Getting past the debate hype

Given the dramatic fallout from the first presidential debate on June 27th that resulted in Joe Biden dropping out, there his a great deal of media hyping about the one to be held tomorrow (Tuesday the 10th) at 9:00pm Eastern time. The usual expectations game is being played, with each side boosting expectations for the opponent so that anything other than a boffo performance can be portrayed as a loss.

I will watch it but do not expect anything dramatic to happen. Kamala Harris seems like someone who is disciplined and on message and is unlikely to get rattled. Creepy Donald Trump will be his usual self, constantly lying and making all manner of unfounded assertions. Harris has already preemptively said that she expects creepy Trump to lie a lot and I hope she says so again early and often during the debate. What I will be watching for is how unhinged creepy Trump’s attacks will be.
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The guerrilla war between fascists and anti-fascists

It is no secret that far-right, white supremacist, neo-Nazi groups have been active on the internet, spreading propaganda, recruiting new members, and organizing people to take street actions (such as disrupting Black Lives Matter and other demonstrations) in order to spread their message. Many of these groups operate in secret. Their goal seems to be to provoke enough confrontations with their perceived opponents and the government so as to trigger a civil war. They seem to believe that if the conditions are right, a huge mass of like-minded gun-owning people will rise up to take back ‘their country’ from the usurpers who are threatening to take it away from the white Christians they see as the rightful owners. Given the massive size and strength of the US military, the idea of provoking an armed confrontation with the aim of taking over the government seems delusional but they may think that there are people in the military who will defect to their side.

Police forces, the Department of Homeland Security, and the FBI are aware of these efforts but are limited in how they can respond. This is because the FBI in particular has had an ugly history of infiltrating and illegally disrupting groups that were legitimately organizing for civil rights, gay rights, anti-war, and other left-wing causes. Republicans in Congress have repeatedly made the charge that there is a ‘Deep State’ that is targeting conservative groups and this has made law enforcement wary of doing anything that might give credence to that view. As a result, they now walk a fine line to show that they are are not surveilling groups based purely on their ideology but because thy pose an imminent threat of violence.
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I must be really, really old

When the news broke yesterday evening that former vice-president Dick Cheney had declared creepy Donald Trump a threat to democracy and that he would be voting for Kamala Harris, I wrote that this was major news. After all, Cheney was vice-president in the period 2001-2009 for two terms under George W. Bush and was reputedly the most powerful vice-president ever, amassing a degree of executive power and influence that no vice-president before him had. He was also a pillar of the Republican establishment. He had served as a congressman, a defense secretary under president George H. W. Bush, and chief of staff to president Gerald R. Ford.

And yet, when I tuned in to NPR’s news programs All Things Considered on Friday evening and Weekend Edition Saturday this morning, neither program, even though they both run for two hours, saw fit to find room to even mention this. Given that NPR’s audience skews older, I can only conclude that they felt that this would only be relevant to a much older demographic than even what they have, and that their audience may not even know who Cheney is or see any significance in his switching his allegiance
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Liz and Dick Cheney endorsements of Harris may signal the beginning of a trend

Recently, I linked to an article by Tim Miller, a writer for The Bulwark, a site that is home to the group of former Republicans known as ‘Never Trumpers’, who bemoaned the fact that there were not more high-profile Republicans who had spoken at the Democratic conventions and endorsed Kamala Harris. Former congressman Adam Kinzinger was the most prominent. Miller pointed out that many Republicans, including those who had occupied high positions in the administration of creepy Donald Trump, had been sharply critical of their former boss but had refrained from endorsing Harris, and he singled out Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney, and Mike Pence by name. Pence has only said that he would not vote for creepy Trump, not that he would vote for Harris.

On Wednesday, Cheney came out with just such an endorsement of Harris and went even further.
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How much do ‘issues’ matter in US elections?

The short answer seems to be ‘not much’, although much lip service is given to it. During election season, voters will often say that what they are concerned about are major issues like the economy, inflation, immigration, and so on. Reporters will often ask them about these things and it makes both reporters and voters look like serious people who are not swayed by superficial matters. But the replies elicited are often generic and do not suggest that the voters are looking for specific proposals in order to make up their minds. They seem to be looking for candidates who view as important the same things as they do.

I am becoming convinced that issues are not that important in people deciding how they vote, while acknowledging that the word ‘issues’ covers a lot of ground. My suspicion is that people decide who to vote for based on a whole host of intangible feelings or general perceptions, like which party or candidate seems like they would do things that the voter would generally agree with, especially on emotionally charged issues, which party they have generally voted for in the past, which candidate they like/dislike/fear more, and so on. At this stage, the genuinely undecided voter is a rarity and is usually a low-information voter who may well not vote at all or vote more or less based on a last-minute impulse.
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The steady decline of Trump’s Truth Social stock

I do not really understand how the stock market works other than at the most naive level. I know that in theory, the price of a company’s stock should reflect the value of the company, so that if the company is making profits and pays good dividends to its shareholders, then the stock price should rise, while if it is losing money and risks going out of business, then its price should drop.

But in the modern world of high finance, there are many more factors that seem to be in play, such as the predictions of future earnings and profits and prospects for growth. Those can raise a company’s stock price even as it is losing money. And there are even more esoteric factors that only the mavens know about.

This brings us to creepy Donald Trump’s social media company Truth Social. I wrote back in April about how it merged with a publicly traded shell company Digital World Acquisition Corp and the initial value of the creepy Trump’s stock was a whopping $6.3 billion. But as economic journalist David Cay Johnson wrote, the underlying value of the stock was effectively zero since its revenues were a paltry $4 million while having an operating loss of $58 million.
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The IVF problem is coming next for Trump

Creepy Donald Trump has tried to have it both ways on abortion, claiming credit for appointing Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade while trying to wash his hands of the extreme anti-abortion measures that some states have imposed in the wake of that overthrow. That attempt to walk a fine line got destroyed when he was forced to say how he would vote on the Amendment 4, referendum measure that seeks to overturn Florida’s extreme law that bans abortion after six weeks and, after trying to waffle on the issue and getting pushback from conservatives, he said that he would oppose the Amendment.

He will face a similar dilemma with IVF treatments. These are very popular and the decision by the Alabama supreme court that said that frozen embryos are children under state law effectively banned the practice since IVF clinics feared prosecution if unused embryos get discarded. That decision sent shock waves across the country and resulted in Republican politicians trying to find ways to dance around the issue without alienating their base.
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Understanding the US presidential election system

Today is the day after Labor Day in the US and traditionally it is seen as the start of the race for the elections to be held in November. This is, of course, laughable because in the US we have effectively a permanent election season, but the conceit is that other than political junkies, most people do not pay much attention to politics until after Labor Day. How true this is is anybody’s guess.

Another curious feature of US politics that can be bewildering to those outside the US (and even to many in the US) is the electoral college system that is used to decide who the presidential winner is. Each state is assigned a number of electoral college votes made up of two (for the two senators) plus the number of congressional seats it has. So Michigan, which has 13 congressional districts, has 15 electoral college votes. Washington DC is not a state but it has been assigned three electoral college votes as if it were a state with just one congressional district. So the total number of electoral college votes is 538: 100 (for the total number of senators) plus 435 (for the total number of congressional districts) plus 3 (for Washington DC). Hence a candidate needs 270 electoral college votes to win. In 2020, Biden defeated creepy Trump 306-232. This need not correlate with winning the popular vote nationwide. In 2000 and 2016, George W. Bush and creepy Donald Trump won the presidency despite losing the popular vote.
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‘Weird’ is spreading to right wing UK politicians

Move over weird JD Vance, you’ve got company.

The Conservative party in the UK is going through the leadership search process after the shellacking they got in the last general election. It turns out that in some surveys, voters see them as being a little weird.

Conservative politicians have started to be seen as “weird”, and few members of the public – even including the party’s own voters – are able to identify the Tory leadership candidates, research suggests.
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The research by More in Common said the party struggled with relatability, particularly in Liberal Democrat areas, by focusing on topics “which excite the base, or the highly politically engaged” but were distant from ordinary people’s lives.

In a similar vein to the attack that US Democrats have levelled against Republicans, especially the vice-presidential candidate JD Vance, the research found “there is a danger that the Conservatives have started to become seen as ‘weird’”.
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It said that in seats won by the Lib Dems “voters would explain that they were voting Lib Dem in these traditionally Tory strongholds because Ed Davey’s party just seemed more ‘normal’”.

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