Four years after his attempted coup and two subsequent federal indictments and a state-level criminal conviction, Donald Trump has been reelected president.
Continue reading “TRUMP DEFEATS HARRIS FOR SECOND TERM FOLLOWING CAMPAIGN AGAINST ‘ENEMY WITHIN’”Blue Wall Collapses As Trump Victory Appears Imminent
Follow along with us below.
Status Check Just After Midnight
You see the same numbers I do. We don’t know the results of the presidential election yet. It all comes down to the Blue Wall states. But the margins in critical areas do not look promising. I heard from one source about an hour ago that Harris still had a shot in each state. I don’t know where that stands. It doesn’t look promising from the reports I see currently. There’s no point in my speculating. We’ll know soon enough.
If Harris loses, that is obviously a crushing result. There’s no way around that. It’s different from 2016 in that it’s not a shock. We all knew or should have known this was a very possible result. The polls and models were about as close to 50-50 as you can get. A number were literally 50-50. But there’s another dimension of the story, assuming Trump does win. And that’s this: everyone knows who Donald Trump is. He was already President once. We know what that was like. Paradoxically Kamala Harris and he both did a pretty good job reminding us who he was over the last month. So it’s not like 2016 when you could say people didn’t know what they were getting. We know who he is. If he wins, which now looks probable though not certain, that’s a very sobering reality.
Continue reading “Status Check Just After Midnight”Alleged Russian Scare Tactics Target Dem Voting In Swing States
Polling sites mostly in heavily Democratic areas in swing states shut down on Tuesday after a series of unprecedented and brazen bomb threats were called in that the FBI attributed to Russia.
Continue reading “Alleged Russian Scare Tactics Target Dem Voting In Swing States”Status Check
Okay, we are clearly down to the Blue Wall and what seems to be Harris’s only path. We have to wait for the vote to come in. To set expectations, I don’t sense a lot of optimism from the people who I trust to be able to look at the nitty gritty results and see where things are going. But again, we wait to see the results. You have to count the votes. They can surprise you.
Apart from those critical contests we see movement to the right in many states, in non-swing states. I don’t have the full picture but it seems like we have movement to the right in rural areas and relative stasis in the suburbs. Again, I don’t have a full enough panoramic view to be able to say that part definitively. But I think that’s the general picture. We also see Democratic Senate and House candidates running ahead of Harris. So that feature of the 2024 polls was not a mirage or a delta that was destined to close by the election day.
Regardless of who wins the presidency, I think the overall verdict has to be that the polls were pretty accurate, both in the swing states and nationwide.
Voters Continue To Choose Abortion Rights When They’re Not Thwarted By Inflated Thresholds
Seven of the 10 states with abortion on the ballot chose to protect the right Tuesday — and Florida would have too, if it wasn’t subject to a 60-vote supermajority threshold.
Continue reading “Voters Continue To Choose Abortion Rights When They’re Not Thwarted By Inflated Thresholds”Phony Bomb Threats from Russia
We’re going to need to wait for the dust to settle. But it’s clear there’s a major wave of hoax bomb threats today into this evening into swing states, seemingly in most and likely all cases targeting areas of heavy Democratic voting. Officials say they appear to be emanating from Russia. Key points are these. a) They’re not real. There are no bombs. There’s no danger. b) This is a focused efforts to disrupt voting and/or vote counting in Democratic areas. c) We know what’s going on here.
Status Check
Okay, pretty bumpy ride for Democrats so far tonight. Florida was a bloodbath. In the parts of the country where we have results there’s a clear Trump trend in rural America. North Carolina and Georgia look touch and go for Harris. But we still mostly haven’t heard from the Midwest and the Blue Wall states. Those look encouraging based on turnout numbers in key cities and stuff like that. But we don’t have results. Same applies to Nevada. We need to see those numbers. That’s where we are.
Also important to remember. You win the Blue Wall states or you don’t. You can win or lose Nevada and it still comes down to those three states and the one electoral vote in Nebraska.
Marjorie Taylor Greene Says This Election Is About Getting J6 Rioters ‘Pardoned!’
The stakes of the race are very clear for MAGA Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). In an Election Day message to her followers on the social media platform Telegram Tuesday afternoon, Greene encouraged them to vote for former President Donald Trump so he might pardon people who were charged with storming the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2021.
“January 6th was not an insurrection and agent provocateurs that fueled the protest,” Greene wrote, kicking off the message with apparent typos.
“Most J6’ers were nonviolent and just walked in the Capitol,” she added. “Vote Trump so we can get them pardoned!”
As of August, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, over 1,400 people have been charged for crimes related to the attack on the Capitol, which took place as Trump supporters converged on the building to protest the certification of Trump’s loss in the 2020 election. About 140 police officers who were guarding the Capitol that day were injured by the mob. Despite this, many of the participants in the violence have become a cause celebre for far-right politicians and Trump has expressed interest in pardoning them.
Greene has been a vocal advocate for some of the January 6 defendants, including participating in a delegation of House Republicans who visited a group of them who were being held in the D.C. jail. She began her Election Day message by sharing a social media post from an account purportedly belonging to a married couple, Tara Stottlemyer and Dale Jeremiah Shalvey, who were sentenced on felony charges related to the attack. The post described how Stottlemeyer and her husband had been separated from their young daughter during their prison sentences, which it blamed on the “Kamala DOJ.” Noting that Stottlemeyer could not vote as a result of her conviction, it encouraged others to support Trump and suggested he might free people who were incarcerated for taking part in the violence.
“Please vote to send home the J6 mom’s, dad’s, grandma’s and grandpa’s,” the post said.
According to federal prosecutors, Stottlemeyer and Shalvey were among the first people to breach the barricades at the Capitol on Jan. 6. Shalvey was convicted of having assaulted members of law enforcement during the breach, “throwing an object that hit an officer with the Metropolitan Police Department.” The pair subsequently broke into the Senate chamber and rifled through senators’ desks. Stottlemeyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Greene, who described the couple’s plight as “heartbreaking,” was among the Republican members of Congress who were involved in protests against Trump’s loss including one that was staged outside the Capitol on Jan. 6. She also was one of the 147 Republicans who voted to overturn the election results.
Greene began promoting baseless conspiracy theories that leftists in disguise were behind the violence as the attack unfolded. Her typo-filled Election Day message blaming the attack on “agent provocateurs” seems like an extension of that conspiracy theory. There is no evidence for either variation of the claim and Greene did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday evening.
Election Miscellany #7
The only clear trend we’re seeing tonight, early but seems widespread, is Trump outperforming his numbers in rural counties compared to 2020. What Dems will need is a counter-trend in suburban counties. We would expect that counter-trend. But we haven’t seen it yet or haven’t seen it clearly yet because we have very few suburban counties that are done counting. A lot of these rural counties just count much faster. It seems like we’re likely to see red areas getting redder, blue areas bluer, etc.