A DISTANT LAND: How in the world could this race be tied?

MONDAY, OCTOBER 14, 2024

Notes from a distant land: Back in the day—back at the start of the current century—these acts of political self-sabotage typically came from Blue America's big Hollywood stars.

In one election, the (politically) clueless act came from Whoopi Goldberg. (She was of course well intentioned.) In another election, the (politically) clueless act came from Larry David.

In each case, a close presidential campaign was sidetracked, for several days, by discussion of the (politically) clueless behavior of a Hollywood star. In one instance, the Gore campaign was negatively affected. In the other case, the political harm was done to Candidate Kerry. 

At that time, this was the way those of us in Blue America would imperil our own nominees. Increasingly, Blue America's political leaders now perform these acts themselves. 

Over the course of the past three or four days, we've been dismayed by what happened when Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer got together with Liz Plank, a Canadian podcaster, to create an ill-advised bit of video about the (little-known) CHIPS Act.

Whitmer is a very successful second-term Michigan governor. Perfectly predictably, the videotape she and Plank created inspired a wildfire across Red Americaacross a very broad land.

Whitmer has now apologized to Catholic leaders in that (battleground) state for what she and Plank have wrought. If you think that votes don't get affected this way, we'd pose Al Pacino's famous question again:

Who's being naive [now], Kay?

We'll offer links to reporting about this unfortunate matter below. In our view, the bad political judgment here pretty much went off the charts. 

Sadly, this wildfire burned through the countryside at a time of declining poll numbers for Candidate Harris. Such surveys can only be approximations, but this is part of a news report in today's Washington Post:

Trump chips away at Harris’s national advantage, two new polls show

A new ABC News-Ipsos poll, conducted from Oct. 4-8, showed that among likely voters, Harris led Trump 50 percent to 48 percent, within the poll’s margin of error. Last month, the same poll found Harris at 51 percent support among likely voters compared to Trump at 46 percent.

An NBC News poll also conducted from Oct. 4-8 and showed an even split between Trump and Harris, with each garnering 48 percent support among registered voters. In that same poll last month, Harris was up by five points—another result within the poll’s margins.

A CBS News-YouGov poll conducted a few days later, from Oct. 8-11 but released also Sunday, found less of a shift.

And so on from there. Summarizing:

At ABC/Ipsos, Harris had lost three points on her nationwide lead. At NBC News, she had lost five pointsand the nationwide race was now tied.

There is no way to be sure, but it's generally agreed that a tie vote in the nationwide popular vote would result in an electoral college win for Candidate Trump. 

Recent history also suggeststhough there's no way to be surethat a similar electoral college outcome would accompany a two-point nationwide win by Candidate Harris.

In the face of this current trend, Whitmer and Plank were putting their cleverness on full display. Red America responded with fury, in a way which could move votes in Michigan and all across the land.

So it goes! So it goes as our own imperfect tribe tries to keep Candidate Trump out of the White House. 

At this site, we'll be voting for Candidate Harris, but a certain question is widespread wherever Blue American discernment is sold. That basic questions goes like this:

How can this race be tied?

This very morning, Jonathan Alter, a good decent person, offered a version of that question when he appeared on Morning Joe

Long ago and far away, we lunched with Alter, in bright sunshine and even al fresco, at the 2000 Democratic Convention. Jonathan Alter's a good, decent personbut we were disappointed by what he said today, part of which went like this:

I did have illusions about roughly half the American public.

We can't yet post his fuller statement. Until the Internet Archive returns, it may be that we will never be able to post the full text of what Jonathan said. 

But that was Altera good, decent persongiving voice to a certain view about every Trump voter in this wide, highly varied land.  By way of contrast, when Candidate Hillary Clinton made her unhelpful statement about that "basket of deplorables," she said that only half of Candidate Trump's supporters could be judged that way.

We thought Jonathan's statement was very Blue but was also unwise. 

Why might someone vote for Candidate Trump? Attention Kamala Harris voters! There exists a wide array of reasons why someone might vote for Trump!

We're going to vote for Harris ourselves, but we've been dismayed by the performance of her campaign—by the performance of the candidate herselfin the past week or two. 

We don't how who's going to win this election, but we weren't surprised to hear that she seems to have been sliding a bit in the nationwide polls. That brings us back to a certain statement about a distant land. 

Last week, we quoted sacred Thoreau, right there in the second paragraph of Walden. No, this wasn't a political statementbut its imagery has been ringing in our heads:

Walden; or, Life in the Woods

[...]

I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience. Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men’s lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me. 

Sacred Thoreau quickly acknowledged "the narrowness of [his] experience." He said he understood his own experiences well, but perhaps not so much when it came to the lives of others.

He said he wanted other writers to give sincere accounts of their own lives. If such people have lived sincerely, the famous writer evocatively said, those people had been living in "a distant land to me."

What did the gentleman mean by that last statement? We assume he was lurking in the region inhabited by Yevtushenko at the start of his poem, People:

People

No people are uninteresting.
Their fate is like the chronicle of planets.
Nothing in them is not particular,
and planet is dissimilar from planet.

"Planet is dissimilar from planet," Yevtushenko said (in translation). Quickly, he moved on to this:

To each his world is private,
and in that world one excellent minute.
And in that world one tragic minute.
These are private.

In any man [sic] who dies there dies with him
his first snow and kiss and fight.
It goes with him.
There are left books and bridges
and painted canvas and machinery.
Whose fate is to survive.
But what has gone is also not nothing:
by the rule of the game something has gone.
Not people die but worlds die in them.
Whom we knew as faulty, the earth’s creatures
Of whom, essentially, what did we know?

Our view? In this lament for the millions of people who lost their lives under Stalin, Yevtushenko was saying something like this:

Every other person lives in "a distant land to me." His or her experiences are essentially unknown to meindeed, to all of us who view that person from the outside. 

Our planet is filled with millions of other peoplewith many millions of the earth's creatures. Our planet contains the worlds of many millions of such people"Of whom, essentially, what did we know?"

Plainly, no one else will ever be as smart or as decent as those of u in Blue America are widely known to be. That said, other people are people tooand their experiences, perceptions and understandings may not align with our own.

In Blue America, we often see our tribunes expressing puzzlement about how anyone could be voting for Candidate Trump. Quite often, we proceed to offer our own unflattering explanations of the motives behind such decisions. As the great anthropologist Gene Brabender said:

Where I come from, we only talk so long. After that, we start to hit.

Where did this great anthropologist "come from?" He came from the planet Earth!

Even here in Blue America, it seems that we "only talk so long." Also, we may not be strongly inclined to wonder about the private worlds of others

During the course of this week, we'll be reporting from a region of gloom as Candidate Harris tries to insert a bit more punch into her (recently faltering) campaign.

We'll be voting for Harris ourselves. But why might somebody else be voting for Candidate Trump?

We'll report this week from a distant landfrom a distant land inhabited by neighbors and friends who live right down the street!

As for those of us within our own tribe, could we declare a moratorium on our obvious cleverness for maybe the next three weeks?

Could we put a lid on our obvious brilliance? On our stores of tribal snark?

Governor Whitmer apologizes to Michigan's (many) Catholics: In our view, the reaction to the wonderfully clever video would have been easy to predict. 

In our view, the political cluelessness put on display is puzzling but hard to miss. Under our faltering nation's current journalistic arrangements, Red Americans have already heard about this. Blue Americans never will. 

For the initial report in the New York Post, you can just click hereFor a subsequent report about the governor's apology, you can just click this.

At Mediaite, readers were given "just the facts." For those barebone facts, click here.


37 comments:

  1. The race can be tied because there are a lot of stupid, ignorant people in america who don't care about democracy, or the fact that one of the candidates is an adjudicated criminal.

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  2. Media critic Somerby has missed the story of the hour:

    https://digbysblog.net/2024/10/13/not-a-dimes-worth-of-difference/

    This race is not tied. Trump is losing. He is planning a repeat of his attempted coup in 2020. Instead of calling for Harris supporters to vote, Somerby is repeating excerpts from old poems and humming a tune only he can hear.

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    Replies
    1. Thanks for the link, a good read.

      Delete
  3. Bob,
    Because Republican voters are pieces of shit.
    You need some challenging questions. This one was too easy.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Somerby refers to Harris's campaign as faltering. This weekend, Harris released her health records. Trump has never done the same, and his health appears to be deteriorating. The New York Times refuses to give Trump the Biden treatment concerning his age and obvious mental decline, so voters are not being told the truth about him. But Trump voters know what is going on. They won't ever vote for Harris because she is a Democrat and Republicans will not vote for Democrats under any circumstances.

    So, this is not an election about Trump vs Harris. It is about a group of people who put party ahead of country and will vote for a zombie before they'll vote for someone from the other party. This situation is not Trump's, but is the result of decades of vilification of Democrats and a crusade the will not engage in partisan politics and will not ever compromise with Democrats.

    Somerby blames the left for this situation, because we haven't kowtowed enough to those who hate us. I blame assholes like Somerby, who tolerate the stupidity on the right, the mendacity, the grifting, lying and cheating. We Democrats didn't create Trump. He is the right wing's creation and they own him 100%. So today's chiding is inappropriate and unfair, and Somerby does not own any high road concerning Republicans, but he does own Trump and Somerby owns whatever mayhem Trump has already created in American politics and whatever chaos Trump and his fascist buddies would create in our country if elected.

    If this election is close (which I personally do not believe it is), it is because of jerks like Somerby.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Look at the way the Republicans in the House will not shorten their recess in order to vote on additional FEMA aid for hurricane victims in red states. This is to spite Democrats right before the election. These elected officials will not help their own constituents, many in dire need, because it might help Democrats deal effectively with the disaster. That is what this has come to, and it is not about Trump but about Republicans with screwed up priorities.

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    2. 10:30 excellent comment, I’ve been saying the same for a long time, but you put it very well.

      Delete
  5. "The video is an apparent takeoff on a TikTok meme in which friends feed each other food and stare uncomfortably into the camera."

    So what is the fuss? Somerby doesn't quite explain why he is even talking about this.

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  6. I saw this video on X and wondered how anyone jump to the conclusion that feeding someone a Dorito chip is a spoof of communion.

    Was there more to it than that?

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    Replies
    1. I don't think there was. This tempest is similar to the one from this past summer's Olympics where folks decided that the Dionysian feast in the opening ceremony was mocking the Last Supper.

      When folks are determined to be offended, no one can stop them.

      Delete
    2. QiB, no, it’s not the same. The Olympic debacle was very questionable. I see nothing in this recent fracas.

      Delete
    3. The Trump “Full Metal Jacket” ad was clueless as go the movie plot.

      Delete
  7. Some days I wonder whether the comments are fake, designed to illustrate Somerby’s point. This is one of those days.

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    1. Whitmer is being made to apologize to Catholics for a video that was not meant to be offensive to Catholics. And because of it, Somerby attacks liberals for our “obvious brilliance” and “tribal snark”, and claims this is why Harris is “tied” with Trump. Is there no right wing attack Somerby won’t buy into and push?

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    2. Whitmer is a strong and promising Democratic woman. Thus, she must be destroyed. Can you imagine Somerby writing this bs if Gore were the target?

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    3. And of course, the trump campaign wants to win Michigan.

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  8. The mediate story Somerby links to is about Gretchen CARLSON.

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  9. https://www.jefftiedrich.com/p/elderly-golfer-goes-full-fascist

    Trump is calling Democrats "the enemy within" and demanding armed guards at polling places. Crickets from Somerby.

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  10. Somerby clearly does not understand how polling works. Otherwise, he might understand how a putative tie might not be a tie at all.

    For one thing, Trump has never outperformed a poll and has underperformed every poll in all of the primaries held in this election. Underperforming means that Trump got a lower percentage of the actual vote than polls predicted. This was largely due to the presence of Nikki Haley, who pulled 20-30% of Republican votes away from Trump, even when she had already dropped out of the race. That can be considered a protest vote against Trump, but you have to ask, "where will the Nikki Haley voters go?" in the upcoming general election.

    Then there is the question of sampling. A poll doesn't ask every prospective voter who they are voting for. They choose a subset of people to ask based on a model of how they think Republican and Democrat and Undecided and Third-Party voters are distributed in the population they are sampling from. If their model is incorrect, the answers given by the people they talk to will be biased and the results will not be a good predictor of the election outcome. That is why there is a margin of error on polls and why they do not claim to be predictions, just a reflection of where certain voters are at in an upcoming election. Models have been majorly wrong before. Pollsters decided they had undersampled Republicans in 2016 and adjusted by oversampling them in 2020, which made them wrong about both elections. Then for 2022, they predicted a "red wave" based on correction of what Republicans told them was a tendency for Republicans to dislike answering polls honest, and were way wrong in 2022, oversampling Republicans and underestimating the backlash re the Dobbs decision among suburban women, who went for Biden in a big way. They thought Republicans might be lying about not voting for Trump, given Trump's general yuckiness.

    Now they are underestimating the number of women who are newly registered just to vote against Trump. They are hypothesizing a black/Hispanic defection that is unlikely to materialize (Clinton got 87% of blacks in 2016, Biden got 87% of blacks in 2020, but Harris, who is a black candidate, is not going to get black votes because Republicans say so?).

    Then you have to factor in campaign funding (which is huge for Harris and faltering for Trump) and enthusiasm (also faltering for Trump) and unknowns such as how Independents and Undecideds will break (usually they go Republican except in 2020). The impact of abortion is clearly to anger female voters, who are switching to Harris or staying home but seem to hate Trump. Pollsters may be underestimating how many women are lying to pollsters and their husbands/boyfriends about voting for Trump but will vote for Harris in the privacy of the voting booth. This has always been true among Catholic women, but may now be a factor for Trump, given Vance's stupidity and the chance that many Republican women do not want to become fundie wives. And Harris is doing a better job of campaigning among young voters, especially by using young-skewing media for her interviews and ads.

    Trump has never won a legitimate election (2016 was manipulated by Comey, Russian interference, and Trump himself via National Enquirer and other cheating). Many are suggesting he plans another attempted coup. He is not doing the right things to win, is too tired to campaign properly, so why would Somerby be hysterically suggesting Harris is losing? There are no clear answers to that except the obvious ones.

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  11. The Dems may have pissed away the Catholic vote. First there was their attack on the Little Sisters of the Poor. Then Harris violating tradition by skipping the Al Smith dinner. Now seemingly mocking Catholic rituals. I know how I would feel if a candidate treated Jews this way.

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    Replies
    1. No they haven't. Since the Catholic church is staunchly anti-abortion, it opposes any candidate that is pro-choice.

      Try and keep up.

      Delete
    2. We know how you would feel, Dickhead in Cal. Your candidate is supporting a self-identified Nazi and Holocaust denier in NC, and you don't give two shits, you fucking troll hypocrite.

      Delete
    3. Biden got 52 percent of the Catholic vote.

      Delete
    4. DiC, did you know there was a group called “ catholics for choice”?

      From their website:
      “a majority of Catholic voters chose a prochoice candidate who publicly embraces his Catholic faith over an incumbent who assiduously courted evangelical voters and prioritized the installation of far-right, prolife judges in the federal judiciary over virtually all other policy outcomes over the last four years. “

      https://www.catholicsforchoice.org/resource-library/how-catholics-voted/

      So maybe quit being so glib about large groups of people.

      Delete
    5. “ I know how I would feel if a candidate treated Jews this way”. Like sitting down to a nice dinner at Mar a Lago with 2 prominent antisemites? You would be incensed.

      Delete
  12. Trump learned from his mentor Roy Cohn never to apologize, because it supposedly shows weakness. Anytime Trump is faced with some embarrassing situation, he lashes out at others, portraying himself as the victim.

    Whitmer did what Democrats do, apologize, even when it wasn’t necessary. That shows strength, character, and a conscience, but Somerby chooses to portray whitmer as another clueless, spiteful, contemptuous liberal, just like all our tribe, he says, which, coincidentally, is the way Republicans view, or pretend to view, Democrats. Meanwhile, Somerby gives deliberate liar Vance a pass because of his so called troubled background.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Republican don’t think that way about all liberals. They tend to focus those sentiments on some of their leaders and media spokesmen.

      I don’t make statements that impugn all Dems. It’s the anonymouse ranks that are clueless, spiteful, and contemptuous. Most (not all) other Democrats are simply wrong-headed or silly.

      Delete
    2. Have you been listening to Trump lately? Or other members of the GOP for that matter? Did you read the comments to that New York Post article? They aren’t limiting their criticism to prominent Dems. It’s all of us liberals they are complaining about. Somerby too. Remember how he would go after commenters to Kevin Drum’s blog?

      Delete
    3. Anonymouse 1:24pm, of course, they’re complaining about Democrats. That’s not the same as sounding like Mengele talking about Jews, the way anonymices sound.

      Delete
    4. This is the dumbest strawman from Cecelia, he is just trying to bait and trigger you. Responding to Cecelia only enables his worst traits, you are doing him, and discourse, more harm than good.

      Delete
    5. Anonymouse 2:30pm, oh, no. anonymices and their band of anonymouse flying monkeys own it.

      Delete
    6. 2:30: you are correct. But it’s occasionally good to have Cecelia’s bad faith nastiness and contemptuousness and refusal to engage in civil discourse on display as a perfect example of ugly right wing behavior.

      Delete
  13. Since Harris achieved a lead in the polls, which she has maintained, Somerby has been hand waving polls…until now, when he suddenly thinks polls are vital, because they supposedly indicate a tightening race (they don’t, Somerby doesn’t know how to read and interpret polls).

    This kind of flip flopping is common among right wingers, since being right wing has little to do with ideology and more to do with personality traits.

    Somerby suddenly now says we are “naive” to not think some insignificant occurrence with someone who is not even a candidate will have an impact on the presidential race, yet Somerby offers no evidence to support his silly claim, other than to quote a line from The Godfather, a fictional film.

    Somerby does not substantiate claims with evidence, preferring the safe sanctuary of storytelling, since, in that realm, you can justify anything with some randomly mined item.

    Right wingers prefer storytelling over evidence (science) because they are primarily motivated by an urge to soothe their personal emotional discomforts, rather than rationally deal with an issue.

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