This Is It. Early Voting Begins for 2024.

Early voting started in a number of states already, and while the turnout is higher than expected in several of them - North Carolina and Georgia especially - there's not really any hope that this turnout favors the Democrats over the evil that is MAGA trump.

We're in the final lap of this damned election cycle, yet another horse race for a national media that treats it all like a game while the rest of us living in the real world are terrified of the outcomes. I've been here before - on the edge of a war none of us can escape - we all have, and our nerves are as frayed as my friend Emily's:

So I've been feeling anxious & a little paralyzed about a lot of things that I very much have no control over & I'm trying to remember that I have no control over those things but I can have input. Election Day is coming up FAST. We can't control the outcome, but we can have input. Here's one way ⬇️

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— Emily L. Hauser (@emilylhauser.bsky.social) October 20, 2024 at 1:11 AM

If we existed in a nation that wasn't coping with a broken Electoral College system - and a voting system vulnerable to trumpian sabotage - maybe we'd be feeling more calm and saner heading towards Election Day. 

All we can control - each of us, in the corners of America where we live - is making sure we can get out to vote when we can - for example early voting to avoid the lines on Election Day for those who haven't gotten mail-in ballots - and then making sure within our circle of friends - the ones voting for Kamala Harris and for Democratic Senators and for Democratic Representatives and for Democratic State officials - also get their votes in when they can.

I would recommend getting to early voting if you're in battleground states especially ones where trump and his RNC lackeys are threatening to send in "poll workers" to delay, derail, or deny voters their right to vote on November 5th itself. It's harder for them to do it at the Early Voting locations due to the likelihood of interfering with NPA or GOP voters (they're hoping to sabotage the Democratic-heavy precincts filled with ethnic and youth voters).

The Republicans do not trust the actual majority of voters: They themselves are a minority party using suppression and gerrymandering to give them political power they don't deserve. The best way to stop the GOP from sabotaging - overwhelming the zone with their shit - is to overwhelm the ballot boxes with actual voters voting against that shit.

We can do this America.

Vote Democratic Party across the board. Deny trump and his Far Right cohort any victory everywhere.

The Constant trumpian Grift: Shilling Worthless Watches Edition

donald trump really only knows how to do one thing: market himself as a fucking brand.

Not just putting his name in gold on buildings, golf courses, steaks, fake universities: In the past few years even in the midst of fighting criminal charges and running for President (again) trump's been out here shilling NFTs, his own publicly traded media stock, overpriced golden sneakers, trump-themed Bibles (!) that alone should be an epic form of blasphemy, cryptocurrency, and now - what the actual fuck - overpriced watches (Alistair Charlton at Wired shared my horror):

Celebrities partnering with watch brands is nothing new. Sometimes a bona fide watch enthusiast like John Mayer partners with Audemars Piguet, or Ed Sheeran (owner of a unique Patek Philippe, no less) teams up with Casio. Then there's the other end of the scale, where controversial Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy and his own watch company resides.

Now, however, there’s a new nadir: the Trump Watch. Announced this week by former US president Donald Trump, the collection consists of two pieces. One is called “Fight Fight Fight” and is priced from $499, and the other is the “Victory Tourbillon.” The latter is claimed to be made from solid 18-karat gold, with 122 diamonds and a tourbillon automatic movement. It’s priced at a nice, round $100,000—about three times the price of an equivalent Rolex Submariner—and, yes, crypto payment is available.

The watches are claimed to feature “premium, Swiss-Made materials and intricate details,” but so far as we can tell, the Fight Fight Fight uses a movement by Japanese company Seiko, while the Victory Tourbillon has a movement alleged to be partially built from Chinese components...

Everything we know about trump and his business empire is that he will cut corners, buy cheap with no care for quality, and sell to excess (and try to trick his suckers customers into spending even more). This watch will be no different.

But don’t just take our word for it. WIRED Watch expert Tim Barber told us: “Trump evidently has some cut-through among certain watch fans, since the gold sneakers he auctioned earlier this year were bought by Roman Sharf, one of the most prominent gray-market watch dealers, with a sizable YouTube following." (Incidentally, the companies that made the gold sneakers and the new Trump Watches were established by the same register agent, Andrew Pierce of Cloud Peak Law, Wyoming.)

“Having said that, I doubt these hideous pieces will increase his equity among most watch collectors. As it happens, all-gold watches being very on trend in the luxury market at the moment, he joins Rolex in producing a gold dive watch this year. But I would be less confident of this sharing any other qualities with a Rolex...”

Now for the Tourbillon, the $100,000 flagship of the Trump watch collection. “This isn’t just any watch,” the former president said. “It’s one of the best watches made,” he adds without context...

This is Trump as Used Car Salesman: he's going to tell you "this is the best ever" and "everybody's talking about" (that part is right, although laughing/screaming in horror is more apt). The kind of fake oversell for shoddy product that led to a ton of Lemon Laws. I digress.

The watch is claimed to use a “TX07 Tourbillon” with 105 hours of power reserve, but finding any record of such a movement online is tricky. Watch commentator Nico Leonard van der Horst said in an Instagram post: “This is hilarious … the manufacturer of this movement is Olivier Mory, who ironically is known for making very affordable Tourbillons half made in China, half made in Switzerland.” Van der Horst added: “If you were to buy this movement and put it in your own watch, you would be able to buy it for under $3.5k...”

Why even sell a watch so much that your average MAGA voter - most of them middle-class/self-employed (car salesmen themselves more likely) - can't afford one? It's a watch meant for the oligarch class, the foreign millionaires and billionaires still looking to curry favor with trump should he ever cheat his way back into the White House. It doesn't help that trump is encouraging people to use crypto as a way to purchase these watches, because that kind of money can't be tracked.

trump is not just violating the Emoluments Clause, he's mocking it: because he knows Congress can't touch him and the courts have no idea how - or no willingness - to enforce it.

Hell, why I am sitting here whining about what trump's doing? If trump is out here shilling overpriced watches to gullible buyers reasonable markets, I can be doing that too!

Hey, everybody, BUY MY BOOKS! People are out here saying they're great reads, even the ones with poor formatting and glaring grammatical flaws!

NOTICE A TREND: 17 Years of Prime Blogging for 7.99!

FUNNY LOCATIONS: Collected Stories for 6.99!

Buy now, and you can happily receive a firm handshake and a pat on the back from me some time down the road if you ever run into me hiding from the feds for possible tax evasion (you can't prove I had anything to do with Eric Adams' mayoral operations, I swear!).

These books are guaranteed to NOT tell you the proper time in any way - unless you use them as part of a makeshift sundial - and will NOT rust or fall apart on you within seven days of receiving.

Amazon Kindle operators ARE STANDING BY!

If I can get oh 12 million people to buy the ebook versions that will allow me to buy a Big Mac next Tuesday, hmmmm yum.

P.S. for the LOVE OF GOD do not let that grifter trump anywhere near the White House again.

Good News: September 2024 Edition

Gods, I feel like a negative nabob half the time. So let's try some good news.

I may not trust the polls but the late September numbers keep favoring Kamala Harris for the presidency over donald "34 count felon" trump.

Harris leads over trump in key battleground states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Again, polls don't vote, voters do: So get the damn vote out Democrats.

Just a reminder that the mainstream media polling services - due to billionaire owners or their own craven needs - skew too much rural and conservative, meaning the pro-Kamala numbers should be even more in her favor (and that the tight races in other battleground states aren't really favoring trump).

The polling, for example, shows a tighter race in Alaska for Harris and Democrats than the past 30 years. Harris' numbers in Nebraska - where the shared Electoral College results by congressional district established a single EV dot in a Red State - are strong enough that the Republican Party is trying to pressure the state legislature to undo the shared Electoral and go Winner-Take-All. But there's signs Harris - thanks to her VP ally Tim Walz, who's from Nebraska - could flip the whole state Blue. Again, get the voters out to vote this November, Democrats. (Psst: Fight for EVERY state - well okay maybe not West Virginia, that's a lost cause - just to keep trump from clearing the Electoral College hurdle!)

Thanks to Richardson's escalating scandals, there's a growing chance Harris - and the whole Democratic ticket - can clinch North Carolina. If that happens alongside Harris reclaiming the battleground states Biden won in 2020, there is no way trump and his lackeys can stop the count and claim "they stole the election".

Even trump's schemes to undo the results are going to hit a wall: the Electoral Count and Presidential Transition Act of 2022. That cleaned up a number of loopholes and grey areas at the state level about challenging election results, and required election certifications done certain ways to minimize partisan sabotage. Granted, trump's legal team are going to test that law and insist on undermining the vote counts in key states/counties, but considering how their lack of evidence undercut their efforts in 2020 will be the same this 2024, it's doubtful he and his lawyers will prevail (the one negative thing to consider: That the trump-loving Supreme Court will break the entire Constitution in his favor when his legal battles reach their bench).

A Presidential win for Harris/Walz won't be enough: which is why the signs of a 2024 Blue Wave affecting the Congressional/Senate races provide a positive buzz. Again, voter turnout matters.

The encouraging news on that front: Democratic voter enthusiasm is increasing this 2024.

Voter turnout remains key, America. Republican efforts at voter suppression can't stop that, no matter how hard they try. If we can get the turnout for Kamala over 81 million - Biden's record - trump and the Republicans can't overcome that.

All this good news comes with that call to action: Get the damn vote out.

Get to work, America.

Flooding the Zone With Lies

The wave of outright lying by the Far Right Noise Machine - and their Republican Party allies hacks - is overwhelming us now as the 2024 election day nears.

It's been well-documented that trump lies nearly every line he says in public; but he's been spewing offensive allegations the past few months that hospitals in Blue states are "performing post-abortions" (which is legally infanticide), and the past few weeks that there are schools forcibly performing transgender surgeries on children (the second part of that covered by Matt Lavietes at NBC News):

Former President Donald Trump repeated his false claim that children are undergoing transition-related surgery during their school day, worsening fears among some conservatives that educators are pushing children to become transgender and aiding transitions without parental awareness.

“Can you imagine you’re a parent and your son leaves the house and you say, ‘Jimmy, I love you so much, go have a good day in school,’ and your son comes back with a brutal operation? Can you even imagine this? What the hell is wrong with our country?” Trump said Saturday at a campaign rally in Wisconsin, a vital swing state.

Trump made similar remarks — saying children were returning home from school after having had surgical procedures — the previous weekend at an event hosted by Moms for Liberty, a parent activist group that has gained outsized influence in conservative politics in recent years...

There is no evidence that a student has ever undergone gender-affirming surgery at a school in the U.S., nor is there evidence that a U.S. school has sent a student to receive such a procedure elsewhere...

According to trump and his Far Right acolytes, our public schools have the medical facilities and the means to perform surgeries at a whim: Considering how most of our schools are struggling to keep up with office supplies makes this deluded narrative a clear fantasy.

You'll notice trump doesn't mention where these things are happening: No mention of which school, which state. If any school has been transitioning kids without parental consent we'd have heard of it by now, even by the traditional media outlets expressing some level of outrage. If any hospital has been killing newborns as trump is claiming, the pro-fetus crowd in those states - even in deep Blue states like California or New York - would be massed outside that building protesting every minute of every day. Vague allegations without any eyewitnesses or documentation, not a thing that could stand up as factual evidence in an actual court of law.

So we know he's lying, we know he's fearmongering to his MAGA base... and yet the mainstream media isn't holding trump accountable - they are not challenging him to his face - for these blatant lies.

And now just over the past few days, JD Vance and several of his GOP buddies are sharing the outrageous and debunked claim that Haitian immigrants are out there eating our pet cats. Even Ian Millhiser over at Vox's Explainer can't fully explain it:

For the record, there is no evidence that any Haitian immigrant ate a cat in Springfield, Ohio, or anywhere else in the United States, for that matter. But the lack of factual evidence hasn’t stopped the GOP from pushing the nativist narrative, which seems designed to play off bigotry and suspicion against the mostly Black population of Haitian immigrants.

More than 300,000 previously unauthorized migrants from Haiti received temporary protected status in June, which means these Haitian immigrants are now — despite Vance’s suggestion otherwise — legally present in the United States. Still, Vance and other Republicans’ attacks on these immigrants come at a moment when more Americans have grown skeptical of immigration...

Springfield’s Police Division said on Monday that there have been no reports of any pets being stolen or eaten in that city. However, there apparently was an incident in Canton, Ohio — a nearly three-hour drive from Springfield — where a woman was charged with cruelty to animals for allegedly killing and eating a cat. But there’s no evidence that this woman is an immigrant or of Haitian descent.

Despite that lack of evidence, the woman appears to have been identified as of Haitian descent in far-right tweets...

The wingnuts are twisting the facts to make it fit their narrative that Haitian refugees - that immigrants in general - are inhuman. That's the only explanation here. And these wingnuts are desperate to turn the manufactured fear of immigrants into easily-promoted hate.

So it’s not surprising that many prominent members of the Republican Party, a party that frequently flags isolated crimes committed by immigrants to fuel nativist sentiment, latched onto an unfounded internet rumor about Haitians and cats as “proof” that immigrants present a problem (that Republicans can fix).

Still, none of this context changes the fact that Republicans at the pinnacle of the party, including sitting US senators and even one of the party’s two nationwide candidates, see no downside to spreading racist, completely unfounded rumors based on random social media posts spread by far-right trolls...

Millhiser spells it out at his conclusion even though he doesn't want to discuss the implications further: Vance and everyone else at the top of the GOP chain of command are happily spreading the fearmongering lies because there's no one willing to hold them accountable for being liars. The ones who could sue for defamation - right now, the entire Haitian community in the United States have every right to sue the GOP for their slander - are too poor or too constrained by their legal status to fight any courtroom battles. The media outlets that are supposed to maintain professional standards of journalism are too cowed by their rich owners - and too blinded by the need for "access" - to push back.

There's been a long and troubling history of the Far Right - especially as trump rose to power among their ranks - to exaggerate at best and outright lie at worst about so-called "criminal" acts committed by liberals and Democrats in order to excite their base into violent action. Think of every attack on Planned Parenthood facilities whenever the wingnuts claim that "baby killers" are farming for body parts. Remember how accusations about a child sex smuggling ring involving Hillary drove a man to attack a pizza parlor in Washington DC.

This is where we are at now in America, as the November general election draws nearer and trump - fearing he is going to lose the Popular vote again and likely the Electoral College - is desperate to stir up the passions of his MAGA base... but not to show up and vote, instead to show up with guns and commit acts of terror and chaos to do whatever it takes to disrupt any voting at all.

Gods help us. The lying is going to get worse until November and beyond, not until every wingnut liar is out of power... and in trump's case sitting in a jail cell.

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD AND TRUTH, AMERICA, STOP VOTING REPUBLICAN. Hold them accountable. That IS in your power to stop their lies.

Update: A historian from Northwestern University is raising the warning flag that violence aimed at immigrants is sure to follow:

So let's not get confused: the debunked claims that refugees are eating cats aren't just nonsense. They are the beginning of a wave of violence. The people spreading this rhetoric either know exactly what they're doing, or they should know. But violence follows. Every time. (3)

— Kathleen Belew (@kathleen_belew) September 10, 2024

trump wants the blood to flow: It's how he knows he has his mob doing his dirty work for him.

Violating Sacred Ground for a Photo Op: August 2024 edition

For the LOVE of God, trump's doing it again. Desperate to show himself as a virtuous leader, trump's violating holy ground for a staged photo op: This time our nation's most honored cemetery for our military fallen (via Quil Lawrence and Tom Bowman at NPR):

Two members of Donald Trump's campaign staff had a verbal and physical altercation Monday with an official at Arlington National Cemetery, where the former president participated in a wreath-laying ceremony, NPR has learned.

A source with knowledge of the incident said the cemetery official tried to prevent Trump staffers from filming and photographing in a section where recent U.S. casualties are buried. The source said Arlington officials had made clear that only cemetery staff members would be authorized to take photographs or film in the area, known as Section 60...

Trump participated in an event to mark the third anniversary of a deadly attack on U.S. troops in Afghanistan as U.S. forces withdrew from the country; 13 U.S. service members were killed in the attack. The Trump campaign has blamed President Biden and Vice President Harris, now the Democratic presidential nominee, for the chaotic withdrawal...

trump is also trying to deflect from the reality that it was HIS administration in December 2020 - when it became clear he was losing the election to Biden - that brokered the deal with the Taliban that led to the U.S. withdrawal and collapse of our backed government there. I wish the national media would remember that and not let trump avoid his accountability. Thing is, he's accountable now for possibly violating federal law by staging his photo op where he shouldn't:

In a statement to NPR, Arlington National Cemetery said it "can confirm there was an incident, and a report was filed."

"Federal law prohibits political campaign or election-related activities within Army National Military Cemeteries, to include photographers, content creators or any other persons attending for purposes, or in direct support of a partisan political candidate's campaign," according to the statement. "Arlington National Cemetery reinforced and widely shared this law and its prohibitions with all participants."

Look, if there IS a federal law in the US Code for this, give us the chapter and verse, people! If trump committed a felony trespass, and if he committed a felony campaign violation, if he even committed some dinky misdemeanor in the rule books, charge the son of a bitch.

Stop letting trump get away with his godforsaken campaign stunts that mock everyone and causes real harm to the people he thinks are standing in his way.

And make him answer - one way or another - for the shame he keeps committing against our men and women in the military.

Update 8/28/24: Follow up on social media pointed me to the Code of Federal Regulations - the administrative side of how agencies interpret and enforce the US Code - specifically to 32 CFR 553: Army Cemeteries. The specific rule is 32 CFR 553.32(c):

Memorial services and ceremonies at Army National Military Cemeteries will not include partisan political activities.

The CFR relies on the 38 USC Section 2413 as one of its legal foundations: It issues the prohibition any form of protest or disruption at a memorial service. While trump wasn't protesting per se, his photo op staging could well have led to such disruptions, hence the ban.

Some of the legal experts I know at TNC's Horde are pointing out there may be no criminal remedy - except for the physical assault of a park ranger - but civil ones. Still, trump needs to understand he can't get away with this outrageous bullshit of turning our national memorial sites into his playgrounds.

The Joy

Update: Thank you Steve in Manhattan at Crooks & Liars for sharing this article at Mike's Blog Round-Up! Hope everyone enjoyed the DNC this week, hope you've ordered your BALLZ TO THE WALZ t-shirts like I have, and get the damn vote out for every Democratic candidate across all 50 states! Let's EFFING GOOOOO....

There is a thrill to the Democratic Party campaign I haven't seen in ages.

The current national convention in Chicago is humming with delight, musicians showing up to perform during otherwise staid roll calls, genuine laughs and cheers from audiences not just sitting there applauding politely on cue. For all of the discontent from the media elites, and for the legitimate criticisms from protestors outside that the party is ignoring the suffering in Gaza, and for all the dread about another trump attempt to hijack the elections; the Democratic voting base is enjoying the moment with the kind of hope for the future not seen since Obama's victorious celebration in Grant Park when he won in 2008.

Amanda Marcotte at Salon is documenting the atrocities sorry bad habit, documenting the pleasantries:

Organizers kicked off the Democratic National Convention by immediately demonstrating that they know how to throw a party better than Republicans. Democrats scheduled their elderly leader who rambles on too long for the first night, not the last. President Joe Biden's Monday night speech started slow and only got more boring, but the crowd cheered him gamely, chanting, "Thank you, Joe!" Part of that was real gratitude for the surprisingly effective job he's done in his four years in office. But the cheers reflected the attendees' joy at knowing this whole thing is done with. It's time to move forward with a candidate who embodies their hopes for the future...

That word matters.

In contrast, Donald Trump's capstone speech at the Republican National Convention was disastrous. Biden may have been long-winded and boring, but Trump was all those things while also sounding objectively weird. His speech ping-ponged between self-pity and incoherence, delivered in that odd sing-song quiet voice he uses when his aides tell him to act "serious." The crowd, always eager to flatter the cult leader's ego, cheered, but it felt forced and exhausted...

It's odd how the RNC was barely a month ago, and yet is utterly forgettable now. The only detail I can recall from it was how a number of attendees band-aided their ear in honor of trump's surviving that assassination attempt the week before... an event that has already dropped off of most people's awareness and something that failed to generate any level of sympathy or concern outside of the MAGA base.

As Andrew O'Hehir wrote about the RNC last month, the convention was "a startlingly quiet, polite, low-energy event." We did witness the audience get hyped up for Hulk Hogan, but even that has caveats: It was the last night, so more people bothered to show up. Hogan is a professional wrestler, an expert at riling up crowds over nonsense. (Though the actual message of his speech was terrifying and fascistic.) And frankly, after four days of listlessly wandering around hoping something interesting might happen, the attendees seemed eager to feel something. But Trump destroyed Hogan's hard work with his whining, droning, weird speech. 

On Tuesday night, Harris made the contrast crystal clear by holding a rally at the Fiserv Forum, where the RNC was held. (Personal insert: Milwaukee is literally up the road from Chicago, so Harris traveling to Fiserv wasn't a burden) It speaks volumes about the enthusiasm gap that it's not even surprising that the turnout and volume at this Harris rally outdid what Trump got at his own convention last month.

The difference was dramatic enough that Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, appeared at the DNC by remote video from Milwaukee. It created the visual effect of more than doubling what Trump was able to turn, despite covering his ear with a comically oversized bandage and everything...

One of the things about long political campaigns is the belief in Momentum (the Big Mo as Bush the Elder called it), and if the differences between the party conventions are any evidence, all of the Big Mo is with Kamala:

With Harris as the nominee, however, you can feel Democratic voters unclenching. This is not a crowd that feels "triggered." The mood is giddy. There's a scent of hope in the air. There's plenty of criticism of Trump, but it's no longer coming from a place of cornered animals trying to survive. The tone towards that babbling old fascist is one of contempt. Instead of flinching, Democrats are laughing in Trump's face. No wonder he's even more obsessed with crowd sizes and ratings than usual. He used to be the one offering entertainment value, even if it was only to his base that just wanted to inflict pain on their perceived enemies. Now it's Harris who is captivating, this time to a nation that wants to feel something other than despair...

I can speak to the enthusiasm among the political circles I keep: both the TNC Horde and the Balloon Juice commentariat are bouncing off the walls like it's a romper room. Hell, even the Rude Pundit is giddy:

It was simple. I thought, "Man, we need this." And by "this," I mean all the joy and energy and possibility being embodied on that stage. But it's not only about this moment. We need this because the one thing that's been missing as we emerged from the worst part of the Covid pandemic (and recognizing that Covid is still very much a problem) is a catharsis, some release where we all recognize that we survived. And it's not just a catharsis for getting through the lockdowns and mass deaths and required health safety measures. It's a catharsis for surviving the presidency of Donald Trump, which took this country down some incredibly dark alleys, leaving it battered and weary, with a good deal of PTSD.

We couldn't actually celebrate, or even fully exhale, because hanging over all of us was the tension of what would bring the Trump saga to its end. We waited for something to validate the anger we had and to demonstrate that things would be different. We hoped that Trump would be convicted and sent to prison, but that didn't happen and may not. 

The election of Joe Biden was an absolutely necessary step to get to this point. We needed someone who knew how the federal government worked inside and out, an old hand to get to the bridge and right the ship, weld the holes, scrub off the rust, get rid of the piles of garbage, and get us back on course, all while restocking the bar. We were all scared out of our weary minds in 2020, awaiting the even deadlier next surge of Covid deaths that was coming in January 2021. Then January 6th happened, and our sense of security in the very things that are supposed to function in this country were undermined, all while watching a large percentage of the population go down a red-capped abyss of crazy and conspiracies they will likely never return from. Biden's skill was in allowing the rest of us to chill out, to see that the government hadn't lost the ability to actually work.

In the last few months, though, everything kept hitting us, even as Trump was found guilty or liable, owing hundreds of millions of dollars. All of it still didn't lead us to anything like a feeling of completion, a feeling we could, indeed, move on. We were hit again and again with insane Supreme Court decisions, with the polls that showed Biden losing, with Biden's obvious signs of aging, with this feeling that it was all going to go south again. We would stick by Biden if we had to (and more than a few were doing so gladly), but, my god, we needed celebration. We needed joy. Real joy, not the kind of joy that says, "We made it," but the joy that says, "We crushed it." We need to face our American demons, who are easily identifiable, and we need to unify to exorcise them and send them back to whatever crevices in the earth they crawled out of, not just defeat them at the polls...

A previous Democratic leader once clarified that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself," but FDR spoke to the rational demands of the moment and to the urgency of recovering from the Great Depression. The demands and urgency we face today have more to do with recovering from the emotional traumas of things like 9/11, the failed War on Terror, the economic chaos threatened by Silicon Valley "disruptors" looking to profit from fanciful shell games, the overwhelming Culture War madness of misogynists looking to take rights away from women and of racists looking to take rights away from ethnics they deemed "Other".

The opposite emotion to Fear in many ways is Joy, a means to build well-being for the self, the delight of the new and the willingness to celebrate. In the face of Republican Fearmongering, it has been a long time since Democrats fought back using Joy not as a shield but as a weapon, cutting through the dour unhappiness of the likes of trump and JD Vance who scowl at their rallies and lie about how America is "doomed" unless they take over as our overlords.

The Democrats are campaigning this year on Joy, not as a slogan but as an emotional buttress, a foundation on which all other policy positions will rest, allowing the nation to build not only on the successes of Biden's administration but on the future of Harris' potential tenure.

This is a campaign movement of Joy that can thrive, that can inspire millions to turn out to vote, with every sign this post-convention that the Democratic ground game will run with this emotion all the way to victory in 2024.

...

Just remember to keep the lawyers on payroll to stop trump and his Republican lackeys from the electoral chaos they're planning to unleash, please and thank you.

It's Campaign Time 2024 and the Beltway Is Still Broken

As the Democratic National Convention continues this week, apparently the national punditry are raging into the void about how they got bamboozled by the Biden retirement/Harris promotion (via Meredith Shiner at New Republic): 

...Trump (in 2016) was unique among that field of suits in that he did not slide from Polite Washington’s slick political candidate widget factory. He didn’t care to perform the same canned lines on tax rates, entitlements, or the national debt. And he showed the world that audiences didn’t care about that long-running political vaudeville act, either. The Trump era, however you define it, yielded few gifts and cured little about the broken political discourse coming out of Washington. But if it didn’t wreck the political press’s performative vacuity, it at least exposed it for all to see.

Now, with nearly four years of Trump out of the White House, Trump back on the trail, and a Democrat at the top of the ticket who can actually campaign, the gap between the Beltway Truman Show and what people outside of D.C. actually are experiencing is widening. And this rift in reality imperils the media at a time when journalism is fighting a multifront war against anti-truth Republicans, declining revenue, and predatory venture capital mismanagement...

The problems of campaign coverage from 2016 wasn't entirely all about trump: The National Media had been suffering with embarrassments and acts of self-immolation ever since they went all in on Bill Clinton's sex scandals and wondered how the hell the rest of the nation stopped trusting them. It didn't help in 2016 that Hillary was there to incite the media mob into a dangerous binary world-view that made Hillary a threat to everyone and not trump. But I digress.

When Trump burst onto the scene, I was still a reporter in Washington covering national politics and Congress. I watched as the journalism-industrial complex of D.C. reporters and operatives around me tried to cast Trump as an atypical candidate who blew up the Republican Party. Casting Trump as an outlier—trying to make him an aberration instead of an outgrowth of a decades-long Republican effort to break our country—obscured the collective national gaze from something much more troubling for the people who make their living on politics: Trump didn’t break the Republican Party at all. He just broke the made-up Washington rules that empowered every lobbyist, reporter, and staffer to attend parties together without fear or reservation.

The Republican Party had been dying for some time, when as a party they decided to shift to a Culture War narrative light on policy and heavy on demonizing fellow Americans. trump merely saw the weak spots in the GOP relationship between leaders and voters and overtook control of the wingnut base. The national media elites had no idea how to explain that - not only to the citizenry but also to themselves - and so have been flailing about trying to find anything that would fit their "both sides!" or "let's have bipartisanship!" world-views. America's punditry are stuck in a bubble of their own. Back to Shiner:

Because if this summer has revealed anything, it’s that, just like the Scott Walkers of yore, we are watching the national media short-circuit before our very eyes. They are insular. They are unprepared. And after years of watching Morning Joe and searching for their birthdays in the Politico Playbook, they do not see their role as speaking to us, but rather speaking to themselves. While this may seem ancillary to the main plotline of our national politics, the mainstream media own-goaling themselves out of civic relevance is a net negative for anyone who believes in the outcome of better, more representative, good government.

For years, largely because Republicans are better at working the refs and crying foul about any effort by the media to hold them accountable for their actions, the idea that the media are dyed-in-the-wool liberals has become the orthodoxy. Of course, the Beltway media are conservative. This is not a novel argument by any means: It’s an industry run by (increasingly reactionary) plutocrats, who reliably summon their charges to lead a highly effective, “But how will you pay for it?” pincer movement against anything resembling liberal policy. Meanwhile, there is seemingly no sin grievous enough to earn a Republican the same sort of nullifying skepticism—the Trumpists who aided and abetted the former president’s attempt to overturn a lawful election remain in the good graces of America’s cable news bookers.

Still, we need to acknowledge that the media are conservative in the most traditional, unideological sense of the word: They are clinging to a status quo, their status quo, that has not matched our reality since Barack Obama was elected president in 2008 and the Tea Party emerged as the energized manifestation of Ronald Reagan’s 1980s fever dreams. Their rules, their conventional wisdom, their savvy takes become more stale, more detached from normal life, and more cartoonish with every passing day...

I argued about this earlier about how the modern Beltway media elites are still obsessing over the Reagan Era like it's still 1985, with Green Eagle making a solid case that the ultra-rich owners of the media outlets have their own (anti-tax and deregulation) agendas to pursue. Either way, we are talking about an entire profession - journalism - unable to fulfill even the most basic functions of that job - to provide Objective (fact-driven) reporting - because they've sunk entirely into Subjective self-absorbed pandering to each other in the news business.

The problem is that we as a nation - we Americans as a people - need objective factual reporting to keep us informed properly about our choices when it comes time to use our power to elect our representatives and our leaders. We're not getting any of that when the headline writers and the front-page opinion pundits and the talk show guests can't even be correct about what they're selling us in their columns and podcasts.

Just again a reminder: For the national media elites, there is no accountability for being wrong (or self-centered). Maureen Dowd could spend the first half of 2024 screaming that Biden needed to step down from the presidential campaign, and less than a month after he did so accuse the Democratic Party of "pulling a coup" that she refuses to admit her own role in it. THIS is how that punditry acts - and reacts - and when things don't go their way they'll throw a conniption far bigger than anything crybaby trump puts out.

Until the national press comes to terms with the current reality that they are biased (and towards trump and other Far Right wingnuts); until the punditry realizes they are not the heroes of their own narratives, they are accomplices in the Far Right's schemes; until the likes of Dowd and David Brooks and the majority of swelled heads at the New York Times and Washington Post settle the fuck down: We are not going to get an honest story out of any of them.

And it's still up to us to tune out their ego-driven narratives and focus on what matters most: keeping criminal trump out of the White House and banishing the Republican Party from the national stage this November general election.

Get the damn votes out, everyone.

Let's Effing Go: Ballz to the Walz Shirt Is HERE

It took forever, but the Ballz to the Walz shirt finally got in the mailbox!

And it fits (so far, things may shrink in the wash, alas)!

The arched eyebrow is noticeable, but I think I need to smile a little more.

Oh, and the Democratic National Convention starts tonight.

LET'S EFFING GO! LET'S WIN ALL 50 STATES (well okay maybe not Idaho)!!!

BALLZ

TO

THE

WALZ

What If: A Different Dynamic for a Democratic 2024

Let me state officially for the record that I am terrible at this prognostication shit.

Not just the fact that I never do well at the Powerball lotteries (cries), but that I'm terrible at plotting out how these 4-year presidential cycles go. When the horserace starts up and the primary candidates line up to get humiliated, I tend to be off by a candidate or three when the official lineups survive to their convention celebrations.

I mean, last year I jumped ahead of everything to try and guess the 2024 election results thinking that it was going to be a repeat matchup between Biden and trump. Granted, certain facts were unavoidable: Biden was the sitting incumbent and they always run for a second term; trump had bullied and cowed the Republican party into taking him back a third time as a candidate retained his maniacal MAGA voting base in spite of a few hopeful candidates like DeSantis and Haley challenging to be a fresh candidate for 2024. A second round of Biden v. trump was kind of a given.

What I hadn't counted on was a mainstream media desperate to hijack the electoral process to force their own choice on a national electorate, hammering on Biden for being too old over and over even as he beat down his younger primary challenger Dean Phillips by 90 percent of the party vote, as well as hammering on trump for also being too old as well as facing criminal indictments and 34 felony convictions no wait, the media still hasn't hammered him on that. Gee, wonder why... /sarcasm

We saw what happened after the early debate between Biden and trump got the media riled up for Biden's scalp: Biden read the room, realized he wasn't going to win back the Beltway mob that was a little too eager to throw the election to trump, and made the move to pass along his primary gains to his running mate Kamala Harris, ensuring a smooth transition for the Democratic campaign while giving the would-be kingmakers in the press both middle fingers.

So now, instead of facing the likelihood of a repeat performance of 2020 results - although possibly switching out Georgia for North Carolina, as things looked in the polls - we're facing a different dynamic for 2024, with massive enthusiasm boosting Democratic chances across the electoral board while the Republicans find themselves doubling-down on an older, out-of-touch, and hate-filled ticket.

I had posted the 2020 Electoral Map as a foundation for what the 2024 map would be when it was Biden:

from 270towin.com 

But now with Harris, what should we expect?

Well, electorally, probably more of the same. The partisan nature of the modern electorate has calcified most of the states into their Red/Blue status for the most part. Only a handful of states - Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina - would be considered battlegrounds, where the shifting independent votes and overall voter turnout matter a whole lot more than in say California or New York or Tennessee or (alas) Florida (Texas keeps threatening to flip, so voter suppression keeps that GOP Red).

But the way Harris is redefining the campaign - and spurring more voter interest at levels not seen since 2008 - is making it more likely the battleground states that went for Biden in 2020 are near-locks this election. Yes, I know the polls can't be trusted. And yet. Depending on what bounce Kamala gets post-convention this week, even on-the-fence states like Georgia and North Carolina could well turn into solid gains. Not merely winning by hundreds of votes but tens of thousands, well out of reach for trump and the GOP to whine that the election was "stollen".

Also 270towin.com 
I'm projecting Kansas and Nebraska to flip Blue
because Walz's appeal to the Midwest is THAT good!

So don't be surprised that trump whines "stollen election!" just like he did in 2020. This is the easiest part of any guessing game with how the 2024 November results play out: trump will scream that he "won" and never concede even the states he honest-to-God never had a chance to win anyway.

Remember this fact: trump can never admit he ever loses.

So what will trump do when confronted with the likelihood he is not only going to lose the popular vote for the third time in a row, but also the likelihood he is going to lose the Electoral College for a second time?

All the signs point to trump scheming with his cronies and state-level allies to stir utter chaos and not allow elections to get certified in the first place.

In 2020, trump and his cronies tried to cook up plans to have "fake electors" put in place to override the legitimate electors giving Biden the Electoral votes - from Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Arizona - in order to flip the 270 needed from Biden to trump. Those "fake elector" schemes didn't exactly work, and there's criminal trials and plea deals happening in Georgia, Michigan, and Arizona as we speak (with trump delaying the Georgia one to save his ass before this year's election). Obviously, setting up fake electors didn't help him.

So now trump is taking aim at making sure the votes from certain counties and states don't even count at all. Via Sam Levin at the Guardian (US):

Nearly three dozen officials who have refused to certify elections since 2020 remain in office and will play a role in certifying the presidential vote in nearly every battleground state this fall, according to a new report by the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew), a watchdog group.

The report underscores the concerns that Donald Trump and allies will attack the certification process at the local level as part of any possible effort to contest a loss in the election. In a presidential election, there are tight deadlines at the local, state and federal levels to certify the vote. Delaying the vote at the local level could cause states to miss deadlines and open up protracted court battles and give oxygen to conspiracy theories...

Certification is generally considered a ministerial duty and the officials charged with doing it can’t unilaterally decide not to officialize election results, legal experts say. Ballot disputes and discrepancies are typically adjudicated before an election moves to the certification stage.

“Each of these states have procedures for examining potential voter fraud and voter irregularities and none of those procedures concern the certification process at the country level. In other words, there are things you can do. County elections officials denying certification is none of those things. That’s not allowed under the law,” said Noah Bookbinder, the president and CEO of Crew.

No effort to block certification thus far has been successful. Each time that local officials have tried, they have been either forced to certify by a court, outvoted by their fellow commissioners or reversed course...

Just because it hasn't happened before doesn't mean it won't happen now. trump has broken a centuries-long Good Faith effort by our governments to abide by the ceremonial acts of bipartisanship, especially when it comes to elections. Granted, we've had broken and corrupt elections at local, state, and arguably federal levels over the years, but for the most part they were aberrations or part of local corrupt political machines that our Civil Rights era of the 1960s and 1970s cleaned up.

The last time I can think of an honest-to-God broken electoral process - to be fair, elections like 1960 and 2000 were procedural question marks (it's just that the Supreme Court over-reached in deciding the 2000 results) - at the Presidential election level was 1876 when the Republicans raised a stink about the electoral results from several states, which forced a congressional committee to "recommend" the results in such a way the Republicans with Hayes won (literally by one committee vote).

It's painful - not ironic - that trump is aiming to stir enough chaos this election cycle to force a repeat of 1876: Get enough (Republican) elections officials to refuse to certify results, which will deny Electoral counts for Harris (and himself) to where no one gets over the 270 hurdle to win the College, and then force the matter into a possibly-Republican-controlled House of Representatives to anoint trump "the winner" even if trump officially loses the popular vote by more than the 7 million in 2020.

If there's any good news, it's that 1) the states where trump's cronies can pull these stunts were likely going Republican in the first place, 2) the battleground states where trump could try this and fail - like Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Arizona - have enough pro-election players in office to prevent this from happening, and 3) there's a chance the voter turnout in enough states will be so overwhelming for Harris/Walz that the local elections officials will have no legal excuse to avoid certifying and not even risk it for trump's sake.

Because much like the fake electors scheme trump and his cronies cooked up, the plans to force non-certification are likely violating a lot of state and federal laws as well (via Marina Villeneuve at Salon): 

“I think there's every indication that Trump and perhaps other candidates will try to disrupt or overturn results if they lose,” said Ben Berwick, a former DOJ trial attorney who is now counsel leading advocacy group Protect Democracy’s election law and litigation team.

Berwick said four years after Trump and his allies failed to overturn the results of the 2020 election based on unsubstantiated allegations, the rule of law still weighs against such legal arguments. Protect Democracy released a March report that stressed that courts and lawmakers have created a certification process that will hold up to manipulation.

“Bottom line is, there is really nothing that local election officials and state election officials can do legitimately or legally to overturn election results,” he said. “That doesn't mean it won't be tried...”

Isn't it just like a convicted felon (trump) to think that illegal acts are perfectly normal things to do? But I digress.

Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig, a 2016 Democratic presidential candidate and the co-author of the book “How to Steal a Presidential Election,” said he's more troubled by potential scenarios where Trump and allies could exploit gaps in existing election law, put pressure on state legislatures or governors and get their case to the Supreme Court.

All those scenarios, Lessig said, require more than actions by local election officials alone.

“I think all of these strategies require something more than just as county officials or election boards screwing around with the results,” he said. “We don't know what's actually being planned, beyond what we've seen on the surface so far.”

What may end up happening will be the same thing that happened in 2020: trump will scream that "illegal immigrants voted" or that Democratic officials "switched out ballot boxes" or some other "stealing my win" excuse. Anything to claim that "the wrong people voted that shouldn't have." And yet for all that screaming, when trump and his lawyers are called to prevent their evidence of "voter fraud" they still won't be able to present evidence that massive voter fraud on the scale they're claiming even happened. They will find scattered individual cases of potential fraud usually committed because that voter was confused, not criminally involved in a conspiracy.

It will then be up to the courts - at the state and then federal levels - to accept trump's conspiracy claims without any actual basis in fact. Many courts won't, because they have to rely on evidence on which to base their decisions. This is something that can well vex the US Supreme Court itself, which we've seen bend over backwards several times to give trump all the wiggle room he needs to escape accountability.

Can a Roberts Court truly throw out all lack of evidence and simply go by trump's claims lies that the 2024 election results were wrong if Harris actually wins? If they do that - if at least five Justices side with trump in spite of the popular and Electoral votes, if they decide on a matter more far-reaching than anything settled in Bush v. Gore - we will have a judiciary essentially invalidating the very concept of free and fair elections for all time.

Gods help us if that happens.

The best way to make sure it doesn't? Massive voter turnout on a scale so convincing for Harris/Walz and the Democrats that any claim of fraud by trump is laughable, to where Roberts and the other Far Right justices won't even risk the end of the U.S. Constitution to save trump.

Elections still matter. Voter turnout still matters, especially in this election cycle, when trump is poised to lie and bluff and bully his way out of certain electoral doom.

For the LOVE OF GOD AND COUNTRY AND THE CONSTITUTION, America, get the vote out this election cycle and vote for Kamala and Tim and for every Democrat up and down the ballot. Get the vote count for Democrats over 81 million again, while trump and JD show every sign of sliding well below the 74 million trump got in 2020.

P.S. one of the other funny thoughts I've had if trump tries to pull off his "don't certify" stunt with local elections officials: Many other elected officials like state legislators and U.S. congresscritters are going to rely on those same election results. It's been proven that not everyone votes a party line: Some candidates will get more votes than others from the same party due to various Indy/moderate voters refusing to vote a straight ticket down the ballot. What happens in a county where trump doesn't win it and screams at the elections official to not certify, but a lower-ticket guy like a state Senator did win and needs that election certified to keep his seat? They can't cherry-pick the ballots: Either the voter was legal to submit a ballot or not at all. 

This could lead to a rather interesting dynamic where the state-level Republicans can't side with trump in order to keep enough seats to control the state legislatures to try and steal the election for trump anyway. This particular paradox can prove most interesting...

Honest Bumper Stickers 2024: Phase One In Which DougJBalloon Get His Oats

Hey kids, remember those brief fun moments when I carved out Honest Bumper Stickers?

Like this one?

Well, here's 2024, the candidates are set, the conventions are happening (or have happened), and it's time to see if I can remember how Inkscape works!

Okay, now that I've gotten THAT out of my system... HERE'S SOME MORE!

because the saying "Balls to the Walls" is a term to go full speed, and...
and... (sigh) look, I *have* to explain it, not everybody gets it!

And just to be fair, I crafted a couple of trump-friendly bumper stickers for this election cycle!

took me hours to find a decent
commons use image of prison bars

I'd make one for the struggling, tone-deaf, cruel-to-animals RFK Jr campaign: Alas I do have standards.

The Ballz to the Walz T-Shirt Exists

Actually there's a number of t-shirts, but THIS one just "pops" don't it!!!

I think that's Biden's aviator sunglasses y'all

So it's on sale at Etsy. Click on that link. No excuses. GO. BUY IT! IT EVEN COMES IN CHAMBRAY!!!

...that's "light blue" to you peeps.

BALLZ TO THE WALZ, AMERICA!

LET'S FUCKING GOOOOOO! GET THE VOTE OUT, DEMOCRATS!

Suck it, trump. Back to the couch for you, Vance.

Ballz to the Walz, Dems

I said this earlier about the importance of making a Vice Presidential pick for your campaign: Your pick sets the tone.

So the tone Kamala Harris set for the Democratic Party by selecting Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate is this:

BALLZ TO THE WALZ, BABY.

What? It's a perfectly cromulent phrase from my youth as a suburban white punk. It means to "go all out," to blitz, to push forward with great force, to fight and not stop until the fight is done. Learned it in middle school, said it through high school, and then didn't really say it much in college because the study load was a bit fatiguing.

I am awaiting the inevitable t-shirt from Etsy, by the by.

The Balloon Juice community is all aflutter, as are my folks from the TNC Horde. To get a sense of why, here's Russell Berman at the Atlantic (paywalled) to explain it some:

In the realm of presidential politics, progressives have become accustomed to disappointment. Joe Biden wasn’t their first (or second) choice in 2020. Nor, for that matter, was Kamala Harris. And Democratic nominees typically pick moderates for their running mates. So when Harris announced Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her choice for vice president this morning, progressives experienced an unusual feeling: elation...

Progressives had latched onto Walz’s dark-horse candidacy over the past two weeks, seeing him as a more appealing option, both ideologically and politically, than Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, whom many believed to be the front-runner. Walz, a former teacher and high-school football coach, impressed liberals with his governing success in Minnesota, where he’s signed legislation enacting paid family leave, expanding the child-tax credit, protecting abortion rights, and lowering the cost of insulin. More recently—and perhaps more important—he charmed them with his folksy takedowns on cable news of Donald Trump and J. D. Vance.

“He’s just plainspoken and direct, and he’s very funny,” Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, who served with Walz in the House, told me. “He’s got the common touch, and I think it’s an ingenious choice.”

In Walz, progressives believe they have found a Democrat who can connect with rural and white working-class voters in the crucial battlegrounds of the Midwest without compromising on the party’s policy platform. “He’s the anti-elite candidate. He comes across as the Everyman,” Joseph Geevarghese, the executive director of the progressive group Our Revolution, told me this morning. He called Walz “a perfect counterbalance” to Harris, whom Republicans have tried to portray as, in his words, “an out-of-touch California elite...”

Harris’s announcement drew praise across a wide ideological spectrum, from Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. In the final days leading up to the selection, however, the largely behind-the-scenes contest between Walz and Shapiro had become a stand-in for larger Democratic fights that the party’s embrace of Harris had otherwise suppressed. The proxy war dismayed some party allies, who urged progressives to stop their attacks on Shapiro. “It’s a false binary,” Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, told me. She said that although she was “ecstatic” about the choice of Walz, she would have been just as happy if Harris had picked Shapiro or any of the other finalists, including Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona and Governor Andy Beshear of Kentucky...

Harris' selection of a popular regional governor does more than just help lock in Minnesota: Walz's brand of Democratic politics has the means to appeal across the entire Rust Belt (every state in the Great Lakes region) that can provide the same electoral appeal that Shapiro or Beshear (or Gretchen Whitmer from Michigan) could have provided.

But with Walz you get a little more: Someone with a personal narrative - he and his wife used In-Vitro to have children, for example - in clear opposition to the fearmongering hypocrisy that trump's presidential ticket is offering to voters. He's not only been a soldier - 24 years of National Guard service in the artillery, putting in the years most other political wannabes would shrug off - but also a high school social sciences teacher and football coach. Someone who would be a key figure in any small town community across America.

And while he was a high school football coach - leading his team to the state finals, no less - he took the time to become the faculty advisor of that school's first Gay/Straight Alliance student group. This is one of many reasons why progressives are elated: Walz is Pro-People, has been since even before Obama and Biden stood public for gay marriage.

Where trump's pick of Vance doubled down on trump's open hostility towards immigrants, women, blacks, gays, trans, and young people, Harris' pick of Walz doubled down on getting a candidate who's eager and grinning from ear to ear and willing to work on solving problems instead of making things worse.

Balls to the walls, guys. Let's get the vote out for Dems this year.

Bad Numbers and Bad Vibes and a Bad Choice

Vanz can't dance, but he'll steal your money/
Watch him or he'll rob you blind...
-- John Fogerty, "Vanz Kant Danz"
(and I'm not the only one who thought of this song when JD Vance got picked for trump's Veep)

It's taken me awhile to write about donald trump's Vice Presidential selection of Senator JD Vance for his 2024 ticket, but in the few weeks that Vance has been on that ticket it's become hilariously - and horrifyingly - clear that picking Vance was a bad idea.

Given trump's previous history with his Veep - trying to bully Pence into throwing the election results in 2020 to the point of sending an insurrectionist mob at him - it was a bit sad to see other Republican figures audition themselves on Fox Not-News for the 2024 ticket, but there was nothing you could do dissuade them. DeSantis, Tim Scott, Doug (seriously, North Dakota?) Burgum, all of them made their daily talking head shows to argue their own submission to trump's will; but none of them pandered - attacking Ukraine, praising Russia, showcasing misogyny - like Vance did.

Thing is, when trump picked Vance - or had others pick him, depending on the story - he didn't do a good enough job of finding out if Vance would boost the ticket or not.

For all I've said about the need for Vice Presidents, as long as that office is part of the electoral process it matters that you choose wisely. A Presidential candidate choosing his/her campaign partner is signaling to voters what he/she values as skills for those who will work in their potential administration. If you're a domestic policy guru, tagging someone with foreign policy cred helps win over the voting base (definitely the punditry) that you'll balance out your agenda. If you're a Moderate from the Midwest, it helps to get a more die-hard candidate from another region (South, Pacific, Northeast) to appease the other party factions (and vice versa). And no matter what, you have to make sure the VP choice has their own charisma or credibility (just not too much to outshine the boss) to win over the mainstream media.

In short: Your Veep pick sets the tone.

What trump and his handlers found out real quick post-convention was that Vance - for all that he's known at the state and federal level of politics- is tone-deaf. And more unpopular than anyone - other than several polling services who were firing off emergency flares - realized.

Let's hear it from Nicholas Liu at Salon:

Senator JD Vance, R-Ohio, is making history as Donald Trump's 2024 running mate, but not in the way that the Trump campaign had hoped. According to a CNN survey taken after the Republican National Convention, Vance has an approval rating of -6 points, making him the first vice presidential nominee to enter the general election with a negative rating since 1980.

The average rating for a running mate after a party convention has been +19 points.

"Frankly, I don't really understand the pick, and apparently neither do the American voters," CNN data analyst Harry Enten said on Tuesday's OutFront with Erin Burnett. Vance, he said, is "dragging Trump down..."

With Trump struggling to appeal to moderate women, the former president may rue choosing a man who ran for Senate on a hardline anti-abortion stance, criticized childcare subsidies as "class war against normal people" and suggested that married women would be selfish for divorcing their abusive husbands, saying in 2021 that "one of the great tricks that the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace" was "making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear...”

Even Vance's purported appeal among white working-class voters appears overstated. He won Ohio in his 2022 Senate election by 6 points; by comparison, Trump won by 8 points in 2020 and Gov. Mike DeWine carried the state in 2022 by 25 points. Among white voters without a college degree, Vance, with a 31-point lead over Democrat Tim Ryan, also lagged behind Trump and DeWine, who won by 36 and 45 points respectively...

I've talked before about how at the state level, a candidate can overcome personal faults to win election all because the partisan nature of local elections make it too easy to win no matter what. Ohio could have run a dead dog for the Senate back in 2022, and that poor mutt could have beaten Tim Ryan by double digits. Vance arguably eked by at 6 percent.

And trump picked a guy with negative popularity at the national level, something that hadn't happened since 1980 (was that Bush the Elder?). For a campaign that's supposed to be tracking every favorable poll to feed trump's vanity, how did they mess that up?

Think back to some of the, ahem, more questionable Veep picks we've seen. 

Sarah Palin? She had a positive boost - and genuinely gave McCain and the GOP a healthy poll bounce - coming out of the convention before her appearances and interviews quickly exposed her as a near-illiterate self-absorbed fool before the November election. Joe Lieberman? In terms of polling and voter turnout, Lieberman mattered little to how Gore performed: However, Lieberman's more conservative stances turned off the more progressive Dem voters which hurt the eventual turnout (the same might be said for Hillary's VP pick Kaine). Dan Quayle? The jokes about him started flying the moment he was tabbed, but even then he brought enough positives to the table that his polling wasn't as bad as Vance.

In each of their cases, there were valid reasons at the time for their picks that did help balance the ticket - geographically, demographically, ideologically - even as those picks ended up hurting or negating the overall effort. The same can't be said for Vance: He mimics trump's ideology to a horrifying tee, and he doesn't appeal to the youth demographics of Millennials or Generation X. He only fulfills a geographic necessity by being from a Midwest (Rust Belt) state, and that will get negated by whomever Kamala picks as her running mate (especially if it's a Rust Belt figure like Walz, Beshear, or Shapiro).

Vance is standing on the national stage with little in the way of genuine charisma or likeability. One of the new breed of Culture War Republicans who attack often and impress rarely, he's demonstrated a shocking ability to alienate people in a heartbeat even among his own Far Right audiences. His anti-immigrant and "DEI" stances - and eagerness to attack a biracial opponent like Kamala Harris - are hard to reconcile with the fact Vance married an Indian (Asian) American woman (where Kamala is Jamaican-Indian (Asian) with a similar background). And Vance's views on women? "Misogynistic" is the nicest word you can say about that.

As Paige Oamek at the New Republic notes in her article title, "Everyone Hates JD":

Just when J.D. Vance thought his polling numbers couldn’t get worse, they have.

Vance’s net negative favorability rating was a major topic of discussion during a Tuesday night CNN roundtable. According to this week’s ABC News/IPSOS polling, Donald Trump’s running mate is polling at a staggeringly low minus 15 points.

It's like watching the rushing numbers by UMass' football team get worse every drive they play against Georgia's defense.

During the CNN segment, former South Carolina state Representative Bakari Sellers called Vance “the Sarah Palin of Dan Quayles.” But as Enten pointed out last week, both former vice presidential picks began with positive favorability ratings: Quayle with 15 points and Palin with 26 points.

“He is historically unpopular, even more so than V.P. nominees who of course went on to infamy,” Enten said of the Ohio Republican.

Vance also won’t be saved by his home state or by the Rust Belt, where last week he polled even worse at minus 16 points, according to a CNN/SSRS poll, with 44 percent of people saying they have an unfavorable view of the senator...

When I noted earlier how intraparty dynamics would give Vance a chance to survive in Ohio, now that he's a candidate on the national level that state-level partisanship won't be able to help him (this is what Scott Walker and Jeb Bush and Rick Perry and other milquetoast candidates found out long ago).

Vance is so unlikeable he's vulnerable to that most dreaded of political attacks, the Whisper Campaign. 

Someone off in the far corners of social media posted a joke rumor - completely unfounded and without direct evidence - that JD Vance wrote a scene in his best-selling book Hillbilly Elegy - by the way the "memoir" turned out to be exaggeration at best and deplorable at worst - having sex with a couch. The joke spread quickly on Twitter to where the AP Newswire had to publish a report calling the story "false"... but then retracted that report because of the slight possibility that Vance could have engaged in that act anyway the editors claimed it wasn't vetted properly.

As Zachary Folk covered at the Daily Beast (paywalled):

The anonymous poster who started the viral—but false—rumor that Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance had sex with a couch said he came up with the smear while shopping at a grocery store. The viral post’s author, who only identified himself as “Rick,” gave his first interview to Business Insider on Tuesday, telling the publication the joke came from “a place of irreverence if not outright disrespect.” The viral tweet has since attracted the attention of late night hosts, Fox News talking heads, and even Vice President Harris’ campaign. Rick said he has since protected his account and changed his Twitter handle to avoid unwanted attention. He also said he did not intend to spread misinformation, but instead simply wanted mock the Republican candidate...

Since then, while the mainstream media tried to keep away from it everyone else went all-in on the "couchfucker" mockery. Why is this joke proving so harmful to Vance?

Because being this unlikeable already didn't provide Vance with enough popular support to laugh off or shrug away the insult. Just looking at Vance - his physical appearance is just on the wrong side of being creepy, his hateful demeanor that just advertises "messed-up psychology," the general vibe of being weird - makes it more believable to the general population that this is a guy who would do something tawdry with your living room sofa.

Any stand-up comedian - or wannabe who did the Open Mic nights in South Florida back in the 1990s, ahem - can tell you this: When the majority of people are laughing at you instead of with you, you're screwed.

Rumors are now swirling that trump has soured on Vance already (don't forget, trump is a Bad Boss who will kick you to the street curb once he thinks you're no longer useful) while other party leaders are discussing how to remove Vance from the ticket. Problem is, replacing a ticket partner at this stage of the election is dicey at best (and that's just the paperwork you need to refill). The last time a Vice Presidential candidate got replaced mid-campaign was Eagleton back in 1972, and all that did was confirm that McGovern's campaign was in utter chaos and led to one of the biggest Electoral College defeats in history (that fact gets diminished with how Nixon's campaign unleashed massive sabotage and trickery against the Democrats when the facts of Watergate went public). 

trump can't afford to dump Vance even at this early stage of the final leg of the 2024 election cycle. trump can't afford to keep Vance because the way things are going JD is going to make Sarah Palin look like Margaret Thatcher.

This needs to be a warning to the American voting public at large: trump has no idea how to pick competent people to work for him. The Republicans don't have any competent or quality candidates to choose from anymore. For the LOVE OF GOD, don't vote trump/Vance this 2024, or for any other Republican hack ready and willing to destroy everything America stands for.

And in the meantime, ScotchGard your ottomans!