Politics – Page 5 – Media Nation

Win or lose, Kamala Harris has been a magnificent candidate

Kamala Harris. Photo (cc) 2019 by Gage Skidmore.

No matter how this apocalyptic election turns out, I think it’s important for all of us to recognize that Kamala Harris has been a magnificent candidate who ran a great campaign. If Donald Trump somehow manages to pull out a victory, that won’t be on Harris; rather, it will be on voters who’ve decided they’d like to give authoritarianism a try, decency and the rule of law be damned.

I hope that by tonight, or at least within a day or two, we can call her Madam President-elect. If that doesn’t happen, I fear for the future of our country. But we’ll also know that Harris did everything she possibly could. We owe her a debt of gratitude.

And if you haven’t voted yet, get out there.

Northeastern students try to vote — and some run into obstacles

Earlier today I asked my First Amendment students to fan out across the Northeastern campus and interview students about whether they had faced any voting obstacles. They posted their findings on Instagram. Most of those interviewed were from out of state and had tried to vote by mail.

Many of them reported an easy experience, but that wasn’t universal. One student from North Carolina, for instance, reported that in addition to having to pay for postage — not a big deal, but really? — she was required to have two witnesses sign her ballot and print out a photo of her driver’s license.

A Tennessee student said she registered to vote in Massachusetts after running into insurmountable obstacles in her home state. “To register for a mail-in ballot, I had to actually be in Tennessee and show my ID,” she said. “They told me that if I can’t come into the county office with an ID, I can’t vote which is just crazy.”

You can find most of my students’ interviews here. We had some technical difficulties, so you’ll find a slightly different mix here.

Shocking news from Iowa, more sobering numbers from the Times, and a map that favors Harris

The map if the Times’ poll is right*

A huge and encouraging outlier for Kamala Harris on Saturday night. Some more sobering numbers today.

First, the encouraging news. As you may already know, the new Iowa Poll from Ann Selzer, which gets high marks from FiveThirtyEight, shows Harris with a three-point lead over Donald Trump. It’s hard to know what to make of this. But Iowa has gone deep red in recent elections, and virtually every other survey has put Trump well in the lead — including earlier samples taken by the same poll.

The margin, 47% for Harris and 44% for Trump, is being driven by voters over 65, especially women, who say they are supporting Harris by 63% to 28%. But Harris also has a slight edge among older men, 47% to 45%.

What does this mean? I’m not a polling expert. I can tell you that the latest Emerson Poll, which also gets very high marks, continues to show Trump with a nine-point lead in Iowa. On the other hand, a new Miami University poll shows Trump with just a three-point lead in deep-red Ohio, and Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown with a two-point lead over his Republican opponent, Bernie Moreno. I should add that FiveThirtyEight does not rate this poll.

If the Iowa and Ohio results are picking up something real, then Harris may be headed not just for a victory, but for one larger than anyone expects. My own totally unscientific, vibe-based sense of the race is that there are three possible outcomes: (1) a narrow Trump win; (2) a narrow Harris win; (3) a surprisingly substantial Harris win. I’m going for somewhere between (2) and (3). Needless to say, Harris will win the popular vote with ease.

Finally, The New York Times this morning came out with its last poll before Election Day, and it is simultaneously worrying for Harris yet showing some unexpected opportunities. The Times-Siena poll sits atop the FiveThirtyEight rankings, so we can’t ignore it — although, as Josh Marshall has observed, it also relies on a different understanding of the electorate from what most other pollsters are using, and that understanding may be right or wrong.

*Based on the barest of margins in the Times poll (something you really can’t do given that all these numbers are well within the margin of error), Harris would lose the Blue Wall state of Michigan and win Pennsylvania. Wisconsin seems a little safer. But she also has small leads in North Carolina and Georgia.

One other possible good sign for Harris: the Times-Siena poll goes all the way back to Oct. 24 (through Nov. 2), and Harris seems to have built momentum in recent days. In any case, I played around with the map, above, and awarded Harris every state in which the Times poll has her ahead, even by less than 1% (again: don’t try this at home) It shows Harris with 293 electoral votes, 21 more than the 270 needed. I also flipped Pennsylvania to Trump, and Harris would still win, with 274 electoral votes.

Corrections: My map is an accurate reflection of the Times-Siena poll, but an earlier version of this post said that Harris was ahead in Arizona. She’s not. I’ve also corrected the number of Electoral College votes needed to win.

With Election Day upon us, some new numbers suggest that Harris has a slight advantage

Cherry-picking the data while trying to maintain my sanity: With Election Day looming, I want to share four sets of numbers suggesting that Kamala Harris really will dispatch the Orange Menace once and for all.

First, The Economist’s election model, which has showed Donald Trump with slight edge in recent days, has flipped again, giving Harris a 52% chance of winning and Trump 48%.

The model is similar to what FiveThirtyEight and Nate Silver do: it’s based on some high-level math that takes into account polls, poll quality and other measures and then runs multiple computerized simulations. You may recall that similar models gave Hillary Clinton a 70% to 95% chance of winning in 2016, so obviously this needs to be taken with several truckloads of salt. Still, it’s better to be at 52% than 48%.

Second, the latest Marist Poll, which FiveThirtyEight judges to be of high quality, gives Harris a lead of between 2% and 3% in the all-important Blue Wall states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Again, that’s not much, and it’s well within the margin of error. But it’s better to be ahead than behind.

Third, The Washington Post’s polling average —that is, an actual average of polls rather than a FiveThirtyEight-style simulation — also has Harris slightly ahead in Wisconsin and Michigan (by 2%) and in Pennsylvania (by less than 1%). The Post’s averages have consistently tilted more toward Harris than The New York Times’, but there’s no reason to think that the Times is doing a better job with these than the Post.

Finally, the Gallup Poll shows a 10-point enthusiasm gap favoring Harris, with 77% of Democrats and voters who lean Democrat saying they are “more enthusiastic than usual” about voting and 67% of Republicans and Republican leaners saying the same. As with all these numbers, it’s impossible to say exactly how that’s going to play out, but it’s better to be at the higher rather than the lower number.

With Jill Stein looming over Democratic hopes once again, a look back at our 2002 encounter

When Stein met Putin. 2015 Kremlin pool photo, with names via NBC News.

Jill Stein is back, running for president for the third consecutive election — and this time members of her own family don’t even want her to run, according to a profile (gift link) by Matt Flegenheimer in The New York Times.

Stein’s Green Party candidacy in 2016 may have cost Hillary Clinton the presidency, and in 2024 it could happen again given how close the margin is between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. “Forget the lesser evil,” Stein told the Times. “Fight for the greater good.” I guess she sees the greater good as Trump’s return to the White House.

Eight years ago I wrote a piece for GBH News on my encounter with Stein during her third-party run for governor in 2002, which I was reporting on for CommonWealth Magazine (now CommonWealth Beacon). With Stein once again in the news, I’m recyling that 2016 column.

Jill Stein In 2002: Passionate, Independent, And ‘Yelling On The Mountaintop’

GBH News | Sept. 13, 2016

To the extent that Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein is known at all, it’s mainly for her ambiguous semi-embrace of the anti-vaccine movement, her Harambe tweet (and her subsequent criticism of how the media covered it), and her video confrontation with my WGBH News colleague Adam Reilly at the Democratic National Convention.

But long before Stein began her quadrennial, quixotic campaigns for president, she was a quixotic candidate for governor of Massachusetts. And I was there.

In April 2002, I was working on a story for CommonWealth Magazine about how much attention the media should give to that year’s third-party candidates for governor: Stein, a Lexington physician making her first run, and Carla Howell, whose respectable showing in her campaign for the US Senate two years earlier had given the Libertarians “major party” status under Massachusetts law.

In 2000, while I was on staff at The Boston Phoenix, I had spent a pleasant day on the campaign trail with Howell as she barnstormed through Western Massachusetts. In 2002, though, she refused to speak with me, even running away at a campaign rally outside the Park Street MBTA station. Her complaint was that I shouldn’t be lumping her with a newcomer like Stein.

By contrast, I found Stein to be charming — warm, sincere, intelligent, and, though far to the left, no more so than any number of state legislators. What she couldn’t explain (at least not to my satisfaction) was why she wouldn’t work within the Democratic Party, where she might have had some hope of success. That’s the calculation that the independent socialist Bernie Sanders eventually made. Stein has remained the perpetual outsider; to this day, the only elected governmental office she lists on her website is her stint as a member of Lexington’s town meeting.

I recently found my notes from my interview with Stein. I found nothing earth-shattering. But I thought anyone who is intrigued by her candidacy might be interested in what kind of a politician she was back then.

Our day began with her giving an Earth Day talk to about 60 people at Simmons College that she had titled “The Hijacking of Environmental Health Care in America: A Doctor’s Call for Reclaiming Our Democracy.” Her address, complete with PowerPoint, touched on subjects such as the skyrocketing rate of asthma, the effects of environmental dioxins on breast milk, and the benefits of wind power.

Looking back, some of her remarks seem strikingly similar to her current talking points. For instance, she told the audience about her efforts to lobby government officials as an activist with organizations such as Physicians for Social Responsibility only to discover that those officials were in thrall to special interests. “The system ties their hands,” she said. “In order to get into office you’ve got to cut the backroom deals.”

More shades of Stein’s 2016 rhetoric: At one point a member of the audience told her, “Ralph Nader gave us the gift of George Bush,” and asked why she wasn’t running instead for a seat in the legislature. Her response: “It’s not as though we’re looking at markedly different agendas between the two parties.”

After her talk, I interviewed Stein in the Simmons cafeteria and asked her what she saw as the media’s responsibility to cover her campaign.

“It would be absurd to think of the media as a gatekeeper,” she told me. “The media is people, and responsible and thinking people. They ought to be able to use their judgment to engage the democratic process, and that means to open up dialogue to candidates that they think are serious.” She added that she’d had a “very good experience” with the media in her work as an activist, saying, “I’ve had great relationships with a lot of press.”

Stein also favored reforms to give non-major-party candidates a chance to have more of an impact. We discussed the instant runoff, which she still supports. The way it works is that a voter can designate her first, second, and third (or more) choices—allowing her to pick, say, the most left-wing candidate first and then a mainstream liberal second.

“It’s very hard to get beyond the two-party system, because any challenger stands to split the progressive party and bounce the election to the third-favored candidate,” Stein said. The instant runoff, she added, “would be an enormous breakthrough, and it could allow us to really open up the dialogue.”

It all sounded very reasonable, if unlikely to become a reality. But it was when I asked her why she chose a campaign for governor that was almost certain to end in defeat rather than continue her work as an activist that I got some insight into what would be driving her all these years later.

“I jumped because I felt there was no choice,” she said. “Personally I’m looking at the irreparable unraveling of the fabric of society and the globe and the planet. And I know too much to do anything but stand up and yell on the highest mountaintop that I can get on. So I didn’t have a choice. When the offer was made [by the Green Party], I could not in good conscience say no, come hell or high water.”

The Republican gubernatorial candidate, Mitt Romney, defeated Democrat Shannon O’Brien that fall, with three others trailing far behind: Stein, Howell, and an independent candidate, Barbara Johnson. Stein did considerably better than Howell or Johnson, and her 3.5 percent was good enough to establish the Greens (now the Green-Rainbow Party) as a major party in Massachusetts. Since then she has attracted a devoted following. But I don’t see how that translates into any actual effect on government policies.

The first presidential debate of 2016 will be held on September 26. Stein won’t be on stage, and neither, we may assume, will the Libertarian candidate, Gary Johnson, since both are currently well short of the 15 percent margin in the polls that they need to earn an invitation.

If it were up to me, I’d let Stein and Johnson participate in the first debate and only then use polling to decide whether they should be allowed into subsequent debates. That’s not going to happen, though. Stein is still yelling from the mountaintop. But she’s no closer to breaking through than she was 14 years ago.

In Maine, a Republican candidate for the legislature is promoting weather conspiracies

Devastation in Ashville, N.C. Photo (cc) 2024 by Bill McMannis.

Conspiracy theories about the weather have come to Maine. Wendy Lee MacDowell of Augusta, a Republican candidate for the state legislature, has claimed on social media that the government is responsible for “weaponized weather” aimed at whipping up storms in conservative states, reports Dylan Tusinski of the Morning Sentinel, which covers Central Maine.

“Reached for comment,” Tusinski writes, “MacDowell refused to provide information backing up her claims and threatened to sue a reporter for requesting an interview.”

MacDowell, who is running against state Rep. Bill Bridgeo, an incumbent Democrat, is echoing claims made by extreme-right Republicans such as U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who posted to Twitter recently: “Yes, they can control the weather. It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”

“They,” presumably, is a reference to Democrats, although there is more than a whiff of antisemitism to these lies, too. For instance, MacDowell linked on Facebook without comment to a video on Twitter, which in turn had been reposted from TikTok, claiming that Hurricane Helene was directed by the government to Asheville, North Carolina, as part of an elaborate conspiracy to take control of lithium mines tied to Doug Emhoff, who’s married to Vice President Kamala Harris.

In the comments, another conspiracy theorist claimed that Emhoff’s family owns a pharmaceutical company “that makes/sells…. the puberty blockers they are pushing on children to change genders.”

And, of course, we all know that Emhoff is Jewish.

The extreme right’s conspiracy theories about hurricanes have resulted in meteorologists coming under attack and have impeded relief efforts, reports Ivana Saric of Axios, writing:

Meteorologist James Spann told Axios on Friday he began seeing an influx of threatening messages and conspiracy theories around the onset of Hurricane Helene. The threats include messages like “‘stop lying about the government controlling the weather — or else,'” he said. Spann also noted that the harassment faced by young women in the field is even greater.

The last word goes to Nicholas Jacobs, a political scientist at Colby College, who tells the Morning Sentinel: “Believing in conspiracy theories is kind of like a giant middle finger to all the groups in society that say they know what truth is.”

The October Surprise, 44 years on; plus, extremism at home, and more on sponsored content

American hostage Ann Swift shortly after her release in January 1981. Public domain photo by the Department of Defense.

The October Surprise. These days the phrase is often used to describe fears that a political campaign will drop some sort of bombshell in the final weeks before Election Day.

Then-FBI Director James Comey’s reopening of the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails in 2016 would certainly qualify, though there was no evidence that the Trump campaign was behind it — nor, for that matter, any evidence of wrongdoing by Clinton.

So, too, would the Hunter Biden laptop story of 2020, though the Trumpers who were behind it were hampered by the inconvenient fact that they’d targeted the wrong Biden.

But I don’t think anyone used the phrase October Surprise until 1980, when it was used to describe something that Ronald Reagan and his associates feared would happen but ultimately did not: the release of more than 50 American hostages who had been held by Iran for many months. If President Jimmy Carter brought them home just before the election, it could have given him the boost he needed to win a second term. Continue reading “The October Surprise, 44 years on; plus, extremism at home, and more on sponsored content”

Vance was styling and lying while Walz stumbled. But it all came apart for JD in the closing moments.

There was a key moment in last night’s vice presidential debate between Democratic candidate Tim Walz and Republican JD Vance, and I’ll get to it. But first I want to deal with the fact-checking, since that was the biggest issue going in.

Before the debate, word was that the CBS News moderators, Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan, would not attempt to fact-check the candidates in real time, as David Muir and Linsey Davis did in last month’s encounter between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump — much to Trump’s detriment. Instead, television viewers who watched the debate on CBS would see a QR code on the screen that would take them to a fact-checking site where some 20 journalists were beavering away. Continue reading “Vance was styling and lying while Walz stumbled. But it all came apart for JD in the closing moments.”

Of elephants, circuses and the Olivia Nuzzi-Robert F. Kennedy Jr. imbroglio

Joe Biden. Photo (cc) 2019 by Matt Johnson.

In the weeks after President Biden’s disastrous performance in the June 27 presidential debate, there were several crucial data points. His interviews with George Stephanopoulos and Lester Holt, which did little to restore confidence in his abilities to think and communicate clearly. A Wall Street Journal story on how his staff was stage-managing his decline. A New York Times op-ed by the actor George Clooney, a longtime Biden friend and supporter, urging the president to step aside.

So I don’t want to make too much of a story by Olivia Nuzzi, published in early July by New York magazine, which described Biden as increasingly out of it and obviously unfit to stay in the campaign. But I will tell you that it made an impression on me at the time, combining first-hand observation and quotes from people close to Biden. Yes, the quotes were anonymous, a fact that is now being added to the bill of particulars against Nuzzi. But haven’t we all gotten accustomed to that? Did anyone seriously expect Biden’s friends to step forward and attach their names to what they were saying — other than Clooney?

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Here’s an excerpt from Nuzzi’s story that describes — rather compellingly, I think — the rising fears among Biden’s friends and supporters:

When they discussed what they knew, what they had heard, they literally whispered. They were scared and horrified. But they were also burdened. They needed to talk about it (though not on the record). They needed to know that they were not alone and not crazy. Things were bad, and they knew others must also know things were bad, and yet they would need to pretend, outwardly, that things were fine. The president was fine. The election would be fine. They would be fine. To admit otherwise would mean jeopardizing the future of the country and, well, nobody wanted to be responsible personally or socially for that.

Now we know that Nuzzi’s entire article was corrupt. That is, it’s suffused with a kind of wrongdoing that’s separate from fabulism or plagiarism, two species of journalistic ethics violations that we’re all familiar with. Nuzzi’s piece might be entirely accurate as well as truthful in its judgments and conclusions. But we don’t know. We’ll never know.

You probably have heard that Nuzzi was involved in some sort of sex scandal with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was, by turns, a Democratic and then an independent candidate for president before ending his ridiculous campaign and endorsing Trump. The details of the scandal aren’t important; they reportedly involve nude photos, maybe sexting. What matters is Nuzzi was writing that Biden was too infirm to stand for re-election while she was sexually involved with one of his rivals.

The story about Nuzzi and Kennedy was broken last Thursday by independent media reporter Oliver Darcy in his newsletter, Status. Darcy reported that Nuzzi had been placed on leave, and he published this statement from New York magazine:

Recently our Washington Correspondent Olivia Nuzzi acknowledged to the magazine’s editors that she had engaged in a personal relationship with a former subject relevant to the 2024 campaign while she was reporting on the campaign, a violation of the magazine’s standards around conflicts of interest and disclosures.

Had the magazine been aware of this relationship, she would not have continued to cover the presidential campaign. An internal review of her published work has found no inaccuracies nor evidence of bias. She is currently on leave from the magazine, and the magazine is conducting a more thorough third-party review. We regret this violation of our readers’ trust.

No evidence of bias? I just pointed out massive evidence of bias. You can’t report on one candidate when you’re sexually involved with another. Or as the late New York Times editor Abe Rosenthal once memorably put it: “I don’t care if you fuck the elephants, but if you do, you can’t cover the circus.” Much of what Nuzzi wrote about Biden was obvious to anyone who had watched Biden fumbling and stumbling on TV. But did she lay it on a little thick to help Kennedy? Did she make Biden seem more infirm than he really was? Or was she truly able to separate the personal from the professional? Who knows?

The last Nuzzi story I encountered was just a couple of weeks ago. It was a long interview with Trump that struck me as interesting, offering some insights into Trump’s thinking following the first assassination attempt, but weirdly soft and sympathetic. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but now we know that she was involved, or had been involved, with someone who was angling for a high position in a possible Trump administration. Again — no bias? Seriously? By the way, I listened to her Trump profile on The New York Times’ audio app, and I’m sure Times editors are thrilled to have learned that they provided Nuzzi with an additional platform she didn’t deserve.

Unlike some observers who’ve been piling on Nuzzi, I knew nothing about her until last week except that was young (31) and employed by a magazine that I thought had high standards. I remember with relish a story she wrote several years ago about traipsing through New York City with a clearly inebriated Rudy Giuliani. I knew she had a reputation for being extraordinarily talented.

One story of hers I have not read is her profile of Kennedy from last November, which is reportedly what led to whatever it was that came next.

On a personal level, what a mess. The oft-married Kennedy has been caught cheating (I guess?) on his wife, the actress Cheryl Hines, while Nuzzi was until recently engaged to Politico’s Ryan Lizza, who lost a previous job at The New Yorker over some MeToo allegations.

But you can get caught up on all the tabloid details elsewhere. What matters is that Nuzzi, one of our highest-profile political writers, wrote two long profiles this year that were so enmeshed in her undisclosed (at the time) conflict of interest that we now have no way of knowing whether they were on the level — or were instead hopelessly compromised.

Why asking voters who they think will win might be the smarter question

Nate Silver’s current project, the Silver Bulletin, is online at natesilver.net

I freely confess to paying more attention to polls than I should. Multiple times a day I check in with FiveThirtyEight, still going strong under the auspices of ABC News despite founder Nate Silver’s departure, to see what the odds are that Kamala Harris will prevent Donald Trump from returning to the White House. (I’m writing this Thursday evening, and the site gives Harris a 61% chance of winning and Trump 39%. Oh, no! Harris was at 64% earlier in the day!)

Silver himself is still at it, and though I don’t pay the subscription fee I’d need to see what his odds are, his analysis of the polls shows that Harris has a 2.7% lead nationally and — more important — small leads in the crucial swing states of Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin as well as a basket of bluer swing states.

What I want to call your attention to here, though, is a fascinating analysis in The Washington Post showing that Harris does much better when voters are asked not who they’re voting for but who they think is going to win. Aaron Blake writes (free link) that academic studies show such a finding can be a good predictor of who is going to win — maybe even better than the direct-question approach:

[S]ome research suggests that this is actually a good measure of where things might end up — possibly even a better measure than merely asking people whom they intend to vote for.

The reason is that it involves people accounting for the preferences of the people around them — turning them into “mini-anthropologists,” in the words of longtime Gallup editor in chief Frank Newport — and possibly even hinting at their own hidden or subconscious preferences.

How pronounced is the effect? The who-do-you-think-will-win question has Harris prevailing by double digits in some recent polls, and similar questions in previous races helped predict President Barack Obama’s re-election victory over Mitt Romney in 2012, Trump’s win over Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden’s narrower-than-expected defeat of Trump in 2020.

None of this matters, of course. But for those of us looking for a sign — any sign — that Trump’s existential threat to the country will finally be brought to an end, it’s worth pondering, and savoring.