In an earlier post, I said that at this stage of the campaign, each side had to decide whether they want to ‘go wide’ (i.e., attempt to win states that are historically tilted against them and, within each state, seek to broaden their appeal beyond their own base so that the opponent’s lead among their base is reduced)) or ‘go deep’ (focus on just the states that you have a good chance of winning and also try to run up the score with their own base and hope that that will be enough to overcome the opponent’s vote). It is hard to do both due to limited resources. A campaign that feels confident and on offense tends to go wide while one that feels defensive tends to go deep. At least as far as the state of North Carolina is concerned, the Harris-Walz campaign seems to be going wide.

Democrats last won North Carolina in 2008 with Barack Obama and it has been seen as a tough state to win. But Harris-Walz seem to be making a push there, and even going wide within the state. They are not just campaigning in the urban centers but also going into rural areas, hoping to make inroads with voters who tend to vote Republican by having campaign workers make personal appeals to win them over. Most of the time, the workers strike out, but occasionally they get a ‘win’, a voter who seems persuadable or who even says they will vote for Harris.
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One of the consequences of close presidential elections in the US is that one learns the minutiae of the complicated rules that govern it. One of those is that the winner of the contest is determined by who gets a majority of the 538 Electoral College votes. The votes are apportioned to the states, with each state given a number that is the sum of the number of its members in the US senate (two for each state) and House of Representatives (determined by its population size). Washington DC is not a state but for the purpose of presidential elections is treated as one with a single district and thus has three votes.

Since the number 538 is even, that leaves open the possibility of a tie result 269-269. In that case, the election is thrown to the House of Representatives, where each state is given one vote, determined by a majority vote of its congressional delegation. Since Republicans have a majority of the seats in a majority of states, this means that a tie vote will result in the Republican nominee becoming president. Hence each electoral vote matters.
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Elon Musk must think that his immense wealth makes him above the law. Since he is able to buy influence with prominent politicians in the US, he may have felt that he could act with impunity in other countries. In particular, he seemed to feel that he need not follow the laws that exist in Brazil regarding how companies operate there and as a result got himself embroiled with a no-nonsense Brazilian judge.

The spat between the self-declared “free speech absolutist” and the Brazilian judge began in January 2023, after former President Jair Bolsonaro’s far right supporters, spurred on by false claims of electoral fraud spread on social media, stormed the National Congress and tried to violently overthrow the democratically elected Leftist president, Lula da Silva.

Moraes, who was in charge of several investigations targeting Bolsonaro as well as his close associates and supporters, swiftly issued orders for X to restrict or fully remove accounts that helped fuel this shocking attack on Brazilian democracy.

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In an interview, creepy Donald Trump was asked if he would run again in 2028 if he lost. I thought that he would reply the way he usually does, by denying the premise of the question and insisting that he would win in a landslide, that there is no way he would lose, and that the only way he could lose was if the election was rigged and in that case he would not accept the result. But what he actually said surprised me.

Donald Trump said in an interview released on Sunday that he did not think he would run for president again in 2028 if he loses this year’s race for the White House.

In an interview on the Full Measure television show with Sharyl Attkisson, the former US president – who ran in 2016 and 2020 – was asked whether he saw himself running yet again in four years time.

“No, I don’t,” Trump answered. “I don’t see that at all.”

He said: “Hopefully, we’re going to be successful.”

He sounds … resigned? Maybe even he sees that the tide seems to be turning against him.

Sri Lanka has gone through a turbulent period for fifty years, with civil wars, racist pogroms, insurrections, vicious government crackdowns involving death squads, and the undermining of civil liberties and democratic institutions like the police and judiciary. Just two years ago, the government was on the verge of bankruptcy that led to massive protests that resulted in the then president and his brother the prime minister forced to abandon their posts and homes and flee the country.

There was hope that this would signal a new era in politics where the corrupt old guard would be swept away to be replaced by a new generation of leadership. But that did not happen. What did happen was that an old politician Ranil Wickremesinghe, a nepo baby himself from an old guard ruling family, who had led his party that once dominated Sri Lankan politics into deep decline so that they were completely eliminated from parliament except for one seat to which he appointed himself, managed to become president through a parliamentary maneuver believed to have been engineered by the ousted and disgraced leaders. He had himself run for the post of president before and been roundly defeated and he was seen as having no mandate. It was felt that he had been installed in the position by the former disgraced leaders in order to protect them from the consequences of the rampant corruption and violations of human right of which they had been accused. Since Wickremesinghe was seen as pro-western, he was viewed favorably by the US and the international lending agencies like the IMF and World Bank.
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