If editorialists had their way …

… things would have been far different

Jeff Bezos, source: New York Post

Jeff Bezos is half right. Newspaper endorsements don’t sway elections. If they did, Donald J. Trump would not have won in 2016.

Eight years ago, the gap between editorialists and the public made the Grand Canyon look like a roadside ditch. Only two of the nation’s top 100 newspapers – the Las Vegas Review-Journal and The Florida Times-Union – supported Trump for president. Fifty-seven editorialized for Hillary Clinton, while 31 (perhaps surprisingly) didn’t endorse anyone, four supported others and three just opposed Trump, according to The American Presidency Project.

“Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election,” Bezos, the owner of The Washington Post, tells us in explaining why he has taken the paper out of the endorsement business. “No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, ‘I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.’ None.”

Clearly, Trump wasn’t the choice of the smart set in 2016. Enough Americans thumbed their noses at editorial writers that Trump could plant his ample bottom behind the Resolute Desk the following January. Yes, it’s true that more voters lined up behind Clinton (48.2 percent) instead of Trump (46.2 percent), but the GOP candidate, nonetheless, swept the Electoral College vote by 56 percent.

So, does this mean that more newspaper opinion writers should go the way of Bezos’s Post? Will the lack of an editorial page thumbs-up make any difference to readers?

Editorial writers at a number of major papers say no on the first point. With Election Day a week away, The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Houston Chronicle, the Seattle Times, The Boston Globe and the Las Vegas Sun have weighed in for Harris. Stumping for Trump so far are the New York Post, The Washington Times and the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

But the endorsers are among a shrinking number of papers advising voters on how to cast their ballots. As recently as 2008, 92 of the nation’s 100 largest newspapers endorsed either Democrat Barack Obama or Republican John McCain for president, according to the Associated Press. But by 2020, only 54 made a choice between Trump and Joe Biden, AP reported, citing the presidency project (47 went for Biden, seven for Trump and 44 took no stance).

Some publishers and editors may side with the Amazon billionaire, who bought the Post in 2013, and who argues that the only thing presidential endorsements do is “create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence.” Readers, he implies, don’t distinguish between editorial pages, which are devoted to opinion, and news pages, ideally devoted to unbiased reporting.

Source: Gallup

That, he suggests, is at the root of widespread public mistrust of the media. Such mistrust, of course, has been growing for decades. Indeed, Trump capitalizes on it with his incessant attacks on “fake news” and, worse, his latest threats to punish media that offend him.

“We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate,” Bezos maintains. “It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose. Reality is an undefeated champion.”

But does it follow that withholding endorsements will help change that view of bias? Even Bezos equivocates: “By itself, declining to endorse presidential candidates is not enough to move us very far up the trust scale, but it’s a meaningful step in the right direction,” he writes.

His argument raises a host of questions. Would newspaper readers be more likely to believe what they read on the front pages because of the absence of calls to action by editorial boards? Do they now disbelieve those front pages just because of opinionated material on the inside of the papers?

Well, consider some recent headlines from the news section of The Washington Post. On the paper’s website, we find “On Elon Musk’s X, Republicans go viral as Democrats disappear,” “Poop artist strikes again with neo-Nazi tiki torch statue for Trump,” “Trump to speak in Florida amid fallout from comedian’s Puerto Rico insult,” and “Autocracy and ‘enemy from within’ are thrust to center of campaign’s final days,” to name a few.

Certainly, Trump supporters would scarcely warm to such pieces. Would such readers believe the outlet to be impartial? Or would they – when fed a steady diet of such headlines over time – just turn away from the paper, deeming it unfair to their golden boy?

Would they, instead, turn to Fox News? There, they could find “news” pieces headed “Momentum shifts against Kamala Harris just days before election and here’s why,” “Harris caught on hot mic admitting her campaign is struggling with male voters,”  and “Trump merchandise outsells pro-Harris by striking margin, as Election Day draws near.”

Bezos is demonstrably correct that editorialists – and columnists, for that matter – don’t make much of a difference in elections, at least once perceptions are set. More than that, though – and far more troublingly — it seems news coverage doesn’t make all that much of a difference.

Citizens nowadays either find media that suits their biases or they just disregard whatever discomfits them, regardless of whether the information is opinionated. Some of my Trump-backing relatives simply dismiss news coverage, either unaware of journalistic ethics of impartiality or blinded by cable TV so much that they argue that all media outlets have agendas. Thus, none are trustworthy.

Source: AIB

But where Bezos may be wrong is in implying that viewpoint-oriented material isn’t important, that it can’t change minds. Support for the Vietnam War waned on newspaper editorial pages (and on network TV, for that matter) long before widespread public support did, for instance, but eventually the public came round.

The editorialists just got there early.

More recently, editorialists in places such as The New York Times urged withdrawal from Afghanistan as far back at least as 2019. This was while Trump was in office and long before the Biden Administration drove its poorly executed abandonment of the 20-year war in 2021. Even then, at the time of the withdrawal, a substantial minority of Americans – 29 percent – did not think the war was a failure. And a surprisingly low 62 percent thought the war wasn’t worth fighting.

Truth be told, some of us who have worked in both straight news and in viewpoint-oriented journalism don’t look on editorials (or op-eds and other commentaries) as all that useful in changing minds on elections. Partisan loyalties and personalities often dictate there. But the edits are vehicles where insights are distilled, where the flood of facts that hit us daily can be sifted, put in context, and, yes, where smart analysis can lead to judgments.

Indeed, Bezos is not barring opinion writers from the Post pages. There, one nowadays still finds “Only care about your pocketbook? Trump is still the wrong choice,” “The U.S. can learn from other countries’ encounters with fascism,” “The Black vote will signal a change, but what kind?: A turn toward nativism among Black voters would send America in the wrong direction,” and more such hardly Trumpian views.

Moreover, he is not barring editorialists from criticizing candidates. On the same day that he explained his rationale in his owner’s note, Oct. 28, the Post’s editorial board lambasted Trump anew and praised Harris in “The right place to make the best case against Trump.” This was in an editorial, an “official” stance of the paper:

“Vice President Kamala Harris will deliver her closing argument in a speech Tuesday at the Ellipse in D.C.,” the editorialists wrote. “This location, where President Donald Trump incited a mob to ransack the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, is fitting and proper. Mr. Trump’s unprecedented efforts to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election, combined with promises to pardon supporters convicted of crimes committed that day, represent Ms. Harris’s strongest argument for why voters shouldn’t return him to the White House. Mr. Trump has shown no contrition for what happened during the worst assault on the Capitol since the British set it ablaze in 1814. Instead, he’s attempted to rewrite history.”

Is that not a condemnation of Trump, if not an endorsement of Harris?

In fairness to Bezos, a longstanding industry view about editorials (and news coverage) suggests that outlets should not get too far ahead of their readers on controversial matters or they simply will lose them. But that doesn’t mean they can’t lead the crowd or try to.

If Denis Morton or Jenn Sherman push too hard or too fast, Peloton riders will just avoid them, as exercise fans know. But riders do expect to be nudged a bit out of their comfort zones.

Back in the day, my editors at BusinessWeek bristled at the idea of letting focus groups of readers determine our editorial content. The argument was that such readers might not know what they want until they see it, and it was up to writers and editors to provide that. Journalists brought judgment that readers needed.

Similarly, when editors at The Wall Street Journal a few decades ago were asked whom they were editing the paper for, they answered “for ourselves.” Of course, that view seems to have changed under editor Emma Tucker, who has remade the paper. Our user-friendly choice-filled days seem to make such responsiveness necessary.

As it happens, both the BusinessWeek I worked for and the Journal long declined to make election endorsements. At BW, the non-stance stance had to do with whether such an endorsement would reflect the views of then-owner McGraw-Hill and the McGraw family or the editors of the magazine – which would likely differ. In the case of the WSJ, the paper hasn’t endorsed a candidate since 1928 (embarrassingly, it backed Hoover). The Journal did say in a recent editorial, though, that it wished that the GOP had chosen someone other than Trump as its nominee for 2024.

“His rhetoric is often coarse and divisive,” the journal wrote. “His praise for the likes of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping is offensive, and betrays his view that he can by force of personality cut favorable deals with them. He indulges mediocrities who flatter him, and his attempt to overturn the 2020 election was disgraceful. These columns preferred any other Republican nominee.”

Hardly warm praise for Trump, whom the writers called “flawed.” But this fell short of an endorsement of Harris.

For its part, The Washington Post until 1976 had mostly avoided endorsements. Even in the critical 1972 election of Richard Nixon, the editorial board stayed neutral.

“In talking about the choice of a President of the United States, what is a newspaper’s proper role?,” the Post board wrote then, as noted recently by current publisher William Lewis. “Our own answer is that we are, as our masthead proclaims, an independent newspaper, and that with one exception (our support of President Eisenhower in 1952), it has not been our tradition to bestow formal endorsement upon presidential candidates. We can think of no reason to depart from that tradition this year.”

Source: The Atlantic

But, given the starkly different options today and the high stakes of this election, is there not reason to think that some smart judgment in an editorial would be useful? The editors at The Atlantic this year decided, for only the fifth time in the magazine’s history, to make an endorsement. Calling Trump “one of the most personally malignant and politically dangerous candidates in American history,” it backed his opponents in 2016 and 2020.

“This year, Trump is even more vicious and erratic than in the past, and the ideas of his closest advisers are more extreme,” the editors wrote. “Trump has made clear that he would use a second term to consolidate unprecedented power in his own hands, punishing adversaries and pursuing a far-right agenda that most Americans don’t want. ‘We believe that this election is a turning-point in our history,’ the magazine prophesied correctly when it endorsed Abraham Lincoln in 1860. This year’s election is another.”

Bezos, along with peers at papers including the Los Angeles Times, the Minnesota Star Tribune, USA Today, The Tampa Bay Times and the Gannett, McClatchy and Alden chains, have taken a different course. Gannett argued that “readers don’t want us to tell them what to think,” as a Poynter Institute analyst reported. The others offered variations on the same theme.

An editor whose paper, The Oregonian, took a different route suggested to Poynter that trying to stay above the fray sometimes doesn’t play well with readers. “Our decision to endorse in this race reverses our policy in 2012 and 2016,” Therese Bottomly said in explaining her paper’s Harris support. “We heard the community’s disappointment over our past non-endorsements loud and clear. Particularly at this precipitous moment, we recognize both the privilege and obligation we have to advocate for the candidate who can best lead our country forward.”

Plenty of folks have been disappointed with Bezos’s decision to sit on the fence this year, with many suggesting he was feeling cowed by ever-increasing threats by Trump to punish his critics. Bezos drew heat from within and without.

Eighteen columnists signed a dissenting column against his choice, calling it “a terrible mistake.” Watergate reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward called the move “disappointing, especially this late in the electoral process.” And former Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron said in a post on X: “This is cowardice with democracy as its casualty.”

As The Guardian reported, the cartoon team at the paper even published a dark image protesting the non-endorsement decision. This was a play on the “democracy dies in darkness” slogan that the Post adopted in 2017, five years after Bezos bought the paper. Author Stephen King and former congresswoman and Trump critic Liz Cheney announced they were cancelling their Post subscriptions, just as more than 200,000 digital subscribers reportedly have.

In the end, this contretemps may amount to just another painful blow to a declining industry. But it could also be a distressing harbinger of the rising threat America faces if the public makes the wrong choice next Tuesday.

Sound and fury

But, rather than signifying nothing, it is most revealinG

Macbeth, a general in one of Shakespeare’s more famous armies, offers a profound insight in Act V of his renowned play. “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” he says.

As the presidential election race tightens, we are hearing many such furious tales from Donald J. Trump.

Consider his “wildly false personal attacks” on the vice president, as The New York Times put it. Trump labeled Harris a “low IQ individual” and suggested baselessly that she has a drinking problem and may be abusing drugs. In a typical case of what the psychologists call projection, he said she was not “mentally or physically able” to be president. He said the sitting VP, former senator and former California State Attorney General was “lazy as hell.”

Will these racist dog-whistles play well with his base? Will the billionaires atop Trumpworld and the white working class and rural folks on the bottom cheer him on for them, seeing them as more evidence that Trump is the ultimate anti-politician? That he speaks like they do?

There’s no doubt that some part of Trump’s base warms to the canards he hurls at Harris, especially since he has so little else to attack her for. But deeply ingrained racism and sexism can’t be the whole story that underlay some 46.3 percent of the electorate’s sentiments.

There’s likely something even more insidious and troubling at play.

Prof. Emeritus John Hibbing, source: The Daily Nebraskan

A well-regarded political scientist who recently retired from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln sheds some light on what animates Trumpers. Prof. John Hibbing, author of The Securitarian Personality: What Really Motivates Trump’s Base and Why It Matters for the Post-Trump Era, points to fundamental splits that divide American voters.

For Trumpers, the key issues are immigration, gun rights, the death penalty and defense spending. For Harris supporters, they are racial justice, healthcare, women’s rights and income inequality.

Hibbing developed this taxonomy from his observations, his work with focus groups and from a national survey that included more than 1,000 Trump backers. He argues that those in the Trump base crave a particular form of security that revolves around their key issues. Trump plays to their longings brilliantly.

Trumpers, Hibbing contends, feel threatened by those they regard as outsiders, groups that include welfare cheats, unpatriotic athletes, norm violators, non-English speakers, religious and racial minorities, and people from other countries. Their key aim – which allows them to disregard Trump’s immorality, dishonesty and corruption – is to elect someone they believe will shield them, their families and their dominant cultural group from these “outsider” threats.

If Hibbing’s framework is correct, what Trumpers crave is a strongman. And Trump’s well-honed image as an alpha male checks most of the boxes for them. Perverse as it may be, moreover, his prolific sexual history (including assaults) and his recent bizarre comments about Arnold Palmer’s genitals may only reinforce that macho image.

John F. Kelly, source: The New York Times

Indeed, one can only wonder whether recent comments about whether Trump is a “fascist” play well to the Trumpers Hibbing describes — that such claims may be counterproductive to those making them. Trump’s former White House chief of staff John F. Kelly, a retired Marine general, told The New York Times that Trump’s desire for power fits the fascist label.

And Mark T. Esper, who served as Trump’s secretary of defense, amplified that. On CNN, he said that “it’s hard to say” Trump does not fall into the category of a fascist. Moreover, as The Washington Post reported, that followed a warning from retired Gen. Mark A. Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in a new book that the former president is “fascist to the core.”

Such sentiments give credence to the recent report in The Atlantic about Trump’s dissatisfaction with generals who bridled at his dictatorial impulses. “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had,” Trump said in a private conversation in the White House, the magazine reported.

But will enough Americans be alarmed by such comments, troubled by such judgments by people once close to Trump? Will most see Trump’s seeming “strength” as dangerous, unlike some Trumpers? And, more to the point, will they see Harris as a better alternative?

Of course, some may just play down or ignore such sentiments. Consider the apologists at The Wall Street Journal, who seem oblivious to Trump’s tsarist ambitions. The editorialists there invoke American checks and balances to suggest he would be reined in. By contrast, The New York Times warns that Trump’s “inner circle has been purged of people who say no. In a second Trump term, the secretary of state would not come from Exxon, and the secretary of the Treasury would not come from Goldman Sachs. The smart — and courageous — people have left the room.”

Certainly, some will warm to Trump’s tyrannical inclinations and his latest barbs. But this last-dash sound and fury could also cost him. Sensible voters may respond to Harris’s arguments that Trump’s vileness – the scorching and divisive language and lies that come so naturally to him – should be put well behind us. After all, does anyone really want more of this for the next four years?

Still, with most voters likely to have cemented their impressions of both candidates — and with many having already voted — it’s unclear how much difference the closing-days rhetoric will matter. Each candidate now wants mainly to mobilize their bases and, perhaps, chip away at the support of the other.

For her part, Harris aims to undermine Trump’s strongman image. Thus, her attack on him for being “weak.” Harris challenged Trump recently for refusing to release a report on his health, sit for a “60 Minutes” interview and commit to another presidential debate – all of which she did.

“It makes you wonder: Why does his staff want him to hide away?” she asked the crowd at a rally in Greenville, N.C. “One must question: Are they afraid that people will see that he is too weak and unstable to lead America?”

And she has embraced the “fascist” label for him. “We must take very seriously those folks who knew him best,” she said in a CNN town hall, referring to the numerous former Trump advisers who have broken with him.

“Do you think Donald Trump is a fascist?” host Anderson Cooper asked Harris. “Yes, I do. Yes, I do,” she replied.

She added that voters care about “not having a president of the United States who admires dictators and is a fascist.”

Strong charges, of course. But Harris is also waving a red flag about Trump’s mental acuity. And, given his increasingly erratic speech, her criticisms may carry weight with some voters still mulling over their choice.

Source: The Conversation

Trump’s mental fitness has long been in doubt and, at 78, it’s as reasonable to question that as it was to question President Biden’s sharpness. Lately, Trump has served himself ill in this regard with the meandering talks he calls his “weave.”

He infamously cut off questions at a recent town hall outside Philadelphia and instead swayed to music on stage for 30 minutes. He bobbed his head through the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.,” swayed to Rufus Wainwright’s “Hallelujah,” watched a Sinead O’Connor video, rocked along to Elvis, watched the crowd during “Rich Men North of Richmond” and then, finally, left the stage to shake hands on his way out.

More recently, his campaign canceled at a virtual town hall he was scheduled to take part in, suggesting he is tiring. Reporters have noted that his energy is flagging at some events, and he’s lost his way verbally – never his strength anyway.

He discussed the porosity of limestone in Washington, D.C., as he complained about vandalism. He referred to his so-called Front Row Joes — devoted superfans he often points out during his rallies — as Front Row Jacks, then corrected himself by calling them “the Front Row Jacks and Joes.” He got Harris’s gender wrong in a comment about vice presidential nominee Tim Walz. And, at a McDonald’s, he couldn’t recall the word “fryer.”

 “Those French fries were good. They were right out of the, uh — they were right out of whatever the hell they make them out of,” Trump said.

As The New York Times reported on Oct. 17, Trump described mail-in ballots as “so corrupt,” reviving one of his false attacks on the 2020 election results. Then, he shared his thoughts about when he watched SpaceX, Elon Musk’s spaceflight company, fly a rocket back onto its launch site.

Such bizarre off-script comments gain attention, for sure. These “flashes of controversy and oddity,” as The Wall Street Journal described them, have spawned headlines and airtime. Perhaps his followers simply disregard them, choosing instead to hear about how much he plans to deport immigrants and otherwise protect them from various threats.

But one has to wonder, do we really want a president who has trouble finishing thoughts as he practices “the weave?” And might geriatricians have other descriptions for such rambling, with characterizations that are more medical and psychological? One must ask: how would incoherence — especially when it’s vicious, racist and vindictive — serve us for the next four years?

The vulgarian strikes anew

Donald Trump plumbs new depths in taSTELESSNESS

Trump and Arnold Palmer, source: People Magazine

In 1988, the cofounders of the now-defunct Spy magazine came up with a memorable description for Donald J. Trump. He long hated the moniker they had for him:  “short-fingered vulgarian.”

But the label stuck. Veterans of the 2016 campaign will recall how the epithet figured into that race. Marco Rubio even criticized Trump’s small hands, saying: “And you know what they say about guys with small hands.”

Crude? No doubt. But Rubio was just descending to Trump’s level – it was his response to Trump’s “little Rubio” crack. And it is all part of a coarse style of politics that Trump has pioneered and perfected, and that he is repeating.

After a Saturday rally in the Pennsylvania hometown of golf great Arnold Palmer, for instance, Trump once again dominated the headlines and the airwaves by making a crude comment about the deceased champion’s genitals.

“Arnold Palmer was all man, and I say that in all due respect to women,” Trump said at the Latrobe gathering. “This is a guy that was all man…. When he took the showers with other pros, they came out of there. They said, ‘Oh my God. That’s unbelievable,’” Trump said with a laugh. “I had to say. We have women that are highly sophisticated here, but they used to look at Arnold as a man.”

You gotta hand it to Trump for that seemingly idle spur-of-the-moment crack. Not only did it garner attention – at which Trump is a master – but it confirmed the views of many of Trump’s devotees about their guy. To them, he is a) refreshingly as blunt and coarse as they are, b) virile enough to salute another’s machismo, and c) the kind of man’s man they want in the White House.

Harris, source: The Appeal

Was this an indirect dig at the idea of a woman as president? A sexist statement that suggests Vice President Kamala Harris could not, as chief executive, command the levers of power as well as the macho Trump could? Well, when a narcissist talks, he generally talks about himself one way or another, and with Trump, a passionate golfer, it’s not a stretch to believe that he wanted to bask in the reflected glory of Palmer, to have voters think of him in the same boorish way.

Ironically, Palmer, who died in September 2016, found Trump appalling. Palmer’s daughter, Peg Palmer, in 2018 recalled a moment when her father saw Trump on television during the 2016 presidential campaign, as The Palm Beach Post reported.

“My dad and I were at home in Latrobe. He died in September, so this was before the election,” she said in a conversation with author Thomas Hauser. “The television was on. Trump was talking. And my dad made a sound of disgust — like ‘uck’ or ‘ugg’ — like he couldn’t believe the arrogance and crudeness of this man who was the nominee of the political party that he believed in. Then he said, ‘He’s not as smart as we thought he was’ and walked out of the room. What would my dad think of Donald Trump today? I think he’d cringe.”

Palmer, she said, “had no patience for people who are dishonest and cheat. My dad was disciplined. He wanted to be a good role model. He was appalled by Trump’s lack of civility and what he began to see as Trump’s lack of character.”

Trump’s focus on manhood is hardly new, though. He has long been preoccupied with genital matters.

As Jezebel reported, when Trump’s former aide Stephanie Grisham wrote in her 2021 book, “I’ll Take Your Questions Now,”  that porn star Stormy Daniels said in an interview that Trump’s penis looked like a “toadstool,” the former president called Grisham “to assure her that his penis was, in fact, not shaped like a toadstool or small.”

Rubio, source: AP via Politico

Indeed, in 2016, he defended his endowment against Rubio’s comments during a primary presidential debate. “Look at those hands, are they small hands?” Trump said at the time, raising them for the audience to evaluate. “And, he referred to my hands – ‘if they’re small, something else must be small.’ I guarantee you there’s no problem. I guarantee.”

Of course, it’s an open question whether Trump’s continuing coarseness will deepen his problems with women voters. No doubt, many of his followers – male and female – will warm to his crudeness or dismiss it as Trump being Trump. But, for more thoughtful women, his vulgarity may confirm anew their worst senses about the man.

Many may recall that the thrice-married often philandering felon is on the hook for more than $90 million after juries found him liable for sexually abusing and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll, for instance. Indeed, Trump’s vileness may remind some that at least 26 women have accused Trump of sexual misconduct, including assault, since the 1970s. His late ex-wife, Ivana, even accused him in a divorce deposition of raping her in a 1989 fit of rage (though she later amended her comment to suggest she felt “violated,” but not criminally raped).

Trump’s problems with women go beyond a sense of decency and his having the “morals of an alley cat,” as President Joe Biden memorably suggested in their debate.

An October New York Times/Siena College national poll found Harris ahead with 56 percent of the likely vote among women now, with Trump getting just 40 percent. That is similar to the breakdown of the final vote in 2020, when Biden garnered 57 percent of the female vote to Trump’s 42 percent, according to exit polls, though Trump appears to have captured a slender majority of the white-woman vote that year.

Indeed, his overall gender gap has driven Trump recently to reach out to women. He appeared in an all-woman town hall in Georgia aired on Fox last week, where he declared himself to be the “father of IVF,” praised Alabama Sen. Katie Britt as a “fantastically attractive person,” and parried a sharp question about his abortion stance: “Why is the government involved in women’s basic rights?”

As the BBC reported, Trump replied by walking the tightrope he has maintained for much of the campaign, taking credit for ending nationwide abortion rights, while also saying abortion policy should be left to the states. Democrats have hammered away at the idea that a patchwork of policies could emerge from such an approach, forcing women to travel for abortions.

At times, Trump has sounded at best as condescending to women. Consider his remarks at a September gathering in Pennsylvania: “You will no longer be abandoned, lonely or scared. You will no longer be in danger. … You will no longer have anxiety from all of the problems our country has today,” Trump said. “You will be protected, and I will be your protector.”

He added that “Women will be healthy, happy, confident and free. You will no longer be thinking about abortion.”

For some women quizzed by the Associated Press about his comments, Trump hit just the wrong notes in that session.

Debbie Walsh, source: NJ Monthly

“This notion that women need to be protected, that women are somehow weak or vulnerable — this sort of protectionist, patronizing tone … I think for a lot of women will just add to that sense of he doesn’t understand their lives, that he doesn’t understand where they are on a whole host of issues,” said Debbie Walsh, the director of the Center for American Women and Politics at the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University.

And Jennifer Lawless, chair of the politics department at the University of Virginia, added: “This kind of language is just more evidence that Donald Trump is out of touch with American women… Not only is the sentiment paternalistic, but the fact that he uttered these words while simultaneously berating women for caring about reproductive rights is stunning.”

To be sure, Trump’s latest bawdiness may just be lost over time, replaced in coming days by new and fresh rambling vulgarity. At the same rally where he saluted Palmer, he called Harris a “shit vice president,” as his crowd roared its approval. If he goes still further down the low road he’s been on, who knows what sort of denigration he might come up with?

The bigger question is: when will Americans wake up to just how perverse – in almost all ways – this candidate is? When will they be as revolted as Palmer was?

Foul language, debasement and politics

Just how far down can we go?

Source: Forward Kentucky

When the sketch comedy show “In Living Color” debuted on Fox in 1990, it introduced America to a wonderful phrase, “Clutch the pearls.” And, as our culture has continued to descend toward some unfathomable bottom, pearl-clutching has become ubiquitous, moving beyond shocked high-society ladies.

So, gentle reader, kindly indulge me while I engage in a bit of it (though I own no pearls).

Actor Sam Elliott, known for portraying cowboys and other men’s men, has just broken some new ground in this area in a fresh ad for Kamala Harris, available here:

In his deep, sonorous tones, Elliott says the vice president has “more courage, more honor, more guts” than Donald J. Trump has ever had. And he tells the bros — presumably the targets of the ad — to shake off anything holding them back. “If it’s the woman thing, it’s time to get over that … it’s time to be a man and vote for a woman.”

Will it work? Who knows? It takes a lot to cut through the clutter, especially with young male voters. Some 36 percent of likely male voters between 18 and 29 favor Trump, compared with only 23 percent of young women, according to the Harvard Youth Poll. While such results suggest that Harris enjoys a commanding lead among young people of both sexes, chipping away at Trump’s support among the bros can only help her.

But one thing about the ad is a bit unsettling — and here comes my pearl-clutching. “Are we really going back down that same f—-ing broken road or are we moving forward …?,” Elliott asks. So, unless there’s some editing, that ad — produced by a Republican anti-Trump group, The Lincoln Project — will not run on network TV.

Perhaps the language — including a word many of us have been known to use at times — is just fine, given the places on social media where the ad runs. That’s where the target demographic is, after all.

Howard Stern and Harris, source: Rolling Stone

Indeed, such demographics and all others are being keenly pursued by Harris and her vice presidential nominee. Tim Walz. That’s why Harris has appeared in such media as Howard Stern’s satellite radio show, “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” and the Call Her Daddy podcast and Walz opted for “Jimmy Kimmel Live.” To be sure, Harris has also sought out the older demographics by sitting for a “60 Minutes” interview, but she wants the younger folks, too.

Still, the unsettling thing about the Elliott ad is that it’s part of a continuing debasement of political culture. Coarse language is just a part of that, a symbol of it.

Sadly, we can lay the blame for this squarely on Trump. This process began, of course, in 2016 with Trump’s juvenile nicknaming of his opponents — Crazy Hillary, Birdbrain for Nikki Haley, Pocahontas for Elizabeth Warren, etc. And that has continued with Crazy Kamala, Comrade Kamala and Tampon Tim. Trump is also known for his coarseness in his rallies, dropping f-bombs with regularity. “Let’s indict the motherf—-er,” he infamously said of Biden at a California GOP meeting last year.

To be sure, some Democrats have aired once-private vulgarities in public, too. In 2019, then newly elected Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib in vowed to “impeach the motherf—-er,” referring to Trump, in a meeting of the liberal group MoveOn.org.

And, as reported by The Washington Post, Harris has been known to be proud of her proficiency in profanity in private — but rarely in public. Last May, though, she bluntly described her thoughts about breaking barriers in a conversation at the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies.

“We have to know that sometimes people will open the door for you and leave it open,” Harris said. “Sometimes they won’t, and then you need to kick that f—ing door down.”

But Trump and his followers degrade language in public on a regular basis. As president, he referred to African nations as “s—holes” and called Joe Biden a “son of a b—-” and, earlier, famously boasted of grabbing women “by the p—-,” of course. His supporters have gleefully echoed his vileness at rallies, wearing T-shirts that say “Biden sucks, Kamala swallows.” Trump’s crowds seem to exult in the freedom he gives them to act, well, like a “basket of deplorables,” as Hillary Clinton memorably put it.

Source: NPR

As the Post pointed out, there is a long history of presidents swearing in private, and maybe a growing level of acceptance for public profanity from leaders. But now Americans are hearing a woman in Harris’s position using unbecoming language, an unfamiliar reality, according to presidential historian Tevi Troy.

“There’s the question of whether it’s appropriate for a president to be cussing. Then there’s the second question of whether it’s considered ladylike to be cussing,” said Troy, who has studied presidents and profanity. “So she’s operating in both spheres, and we’re in uncharted territory.”

Serge Kovaleski, Trump; source: KTLA

This goes beyond public language, though. After all, using decent language — in any setting — is just a matter of showing respect for others. And Trump is a master of disrespect. Recall how he mocked a disabled reporter, Serge Kovaleski, by mimicking his physical challenges.

Trump seems to delight his crowds by waxing profane about many people— Blacks, gays, immigrants, non-Christians of all sorts. In her criticism, Clinton derided Trump followers as racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic and Islamaphobic, and those labels likely still apply to many of them. The attacks work for Trump.

Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, have displayed extraordinary disrespect for legal Haitian immigrants, for instance, in their attacks on residents of Springfield, Ohio. Their demonization and villainization works to whip up fear and racism among his white followers, as it confirms their sense of superiority by invoking tropes such as the eating of household pets.

“The power of such baseless accusations by Trump and Vance lies not in their factual basis, but in their resonance with long-standing racial fears about Black and brown people,” Princeton Prof. Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús writes in Time Magazine. “These anxieties transcend the specific moment of misinformation. Rather they tap into a fears rooted in Christian bias and cultural stigma and then perpetuated by law enforcement, animal rights groups, politicians, and white communities who see non-white immigrants as existential threats to the purity of American neighborhoods.”

Source: Black Agenda Report

Ever since Trump derided southern border-crossers as criminals and rapists in 2016, he has found a ready market among fearful white followers. One hears of people in lily-white areas rushing out to buy guns to protect themselves from the invading hordes Trump has described.

“Fear, like hope, can be very motivating and is not inherently bad. The challenge is to identify when fear is being used deceptively,” Dolores Albarracin, a professor of psychology, business, and medicine at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said in an American Psychological Association piece in 2020. “For example, intentional distortion of evidence is within the realm of disinformation and often foments fear for political purposes.”

Certainly, the denigration of Haitian immigrants falls into the latter category. Trump campaign lies about the pets were denied by Republican Gov. Mike DeWine and local Springfield, Ohio, officials, but Trump followers breezed right on by the facts. “Bomb threats, school closings, rallies, and more have come at the cost of misinformation and baseless claims,” the Columbus Dispatch reported. “Associating eating pets with immigrants is often considered a longstanding trope that exposes racism and discrimination.”

Such cultural debasement by Trump extends to the media and other institutions, as well, of course. The former president has long excoriated the media and his recent refusal to appear on “60 Minutes,” for fear that his misstatements would be called out by fact-checkers, just underscores that.

He has also demeaned the legal system (and not exclusively over his 34 felony convictions, as well as the $88 million in judgments he must pay a woman he raped, E. Jean Carroll). And he has similarly discredited the FBI, intelligence agencies and the military.

Of course, if Trump wins on Nov. 5, we can expect more of the same. If he loses — and if the GOP consigns him to the political dustbin — perhaps we can hobble back to a culture of normalcy. The Elliott video for Harris is not an official campaign ad and it’s highly unlikely Harris would greenlight such language in forthcoming ads. We could also expect that a President Harris would likely keep her salty language behind closed doors.

Celebrating the best of American culture is a lot of what Harris is about. Trump is all about something else entirely.

Marketing can move from silly to dangerous

Trump’s badly timed opportunism is anything but PresidentiaL

Source: Marketoonist

On a recent Southwest flight, the attendant gave out little bags of pretzels bearing some peculiar language. “My mom and I created Stellar Snacks in 2019 with a dream of crafting pretzels infused with passion,” the writing on the bag said. “It’s not just a pretzel … it’s a labor of love.”

Oh, really now.

Yes, marketing is important. And yes, it’s normal for marketers to stretch the truth just a bit to sell their wares.

Source: WhoWhatWhy

But there are times when we must call BS for what it is. That’s kinda the way it is in our presidential election race now, too.

There’s an extraordinary amount of BS out there as we get closer to Nov. 5. Today, for instance, Donald J. Trump offered this reaction to the missile attack by Iran on Israel:

“Under ‘President Trump,’ we had NO WAR in the Middle East, NO WAR in Europe, and Harmony in Asia, No Inflation, No Afghanistan Catastrophe,” Trump posted on his Truth Social outlet. “Instead, we had PEACE. Now, War or the threat of War, is raging everywhere, and the two Incompetents running this Country are leading us to the brink of World War III. You wouldn’t trust Joe or Kamala to run a lemonade stand, let alone lead the Free World.”

Never mind that in 2018 Trump pulled the U.S. out of a U.S.-Iran nuclear deal, ratcheting up hostilities between the countries. Ignore the fact that an Iran-backed group then, in December 2019, launched rockets at an Iraqi military base, killing a U.S. contractor and wounding our soldiers and others, and provoking retaliatory strikes in Iraq and Syria by the U.S. Never mind that in the following month, the U.S. killed the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force, triggering missile attacks on U.S. forces and killing some of them.

This was peace?

The truth – as opposed to the marketing – is that tensions between Israel and Iran, as well as between Iran and the U.S. have been a constant for many years. They are erupting now, all in the wake of the October 7, 2023, invasion in Israel by Iran-backed Hamas. That triggered Israel’s Gaza invasion and led to increasing rocket attacks on Israel by Hezbollah. And that, in turn, set off the Israeli reaction in Lebanon that has led us to today’s missile attacks by Iran.

But none of those historical facts deter Trump from arguing that these eruptions — and others — would never have happened had he been in the White House again.

“If I was in charge, October 7th never happens, Russia/Ukraine never happens, Afghanistan Botched Withdrawal never happens, and Inflation never happens,” Trump claimed. “If I win, we will have peace in the World again. If Kamala gets 4 more years, the World goes up in smoke.”

His claims sound wonderful. They are also ahistorical nonsense.

A Hamas tunnel in 2016, source: NPR

How would Trump have halted Hamas, whose members built extraordinary tunnel networks in Gaza for years, including during his term? What could he have done to deter the group that he hadn’t done before, as it burrowed beneath Gaza? The terrorist group’s timing likely had more to do with it seeing a chance to take advantage of tumult in Israel over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s domestic problems. Indeed, Hamas’s war-triggering actions likely had even more to do with the threat it saw in then-growing Saudi-Israel rapprochement and diminishing support in Gaza for the group.

As for Russia and Ukraine, the latest war’s roots go back at least to 2014, a couple years before Trump’s ascension to power. Back then, Russian paramilitaries took over Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk areas and Russia then invaded Crimea, taking control of the region. Thousands of Russian soldiers flooded in over the next several years and fierce fighting raged between 2017 and 2019, during Trump’s term. Did Trump do anything to toss Russia out? Despite a peace agreement, Russia then began its fullscale invasion in early 2022. It was all of a piece.

And, as for Afghanistan, one can only wonder why Trump maintained U.S. troops there during his entire term. It was clear for many years that the U.S. had won nothing enduring in the country since 2001. So why did Trump leave the withdrawal from one of America’s longest and least successful wars to his successor? Why were American soldiers still dying there on his watch?

Source: Amazon

Trying to rewrite history in the self-serving way Trump is doing may fool some of his backers. After all, they likely see him as a strongman who can set the world aright and cure domestic and foreign ills. In his rhetoric, Trump offers strength, harmony and peace.

But was there really harmony and peace during his tenure – at home or overseas? Recall that George Floyd, a Black man, was killed by police in May 2020, in Minnesota, during Trump’s last year in office. The event triggered protests nationwide, with disturbances in well over 100 cities. As for peaceful relations overseas, recall the coronavirus tensions with China in 2020 and Beijing’s clampdown on Hong Kong, as tensions between the U.S. and China grew. Were these times of tranquility?

For all of his business failures – which include six bankruptcies – Trump is a clever marketer. “The Apprentice” turned him from a struggling developer with a bad rep in New York into a national emblem of tough-minded leadership, never mind that the show was a venue in which facts never mattered.

Now, Trump’s efforts to rewrite history will likely con some of his devotees just as the “reality” show did. Perhaps they are the sort of folks who can believe that pretzels can be “infused with passion.”

But will he fool anyone with a passing acquaintance with facts? Anyone who has some understanding of history?

What is happening now in the Middle East is extraordinarily dangerous. Keeping full scale war at bay will require delicate diplomacy, and even with that a far greater explosion may well be unavoidable. If Trump were a decent leader, he would keep his mouth shut about that and, maybe, even support President Biden’s efforts.

Source: Google Finance

But then, this is a man who sells sneakers, Bibles and even a picture book bearing a cover with the image of him raising his fist after being grazed by a bullet. You can get Trump’s signature on the book for $499. This is a man who brought public a social media company, Trump Media & Technology Group, through a shady offering, only to have it fall from its March 2022 high of $97.54 a share to the current $16 (no doubt, with many of his followers taking the hit).

The would-be president’s marketing is shameless. Now, at a time of global peril, it’s also dangerous.

Easy fixes sometimes are anything but

Contrasting the Trump and Harris economic planS

Source: Directors & Boards

Politicians like easy-sounding solutions to complex problems, particularly on the economic front. Their fixes often are aimed at pleasing voters who know little or nothing of economics. At times, their efforts smack of pandering and might even be harmless.

But, at other times, they can be quite dangerous — as seems likely with the plans of Donald J. Trump. Just mull over what 16 Nobel laureate economists have to say:

“The outcome of this election will have economic repercussions for years, and possibly decades, to come,” warns a letter signed by Columbia Prof. Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist at the World Bank; Harvard Prof. Claudia Goldin, former director of the Development of the American Economy program at the prestigious National Bureau of Economic Research, and 14 other Nobelists. “We believe that a second Trump term would have a negative impact on the U.S.’s economic standing in the world and a destabilizing effect on the U.S.’s domestic economy.”

They caution that Trump’s plans, including his goal to impose tariffs of 10 percent to 20 percent on foreign goods and 60 percent on Chinese-made products, will do exactly the opposite of what he’s been promising as he has attacked the Biden-Harris administration for inflation. Just as inflation rates are coming down, those duties would kickstart a price-spiral anew.

Source: Dividend Power

“Many Americans are concerned about inflation, which has come down remarkably fast,” the economists argue. “There is rightly a worry that Donald Trump will reignite this inflation, with his fiscally irresponsible budgets. Nonpartisan researchers, including at Evercore, Allianz, Oxford Economics, and the Peterson Institute, predict that if Donald Trump successfully enacts his agenda, it will increase inflation.”

And listen to some of those folks, who’ve crunched the numbers on Trump’s plans:

The Peterson Institute for International Economics think-tank in Washington calculates that 20 per cent across-the-board tariffs combined with a 60 per cent tariff on China would trigger a rise of up to $2,600 a year in what the average household spends on goods,” reports the Financial Times. “They say that the tariffs would disproportionately hit the low-income households that Trump claims his economic policies help protect.”

And the Peterson Institute is hardly alone. The Tax Policy Center, concurs, albeit with slightly different figures because Trump has floated both 20 percent and 10 percent global tariffs.

“A worldwide 10 percent tariff and a 60 percent tariff on Chinese goods proposed by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump would lower average after-tax incomes of US households in 2025 by about $1,800, or 1.8 percent,” writes center senior fellow Howard Gleckman, a former BusinessWeek colleague. “They’d reduce imports into the US by about $5.5 trillion, or 15 percent, from 2025–2034.”

The consensus among the experts is that Trump’s plan would hit consumers hard. The effect would show up not only in finished goods made overseas, but in anything manufactured in the U.S. with foreign-made components, as the higher costs would filter through the system. Thus, there would be no escaping the higher prices.

Beyond just ratcheting up inflation, Trump’s plans could drive down gross domestic product and employment.

“Candidate Trump has proposed significant tariff hikes as part of his presidential campaign; we estimate that if imposed, his proposed tariff increases would hike taxes by another $524 billion annually and shrink GDP by at least 0.8 percent, the capital stock by 0.7 percent, and employment by 684,000 full-time equivalent jobs,” says another nonpartisan group, the Tax Foundation.

The kick in the teeth that Trump could deliver to the nation may also come at a tough time, as the economy slows under the Federal Reserve’s so-called “soft-landing” approach. The Fed, the independent group that has the job of reining in inflation, recently lowered interest rates by a substantial half-point in the federal funds rate. That’s because its leaders believe that inflation is moving toward a sustainable 2 percent annual rate, the Fed’s target, without driving unemployment up to unacceptable levels.

The Federal Reserve, source: Investopedia

As the Fed tries to balance employment and inflation, it is no doubt mindful that the national jobless rate recently rose to 4.2 percent after dipping as low as 3.4 percent, a 54-year-low, earlier in the year. The Fed is following classic economic theory: when the jobless rate is too low, higher wages kick up inflation; when unemployment is too high, of course, that’s a red light for the economy.

In time, the lower interest rates that the Fed has engineered should deliver an upward jolt to the economy. That will set the stage for the next president – whoever that is – to bask in the glow of sustainably low unemployment with reasonable inflation. But that president’s policies, if they are inflationary, could tip the balance.

As the experts see it, the outlook under a Trump presidency is hardly cheerful, particularly if his tariffs trigger an all-out global trade war. “The last time we were in a trade war under Trump, the global manufacturing cycle went into a recession,” Julia Coronado, a former Fed economist who now runs the MacroPolicy Perspectives consultancy, told the Financial Times.

Recall that, during Trump’s term, the economy slipped into recession from February to April 2020, a few months before his tour in the White House ended. Covid drove that downturn, which was marked by a jobless rate of 14.8 percent in April of 2020. When Trump left office, the jobless rate had fallen to 6.4 percent and it fell substantially after that, in part thanks to the infrastructure-spending policies of President Joe Biden.

Source: Bloomberg

Contrast Trump’s plan with Harris’s blueprint for stimulating housing construction, particularly for the middle class. She wants to boost housing supply by expanding the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, providing incentives for state and local investment in housing and creating a $40 billion tax credit to make affordable projects feasible for builders. Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s, and Jim Parrott, a housing adviser under the Obama administration, estimate that America has a shortfall of three million homes right now, and Harris aims to close that gap. The two are advising her campaign on these plans.

Ben Harris of the Brookings Institution, a former chief economist of the U.S. Treasury, concurs that the plan is sound. “Critics assail the high cost of subsidies to developers, but they are the best tool the federal government has to incentivize homebuilding,” he writes. “We desperately need more affordable homes in America – millions of them – and the only practical way to boost supply quickly and meaningfully is to offer financial incentives to local governments to expand zoning for affordable housing and to developers to build it. The vice president proposes to do both.”

To be sure, Harris’s plan to provide $25,000 to first-time homebuyers is drawing less praise.

Calling that “a really bad idea,” Michael Strain, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, says: “The ultimate beneficiary of that credit is not going to be first-time home buyers. It’s going to be people selling homes.” Economics writer Peter Coy of The New York Times echoes that, saying the plan would do nothing to boost housing stock, but only demand. “Sellers surely would take advantage of the increased demand by raising their prices,” Coy writes. “So a big portion of the taxpayer money that was intended for home buyers would wind up in the pockets of sellers.”

But it’s far from clear how the construction stimulation efforts and the aid to homebuyers would offset one another. A rush of homebuilding in theory should lead to lower prices, and the numbers of people likely to be involved in her $25,000 support effort seem relatively small.

Moody’s estimates that Harris’s down-payment plan would help some 11.7 million more first-time homebuyers, including 2.75 million first-time Black and Latino homeowners. This is just 3.2 million more first-time homebuyers and 1 million more Black and Latino first-time homebuyers than would take place without her plan.

For her part, Harris is doing some pandering by proposing to attack alleged price-gouging, particularly in grocery costs. Quoting a campaign statement, The Washington Post reported that Harris wants to implement “the first-ever federal ban on price gouging on food and groceries — setting clear rules of the road to make clear that big corporations can’t unfairly exploit consumers to run up excessive corporate profits on food and groceries.”

The details were not clear, the Post reported. But it said Harris would aim to enact the ban within her first 100 days, in part by directing the Federal Trade Commission to impose harsh penalties on firms that break new limits on so-called gouging. The statement did not define gouging or excessive profits.

As Alexander Henke, an economics professor at Howard University, told the school newspaper, Harris’s “vague” plan appears to be more like a political economy move than an economic one, tapping into popular sentiment against price gouging by delivering poll-tested messaging. And Harris should know better — she studied economics at Howard and her father, Donald, is a retired Stanford University economics professor.

What’s more, this horse long ago left the barn. Most of the inflation is now behind us, suggesting that the economy is resolving the inflation on its own and there would be few prosecutions.

Just look at the numbers. Prices for food overall rose 9.9 percent in 2022, faster than in any year since 1979, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The hike was especially sharp in so-called food-at-home prices, up 11.4 percent. But the rises have slowed since then, climbing last year by 5.8 percent overall and by 5 percent for food-at-home. This year, the department expects prices for all food to increase 2.3 percent, with food-at-home prices rising just 1.2 percent.

What drove up prices in prior years? Were greedy corporations taking advantage of consumers? Were nefarious or misguided Biden-Harris policies driving up the price of eggs (something VP nominee JD Vance embarrassingly got wrong in a Pennsylvania grocery store photo-op)?

Not according to experts at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. They point to post-Covid volatility in global commodity prices and a sharp rise in wages for grocery-store workers (likely related to a shortage of such workers). When such “input” costs rise, everyone in the production and retail chain tries to sustain their profit margins. As it happened, foodmakers showed no margin gain in recent years, while retailers showed only a modest uptick in already-thin margins.

Other key elements of the plans of both candidates suggest far different approaches — Trump would take a largely top-down tack while Harris, as she puts it, aims to build the economy from the middle class out. She hit hard on this theme in a Sept. 25 address on the economy and her idea are spelled out on her website.

Source: The New York Times

Harris would boost the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent and she has promised not to raise taxes on people making less than $400,000 per year. She wants to restore and expand the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit, including a $6,000 child tax credit for the first year of a newborn’s life. She would also increase the tax deduction for start-up businesses from $5,000 to $50,000, a move she argues would stimulate innovation among all-important small businesses.

By contrast, Trump wants to reduce the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 15 percent for companies that make their products in the U.S. He already cut the rate from 35 percent during his 2017-2021 presidency. It’s long been known that such moves deplete government revenues. Trump also said he would end taxes on overtime pay and on tips (the tips idea is one Harris also suggests). And Trump also aims to exempt Social Security income from taxes, unmindful apparently of how the Social Security system, even under the current system, will likely be insolvent by 2035 unless policymakers impose a fix.

Trump also wants to extend individual tax cuts he pushed through Congress in 2017, including for the wealthiest Americans. Experts estimate that would reduce revenue over a decade by about $3.3 trillion to $4 trillion.

Harris has also proposed hiking taxes on high-income earners. Americans earning below about $100,000 annually would continue to pay no taxes on long-term capital gains and higher-income families earning up to $1 million would continue paying up to a maximum rate of 20 percent. But those who earn $1 million a year or more would see a rise in the tax rate on their long-term capital gains to 28 percent.

Whether soaking the rich a bit, as Harris proposes, is good or bad economically, it may sell politically. And, if nothing else, it’s likely to do far less harm than Trump’s tariffs would.

Nebraska may matter again

How antidemocratic efforts could sway a presidential election

Source: The Hoover Institution

“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,” French journalist Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr wrote in 1849. “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

Consider 1968 and 2024. There are big differences, of course, but in some ways the years are echoing one another, especially in the pivotal role Nebraska may again play in a presidential election.

Nebraska’s public TV station in 2008 produced a documentary about the state’s key role in the election of over a half-century ago. The piece, “‘68: The Year Nebraska Mattered,” ably charted the ways presidential contenders courted support in the state.

The documentarians may have even more reason to revisit the theme about this year.

Source: Nebraska Public Media

Recall that in 1968, the country was beset by often-violent polarization. Vietnam was tearing us apart, pitting young people against old, conservatives against liberals. Racism was a huge issue, as the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. provoked rioting across the country.

An openly racist strongman candidate for president thought Nebraska was so important to his campaign that he appeared in Omaha. George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, came to the state to court voters for his American Independence Party. His visit triggered rioting in the then-small city and he drew condemnation from the state’s Republican governor, Norbert Tiemann, among many others.

Meanwhile, Democrats also stormed the state for their primary. Sens. Robert F. Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy both came to woo convention delegates, hoping to beat incumbent Vice President Hubert Humphrey for the nomination. On the Republican side, Richard Nixon vied with New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller to his left and Ronald Reagan on the party’s right. Nixon, who was trying for a comeback after losing the 1960 presidential election, stumped for voters in Omaha, too.

As it turned out, Nixon swept Nebraska for the GOP ticket. While Kennedy won over the Nebraska Democrats, his assassination on June 5 left the party ultimately with Humphrey. And, in the end, Nixon prevailed nationally, overwhelming both Wallace and Humphrey that November.

Source: Lincoln.org

Now, Nebraska is looming large again – even larger this time — as Donald J. Trump presses legislators in the state to overturn its practice, dating back to legislation in 1991, of splitting its Electoral College votes by Congressional district. Nebraska will have five such electoral votes and Trump fears that he will lose one such vote, that of the 2nd District, comprising Omaha and its suburbs. While the state overall went for Trump in 2020, he lost that Omaha area electoral vote.

The district has gone twice for Republicans and twice for Democrats in the last four presidential elections, as reported by the Nebraska Examiner. To avoid a repeat of his 2020 loss, Trump wants the state legislature to switch over to the winner-take-all system that prevails in other states, a change that would, in effect, disenfranchise many Omaha-area voters, as the rest of Nebraska tends to go GOP.

As polls suggest that there will be a tight vote nationally, just a single vote in the Electoral College could put Harris over the top, giving her the 270 she would need. Thus, Trump’s electoral gamesmanship.

Unsurprisingly, the opportunistic Republican governor of Nebraska, Jim Pillen, backs Trump’s efforts. But, so far, he hasn’t amassed enough support among the state’s legislators to do this. Pillen went so far as to bring a couple dozen Republican legislators to his mansion to hear an in-person pitch for eliminating the electoral rule from Sen. Lindsey Graham, as the Examiner reported. Trump also spoke by phone beforehand with some of the attendees.

The only other state to have a similar split-vote rule is Maine, which has taken that approach since 1969. So far, however, legislators in the Democratically dominated state have balked at making a change, even though that could help Democrats by taking away a likely GOP single electoral vote. Trump carried a single Maine district in both 2016 and 2020, getting one of the state’s four votes.

The states each award a single Electoral College vote to the winner in each of their congressional districts, plus two votes to the statewide winner of the popular vote.

Maine pioneered the split-vote system as part of an effort to push the country toward a system where the popular vote matters more than the Electoral College does, as the Bangor Daily News reported. Recall that five presidents, including George W. Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016, lost the popular vote but prevailed in the college vote. Trump was swamped in both in 2020, though he continues to deny that.

Source: The Guardian

Trump’s effort to overturn the Nebraska split-vote practice is of a piece with his general antidemocracy approach, of course. His supporters recently enacted a rule in Georgia to require counting ballots by hand, which would likely delay results and, according to critics, could lead to many errors. The change is being challenged in court.

Recall that Trump infamously tried to pressure Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” 11,780 votes to put him over the top in the state in 2020. Trump’s phone call to the official was filled with a slew of false claims by the former president, as the Brennan Center documented.

Recall, too, Trump’s efforts to discredit elections all across the country. More than 60 court cases went against him, including many that involved judges appointed by Trump and other Republicans.

If he does win this fall, Trump’s intentions to subvert democracy are troubling, whether they involve electoral manipulation, concentrating more power in the White House or summoning the military to suppress dissent. His plans — some of which are based on Project 2025, despite his disavowal of the document — have been criticized by such nonpartisan groups as the ACLU and Protect Democracy, along with Democratic leaders from President Biden on down.

Trump has long been an admirer of autocrats, even praising one, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, by name in his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris. The former president warmed to the idea of being a dictator on day one in an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity. And his vice presidential nominee, JD Vance, recently shared a stage with autocrat-loving Tucker Carlson, a disgraced former Fox News host turned podcaster. Carlson did a fawning interview with Vladimir Putin and recently gushed over a Holocaust denier on his podcast.

If Trump defeats Harris — with or without overturning the Nebraska system — his bid to upend the longstanding split-vote approach in Nebraska may just be a sign of what more is to come. Much has changed since the state made a difference in 1968, but we again see a racist demagogue with a strongman approach trying to make a mark in Nebraska at a time of great polarization. The biggest difference this time is that he’s got much of the state’s Republican establishment behind him.

State Sen. Mike McDonnell, source: Nebraska Examiner

The choice of whether to toss out split-voting could be close — maybe even a matter of a single vote in Nebraska’s Republican legislative ranks. Fittingly, that may hinge on local Omaha politics, according to the Examiner. State Sen. Mike McDonnell, a labor leader and Democrat-turned-Republican, aspires to run for mayor of the city.

Would his constituents want to support someone who made their votes irrelevant? When he switched parties, McDonnell said he opposed a shift to winner-take-all. A spokesman said he’s sticking with that stance — for now.

And will antidemocratic efforts prevail nationally? If so, the path to those may begin in the state capitol of Lincoln, Nebraska.

Unfinished business

As the Trump-Harris race shows us, sexism remains alive and well

Source: New York Times

Fifty-four years ago this Sept. 19, Mary Tyler Moore launched an eponymous hit series on CBS about a young woman who was “gonna make it after all” as a TV journalist in Minneapolis. “Mary Richards” would build a life for herself as an independent woman. The show ran for seven seasons and won a stunning 29 Emmys. Widely hailed for being part of so-called Second Wave Feminism, which focused on equality and discrimination, the series dealt with sex, sexism, birth control and other hot-button topics of the time.

Debuting as women were surging into the workplace in larger numbers, the Mary Tyler Moore Show paved the way for other TV efforts that revolved around women demanding to be on equal footing with men. Among them were “Rhoda,” “Murphy Brown,” “30 Rock” and, in some respects, “Friends” and “Cheers,” all heavily influenced by Moore’s groundbreaking effort.

How can it be that a half-century on from then America has still not left the battles over sexism behind? How can it be that for the current generation of women political figures such as Donald J. Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, are doing their best to remind us of what, in many respects, were the bad old days? How can it be that gender remains an issue for many Americans as they ponder whether a woman can serve as president?

Women now approaching their 60s — such as Vice President Kamala Harris, 59 — were children when “Mary Richards” was challenging glass ceilings on Moore’s show. But, all around them, real women were doing the same.

Source: Instagram

Harris’s late mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, for instance, came to the United States from India alone at 19, earned a doctorate in nutrition and endocrinology from the University of California Berkeley, and went on to make important contributions as a researcher focusing on breast cancer. As a single mom, moreover, she raised Harris and her sister after splitting up with Harris’s father.

As gains that women have made are under siege now, it’s no surprise that Harris should adopt as one of her campaign mantras “We are not going back.” In counterpoint to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” evocation of a mythical American past, Harris’s tagline suggests progress in matters such as reproductive freedom, LGBTQ rights, Black and other minority rights, and a modern version of feminism — one in which a woman can become not only the first female vice president, but president.

Harris would have America “turn the page” — another tagline — on Trumpism. That, pathology, as she sees it, is the 78-year-old former president’s use of racial divisiveness, his juvenile treatment of opponents, and his well-recorded disrespect for the military, his disregard for the law (as his felony criminal convictions suggest) — along with his sexism.

E. Jean Carroll, source: CNBC

Trump’s attitudes and actions toward women, of course, seem like something on which turning the page seems well overdue. Recall Trump’s lewdness in the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape. Take note of his sexual abasement of E. Jean Carroll, after which juries found him liable for abuse and defamation, costing him more than $90 million. Don’t dismiss his hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels and his extramarital affair with Playboy model Karen McDougal, part of his well-documented pattern of cheating on three wives.

Remember that about two dozen women have accused Trump of sexual misconduct dating back to the 1970s. Recall that his first wife, Ivana, accused him of rape during their 1990 divorce (she later retracted her claim). Another woman accused him of “attempted rape” in 1993 at his Mar-a-Lago resort, but settled a separate breach of contract case and forfeited the rape claim. Still another alleged that Trump attacked her on a flight to New York. Trump denied it all.

Just how vile is he? He looks on own daughter, Ivanka, in, well, a less than fatherly way. “If Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her. Isn’t that terrible? How terrible? Is that terrible?,” he said in 2006 on ABC’s “The View.” And, in a 2015 interview with Rolling Stone, Trump reportedly celebrated her “beauty,” adding, “If I weren’t happily married and, ya know, her father …” He was even rebuked by his former chief of staff for sexual remarks about Ivanka in front of White House staff.

Source: AP

Trump’s extraordinary litany of public comments define him, too. To pick three from a very long list, he labeled his own former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. and former Gov. Nikki Haley “birdbrain,” said “If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband, what makes her think she can satisfy America?,” and said of talk show host Megyn Kelly “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.” He slandered Harris as “Dumb as a Rock,” only to be humiliated by the former California State Attorney General and former U.S. Senator’s brilliance in skewering him in their debate.

Fortunately, many American women have long had Trump’s number. “President Joe Biden won women by 15 points over Trump in 2020, according to exit polls, up from former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s 13-point victory among women in 2016,” The Washington Post reported. “Polls suggest that this year, women prefer Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris over Trump by similar margins. Harris led Trump by 13 points among women in an ABC News/Ipsos poll” released in early September.

Disdain for Trump is especially pronounced among younger women — even while younger men don’t shun him quite as much. “Sixty-seven percent of women 18 to 29 supported Vice President Kamala Harris in a New York Times/Siena College poll in six swing states last month, compared with 40% of young men,” The New York Times reported. “Fifty-three percent of young men in those states backed Donald J. Trump, compared with 29% of young women.”

Still, substantial numbers of women back Trump, in spite of his misogyny and coarseness. Trump has implied that Harris’s former romantic relationship with Willie Brown, a former San Francisco mayor, fueled her political success. And as the Times reported, he recently shared a screenshot on Truth Social showing an image of Harris and Hillary Clinton, appended with commentary from another user, with a reference to oral sex.

Asked by a Times reporter what she thought about Trump posting that image, co-founder of Moms For Liberty Tiffany Justice stammered: “You know what, I think that, uh, a lot of people say a lot of things. And we’re focused on the issues that are hurting American voters.”

Women who support Trump seem willing to turn their eyes away from a lot. Like Melania Trump, who suggested that her husband’s celebration of sexual assault in the Hollywood Access tape was just “locker room talk,” they wave aside his depravity.

Evangelical women who back him may see Trump as the sinner who is G-d’s tainted vehicle in areas such as abortion, although his waffling on the matter — declining to endorse a national ban — lately has irked many of them and smacked of betrayal. As he has sought to win over women concerned about such bans, Christian leaders have suggested his backpedaling could dissuade religious voters from showing up on Election Day. R. Albert Mohler, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminar, told The New York Times’ The Run-Up podcast that Trump faces the “grave danger” of evangelicals staying home on Nov. 5.

Harris and her team, however, are busy reminding voters that Trump just last spring proudly claimed to have destroyed the protections of Roe v. Wade by appointing Supreme Court justices who gutted the longstanding legal precedent. “After 50 years of failure, with nobody coming even close, I was able to kill Roe v. Wade, much to the ‘shock’ of everyone,” Trump said on his social media platform.

Source: Evangelicals for Harris

Trump, moreover, has lost some of his base even among evangelical women. The Rev. Billy Graham’s granddaughter, Jerushah Duford, famously condemned Trump in 2020. “How did we get here?,” she asked in a USA Today piece exhorting others to abandon him. “How did we, as God-fearing women, find ourselves ignoring the disrespect and misogyny being shown from our president? …. Jesus loved women; He served women; He valued women. We need to give ourselves permission to stand up to do the same.”

In mid-August, Duford made her support of Harris clear, taking part in an “Evangelicals for Harris” Zoom call. “Voting Kamala, for me, is so much greater than policies,” Duford said. “It’s a vote against another four years of faith leaders justifying the actions of a man who destroys the message Jesus came to spread, and that is why I get involved in politics.”

Will more women turn out for Harris? They might if they look into Trump’s history more closely, along with the views of his “childless cat ladies” running mate, Vance. The GOP vice presidential nominee apparently would have many women of the Mary Tyler Moore generation revisit their child-rearing days with grandchildren and give parents more voting power than childless Americans.

“In 2020, [Vance] did not demur when the podcast host Eric Weinstein asserted that helping care for youngsters was ‘the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female, in theory,’” The Atlantic reported. “The next year, Vance suggested that parents should have ‘more power—you should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic—than people who don’t have kids.’ He also tweeted, “‘Universal day care’ is class war against normal people.’”

In past elections when Trump ran, the gender gap was substantial. This time around, it could prove to be a yawning chasm. And when one explores why, the question arises: How could any self-respecting woman, of any age and any religion and any race, support this man?

“Shining city on the hill” or “a nation in decline”?

The facts don’t bear out Trump’s doomsaying — at least in economic terms

Source: Los Angeles Times

In a memorable election debate with President Jimmy Carter on Oct. 28, 1980, GOP nominee Ronald Reagan asked Americans: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”

Amid the stagflation and rising unemployment of the time, many were not. So Reagan went on to turn Carter into a one-term president. Reagan even won the popular vote (unlike Donald J. Trump in 2016). And he went on to serve two terms.

That “better-off” question is rising again, of course (as it often has in presidential races). As one might expect, Fox News has bruited it, citing a poll the outlet took last spring that suggested 52% of voters felt worse off. Still, in a poll a bit later by The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer and Siena College, the outlook was similar, as more than half of registered voters in six battleground states rated the economy as “poor.” Many Americans even wrongly think we’re in recession.

Like many of those voters, some of my relatives are answering “No” to the “better-off” question, saying they felt richer during the Trump years than they have during the Biden-Harris term. And a libertarian friend argued the same point, contending that the reasons many Americans back Trump are not based in racism or sexism, but rather on economics. They just don’t think Democratic policies have helped them, he said.

But are we, in fact, better off? Do the data substantiate or undercut the often-partisan feelings, deeply felt as they may be?

Without seeing their tax returns, of course, we can’t know whether certain individuals have fared better or not since January 2021. We don’t know how their businesses have done or how they have coped if they are on fixed incomes (though Social Security boosts for costs of living of 8.7% in 2023 and 3.2% this year may have helped).

But we can explore the so-called national “vibecession” to see if it is based in facts or is just a matter of hazy memories. And recall that some of those memories have been demagogically reinforced by Trump’s inaccurate bravado about overseeing the greatest economy in world history.

“Nostalgia’s rosy glow makes almost all presidents more popular after they leave office,” Los Angeles Times journalist David Lauter writes. “[T]hat effect may have been especially sharp this time because the steep inflation of 2021 and 2022 caused voters to fondly recall the good economy of Trump’s first three years in office; and younger voters may have only vague memories of Trump controversies that took place in their teenage years.”

Certainly, we must concede that inflation has been a bear, especially for lower-income folks:

Indeed, because higher prices are baked in, it may not help former Vice President Kamala Harris that inflation has moderated substantially this year. As the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Sept. 11, the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers rose just 0.2% on a seasonally adjusted basis in August, the same increase as in July. Over the last 12 months, the all-items index increased just 2.5% before seasonal adjustment.

It also may make little difference to voters that presidents don’t control inflation and can only modestly influence it. Reining in price hikes is the province of the independent Federal Reserve, which is poised to lower interest rates for the first time in four years because of recent progress on the price front. The rollback could make housing and other things more affordable for many, though not for a while yet.

Despite that, of course, Trump has trumpeted inflation as a reason Americans should elect him. He knows all too well that a price spiral has cost incumbent presidents — notably Carter and Gerald Ford — the White House. It helped Reagan to get in, too, so Trump understandably figures it could be a winning issue for him.

What’s more, real incomes haven’t been growing much. As polls expert Nate Silver writes, real disposable personal income, basically how much money people have left after taxes and inflation, is historically one of the best predictors of election outcomes. And it’s been flat during Biden’s tenure: people’s incomes aren’t growing much. Part of that, he notes, was due to spikes caused by COVID stimulus spending — but even over the past year, it’s barely kept up with population growth:

But to maintain that things haven’t been getting better economically — overall — is simply false. If one looks at gross domestic product, for instance, the trend line has been markedly up:

And unemployment rates reflect gains, too. Recall that Trump’s term was marked by a Covid-induced recession that lasted from February to April 2020 (hardly the sort of thing one can look back on fondly). After Trump left the Biden-Harris team a jobless rate of 6.4% in January 2021, the climb back economically challenged the Democrats. It took the labor market a bit less than two years to recover to pre-recession levels. Now, we’re just above historic lows in joblessness, with a 4.2% national rate.

Source: BLS

Moreover, one’s feeling of well-being has a lot to do with housing costs and prices. And for homeowners, times could scarcely be better, at least insofar as their wealth is tied to the value of their homes (the story is different, of course, for renters and would-be home buyers):

To point to just one example, the home of my relatives in suburban Jackson, New Jersey, is now worth $570,000, a good bit more than the $120,000 they paid in 1990 (and that $120K equals $296,500 today, so they’ve had dramatic inflation-adjusted gains), according to Redfin. By that measure alone, they are much better off than in the past.

But much of that data above is backward looking. At the moment, it seems, many consumers are hardly feeling impoverished, and some are beginning to believe Harris would be a better choice than Trump on the economic front.

“Consumer sentiment was essentially unchanged for the fourth consecutive month, inching up 1.4 index points,” the director of the much-watched University of Michigan consumer survey reported in an early assessment of August survey results. “With election developments dominating headlines … sentiment for Democrats climbed 6% in the wake of Harris replacing Biden as the Democratic nominee for president. For Republicans, sentiment moved in the opposite direction, falling 5% … Sentiment of Independents, who remain in the middle, rose 3%.”

Source: Econlib

“The survey shows that 41% of consumers believe that Harris is the better candidate for the economy, while 38% chose Trump,” survey director Joanne Hsu writes. “Overall, expectations strengthened for both personal finances and the five-year economic outlook, which reached its highest reading in four months….”

Of course, big-picture facts may matter little to folks who are convinced the past was better. Indeed, with its Make America Great Again theme, the Trump candidacy is based on a rosy view of the past, one that under scrutiny seems beyond saccharine and, for many Americans, is just inaccurate. His negativism, with comments such as “we are a nation in decline,” play well with some, but will they with most?

To be sure, there is plenty of reason to be concerned about various social pathologies in the United States — school shootings come to mind first and foremost. Despite my libertarian friend’s view that racism and sexism are well back in the country’s rear-view mirror, moreover, many Americans are concerned about such ingrained traits in our national psyche — even if we have had progress there.

“Voters overall have mixed views of the impact of Harris’ gender and race and ethnicity on her candidacy,” a recent report by the Pew Research Center finds. “More say the fact that Harris is a woman and that she is Black and Asian will help her than hurt her with voters this fall. Somewhat more voters see Harris’ gender as a potential negative (30%) than see her race and ethnicity this way (19%).”

“Harris supporters are far more likely than Trump supporters to say the vice president’s gender and race will be a liability,” the report continues. “More than twice as many Harris supporters (42%) as Trump supporters (16%) say the fact that Harris is a woman will hurt her with voters. Fewer Harris supporters think her race and ethnicity will be a hindrance (31%), but just 8% of Trump supporters say the same.”

With comments such as “she happened to turn Black,” Trump is doing his best to rouse the racists among his devotees while trying to undercut Harris’s support among Blacks. Certainly, Trump doesn’t seem to be succeeding in the latter regard, with some 82% of Black voters “definitely” or “probably” in her corner, according to a Washington Post-Ipsos poll.

In the end, to the extent that Harris can get people to focus on facts, she may even persuade some that things have been getting better, Trump’s incessant focus on the negative notwithstanding. And there’s a decent shot things will get even better going forward. Focusing on a sunny future — America as a “shining city on the hill” — helped Reagan. Might that work for Harris, too?

“Me, debate again? You crazy?”

Trump can’t afford another disaster, but the first may make little difference

Source: Facebook, h/t to Mark Vamos

Of course, he won’t debate her a second time.

For the benefit of his followers and his ego, Donald J. Trump declared that he bested Kamala Harris in a debate that even conservatives – smart ones anyway – declared was a hands-down disaster for him.

“Kamala Harris baited Trump with surgical precision, triggering his insecurities — about his crowd sizes, his wealth, his racism, his criminal record — while giving him full scope to wallow in his delusions. In the 90-minute debate, she exposed Donald Trump and broke him, Charlie Sykes wrote on Substack. “Trump was undisciplined, unprepared, and easily goaded into his signature tantrums of grievance, which were as incoherent as they were divorced from reality … Tens of millions of voters watched a live reality television show in which a bitter, confused, and diminished old man was falling apart in front of their eyes.”

Another conservative, David Frum, weighed in in The Atlantic: “He repeated crazy stories about immigrants eating cats and dogs, and was backwards-looking, personal, emotional, defensive, and frequently incomprehensible. Harris hit pain point after pain point: Trump’s bankruptcies, the disdain of generals who had served with him, the boredom and early exits of crowds at his shrinking rallies. Every hit was followed by an ouch.”

Source: AP

Certainly, much of the public appeared to agree that Vice-President Harris mopped the floor with Trump. Shortly after the Sept. 10 fracas, a CNN poll showed Harris winning 63% to 37% among debate-watchers and a YouGov poll showed her winning 54% to 31% among registered voters who watched at least some of the melee, with 14% unsure, according to The Washington Post

So, with his animalistic smarts, Trump is wise to avoid a second debate. How could he possibly want a second round of his angry squinting, venting and waxing irrational and conspiratorial? By contrast, when he controls the stage and speaks to true believers in his rallies, he’s the master of his own domain (reference intentional), the TV-savvy demagogue who can appear slick and poised (despite many slips).

Source: 538

For Harris backers, however, the problem is that the debate may not have moved the needle much with the few undecided folks out there. The latest polls barely budged, with Harris ahead of Trump by just 2.8 points, at 47.1% to Trump’s 44.3%.

Despite Harris’s national lead, the model that polls expert Nate Silver uses still gives Trump a higher chance of winning the necessary 270 Electoral College votes in November, as Newsweek reported. It shows Trump taking the critical battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada and North Carolina. The other swing states, Wisconsin and Michigan, are a toss-up.

How can this be? How can such an inarticulate boor, a proven criminal and business and political failure, still have the slightest bit of credibility? After his disastrous performance, how can his party still rally around him, unlike the Democrats and President Biden?

The answer is complicated. But I suggest it starts, paradoxically, with the fact that Harris won the debate. In her triumph, she is many things that Trump’s followers can’t abide: smart, young, female and Black.

On the smart point, Trump has long been popular with undereducated voters. In 2016, only 29% of Trump voters had college degrees, compared with 43% of Hillary Clinton’s voters. And while non-college whites made up a majority of Trump’s voters (63%), they constituted only about a quarter of Clinton’s (26%). As Trump famously said after winning a Nevada primary in 2016, “I love the poorly educated.”

Did many of them even watch the debate? Some 67.1 million Americans tuned in, more than the 53.1 million who watched Biden self-destruct in the June 27 faceoff with Trump, but less than the 73 million who watched the first Trump-Biden match in 2020 and far less than the 84 million who watched Clinton and Trump battle the first time in 2016.

Source: NPR

And let’s remember that Clinton was widely pronounced the winner in her three debates with Trump back then. Only some 32% of those polled pronounced him the winner in his best performance in the second debate. Just 24% judged him favorably in his first outing with Clinton.

With both Clinton and Harris, I submit, the fact that both women ran circles around Trump intellectually was a negative with much of the undereducated electorate. Recall that such folks likely spent much of their time in school resenting the smart kids, so they likely would give Clinton and Harris little credit for their debating savvy.

Second, Harris at 59 is relatively young, especially compared with the 78-year-old Trump. Middle-aged voters tend to support Trump, while those over 65 are split evenly, and are up for grabs. Thus, we see Harris pounding away on the Biden Administration’s efforts to cut insulin costs, its moves to let Medicare negotiate with drugmakers and its $2,000 cap on out-of-pocket drug costs. We also see Trump’s plan to exempt Social Security payments from income taxes.

A lot of the older folks turned away from President Biden after his debate debacle. Will the Trumpers among them do so now after the former president’s poor performance? Will they see the signs of cognitive decline that have long been evident to mental health professionals?

Psychiatrist Richard A. Friedman, source: Weill Cornell Medical College

“If a patient presented to me with the verbal incoherence, tangential thinking, and repetitive speech that Trump now regularly demonstrates, I would almost certainly refer them for a rigorous neuropsychiatric evaluation to rule out a cognitive illness,” Weill Cornell Medical College professor and psychiatrist Richard A. Friedman wrote in The Atlantic. “A condition such as vascular dementia or Alzheimer’s disease would not be out of the ordinary for a 78-year-old.” 

Still, let’s not forget the potent impact of identity politics. For all her brilliance, her achievements and her skills, Harris is female and Black, guaranteeing an uphill fight. According to the latest Pew Research Center polling, most Harris supporters say Trump’s race will help him (59%), as will his being male (56%). Most Trump supporters, by contrast, say the former president’s race and gender will not make much of difference (66% say this about Trump’s race, 61% say the same of his gender), but the latter numbers are hardly encouraging in a tight race.

Another element in Trump’s favor is the weariness many voters feel about the race, a sentiment the non-stop headline-grabbing nonsense and divisiveness from Trump has fueled. Some Trump supporters in my family, for instance, are just tired of it all and want the election behind them. They don’t want to hear criticisms of their golden boy, no matter how valid. As Harris has noted, even Trump rally-goers drift out of his gatherings early out of exhaustion and boredom.

Finally, there’s the matter of faulty memories. Despite such evidence as the Covid-induced rise in unemployment to 14.8% in 2020 and the 6.4% rate Trump left to Biden, Trump claims his tenure produced the greatest economy in the history of the world. That is simply false, and yet his repetition of the claim appears to have lulled Trumpers into believing it.

GDP Growth, source: Statista

“In the U.S., average annual GDP growth during the past eight years has been almost constant in real terms, except for the Covid period (2020 and 2021): 2.6% in 2017-2019 and 2.3% since 2022,” economist Enrico Colombatto wrote in August.

When Biden took office in January 2021, the unemployment rate was 6.4%, Colombatto added. The rate gradually declined to the low of 3.4% in early 2023 before climbing to 4.2% under an inflation-fighting economic slowdown engineered by the high interest rates set by the Federal Reserve.

Let’s recall, moreover, that presidents can influence economies but they don’t control them. The Fed has far more to do with inflation – admittedly very high under Biden – than a president does. And lately it appears that the Fed will move to lower interest rates.

Back in 2016, Trump’s demagoguery and stagey anger proved remarkably effective. But is the sequel playing badly now? It’s possible that Harris’s efforts to paint an optimistic future, with programs to help housing get on track and tax credits for parents of young children – “the opportunity economy,” as she calls it – will sell better than Trump’s rage. So, too, may her plans for reviving a border-fixing bill that Trump quashed early this year so he could run on that troubling issue.

Nonetheless, given all the possible pitfalls in coming weeks and the shortcomings of polling, it would seem the election remains either candidate’s to win. It may prove to be a matter of voter turnout, which could rest on which candidate can generate more enthusiasm. It may be a matter of knocking on doors, the key for Barack Obama’s victories. So far, Trump’s “ground game” seems weak, as he relies on rallies and headlines.

Certainly, Democrats have been winning the dynamism race ever since Biden yielded to Harris. Can Harris sustain that? Can she convince voters that the exhausting politics of division and the chaos that Trump tends to sow are better left behind rather than repeated for another four years? The questions remain open.