people contributed to social movements that were clearly progressive. Furthermore, for the vast majority of folks who count themselves as progressive this alignment has a deep logic all the way down to the present day. 

As Gabe Winant, one of the sharpest observers of the contemporary scene, noted back in 2019 in N+1:

For all the cynicism and compromises that professional pretensions engender, professional labor  [i.e. the labor of the PMC, per Adam Tooze] does carry a utopian seed—in the impulse to create and disseminate knowledge, to care for the sick, or to defend the rights and dignity of the democratic subject.

And yet what is also undeniable is that in the late 1970s and 1980s large and powerful parts of the PMC broke with any association with classic, working-class. left-wing politics, rooted in the trade union movement. Instead, they provided their support to the agenda of neoliberalism. Despite its endless critiques of the state and its rhetoric about markets, actually existing neoliberalism was the latest iteration of PMC politics. Neoliberalism was a managerialism.

.. The outcome in electoral terms in the US from the 1990s onwards was an increasing alignment of the Democrats with College-educated voters, an alignment that was particularly strong for women and minorities. Figures like the Clintons and the Obamas personify this coalition.

By 2008 this corporate-PMC synthesis made a large and tempting target for populisms of the left and the right. These populisms pitted “the people” against an elite bloc that was more often than not personified, not by oligarchs or the owners of the means of production, but by members of the PMC. Perversely, the much remarked upon resentment of working-class voters, particularly men, triggered by new patterns of inequality and disadvantage, vented itself in the first instance on elementary school teachers and social workers, often women, who found themselves grouped with “beltway liberals” in the crosshairs of right-wing populist vitriol.

... Trump and Brexit in 2016 were early breakthroughs for the new anti-PMC politics.

The Trump shock of 2016 caused soul-searching in the Democratic party elite. The principal wager of the Biden administration was an effort to react to the first wave of anti-PMC revolt by widening the Democratic electoral coalition so as to attract trade unionists and working-class Americans back into the fold. In many ways this was ironic. The fact that the American working-class is increasingly feminized and diverse is no conceit of woke PMC ideology. Under Biden the party chased the image of the blue-collar production worker, almost as hard as they would eventually chase the respectable centrist Republican.

In 2020 when COVID demonstrated the harsh and dysfunctional reality of governance under Trump, the Democrats won back a majority. Though not for the anti-vaxxers, but for a majority of the population, COVID was a “PMC moment”. Nurses, doctors and lab scientists mattered, along with logistics experts and people who could get things moving again. It was not merely coincidental that COVID handed a PMC-dominated Democratic party a surprise victory. It was not for nothing that it was the Democratic majority in Congress that carried the US under Republican Presidents, both through the crisis of 2008 and that of 2020.

In 2024 with the electorate wanting a faster return to normality - resentments concentrated in the superheated discussion of “inflation” - what came back to the fore was the anti-PMC coalition that Trump rallies like no politician before him....

... What has become obvious with the Clinton-Trump-Biden-Harris-Trump sequence is that the Democratic formula is itself increasingly a driver of crisis. It is not capable of providing reliable electoral wins. And when it does have power, nostalgia for the bygone era of hegemony and the reflexes of US globalism - a quintessential product of the 20th-century PMC - tend to accelerate crisis in the form of aggressive claims to US leadership and a resurgent neoconservative revisionism. ...

In the first Trump administration, expressive gestures of rupture with the status quo were tempered by vested interests and the functional imperatives of the moment. The administration then inherited an economy with plenty of slack and a relatively calm geopolitical environment. Until 2020 few complex trade-offs were called for. When COVID hit, the Trump administration and the Republicans in Congress rapidly decomposed. How the Trump administration will actually look remains to be seen, but the environment today is far more complex and will test the anti-PMC politics of the Trump administration far more seriously.

Looks like big trouble ahead, and that's aside from the Christian nationalist and cult-of-Trump fascist aspirations of the Orange Man's coalition.

Hell yes, grassroots campaigning still counts!

In campaign postmortems, there's the usual angst-filled punditry out there that says nothing the Dems did, and especially nothing the grassroots did, mattered at all. 

Bull-bleep. As the season geared up, I described what we were going to see as a "hot and cold running volunteer" election and I stand by that. Vast numbers of people turned out to do the difficult job of direct voter contact in various forms. That's what happens when people really care and/or feel truly threatened.

And their efforts show up in the results. Where there wasn't much of a Harris-Walz campaign -- in the reliable blue states which saw only national ads and online media -- the shift toward Trump from 2020 was in the 6 percent range. Lots of Dems and Dem leaners didn't vote. But in the battleground states where money was invested and activism thrived, the shift was closer to 3 percent. Still too much obviously, but quite different. Yes, there was a red tide coming in, but some places Democratic (and small "d" democratic) activism came much closer to stemming that tide.

Ben Wikler, chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, sent out an informative message which aims to describe what party efforts, including at the grassroots, meant in his state. Some of what he saw:

... The shift here was just one quarter the size [of the national deficit]: a 1.5% swing from 2020. Not because Trump was weaker here than elsewhere, but because we were stronger.

Thanks to tens of thousands of heroes—our candidates, the campaign, party infrastructure, allies, and volunteers—we persuaded and turned out even more voters for Harris than we did for Biden in 2020. We lost Wisconsin by just 0.9%—the smallest margin of any state in America.

2024 was a high turnout year, second only to 2020 nationwide. But in most states, turnout went down slightly. In Wisconsin, overall turnout went up—by 1.3%, the most in the country. 

He describes the configuration of forces, groups, and miscellaneous people who made up the Wisconsin campaign: 

... Roughly 100,000 volunteers this year took part in the fight in Wisconsin.

The presidential campaign in Wisconsin and the WisDems core team worked together, hand in glove, on a constant basis. That integration was the product of years of work, relationships, and strategy. It was also made possible by the powerhouse Coordinated Campaign. ...

Every one of the 100,000 people who volunteered, including tens of thousands who knocked on doors and made phone calls in Wisconsin this year, helped Tammy Baldwin win Wisconsin, helped make huge gains downballot, and helped ensure that Harris came closer to winning here than any other battleground state.

The middle class built America, and unions built the middle class. ... Enormous thanks to all the groups involved in mounting an absolutely blockbuster field and communications operation in Wisconsin. 

Elections rely on a three-legged stool: the candidate campaigns, the party and volunteers—and allied groups. ...

Wikler's picture of the three-legged stool may be particular to Wisconsin. He heads one of the most effective Democratic parties in the country. In much of the country, especially bluer states, the three legged stool of progressive campaigning probably looks more like 1) candidates and party infrastructure of varying quality; 2) union workers where such exist; and 3) para-campaign and civil society groups like Seed the Vote, the ACLU, and enviros who've internalized that they have to play in elections to survive. 

But whatever organizational form that the wider democracy campaign assumes in the future, it will demand what Wikler enjoins:

... we organize in every corner and every community in Wisconsin, year-round.

Under-recognized is that the experiences and connections made when literally millions of people are activated in a campaign changes many of the people who participate. As legendary California organizer Fred Ross asserted: 

No good organizing is ever lost.

The period ahead may seem bleak, but there are a hell of a lot of us, we've seen each other, and we can get organized and feisty.

"I never knew how much they hated us."

That was the conclusion of a brave and brilliant young woman who worked with Erudite Partner on the campaign just concluded.

This was an election which confirmed the existence of a wide gender gap. And for the youngest voting group, this wounds and can morph into righteous rage.

Jessica Valenti, who writes Abortion Every Day, communicates this aspect of our recent catastrophe:

The Fury Gap
Young women were radicalized overnight

If you thought the gender divide was bad before, you haven’t seen anything yet. Donald Trump’s win this week, bolstered by online shitposters and billionaire misogynists, has shifted something fundamental in young women. And while we’ll see plenty of ink spilled in election post-mortems about the online radicalization of young white men—as there should be—it would be a mistake to miss the story of how this election is doing something similar to their female counterparts.

Over the last two days, I’ve watched as young women’s TikToks and social media posts went from inconsolable shock to pure, hot rage. I saw in real time as those in their teens and 20s—some of whom voted for the first time—realized the depths of their country’s disdain for them. 

For those of us in middle age or older, there wasn’t anything revelatory about the election; we’ve lived that betrayal for years. But to understand for the first time that America would rather elect a rapist than a woman is soul-crushing. Even worse: Realizing just how many men voted for Trump not in spite of his sexual predation—but because of it.

As difficult as that epiphany is to bear, it did not take long for this younger generation of women to respond with a resounding fuck that and fuck you. ...

... This is a generation of young women who grew up online, steeped in a world of social media misogyny and trolls who comment on their bodies and demand they “make me a sandwich.” And that’s on top of getting the same lessons that women my age did—told to watch what you wear, when you walk, and who you trust.

So I have to imagine that after a lifetime of being expected to eat shit, waking up on Wednesday morning knowing that the men in your lives voted away your humanity made the decision to leave them behind pretty easy.

Especially considering how many took the mask off immediately after the election was called: Since Tuesday, young men have flooded women’s mentions with “your body, my choice”—a phrase that some even started shouting at little girls at school just a day later.

It’s that Republican-enabled impunity that will keep young women furious. Why put up with even a minute of it? ...

Let's those of us who thought we'd grown beyond having to scrabble to be recognized as fully adult and human in a man's world, figure out how to be there for these young ones who newly feel the pain we hoped we'd put behind us.

It's the COVID, stupid!

Of course not entirely. And the virus has plenty of enablers and accelerators. But the horrid result of the Presidential election convinces me that pandemic effects are still working through society. 

Mostly we're too close to the election to be very discerning. I took a broad view yesterday in the comments on David Rothkopf's substack effort to understand what the voters have done:

[David] tossed this remark in as a throwaway: "We still do not fully understand or appreciate what a game changer COVID was for our society." I will not be surprised if future historians with more distance suggest this was the central phenomenon in our politics.

COVID proved to us that government could not protect us -- or that it's response was cruel and useless --or somebody was trying to put something over on us. And many more things, all disillusioning.

I have seen surveys somewhere that internal resilience to the COVID shocks was highest among old people, even though we were objectively the most vulnerable. Very young people were worst thrown off-center. The in-betweens, in-between. [Found the study here. Does seem to say what I remembered.]

In the conditions of 2020-2025 America, our political order just wasn't up to a worldwide plague. Much follows from that, much of it more ultimately damaging than the plague itself ...

Before the vote, Patrick Healy ran focus groups for the New York Times:

The worst of the pandemic may feel far away now, but as we look at the Harris versus Trump contest on Tuesday, Covid is the essential prism through which to understand the trajectory of the last three years in America. The pandemic felled Mr. Trump in 2020, bringing out the true autocrat for all to see on Jan. 6, 2021, and fueled his hunger for the second term he felt he was owed. Covid shaped the economy that Mr. Biden tried to revive through policies that proved inflationary. The shocks and aftershocks of the lockdowns and closures set many of our focus group participants on harder paths in life, from schoolchildren to college students to workers to the elderly.

Covid changed and scarred America. Desperation set in for people who thought of themselves as financially stable or middle class. The frustration we heard in our early focus groups in 2022 metastasized into anxiety in 2023 and intensified into anger in 2024. Listening to them, I stopped seeing anxiety and anger as two distinct emotions. They were one and the same by the time the presidential general election began this year.

So many people talked about their lives before and after Covid that it influenced how I saw Mr. Trump’s chances and Mr. Biden’s challenges in this election (and how those challenges, inevitably, shifted onto Ms. Harris). ...

Nowhere in the world following the pandemic where elections genuinely matter have incumbent parties sustained their power as before. Sometimes the deep societal disruption has had results democratically oriented people can applaud. Voters bounced the Tories in Britain resoundingly and replaced the authoritarian party in Poland more narrowly. Even Narendra Modi's Hindu nationalist party which runs not entirely free elections saw its margins decreased. 

Meanwhile, far right parties threw the previous bums out in Italy and Argentina, installing the more and less responsible far right.

Our societies have proved far more fragile than they look. We're enduring animals; we'll right ourselves, more or less. 

But the cost will be great. And there'll be novel challenges.

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!

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.

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.

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.

A love story from Texas

Jessica Valenti chronicles Abortion Every Day on a substack. It's an exhaustive and exhausting labor of love for women and for freedom. She knows why she fights on.

Today, the Harris campaign put out what I think may be the most powerful political ad I’ve ever seen. Please know before you watch that it is extremely distressing and graphic. But for good reason—it demonstrates exactly what abortion bans do to American women. ... this is why Republicans are losing and will lose.

They think they can talk about abortion as if it’s some shallow side issue. As if calling women ‘single issue voters’ will make us forget that the ‘single issue’ is our lives.

 This election is about all our lives.

Getting Out The Vote: a tale

From the UniteHERE phonebank: we're calling into Pennsylvania. The state is most likely to be one of the closest elections in the nation.

The job is to contact all the people who've requested mail-in ballots, identify whether they are Harris voters, make sure they actually received their ballot from the county, help them with any details about how to submit the slightly complicated pile of envelopes and required signatures, and make sure they get their vote in on time. 

UniteHERE union canvassers (you can join them via Seed the Vote) have been helping people they meet at the doors in Philadelphia for weeks to request mail-in ballots -- and naturally, many other citizens request them without our encouragement. But in Philly, a lot of mail-ins come because of this door-knocking program. 

So I'm on my last call of a 3 hour shift yesterday ... what sounds like a nice young man answers.

I'm friendly and he agrees to talk for a few minutes. I ask whether he's for Harris -- "hell, yes!"

I ask whether he's got his ballot yet? "Oh yes. And I already mailed it in."

And then the kicker. "I'm doing what you are doing on the doors ... I'm working with a union -- UniteHERE."

I just laugh and we trade notes for a bit on what it's been like on the streets in Philadelphia. He didn't know we had a whole phonebank calling the people they'd pushed to use mail-in ballots. He did know, a lot of Philly people love them some VP Harris!

This was a true experience of a campaign working the way it is supposed to work: my call closed the loop on a process that is what campaigns call Get Out The Vote -- GOTV. Find the voters who support your candidate and do whatever it takes to make sure they actually do vote. That's the task for the next 12 days!

Amid the horror, there's no stopping ...

Almost two weeks ago while phone banking to turn out Harris voters in Charlotte, North Carolina, I was a little surprised that no one mentioned the late-September hurricane which had devastated the Appalachian west of the state.

I know something about campaigning in the wake of a natural disaster since I was leading a political canvassing campaign when the Loma Prieto earthquake shook San Francisco in 1989. That event, despite collapsed freeways and bridges, was not nearly as horrific as the depredations of Hurricane Helene. But the shake shook us all.

Electoral calendars stop for nothing and people enmeshed in them have to stay on track. Yet after such a disaster, the universe feels unstuck and normal life seems frozen -- perhaps because we have lived such violent emotions. People feel lost, in shock, as they do what they must in a changed world.

Being a political person, I have wondered what the hurricane, flooding, and destruction near Asheville might mean for getting out the vote in those hills. Though clearly the electoral contest is not the main emergency for people without light or heat, who have lost homes and livelihoods, the election does go on.

A friend of a friend -- one Fen Druidin -- from the Asheville area described going to the early voting polls:

Everywhere around here, people check in with each other. "Are you okay? Where are you located? How bad was it?"

We all know which parts were hit hardest. At the early voting site, I overheard the poll worker interacting with the woman who had been in line behind me. She'd been quiet and serious the whole time we were in line, not laughing when we did, though others interacted with us.

The poll worker asked her where she lived.

"Swannannoa," she said. [A particularly hard-hit location where many died.]

There was a hush. We all know what that means. It's hard to describe what I mean by a hush. Just. A held breath.

Then, "Are you okay?" The poll worker asked.

"Our house is gone," said the woman.

"Oh, my gosh, I'm so sorry. Do you need anything?"

"We're just waiting on insurance and FEMA to finish their assessments," said the woman. "Then we can move forward. But we're okay for now."

Politico sent a reporter and a photographer to report on the election in the Asheville area. Some excerpts:

They lost their homes and possessions. They’re showing up to vote in NC.

When Hurricane Helene swept through Yancey County, the flood waters took Byrdene Byerly’s home and nearly all her possessions. She escaped from her house with only the muddy clothes on her back and her pocketbook.

But despite all the devastation, on the first day of early voting, Byerly was at the county Board of Elections to cast a ballot for Kamala Harris.

“I’m soon to be 82 years old, and I’ve voted since I was 21,” she said outside the polling place Thursday. “I always vote.”

... The situation, despite remaining dire in some areas, has improved in most places. In an interview two weeks before early voting started, Anderson Clayton, chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party, fought back tears as she processed how to balance the election with the immediate devastation many in her state were living through.

“Everyone keeps asking me about voting locations and everything,” Clayton said on Oct. 3, nearly a week after flood waters swept through western North Carolina. “There are still people who have not been found.”

... In the immediate aftermath, the state’s Democrats had paused campaigning in the region, including all texting operations besides checking in on people and suggesting where to find storm-related resources. But now, despite the Democrats’ continued work on local relief efforts in the region, they’re back to deploying volunteers to help mobilize voters, according to a Harris campaign official and activists on the ground.

... “Everything came to a halt that we’d been working on,” said Dalton Buchanan, chair of the Henderson County Young Democrats. “It became not a priority for a bit. It was just in the backside of our mind, that there was politics happening.”

But the reality of the election crept back in, Buchanan said, “when we had to deal with the right-wing extremist people making threats to FEMA, and bad misinformation spreading everywhere.” He said he had to urge some of his own family members, distrustful of the federal government due to some of the GOP’s propaganda, to apply for aid after losing their homes. 

This past weekend, the county party was finally back to canvassing and phone banking.

I recognize some elements of these descriptions. A field campaign apparatus, a mass of volunteers accustomed to going door to door, is well designed to spread good information to people isolated in a disaster and to collect help from those who can. We did that in 1989.

A natural disaster also serves as a breach of the normal which unleashes extremist nightmares into the daylight. Our campaign for legal recognition of LGBT partnerships was accused by right wing preachers of having caused the earthquake. I won't be surprised that some people think Democrats or Donald Trump caused the hurricane.

We in San Francisco persisted as do the people of western North Carolina. That's a good country at good work.

Harris has a policy!

Why doesn't Kamala Harris spell out her policies? The legacy mass media keep loudly demanding this.

I'm talking to voters on the phones, at least the ones who don't hang up on me. The Harris voters who I'm helping to navigate Pennsylvania's mail-in ballot maze have two concerns that don't seem to arise from lack of policy plans: they want to be done with Trump and/or to ensure that women can make their own decisions about our bodies.

So you can count me among the surprised when I learned that Kamala Harris was articulating a serious effort to make possible in-home care for elders. That really is a novelty. 

Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris ... proposed a major new initiative: expanding Medicare to cover the cost of long-term care at home.

Such a plan could mean the option of staying at home, rather than in a nursing facility, for the millions of seniors and people with disabilities who need help with the daily tasks of life.

It could also mean physical and financial relief ― and new opportunities for school or work outside the home ― for the millions of working-age Americans who today provide so much of that care on their own without much in the way of outside assistance.

If the proposed legislation is enacted, such a program would represent a substantial boost in federal support for caregiving and, by any measure, one of the largest one-time increases in American history. HuffPost

This could be huge for most all of us. Most old people want to stay in their homes as they age, but the way assistance has been structured has made this incredibly difficult. At present, eligibility for government assistance for home care usually requires spending down all you have to become dependent on Medicaid. Naturally most people don't want to do this. Many feel that they would be robbing their children, besides naturally wanting to stay in home surroundings.

I watched this in my own family. My mother-in-law didn't have much savings to retire on. Rent took up more and more of her budget. As her chronic illnesses worsened, she needed help -- not medical help, but help with the tasks of daily living, food shopping, some cooking. But she certainly didn't need to be in a nursing home. Yet Medicare did nothing for her. Ever ingenious, she realized that if she went into hospice care, she could get some home assistance ... so she schemed to qualify. She then survived longer in hospice care than anyone her workers had ever seen, being a tough and artful old bird. It took a special sort of person to pull this off; she should not have had to find a way to game the system.

What Harris is proposing could be life changing for elders and families. I have to ask, why aren't we hearing more about this policy proposal?

In answer, I suspect is that in-home elder care is a burden that falls more on women than on men. Women live longer and find themselves in this fix more often; daughters live with the expectation they'll take up the task of caring for family members. This is coded (and actually is) a women's issue -- perhaps we only get one per election and this year it is bodily autonomy? That's good, but we need more.

Can this get passed into law? Certainly only if enough Democratic Senators and Congressmen win to ensure majorities. And it may take a few legislative rounds for such a major expansion of the government's duty of care to become law. But this is a worthy goal.

Here's Harris making the pitch for her plan. I like the bit about how she cooked for her dying mother, searching for foods the older woman would find appetizing. That's the real stuff!

A loaded gun

LA Times columnist Anita Chabria offers advice on how we need to think of this election: 

So what’s a democracy-loving American, Republican or Democrat, to do?

You have to listen to Trump.

If we don’t know what the MAGA folks are saying — and believing — we lose the ability to see the bigger picture of what is happening.

If we don’t pay attention to the lies Trump is telling about FEMA [in hurricane ravaged North Carolina], we can’t understand how significant it is that a lone man with a gun is threatening aid workers.

That man is the intended result: A person so removed from our shared reality that no impartial fact can sway him from his fear, rage and commitment.

With or without weapons, we will see more of these desperate Americans in coming days.

In Congress, in state governments, in local election boards, MAGA believers are being asked to prepare to contest the election — operating on the notion that fraud is inevitable, and Trump needs their help.

Those asks include going to polls to monitor and even record voters — to expose the voter fraud they so firmly believe stole the last election. They are being asked to watch poll workers as they open mail-in ballots, to check signatures as much as elections officials will allow and look for malfeasance. They are being asked to keep a close eye on Black and brown people who they believe are being paid or compelled by Democrats to illegally vote.

... Nov. 5 will not liberate any of us from this post-fact reality — the election will not vanquish it, one way or another.

But ignoring it is like turning our backs to a loaded gun.

It's all horribly exhausting. This election is a test of our national resilience. Those who came before found their inner strength when they needed it. We wouldn't be here if they hadn't. Can we find ours?

 

This election is a tear-jerker

Either the purpose of government is to deliver practical compassion -- or it is to line the pockets of swashbuckling grifters like Elon Musk and deranged crooks like Donald Trump.

Here's the story of one woman who found out who was on her side -- and wants us to know whose side she's on. 

 

Slightly longer than I usually post. But worth watching.

He's not a giant. He's a bumbling coward.

Some observations on the presidential election from historian Heather Cox Richardson: 

... Trump’s campaign seems to be deliberately pushing the comparisons to historic American fascism by announcing that Trump will hold a rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden on October 27, an echo of a February 1939 rally held there by American Nazis in honor of President George Washington’s birthday. More than 20,000 people showed up for the “true Americanism” event, held on a stage that featured a huge portrait of Washington in his Continental Army uniform flanked by swastikas.

Nazi enthusiasts march into Madison Square Garden, 1939

Trump’s full-throated embrace of Nazi “race science” and fascism is deadly dangerous, but there is something notable about Trump’s recent rallies that undermines his claims that he is winning the 2024 election. Trump is not holding these rallies in the swing states he needs to win but rather is holding them in states—Colorado, California, New York—that he is almost certain to lose by a lot.

Longtime Republican operative Matthew Bartlett told Matt Dixon and Allan Smith of NBC News: “This does not seem like a campaign putting their candidate in critical vote-rich or swing vote locations—it seems more like a candidate who wants his campaign to put on rallies for optics and vibes.”

Trump seems eager to demonstrate that he is a strongman, a dominant candidate, when in fact he has refused another debate with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris and backed out of an interview with 60 Minutes. He has refused to release a medical report although his mental acuity is a topic of concern as he rambles through speeches and seems entirely untethered from reality. And as Harris turns out larger numbers for her rallies in swing states than he does, he appears to be turning bloodthirsty in Democratic areas.

Today, Harris told a rally of her own in North Carolina: “[Trump] is not being transparent…. He refuses to release his medical records. I've done it. Every other presidential candidate in the modern era has done it. He is unwilling to do a 60 Minutes interview like every other major party candidate has done for more than half a century. He is unwilling to meet for a second debate…. It makes you wonder, why does his staff want him to hide away?... Are they afraid that people will see that he is too weak and unstable to lead America? Is that what’s going on?”

“For these reasons and so many more,” she said, “it is time to turn the page.”

The political professionals who are running Trump's campaign are trying to compensate for their candidate's obvious deterioration by pouring resources into the seven states whose outcome will decide the Electoral College. I wouldn't be surprised if they like having him out of the way, fulminating threateningly somewhere else.

If you live in one of the swing states -- Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona or Nevada -- you are seeing Republican anti-Harris ads in every medium. You might even be seeing a Republican canvasser, usually paid by Elon Musk, though the union and Democratic field programs seem much more robust.

If you don't live in one of those places, you can still do your bit against our cosplay fake Nazi. You don't even have to travel to help Harris. Join the UniteHERE union phone bank and make calls to voters from home.

Lovely ladies with their minds set on freedom

 

Renee Bracey Sherman (l) was in town yesterday, promoting her new book, Liberating Abortion: Claiming Our History, Sharing Our Stories, and Building the Reproductive Future We Deserve. The author was joined by Lateefah Simon (r), the next Congressperson from California's District 12, the East Bay seat from which Barbara Lee is retiring. 

There was plenty of wisdom, plenty of determination, plenty of delight, and plenty of laughs to share.