MONDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 2024
All too often, we don't: We the people are often quite sure we know what we're talking about.
All too often, we don't! Consider something which happened just yesterday on C-Span's Washington Journal.
During the 8 o'clock hour, Charlie Cook—he of the Cook Political Report—was the guest for a full segment. In his initial assessment of this year's election, he downplayed the idea that Trump had won in a landslide. He also suggested that Trump's relatively narrow victory margin might not constitute some sort of clearcut "mandate."
(Regarding the lack of an obvious "mandate," he said the same thing about Biden's 4.5-point victory margin back in 2020.)
The very first caller was able to see right through what Charlie was selling! She was thoroughly sure of herself, and she basically didn't seem to know what she was talking about:
MODERATOR (11/24/24): Let's get to your calls with questions for Charlie Cook of the Cook Political Report. We'll start with Henrietta in Fort Pierce, Florida, on our line for Republicans.
HENRIETTA FROM FLORIDA: Yes. Hi, good morning. I think this gentleman is just giving us lots of drivel. This was a mandate. Three hundred and sixteen [sic] electoral votes? Puh-leeze! When's the last time someone got that?
In addition to that, it's been twenty-plus years since a Republican won the popular vote. In addition to that, this was a statement from America as a whole that we rejected everything that the Democrats have done for the past four years.
MODERATOR: So Henrietta, before we get to your question for Charlie, I do just want to point out that Trump won 312 electoral college votes, not 316.
To the hear the phone call, click here, then jump ahead to the 13-minute mark.
Forget the minor error concerning the precise number of electoral votes. Forget the absurdity of the claim that "America as a whole" has issued the denunciation the caller described—in an election which Candidate Trump won, on a nationwide basis, by only 1.6 points, with slightly more than half the electorate voting for someone else.
This highly self-assured C-Span caller was full of vinegar this day. We were most struck by the rhetorical question in which she hoped to prove that the election had produced a mandate. Her question went like this:
Three hundred and sixteen [sic] electoral votes? Puh-leeze! When's the last time someone got that?
When's the last time someone got that? Let's take a look at the record:
Electoral votes, winning candidate
1992: 370 (Clinton)
1996: 379 (Clinton)
2000: 271 (Bush)
2004: 286 (Bush)
2008: 365 (Obama)
2012: 332 (Obama)
2016: 304 (Trump)
2020: 306 (Biden)
2024: 312 (Trump)
When's the last time someone got that? Bill Clinton exceeded the number in each of his elections. So did Barack Obama. A bit farther back in time, Reagan got 525 electoral votes in 1984. Bush the elder got 426 four years later.
The caller was thoroughly sure of herself. She knew that Cook's assessments were ridiculous drivel.
That said, she didn't seem to know her brief—nor was she ever corrected on this particular point. Neither Cook nor the C-Span moderator noted the actual facts of this particular case.
The caller was full of tribal certainty. Also, she was wrong.
Especially under current arrangements, it's frequently like that in Red America—but also, alas, Over Here!
Beating a dead horse
ReplyDeleteWill Somerby include this as he continues sermonizing about how it's all liberals' fault?
DeleteInside the Republican false-flag effort to turn off Kamala Harris voters
A multipronged dark money effort by advisers to Elon Musk targeted liberals, Jews, Muslims and Black voters with ads that were not quite what they seemed.
Muslims in Michigan began seeing pro-Israel ads this fall praising Vice President Kamala Harris for marrying a Jewish man and backing the Jewish state. Jews in Pennsylvania, meanwhile, saw ads from the same group with the opposite message: Harris wanted to stop U.S. arms shipments to Israel. Another group promoted “Kamala’s bold progressive agenda” to conservative-leaning Donald Trump voters, while a third filled the phones of young liberals with videos about how Harris had abandoned the progressive dream. Black voters in North Carolina were told Democrats wanted to take away their menthol cigarettes, while working-class White men in the Midwest were warned that Harris would support quotas for minorities and deny them Zyn nicotine pouches.
What voters had no way of knowing at the time was that all of the ads were part of a single, $45 million effort created by political advisers to Tesla founder Elon Musk who had previously worked on the presidential campaign of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), according to a presentation about the group’s efforts obtained by The Washington Post.
The project, funded with anonymous donations, micro-targeted messages across the battleground states, often with ads that appeared to be something they were not — a tactic the organizers sometimes referred to internally as “false positives.”
With digital spots, direct mail, text messages, influencer marketing and mobile billboards, the overall project was a high-tech experiment in misdirection — an old political tactic that has been sharpened in recent decades with increasingly precise targeting techniques.
Ads tested better if Muslims felt they were seeing a message meant for Zionists, “Bernie bros” felt they were hearing from the far left, and “Zyn bros” felt they were hearing from activists who wanted “a world without gas-powered vehicles,” a ban on fracking and affordable housing for undocumented Americans — policies Harris did not actually support during her campaign. . . .
The entire effort grew out of research by Building America’s Future, a conservative political nonprofit that was founded during the first Trump administration by Republican consultants Generra Peck and Phil Cox. With others at P2 Public Affairs, Peck and Cox, former advisers to DeSantis, were top strategists for a separate effort, America PAC, the super PAC funded by Musk to support Trump. Musk donated to Building America’s Future in 2022, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. The group’s leaders have declined to comment on their donors.
Starting in February, Ryan Tyson, a former pollster for DeSantis, began holding a series of about 25 focus groups with specific communities of targeted voters, with most of the research effort focused on likely Democrats who were uncertain about voting. The goal was to figure out how to help Donald Trump win during a campaign in which Democrats were vastly outspending Republicans on digital advertising.
“Clearly, you had a White liberal demographic that hated Donald Trump. That was without question. You could see that coalition everywhere. But once you get past White progressives, every other historical demographic stronghold from the Democrats just started to drop off,” Tyson said about the effort. “What did exist was a tremendous amount of voters on the left that were disaffected. And the only persuasion question was whether they could be persuaded to vote.”
The effort worked in concert with a separate project by the Trump campaign to depress turnout for Harris — knowing that Trump would be unlikely to drastically expand his vote totals. . . . "
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/15/republican-ads-false-flag/?ref=iknowhowmuchyoucare.com
“We can have democracy, or we can have billionaires. Not both. At least with these campaign finance laws,” [Statler] writes. The problem is that the billionaires are winning. They are drowning democracy in a flood of dollars:
DeleteJust 400 mega-donors outspent every other contributor to the Republican Party based on what we know about the spending in the 2024 campaign. Elon Musk alone appears to have outspent every small donor to the Trump campaign. And that’s if you don’t count the multiple billions of dollars he put into the $44 billion he wrangled to purchase Twitter and turn it into a Trump campaign website. In return, Tesla has skyrocketed 40% since Trump’s election, making Elon about $70 billion he can blow on future elections.
And the way that Elon spent degraded democracy itself. His PAC drowned targeted voters with disinformation of the sort tens of millions are now fleeing from on Twitter.
It’s not a fair fight. But then, the right doesn’t believe in fair:
It’s the billionaires versus the people, and the billionaires are kicking our ass with Elon—and his grudge against his daughter and the culture that accepts her in a way he never can—leading the way. His Phishing Scam Approach to politics has helped him, officially the richest human being ever to live, to become significantly richer.
Many factors have made America the most unequal country in the OECD and now threaten our ability to govern ourselves.
https://digbysblog.net/2024/11/25/no-defense-baby-they-sur-ren-dered/
You can successfully win a presidential election as a black person. It has yet to be proven that you can successfully win as a woman. The idea that you can run a successful campaign as a black female is a liberal's fantasy, even against as poor a version of a candidate as Trump.
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Good for you, you're entitled to gloat. Your candidate won. For myself, voting for a racist who logged in 30,000 lies during his presidency, was responsible for hundreds of thousands of excess COVID deaths, and who watched as over 140 Capitol police were brutalized by a mob he fomented with a lie about his losing an election? I passed on that. Don't feel good about losing. Would feel worse about having to explain to anyone with morals my voting for Trump.
DeleteMost Trump voters think most Democrat voters are moral idiots, so there is no effort to explain their vote.
DeleteA majority of voters say they approve of President-elect Trump’s handling of the presidential transition so far as the country continues to hold its breath for a peaceful transfer of power in January.
ReplyDeleteA new CBS News poll released Sunday found that 59 percent of voters say they approve of Trump’s handling of his presidential transition so far, with 41 percent saying they do not approve.
Since his election, Trump has gained some favor with Americans. Another poll released last week showed 54 percent of respondents said they approve of Trump’s performance. The approval rating is boosted by the 91 percent of Republicans who said this, but it also includes 49 percent of independents and 22 percent of Democrats.
The percentage of Republicans who say they are worse off financially today than they were a year ago, has fallen 16% since November 5th.
DeleteYes, the stock market is liking Trump's victory. Many Republicans are better off already.
DeleteTrump hasn’t signed the necessary paperwork to go forward with the transition. How can people approve of that.
DeleteSomeone disagreed with Cook without evidence. That doesn’t make him wrong.
An example of someone being wrong on the right sheds no light on wrongness on the left.
Delete4:41 is beyond lame. " ...54 percent of respondents said they approve of Trump’s performance." Performance as what?
Delete"... the country continues to hold its breath for a peaceful transition of power." Wow. Republicans have an amazing capacity for projection.
DeleteIt was a huge victory for Trump given the other side and the media had thrown everything they had at him including trying to keep him off the ballot, dragging him into court for this and that, calling him Hitler etc. They threw everything they had at him and he was even shot at and he still won.
ReplyDeleteYour candidate won and you're still a whiny victim. Must be a bitch to be so aggrieved 24/7.
DeleteJill Stein won?
DeletePutin's Woman of the Year.
DeleteIt's likely he won because the other side and all its corrupted institutions tried to take him down, not in spite of it.
DeleteIt was not a "huge victory" for Trump, considering population growth he could not even match his 2020 support, when he lost.
DeleteTrump in reality squeaked by due to low turnout for Dems.
Trump did not score a victory, he limped across the finish line because Harris could not get the vote out.
Harris ran essentially the same campaign that Biden did in 2020 and Clinton did in 2016, the most significant reasons for Harris' loss are clear: lack of universal mail in ballots, a woman of color candidate, and increasingly sophisticated Republican dirty tricks.
DeleteYes, fewer dead people voted this year than in 2020. It's probably the weather or something.
Are you looking for a way to catch a cheating partner/spouse⁉️
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4️⃣ Recovering money lost to Scam such as-: Cryptocurrency/Forex/Binary Option investments.
5️⃣ Recovering Money lost to Scam such as-: Buying and Selling scams.
6️⃣ Recovering money lost to Catfishing and Romance Scams.
Our services are simple to access your task would be assigned to a particular person, and can be reassigned to someone else if need be. Contacts are made by emails and any other info required would be strictly be the task related.
You can as well ask for other services not listed above, as long as it gas to do with computer and the internet, we would get the job done.
⚠️ Note-: We do not engage with task and jobs that requires us to cause harm to person(s) our job is simple to help individuals with our skills and expertise.
Use the emails below for contact-:
Pythonaxhelp@protonmail.com
Pythonaxservices@protonmail.com
Pythonax.
Copyright ©️ 2024
Only for persons above 18.
ReplyDeleteAll things considered, given the context of the establishment media extreme hatred, declaring The Donald Hitler-Hitler-Hitler every 5 minutes -- 312 electoral votes is u-n-b-e-l-i-e-v-a-b-l-y high.
It's UGE.
It's fucking incredible.
12:59,
DeleteCongratulations! You elected an establishment media person to be one heartbeat from the Presidency.
It IS fucking incredible. Incredibly stupid.
Yes, White males have retained their dominance, great!
Delete