Stuart Rothenberg is one of those old school election watcher/analyst types, from the pre-poll aggregator, pre-538 era. Rothenberg, Charlie Cook, Larry Sabato etc. His new column out from him in Roll Call caught my eye. The gist is simple enough. While he’s not predicting this outcome, Rothenberg says we shouldn’t be surprised if the 2024 presidential actually turns out not to be that close, despite the fact that a photo finish is the one thing everyone on every side of the race seems to agree on. He points to new high quality polls out of Pennsylvania and Iowa which suggest the race may not be quite as close as we all universally assume. And Rothenberg is not the type you’d generally expect to predict or hint at something like this. As Rothenberg puts it, after detailing this universal consensus: “[I]f you are something of a gambler and everyone you know believes the 2024 presidential contest is and will remain extremely close, you probably should put a few dollars on the possibility that November will produce a clear and convincing win for Harris.”
Continue reading “Maybe It Won’t Be That Close?”This Year, Nearly Everyone’s On The Same Page: GOP Gets To Work Early To Delegitimize Election
Ahead of the upcoming election, Donald Trump’s allies are advancing a more organized, more calculated version of their misinformation strategy from 2020.
Continue reading “This Year, Nearly Everyone’s On The Same Page: GOP Gets To Work Early To Delegitimize Election”A Very Important Read
Over the last ten days, as Donald Trump and JD Vance have rallied and incited hardened pro-Trump extremists to terrorize the community of Springfield, Ohio, most press reports — even ones from normal publications — have listed the Haitian immigrant population as ranging anywhere from 20,000 to 30,000 people. The problem is that that number is almost certainly wrong.
Continue reading “A Very Important Read”Welp, Turns Out Police ARE Investigating Trump’s Arlington Cemetery Fiasco
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Not Done Yet!
Despite the Army declaring the “case closed,” a police investigation is underway into the Arlington National Cemetery fracas involving a cemetery staffer and two Trump campaign staffers, ABC News reports.
The police department at Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall, where the cemetery staffer filed a report, is apparently conducting its own investigation that is technically outside of the Army chain of command.
Among the things we learned from ABC News:
- An investigator with the base’s police department has sought in recent days to contact Trump campaign officials about the incident in order to interview the campaign staffers involved.
- Attorney Stanley Woodward is representing the Trump campaign staffers.
- The base’s police department is administered by the Army but is staffed by federal law enforcement officers, not military police.
- In a related development, the Army declined to release documents pertaining to the incident because “those documents are part of an open investigation,” ABC News said.
An unnamed Defense Department official confirmed the essence of the ABC News report, saying in a statement: “The investigation is ongoing at Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall by base authorities.”
The Foiled Assassination Attempt Against Trump
New details emerged about the Florida golf course incident Sunday that marked the second apparent assassination attempt against Donald Trump since July:
- Federal firearms charges were filed against the suspect, 58-year-old Ryan W. Routh. Additional criminal charges may be forthcoming.
- Routh may have been lying in wait for more than 11 hours before he was detected by Secret Service.
- Routh never got off a shot in the encounter with the Secret Service.
Secret Service Under Renewed Scrutiny
- The Secret Service conceded it did not do a full sweep of the golf course before Trump arrival in what was an unplanned outing.
- Experts called the incident a security failure even though the gunman was caught and Trump was uninjured.
- Trump’s golf outings have long been a concern for the Secret Service, but Trump himself largely dismissed those concerns.
The Suspect
- WSJ: U.S. Authorities Were Warned About Suspected Trump Gunman
- NYT: Suspect in Apparent Trump Assassination Plot Crusaded for Many Causes
- Reuters: The Erratic Life of a Struggling Roofing Contractor
The World’s Richest Moron Is Dangerous
Elon Musk deleted his own post on his platform X that wondered aloud why no one was trying to assassinate Joe Biden or Kamala Harris.
Trump-Vance In Action
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) deployed 36 state troopers to Springfield to guard 17 schools after the Trump-Vance ticket made the small city the centerpiece of its racist jihad against immigrants, specifically targeting the local Haitian immigrant community.
Dehumanization Alert
Portage County (Ohio) Sheriff Bruce Zuchowski posted on Facebook that local residents should keep a list of homes displaying Kamala Harris yard signs “Sooo…when the Illegal human ‘Locust’ (which she supports!) Need places to live…We’ll already have the addresses of the their New families…who supported their arrival!”
Oopsie!
Brian Beutler with an important catch from JD Vance’s Meet the Press interview Sunday: Trump-Vance is coming for Obamacare, and Vance tipped it off in a way that might be lost on most journalists and lay persons.
2024 Ephemera
- Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, plans to boot the Russian state TV network RT from its platforms.
- TPM’s Hunter Walker: Before He Hated Her, Donald Trump Thought Taylor Swift Was ‘Terrific’
- Scientific American makes a presidential endorsement for just the second time in the magazine’s 179-year history: Kamala Harris. The first time was when it endorsed Joe Biden in 2020, making Donald Trump the common theme here.
No Funny Business
A bipartisan group of nearly 20 ex-governors is sending a letter to their sitting successors urging them to certify the November election results by the Dec. 11 deadline prescribed by federal law.
Mark Meadows Loses In Arizona
A federal judge rejected Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’ effort to remove the fake electors case against him in Arizona from state court.
The Supreme Court Isn’t Going To Fix Itself
If you can’t get enough of the NYT’s groundbreaking report over the weekend on the Supreme Court’s last term, I highly recommend Georgetown University law professor Steve Vladeck’s latest piece. A sample:
All of this leads to a discomfiting conclusion: This is a Court that is well aware of the political storms surrounding it (and, in some cases, for which it is responsible), and is not simply pulling in its oars. No one in Kantor and Liptak’s reporting is arguing for even a modicum of judicial restraint; and none of the justices to the right of Justice Barrett seem at all worried about the institutional impact of continuing to divide so transparently along partisan and ideological lines in the Court’s highest-profile (and themselves politically charged) rulings. What all of that suggests is that this is all going to get worse before it gets better—and that any arguments that the Court has somehow gotten past the nasty, bitter, and highly charged infighting that has characterized the past few terms are wanting for any basis in reality. This Court isn’t going to fix itself; perhaps we ought not to sit around waiting.
Vladeck’s full piece is here.
It Was Only A Matter Of Time Before This Happened
ProPublica: Abortion Bans Have Delayed Emergency Medical Care. In Georgia, Experts Say This Mother’s Death Was Preventable.
Kilauea Resumes Erupting
Magmatic movement over the weekend culminated in a small eruption on the flanks of Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano Sunday night. The eruption paused most of Monday but resumed late in the day and continued after darkness fell. Here’s an overflight of the two new rifts that opened overnight Sunday:
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Before He Hated Her, Donald Trump Thought Taylor Swift Was ‘Terrific’
Former President Donald Trump used to be a Swiftie. More recently, there is trouble between the two of them.
On Sunday, Trump took to his Truth Social platform to issue an all caps declaration: “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!”
Continue reading “Before He Hated Her, Donald Trump Thought Taylor Swift Was ‘Terrific’ “Yes. Trump Started The Fire. And Everyone Knows It.
When a young man took a shot at Donald Trump in July it was the first time political assassination, attempted or otherwise, had intruded into presidential politics in more than 40 years. Now it appears to have happened a second time in two months. What’s going on here? It comes almost a week after Donald Trump and JD Vance began a campaign of racist anti-immigrant incitement focused on Springfield, Ohio, an effort so destructive and reckless that the Republican mayor and at least two of the three Republican County supervisors have either begged Trump to stop or publicly questioned whether they will even vote for him because they’re so upset about it. The city has been rocked over the last week by repeated bomb threats, school evacuations, the shuttering of one local college which has moved to remote study. This isn’t even counting the experience of Haitian migrants who are being terrorized by the pro-Trump extremists Trump and Vance have incited against them.
Continue reading “Yes. Trump Started The Fire. And Everyone Knows It.”Pennsylvania’s Mail-In Ballot System Has A Quirk That Trump Will Again Try To Exploit
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.
Mail-in voting in Pennsylvania will not begin on Sept. 16, 2024, as was previously slated. Due to ongoing court cases, the past is poised to repeat itself in the commonwealth in the upcoming presidential election.
Legal battles over Pennsylvania’s election system drew national attention in 2020 as former President Donald Trump and his allies in the state leveraged quirks of the system to sow doubt about the results of the election.
Trump is setting the stage to do the same in 2024. On Sept. 8, 2024, he posted to Truth Social declaring that a Tucker Carlson interview revealed that “20% of the Mail-in Ballots in Pennsylvania are fraudulent.” He called for the U.S. attorney general, the FBI and Pennsylvania Republicans to do something about it.
Given the decentralized nature of elections administration in the United States, every state — and even county — has its own rules for ballot counting and voting.
As an associate professor of public policy who closely follows Pennsylvania politics, I have been watching the situation with mail-in ballots over the past four years. Here’s why I expect the same problems to rear their heads again this November.
Act 77
For much of its history, Pennsylvania allowed mail-in absentee voting for only a very specific set of voters, such as those traveling out of state on Election Day.
In 2019, Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf and the Republican-controlled General Assembly passed Act 77, which made wide-ranging reforms to the state’s election system.
Each party got something big.
Democrats got no-excuse, mail-in voting, meaning anyone can request to vote by mail. Mail-in voting has been used far more by Democratic than Republican voters in Pennsylvania, though this has been driven in part by misinformation surrounding the security of mail voting.
Republicans, meanwhile, got rid of straight-ticket voting that had hurt them in down-ballot races. Straight-ticket voting is when voters are able to pick an entire slate of Democrats or Republicans with just one mark rather than having to vote in every single race.
COVID and the 2020 election
No-excuse, mail-in voting in Pennsylvania was road tested amid a global pandemic.
During the Pennsylvania primary in June 2020, there were significant delays in processing a surge of mail-in ballots. For context, only 4% of votes cast in Pennsylvania in the 2016 presidential election — before Act 77 — were sent by mail. That share ballooned to 39% in the 2020 election.
Of course, the increase was not driven solely by Act 77 but also the COVID-19 pandemic. Mail voting was popular because it allowed people to vote from their homes without risking possible exposure to the virus. Alarm bells sounded among county officials, though, when some Pennsylvania counties took more than a week to finish their counts and certify results in the primary.
Over the summer of 2020, experts began to talk of a “red mirage” or “blue shift” in states such as Pennsylvania. The expressions describe the phenomenon when in-person votes counted on Election Day favor Republicans but then Democrats take the lead in the days after as mail-in votes, which tend to favor Democrats, are counted.
Trump claimed that such a phenomenon was evidence of a “stolen election.”
PA prohibits ballot preprocessing
One reason it is so easy to contest election results in Pennsylvania is that the state is among the very few — others include Alabama, Mississippi and North Dakota — that do not allow preprocessing of mail-in ballots.
Preprocessing refers to removing mail ballots from their envelopes, checking whether the ballots are valid, flattening them and setting them aside to be counted on Election Day.
The process sounds simple, but it is time-consuming when done tens of thousands of times by county election officials.
Some states, such as Oregon, allow election workers to start this process right away, as ballots come in. Others, such as Arkansas, allow preprocessing to start only five to seven days before Election Day. Some states also allow voters to “cure,” or fix minor mistakes on their ballots — such as a missed signature or other field — if election officials spot an error.
Pennsylvania, however, does not allow ballot processing to start until 7 a.m. on Election Day, when polls open. This is a major reason for the significant delays in counting ballots in the state.
And it is a quirk that Trump and his allies exploited in 2020 to cast doubt on the results.
Problem not fixed
The warning of delays in the 2020 primary and growing rhetoric from Trump around a stolen election almost pushed the Pennsylvania General Assembly to fix the problem in September 2020. However, a deal fell apart over other proposed changes such as banning ballot drop boxes.
House Democrats have attempted to pass a stand-alone preprocessing bill, including one earlier this year. It would allow counties to begin processing – but not counting – ballots seven days before Election Day.
But the fallout of the 2020 election seems to have poisoned the well on election law compromise, even when it comes to preprocessing, which is widely supported by election experts and does not confer a particular advantage to either party. Also, not all counties want to preprocess. For example, less populated counties do not want to use the extra personnel and financial resources, as it doesn’t save them much time.
What to expect
While Sept. 16 is the first date that counties in Pennsylvania must begin processing mail-in voting applications, multiple court cases surrounding the commonwealth’s ballot and when and how they should be counted are still pending.
This means that while Pennsylvanians will have their applications processed in September, they likely will not receive a mail-in ballot until October.
Meanwhile, the General Assembly is unlikely to change rules against preprocessing before the 2024 election.
Mail-in voting has not faded with the pandemic. During the 2022 midterm election, 1.4 million Pennsylvanians requested to vote by mail. Given voter turnout is much higher during presidential election years, Pennsylvania can expect that number to rise in 2024.
Pennsylvania has redesigned its mail-in ballot, which has resulted in fewer rejected ballots. Still, the Trump campaign is already working to exploit technicalities to reject mail-in ballots in the crucial swing state.
Ongoing lawsuits on top of ballot-counting delays may well delay certification of the commonwealth’s results in November. Given its emerging status as the must-win state in the 2024 election, Pennsylvania will once again have the eyes of the nation on its election system.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Abortion Bans Have Delayed Emergency Medical Care. In Georgia, Experts Say This Mother’s Death Was Preventable.
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
In her final hours, Amber Nicole Thurman suffered from a grave infection that her suburban Atlanta hospital was well-equipped to treat.
Continue reading “Abortion Bans Have Delayed Emergency Medical Care. In Georgia, Experts Say This Mother’s Death Was Preventable.”American Politics Hit Tilt In One Dangerous Weekend
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Teetering On The Brink
Everything that will confound historians about 2024 was distilled, bottled up, and thrown back in one big shot this weekend. It burned all the way down the gullet.
Former President Trump appears to have been the victim of a foiled assassination attempt on one of his golf courses in Florida. A suspect is in custody.
Trump and his running mate continued to target immigrants for abuse and reprisals, directing their invective against Haitians in the small city of Springfield, Ohio, which is now under siege from threats of violence. Or to put it another way, JD Vance, the state’s junior senator, has spent days stoking an anti-immigrant fervor against his own constituents that is crippling the functioning of a city he represents.
When pressed, Trump refused to denounce the bomb threats in Springfield, but he did manage to declare his “hate” for the world’s biggest pop star, who endorsed his opponent. A WSJ headline was a reminder that sometimes saying exactly what happened is the best way to capture the inanity of the moment: “Trump Posts Disdain for Taylor Swift, Vance Defends Pet-Eating Claims.”
In the midst of the simmering political violence, we got a glimpse of the internal workings of a deeply corrupted Supreme Court that in its last term handed Trump unprecedented victories against the rule of law and a gave him an endlessly long leash with the promise of wide-ranging immunity from prosecution if he were to be re-elected.
Amid the chaos, the slo-mo deterioration of civic order, and the erosion of democratic institutions, there is an impending national election that remains far too close to call and upon which almost everything we take for granted in American public life depends.
Quite a weekend.
On The Ground In Springfield, Ohio
A sampling of some of the real-world impacts of the Trump-Vance racist vitriol:
- Two Springfield hospitals were locked down Saturday after bomb threats.
- Wittenberg University closed all of its campuses for the upcoming week and moved to remote classes after reported threats.
- Clark State College similarly went to remote classes for the week after receiving threats.
Trump Declines To Denounce Bomb Threats
Reporter: Do you denounce the bomb threats in Springfield?
— Acyn (@Acyn) September 14, 2024
Trump: I don't know what happened with the bomb threats. I know that it's been taken over by illegal migrants, and that's a terrible thing that happened. pic.twitter.com/1PnnSAhujK
A Glaring Admission
JD Vance protests that he didn’t say what he said and tries to re-craft his own words:
Vance claims he and Trump have to "create stories" about migrants eating cats and dogs "so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people."
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 15, 2024
There is then some awkward dead air as Bash tries to highlight the absurdity of what he just said pic.twitter.com/IN26ZGYsvE
The JD Vance Beat
- Politico: Is There More to JD Vance’s MAGA Alliance Than Meets the Eye?
- The Bulwark: JD Vance and the “Southern Bourbons”
Second Trump Assassination Attempt Since July
The Secret Service opened fire on a gunman on the perimeter of the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, where the former president was playing. It’s not clear if the gunman got off any shots before he fled the scene. Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, of Hawaii has been identified in news reports as the man later detained as a suspect in the incident. The New York Times interviewed Routh back in 2023 as part of a story about Americans volunteering to help Ukraine after Russia’s invasion. He has no military experience but he told the Times that he had traveled to Ukraine and was willing to fight and die to help Ukraine.
Trump, who was uninjured, was evacuated from the course.
Vice President Kamala Harris posted on X Sunday afternoon expressing her relief that Trump was not harmed.
The NYT’s Big SCOTUS Story
Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak have extensive new behind-the-curtain reporting on the Roberts court this term in “How Roberts Shaped Trump’s Supreme Court Winning Streak.”
Good Catch
The NYT was among those to catch Trump’s “slip” during the debate last week: “He used the pronoun ‘we’ to describe some of the rioters, grammatically placing himself among those who have been charged with storming into the Capitol.”
Time To Settle?
A judge cleared the way for Smartmatic’s giant defamation lawsuit against Newsmax to go to trial later this month over its bogus claim that the the voting machine company was involved in rigging the 2020 presidential election.
2024 Ephemera
- Vance backtracks on whether Trump would veto national abortion ban.
- Donald Trump called his literal and figurative fellow traveler Laura Loomer a “free spirit” in a California press conference.
- Biden administration announced a new effort to combat the influence of Russian state media network RT as part of its larger effort to combat Putin-backed disinformation and malign influence operations.
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The Wait-And-See Time In A Sprint Of A Campaign Cycle
Hello, it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕
It’s odd to be in a lull amid a campaign as truncated and breakneck as this one.
Continue reading “The Wait-And-See Time In A Sprint Of A Campaign Cycle”