Expect a Trump campaign shake-up soon

When media pundits analyze campaigns, they tend to follow a predictable pattern. For the campaign that is leading, they point to things that they say are making it do well, while for the campaign that is losing they point to things that they say is hurting them. The problem is that these explanations are highly malleable and if for some reason fortunes get reversed, they will suddenly reverse their explanations as well.

Right now, the creepy Donald Trump-weird JD Vance campaign seems to be losing ground to the Kamala Harris-Tim Walz campaign and there is no shortage of explanations for why this is so. The chief one is that creepy Trump is undisciplined and is going off message to make rambling personal attacks on his opponents. But when creepy Trump was doing well just a month ago when Biden was the presumptive Democratic nominee, these things were not seen as major liabilities. It seems like when you are winning, you can do no wrong but when you are losing you can do nothing right.
[Read more…]

Good riddance to Columbia University president

Minouche Shafik resigned today. Her terrible handling of the protests at Columbia University, and her craven capitulation to hardline Israel supporters in the US congress infuriated both students and faculty.

Her resignation, effective immediately, was unexpected, with the university’s fall semester just weeks from beginning. It comes on the heels of two other Ivy League presidents’ resignations in the past year.

Immediately after the news, reports of pro-Palestinian protesters celebrating near the university began appearing on X as some members of the Columbia community voiced their support for the change of leadership.
…

Shafik, whose tenure began in July 2023 and made her the first woman to head the prestigious university in New York City, appeared before Congress in April, in highly publicized hearings regarding allegations of on-campus antisemitism. At about the same time, her decision to call the New York police department on to campus, in response to student protests, drew the ire of students and faculty.

“The dumbest climate conversation of all time”

I did not listen to the Elon Musk-creepy Donald Trump love fest. I did not want to waste two hours of my life listening to two egomaniacs fawning over each other. Apart from the disastrous start in which technical glitches delayed the start by 50 minutes, the reviews of the subsequent content have not been not good, justifying my decision.

Some of the most scathing comments have been about their discussion on climate change, where creepy Trump said we should drill for more oil, that rising sea levels will provide the benefit of more ocean front property (what??), and wondered why we are not talking about ‘nuclear warming’ (whatever the hell that is), while Musk seemed to think the only reason to going electric is because fossil fuels will eventually run out.
[Read more…]

Seth Meyers had a lot of catching up to do

The last three weeks have been a political whirlwind but the late night talk show that he hosts has been on hiatus during that time. They must have thought this was a good time to plan their break. It is the summer doldrums, the Republican convention had just ended, the Olympics were going to dominate the news for two weeks, and they would come back just before the Democratic convention

But things have been so crazy that when he returned on Monday, he had a lot of catching up to do and it was worth watching his summary to be reminded about how things have changed so dramatically.

The politics of crowds and poll numbers

There has been a lot of reporting about the size of crowds at campaign rallies. I have never been too impressed by crowd sizes as an indicator of popularity because however large they may be, they represent just a tiny fraction of the votes one needs to win. They measure more the depth of intensity of the most ardent supporters of a candidate, not the breadth of support. For example, in the case of creepy Donald Trump, there seem to be many of the same people who go to rally after rally, sometimes traveling great distances. It is like a cult following. Such people can swell multiple rally crowd numbers but still have only one vote.

But rally crowds do help campaigns in several important ways. The people who are enthusiastic enough to spend a big chunk of a day going to a campaign event and lining up to get in are those who are very likely to vote and, more importantly, more willing to work on the campaign in some way. You can be sure that there are campaign staffers at these events who are signing up people as donors and volunteers. While getting money helps since so much is needed for expensive TV advertising, American elections are awash with so much dark money that by the time elections come around, the airwaves are saturated with so many ads that they are unlikely to sway voters. Their purpose is largely to remind those who are already committed as to why they should stick with the candidate. The main benefit of getting new people to contribute even a small amount is not the money but because once you have given money to some cause, you are more invested in that candidate and want that person to win, like betting on a horse or a sports team.
[Read more…]

The Musk-Trump interview is a bust

[UPDATE: The interview has finally started, 50 minutes late. The Guardian is live blogging it.]

The much ballyhooed interview was supposed to start at 8:00pm ET but at 8:40pm, there was nothing. The number of people who were able to sign in and now hear just silence or cheesy music keeps dropping.

Musk came on to say that they had experienced a DDOS attack, where “DDOS stands for distributed denial of service, and is when a network of computers infected with special malware, known as a “botnet”, are coordinated into bombarding a server with traffic until it collapses under the strain.”

I am skeptical of the DDOS explanation, especially given that Musk also promoted the Ron De Santis presidential launch last year on his site and that too was a mess of glitches. People are being reminded about what creepy Trump said then.

Surely the alleged genius Musk would be able to cope with a DDOS attack. Either Twitter/X is a hot mess or he is lying.

Creepy Donald Trump will not be happy with this debacle and that just five people will be able to hear it live, assuming that it goes ahead at all.

A little logic puzzle

As a respite from political news, here is a nice little logic puzzle.

Alice and Bob are two infinitely intelligent logicians. Each has a number drawn on their forehead. Each can see the other’s number but not their own. Each knows that both numbers are positive integers. An observer tells them that the number 50 is either the sum or the product of the two numbers. Alice says to Bob, “I do not know my number,” and Bob replies, “I do not know my number either.” What is Alice’s number?

The above link also points you to the solution.

The politics of insults

When it comes to media coverage of campaigns, there is no question that a candidate will get a lot more coverage with a well-timed zinger at their opponent than with a detailed policy analysis. Hence it should be no surprise that much attention is paid by campaigns to crafting the kind of insult that can go viral.

When it comes to campaign speeches, those of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have some actual policy substance with some insults thrown in, such as describing creepy Donald Trump and weird JD Vance as, well, creepy and weird. Of course, creepy Trump’s main campaign strategy is as usual to hurl insults while making either vague and ambiguous policy proposals or hardline concrete ones that appeal to the racists and xenophobes in his base but are unlikely to be implemented, such as building the wall and deporting every undocumented immigrant in the country.

Weird Vance is trying to follow in creepy Trump’s footsteps, most recently saying that Harris “bent the knee to the Hamas caucus of the Democratic party” by picking Walz. He should be careful since they could respond by saying much more accurately that weird Vance and creepy Trump represent the Nazi wing of the Republican party, since white supremacists and neo-Nazis are being embraced by them.
[Read more…]

Tim Walz’s unusual finances

It is not unusual for elected officials to have humble beginnings and then become very wealthy while in office. But although Tim Walz has been in elected office for nearly 20 years, first as a US congressman for 12 years and then as the governor of Minnesota, he appears to have very little wealth.

Either he is a very clean politician or is extremely clever at hiding his wealth.