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qqueenofhades · 6 months

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i registered to vote for the first time ( i feel old) now that im an adult but my state has closed primary elections which i was wondering if you have an opinion about. my initial thought was that its bad because i had to register democrat (rather than my states green party which represents my beliefs more) just so i could vote between democrat candidates, which feels like being pressured into supporting the weird pseudo two party system we have. but then i looked it up and apparently a reason for this is so that people from opposing parties wont purposefully mess up the votes just so that their preferred candidates have an easier time winning, and i think that makes sense too. but is that actually the reason theyve closed it or is it just to force us dem/republican?? cause it feels strange

Okay, look. I respect the fact that you're a young person, and I appreciate that you have not only registered to vote, but plan to vote in the primaries, so I don't want to lecture you too much. That said: I am taking you out for coffee, I am sitting you down, I am looking into your eyes, and I am urgently telling you the following:

The Green Party is a scam. It is a scam. It has existed for decades in American politics as an empty shell corporation weaponizing the good intentions of young people like yourself, because all it theoretically stands for "it's good to save the planet maybe." Which is not something that any non-insane person seriously disagrees with, but there is no world in which that cause is actually furthered by registering/voting Green (you mentioned that you did vote for Democrats, which -- good, but listen to me here, youngun, okay?) It ran Jill Stein in 2016 to siphon more votes from HRC, and this election it plans to run Cornel West, a pro-Russian tankie who positively equated Bernie and Trump, as another spoiler candidate. It does not stand for "protecting the planet" or America in any real way. It has never elected a single senator or congressman, let alone a president. It stands for empty performance/grievance political theater by those people who feel too morally superior to vote for/affiliate with Democrats, often because the internet has told them that it's not Cool or Hip or Progressive enough.

If your main priority is climate/the environment, you're doing the right thing by registering as a Democrat and voting for Democrats. (Also: the adjectival form is Democratic. It is the Democratic party and Democratic candidates, otherwise you sound like the Fox News host who wrote a book literally entitled "The Democrat Party Hates America.") They are the only major party who has in fact passed major climate legislation and have made environmental justice a central tenet of their platform. As opposed to the Republicans, whose Project 2025, along with the rest of its nightmare fascist prescriptions, openly pledges to completely wreck existing climate protections and forbid any new ones, just because we weren't all dying fast enough under their death-cult rule already. That's the main logical fallacy I don't get among both the Online Leftists and the American electorate in general: "the Democrats aren't doing quite enough as I'd like, so I'll enable the active wrecking ball insane lunatics to get in power and ruin even the progress we HAVE managed to make!" Like. How does that even make sense?

On a federal level, the Greens have contributed nothing whatsoever of tangible value to American or international climate policy/legislation, environmental justice, or anything else, because as noted, they don't have any elected candidates and mostly focus on drawing voters away from Democrats. There might be plenty of good candidates on the local or city level, which -- great! Vote away for Greens if they're available, or the only other option is a Republican! But on the federal/primary level, please understand: once again, they are a scam. There is no point in affiliating yourself with them. You're welcome to register Green and vote Democratic, if that makes you feel better or if you prefer having another label next to your name, but once again, I'm telling you in my position as a salty Tumblr elder that they have done nothing but harm to the causes they claim to care about, because "environment" is such a nebulous priority and has demonstrably been hijacked to stop the American government entity, i.e. the Democrats, that is actually working to improve on it.

As for your question: nobody is "forcing" or "pressuring" you to vote in primaries. By your own admission, you made a conscious choice to register as a Democrat in order to vote for Democratic candidates. If you were just a regular registered voter of whatever party affiliation, you would vote in the general election for whatever candidate the primary process produced. But if you are sufficiently vested and committed to that process that you would like to have a say in who is running under that party label, it is not unreasonable that you would register as a member of that party. Nobody has twisted your arm behind your back and made you do so; you are taking a considerable level of initiative on your own. Likewise, open primaries can be both a good and bad thing. This falls under the "the political system we have is flawed, but we can't magically pretend it doesn't exist and act according to our own fantasyland versions of reality" thing that I keep saying over and over. So yes, if you want a role in shaping the Democratic candidates who emerge from a Democratic primary process, you will usually register as a Democrat, and nobody has forced you to do that. It's that simple.

Likewise as a general programming note: I'm trying to cut back on politics a bit right now, because I don't have the spoons/bandwidth/mental health to deal with it. I apologize. So if you've sent me a politics-related ask recently and haven't received a response, I'm not deliberately or maliciously ignoring you; I just am not able to handle it as much as usual and will have to put it on pause. However, I feel as if this is important enough to be worth saying, so, yeah.

#anonymous #ask #politics for ts

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titleknown · 5 months

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Hot Take: If you want to actually have a shot at getting US electoral politics out of its ratchet-esque death spiral, you need to start advocating for ranked-choice voting in your state.

Like, due to the way "first past the post" voting inevitably leads to a two-party system, it's basically the big reason that the political system has devolved into "Which Skeksis are we going to let drain the Gelfling essence this time," and ranked choice voting is one of the big ways that we can end up making it so that we can actually have another option besides "barely tolerable neoliberal war-pig" "literal insane theocratic fascists" and "spoiler candidate that will leech votes from the barely tolerable one and give the fascist a seat"

And like, it's a state-based issue! you can have a direct impact on it! Look up if there's any efforts to put it on the ballot for next election!

Here's the org trying to do that for my state, Arizona, look up the ones trying to do that for your states as well and post 'em in the reblogs!

#ranked choice voting #politics #electoral politics #american politics

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goddess-help-us · 2 years

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US Democracy: Close to Death

Pardon my language.

But we are f*cked. Yesterday (June 30, 2022), SCOTUS agreed to hear “Moore v. Harper” on its fall 2022 docket. This case deals with the authority of states to run elections (see more detail later on)*. The conservative-majority court will likely rule in favor of Moore, which would let Republican-held state legislatures appoint their own electors in the electoral college, ignoring the popular vote. In essence, Republicans wouldn’t have to repeat Jan. 6 in the future. They could simply use Republican-held statehouses to reject election results they don’t like, ending free and fair elections in the US.

Presently, there are not enough votes for Congress or the President to do anything to stop this. Congress could potentially impeach Justice Thomas for his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection but the Constitution requires a two-thirds majority Senate vote to convict a sitting Supreme Court justice. Sufficient support for this does not exist in the Senate, and is not likely to exist at any time soon.

There is only one real, legal recourse to this threat: obtaining a true Democratic majority in the US Senate, which we do not have. Senators Manchin and Sinema are unreliable at best and potentially plants at worst. They support neither the reform of or conditional exemption to the filibuster, nor “packing the court.” We need two additional Democratic senators to make their spoiler-effect opposition irrelevant. A 52-member Democratic Senate would allow the filibuster to be bypassed and open the way for the Judiciary Act to pass, which would allow President Biden to add four additional Supreme Court justice seats to reign in this current slow-motion right-wing coup. Don’t think abolishing the filibuster is right? See additional text later.**

How do we get two additional Democratic votes in the Senate? There are currently two highly-competitive Senate races for seats held by Republicans in the midterms this November: Pennsylvania (Dr. Oz (R) vs. John Fetterman (D)) and Wisconsin (party nominees undecided, primary scheduled Aug. 9, 2022). The Dems also need to hold onto every seat they currently occupy. This includes other highly-competitive seats in: Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada. I’ve never campaigned for anyone in my life before but today I signed up to volunteer with John Fetterman’s campaign because I feel like this is important.

I can’t tell anybody what to do this information, I can only provide it. But I hope that people who value laws, regulations, and policies that support the social, economic, environmental, and democratic wellbeing of a society can recognize when those things are at stake (and they are). The Republicans and their right-wing evangelical supporters know that the 2022 midterm and 2024 general elections are the last chance they have to impose their religious agenda on the country. They know the majority of Americans do not support an elimination of abortion, the banning of LGBT people from public life, or the continuous denial of the climate crisis. That is why they are using the Supreme Court to take action right before these critical elections. They should not get away with this.

“I’m too anxious or burnt to do anything.” That’s true. It’s been an exhausting past two years. But, for myself, I hate to think of the regret I might have in 2024 when a Republican-held Court, White House, and Congress enact a nationwide federal ban on abortion or LGBT people. Do I want to ask myself at that time, “was there anything else I could have done?” “Electoralism doesn’t work.” I sympathize.*** Often times it feels we elect people who don’t ultimately do anything. But I guarantee that voting will become even more of a token gesture in the future under the likely Moore v. Harper ruling if it’s allowed to proceed unchecked. “The Nation is already f*cked, there’s no point in saving it. We should just let the inevitable balkanization of America happen.” While I think current inflation and supply chains are bad, I can’t imagine how much worse they will be when the nationwide networks of food, medicine, water, household goods, consumer electronics, et al. are subject to tariffs and various petty interregional conflicts that the federal government currently mediates. Yes, the US will cease to exist one day, but let that be a day when we decide that we no longer need the federal government to aid us in living healthful, rich lives, not because of a right-wing coup.

Thank you for your time if you've read this far.

*Moore v. Harper is a Supreme Court writ of certiorari between Thomas Moore, the Republican Speaker of the North Carolina House of Representatives, and Rebecca Harper, a North Carolina citizen who is collectively filing with other North Carolinians against the Speaker. The case has to do with a Feb. 2022 North Carolina Supreme Court decision that threw out the State Legislature’s election map as gerrymandered. The NC Supreme Court ruled that the maps adopted by the NC Legislature violated the NC Constitution. The NC Supreme Court adopted remedial election maps in their place. Speaker Moore, in turn, filed a writ of certiorari with SCOTUS that it accepted June 30. The NC Republicans believe the US Constitution does not allow state supreme courts jurisprudence over elections and that state legislatures should be able to run and organize elections exclusively. SCOTUS has continuously ruled, however, since 1916 (Davis v. Hildebrant) and as recently as 2015 (Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission) that the Constitution does not give unilateral election-running authority to a state legislature but rather to the public or a state’s constitution. The likely SCOTUS ruling in the fall on Moore v. Harper would overturn over a century’s worth of precedent and allow sitting state legislatures to blatantly gerrymander election maps and even the ability to ignore the popular vote.

**Don’t think abolishing the filibuster is right? The US Constitution does not support the use of the filibuster and does not require a two-thirds vote for laws. It only specifies that a two-thirds majority be used for: censure, expulsion, conviction, and treaty approval. The Senate has reformed the filibuster throughout US history. Senators used to be able to simply filibuster a motion out of the Senate without any accountability. In 1917, the Senate changed its rules to allow a two-thirds majority vote to end debate, the first such check on the filibuster. In 1975, the Senate changes its rules again and dropped this threshold from 67 to 60 senators. Clearly, the Senate has a history of changing its own rules as allowed by Article I, Section 5 of the US Constitution. It is perfectly reasonable and constitutional to either reform or end the use of the filibuster.

***Yes, electoralism is not the end-be-all of civic engagement. It is the bare minimum. If you want more than casting a vote then (good news): there’s a wealth of civil society and community-based organizations out there waiting for your talent, energy, and expertise. Getting involved can connect you to additional resources. And, yes, support mutual aid requests as you are able but mutual aid is not a replacement for actual, scalable human services, like medicine, professional care, electronic infrastructure and services, formal education, et al. that our federal state provides. This is not an “one or the other” decision. All of the tools are here. Use all of them as you are able. Campaign, vote, organize, donate, spread awareness. All of it. And anybody calling for a violent revolution is clueless. The right-wing white supremacists have been preparing for this moment four four decades, with ready-to-mobilize militias. There are no comparable and scalable left-wing militia organizations to counter this. Sure, join your local Socialist Rifle Association but SRA, as it stands now, is simply not comparable to the organization that right-wing extremists currently have. And once you have outed yourself as an active leftist gun user (in the same way that white militias use theirs), you can forget about your constitutional rights. The longer-term solution is to create locally-based power that can resist overreaches by state and federal governments.

#scotus #us supreme court #moore v harper #elections #voting rights #voting rights act #abortion #abortion rights #womens rights #us elections #us democracy #left wing #community organizing

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kineticpenguin · 4 months

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The problem with electoral doomerism is that it'd be extremely cool and funny if a leftist candidate acted as a spoiler and cost the Democrats a state in a presidential election. Unfortunately the only weirdos who reliably show up to vote third party are Libertarians

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kp777 · 3 months

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By Jim McGee

Common Dreams

Jan. 30 2024

The time has come to go big and go bold and speak to the felt concerns of people who might actually vote for you. The Democratic presidential candidate needs to offer voters something to vote for. We are weary of fear-mongering.

Dear President Biden,

History will say that you have done more for working people than perhaps any president since FDR. You steered us through the pandemic, mitigating the economic disruption and we appear to be reaching the mythical “soft landing” in dealing with inflation. You have presided over a substantial restoration of many worker rights that had been lost or diluted through 40 years of neoliberalism. All this in the face of a hostile Congress and an indifferent Senate.

You are running against someone who, by all objective criteria, should not even be a candidate. He has perpetuated his own lie about the 2020 election results. He has fomented insurrection and should not be allowed to run. He has neither the intellect nor the temperament to be chief executive of the United States

Yet the Washington Post reports that despite the relatively good economic news, voters, including Democratic voters, don’t feel it. As one NPR correspondent recently stated, “Increasingly, reality doesn’t matter.”

Let’s face it, your campaign is in trouble. The polls tell us that. At best, it is a toss-up, and worst case, you could lose in key swing states. Even your former running mate, President Obama, seems to be worried.

This simply should not be. There is too much at stake.

While your presidency embraced a number of bold initiatives that would make life better for working-class Americans, your election strategy is not that different from your opponent’s—fear the other guy. Fear what he will do to our democracy, fear what he will do for what’s left of abortion rights. That is not a guaranteed winning strategy. Most of my adult voting life I seem to be voting for the “lesser of two evils” and look where it has landed our country.

This is not the game plan likely to inspire the passion and intensity needed to overcome the cynicism and indifference that seems to have infected vast swaths of the electorate. Young people, in particular, are not motivated to vote for a continued Biden presidency that speaks out of both sides of its policy mouth on existential issues like climate change. Recently, the Washington Post reported that almost half of Americans are dissatisfied with the likelihood of Biden-Trump choice. You certainly don’t need any openings for a third-party spoiler.

Most of my adult voting life I seem to be voting for the “lesser of two evils” and look where it has landed our country.

And then there is October 7th and its aftermath in Gaza. Your reluctance to speak out against the Netanyahu government’s brutal reprisals is a matter of deep concern among significant Democratic constituencies who need to be there for you on election day.

You need to endorse Medicare for All.

Your base is already solidly in support of Medicare for All. By endorsing Medicare for All you will be delivering a message of hope, of aspiration.

I have spent my career working with union-management health care funds, both public sector and Taft-Hartley funds. After almost 50 years I can say emphatically that the system does not work. If the pandemic proved nothing else, it demonstrated the idiocy of a healthcare system that bases entry into that system on employment. Endorsing Medicare for All would energize union support for your candidacy.

I shouldn’t need to cite the well documented evidence that a single payer, Medicare for All system is both superior and more popular. Rather, in the spirit of the John Lennon song, Imagine, I challenge you to imagine a different world.

Imagine a world where we can take health care for granted, where health care is not part of decisions about where to work, how long to work, how many hours to work, or when to retire, or even who to stay married to. Imagine a world where small employers are not at a competitive disadvantage in the hiring marketplace by health care costs. Imagine a world where something as basic as health care is not subject to collective bargaining and is not a significant cause of strikes. Imagine a world where we only enroll in health care once and are not bombarded by confusing “choices”. Imagine a world where those paying for a health care and providing health care can take a lifetime perspective, instead of the current insurance contract year. Imagine a Medicare system that is comprehensive rather than being divided into “Parts.”

If the pandemic proved nothing else, it demonstrated the idiocy of a healthcare system that bases entry into that system on employment. Endorsing Medicare for All would energize union support for your candidacy.

To bring it down to a more practical level, imagine an election cycle where voters are genuinely motivated to vote FOR you and not just against your opponent. Bernie Sanders proved the appeal of the Medicare for All message, especially among young people.

Medicare for All is the message you need to bring voters to the election booth. It will penetrate the gloom and doom that permeates American politics, what the New York Times referred to as the “existential dread of American politics” and energize the electorate. It will pit a positive message against a negative one.

It’s time to move past the politics of fear and to imagine the politics of hope.

It’s time for Medicare for All.

#2024 presidential election #joe biden #medicare for all #democratic party #healthcare

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identitty-dickruption · 5 months

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Vaguely related to mandatory voting, I wish the US had nationwide Ranked Choice Voting, some states have it like in Alaska but it was done cause Republicans thought it'd make them win more (was very much so not the case) and it made the Republican Party freak out and several states (such as Florida) banned it in all elections

yeah this is an old hobby horse of mine, so I hope you don’t mind me absolutely going off

first past the post is the worst thing in the world and if I ever meet a genie, I’m using wish #1 to abolish it. for those who don’t know, first past the post is the voting system where you only mark one box. it’s used in most of the US and the UK, among other places. here are my top five reasons it sucks:

so so many wasted votes. most voters end up with no say over the outcome of the election

for the above reason, it almost always devolves into a two party system, because voters have to think strategically in order to not waste their vote

the party has complete control over who is on the ballot paper, and they can only choose one person per electorate

if there are more than two parties, someone can win the election with a MASSIVE minority (we’re talking. ~30% of the vote) see: most British elections

it makes parties overly cautious about who they put on the ballot (i.e. usually a white heterosexual)

every voting system has its upsides and its downsides. I’m not saying there’s some perfect system out there on the other side of the rainbow. but first past the post is SO SO DOGSHIT

and the five reasons above are the same reasons certain people (mostly conservatives) love first past the post so damn much. they know it supports their status quo. they know it takes agency away from voters. and they’re scared of what would happen if it wasn’t in place

spoiler alert: Australia has had our quirky voting system for a long time now, and it hasn’t magically wiped conservatism off the face of the country (unfortunately)

#asks #I’m so angry for you and for every citizen of a FPTP country #it’s so UGHHH that you guys have to deal with that bullshit #politics

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dertaglichedan · 7 days

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Biden, Panicking Over RFK, Wheels Out Kennedy Family Endorsements.

The Biden campaign is set to wheel out 15 endorsements from family members of Robert F. Kennedy Jr, as polling increasingly reveals RFK takes more votes from Joe Biden than Donald Trump. Siblings of RFK Jr. are set to endorse Joe Biden’s reelection bid on Thursday, including Kerry Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s younger sister.

“Daddy stood for equal justice, human rights, and freedom from want and fear. Just as President Biden does today,” she said of her father, Robert F. Kennedy Sr.

The Biden campaign has hired a team focused on seeing off the threat from RFK Jr., with the Democrats concerned he could act as a spoiler. Past polls have RFK Jr., performing better than any third-party candidate since Ross Perot in the 1990s, with his support pulled roughly equally from Biden and Trump supporters.

RFK recently announced left-wing multi-millionaire Nicole Shanahan as his Vice Presidential pick. Shanahan has donated millions to his campaign, which has been run by a former CIA operative.

RFK’s potential involvement in Presidential debates remains a concern for both major parties. He requires 15 percent of the vote in national polls, as well as securing his position on the ballot in enough states to prove electoral viability. He is currently short of these marks.

***With a family like this,, supporting a goofy old fool.

Who needs... Enemies...

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tomorrowusa · 5 months

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« Americans increasingly use polls to vent, not to vote. During the 20th century, when Americans were in a better mood about the state of the country, presidents generally had high approval ratings and broad support during their time in office. Since 2003, the national mood has grown unbelievably sour, and since 2005, sitting presidents have had underwater approval ratings during about 77 percent of their terms.

[ … ]

The median voter rule still applies. The median voter rule says parties win when they stay close to the center of the electorate. It’s one of the most boring rules in all of politics, and sometimes people on the left and the right pretend they can ignore it, but they usually end up paying a price.

The Democrats’ strong showing in elections across the country this week proves how powerful the median voter rule is, especially when it comes to the abortion issue.

[ … ]

Dull but effective government can win, and circus politics is failing. The Trumpian G.O.P. has built its political strategy around culture war theatrics — be they anti-trans or anti-woke. That culture war strategy may get you hits on right-wing media, but it has flopped for Ron DeSantis, flopped for Vivek Ramaswamy, and it flopped Tuesday night on the ballot. Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, did so well in Kentucky in part because he stayed close to the practicalities, focusing on boring old governance issues like jobs, health care costs and investment in infrastructure. He also demonstrated a Christian faith that was the opposite of Christian nationalism.

[ … ]

Remember that none of us know what the political climate will be like a year from now. Neither you nor I have any clue how some set of swing voters in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are going to see things in 12 months, or what events will intervene in the meantime. Nobody does. »

— New York Times columnist and PBS political commentator David Brooks explaining in his NYT column last week why Democrats need to "chill" about recent polls.

Democrats are sometimes too overreactive for their own good. People who are excessively nervous tend to make more mistakes.

If you have a healthy concern about next year (as opposed to paranoid worry), there are several things you can do.

First and foremost: Volunteer to register voters. Start by asking like-minded people you know if they are registered. Help them with the process. And always remind friends that they need to register whenever they change their address. ALWAYS. Do things like having voter registration tables set up outside high school graduation ceremonies. Go to where the people are.

Shoot down any talk you hear of third party or independent saviors. Not counting faithless electors, the last third party presidential candidate to score any electoral votes was segregationist George Wallace in 1968. H. Ross Perot got almost 19% of the popular vote in 1992 but got zero electoral votes. If just 539 people in Florida who voted for spoiler Ralph Nader had instead voted for Democrat Al Gore, Gore would have been president a lot of horrible things that happened under George W. Bush (like bad SCOTUS appointments) would not have happened. And if the votes cast in 2016 for bad folk singer Jill Stein in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan had gone for Hillary Clinton instead, Trump never would have been president and Roe v. Wade would still be in effect. Electoral votes are all that matter in presidential elections.

Quit fussing over Biden's age. You rarely hear Republicans doing the same about Trump who was born in 1946. Biden can sign his name on bills or veto them – there's nothing wrong with his arm and he doesn't need to use a Sharpie. He has made excellent appointments to the federal judiciary. And some of the most far ranging progressive legislation enacted since the mid 1960s happened on Biden's watch. Being younger doesn't necessarily make somebody a good president; 38-year-old Vivek Ramaswamy would be atrocious. If you really want somebody young, remember that in 2028 people born in 1993 will be eligible to be president. It will be worth the wait if Trump is in the Big House instead of the White House by then.

#democrats #overreaction by dems #democrats should chill #polling #polls don't vote – people vote #election 2023 victories #donald trump #unhinged republicans #election 2024 #david brooks

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mariacallous · 1 year

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The Senate Majority Leader navigated one of the most sweeping legislative sessions in memory—why haven’t voters seemed to notice?

Chuck Schumer did not expect to become the Senate Majority Leader after the 2020 election. The Democrats held forty-eight seats, with two upcoming races in Georgia that he didn’t think the Party would win. Without a Senate majority, he told Joe Biden in the months before the Inauguration, “you’re not going to have a happy time as President.” On the night of January 5, 2021, Schumer watched the Georgia returns in the book-lined living room of his Brooklyn apartment. “Finally, at four in the morning, it becomes clear we won both seats in Georgia,” he told me. “I felt amazing. I can’t sleep, get in the car at 7:30 A.M., drive down to D.C.”

Later that afternoon, as the incoming Majority Leader, he was counting electoral votes on the Senate floor when a policeman rushed over. “He grabs me by the collar. I’ll never forget that, and he says, ‘Senator, we’re in danger, we got to get out of here.’ ” Trump supporters, most of whom had just attended the outgoing President’s speech on the Ellipse, had stormed the Capitol. Schumer exited the chamber and rushed down the hallway. “I was within twenty feet of these bastards,” he told me. “January 5th and January 6th: I call them the best of times, the worst of times.”

Since then, Schumer has presided over an evenly divided Senate, just the fourth such split in U.S. history. “This is the hardest job I’ve ever had,” he told me. A month after the Capitol riot, as Democrats were trying to confirm Biden’s Cabinet secretaries, the Senate held an impeachment trial for Donald Trump. Schumer had wanted it to start in January, as soon as the House sent over the articles, but the outgoing Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, stalled. In the end, all but seven of the Republicans in the chamber voted to acquit Trump, including McConnell, who, according to an account in “This Will Not Pass,” by Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, had told his aides, “The Democrats are going to take care of the son of a bitch for us.”

Then the Democrats had to legislate, with zero margin for error. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema became the faces of a party that always seemed just a few votes shy of delivering on its biggest campaign promises. Nevertheless, Congress passed two major pieces of legislation in its first year in session. One was the American Rescue Plan, a $1.9-trillion relief measure that infused money into local and state governments, financed vaccination programs, aided businesses, and fought child poverty. The other was the $1.2-trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which funded roads and bridges, public transit, improvements to the electrical grid, broadband Internet, and clean-energy initiatives. “The American Rescue Plan, in and of itself, was the most impactful thing a member could do in thirty years,” a senior Senate aide told me. The infrastructure bill, he said, “was the largest infrastructure bill in forty to fifty years.” The successes registered, but only briefly. “We didn’t let each victory breathe,” the aide said. “We went immediately into Build Back Better,” which was the President’s sweeping domestic-policy plan.

That became the crucible for a bitter fight within the Party. In its original form, the Build Back Better Act promised some $3.5 trillion to tackle climate change and invest in an ambitious range of social services, from universal pre-K to child tax credits and paid family leave. Administration officials knew it would have to be pared down. But, in multiple rounds of negotiations, spanning more than a year, Manchin played the role of principled holdout, then spoiler. By the summer of 2022, when the effort to salvage the President’s agenda appeared doomed, Schumer started to achieve a series of legislative breakthroughs on other issues. Between June and August, Congress passed a bipartisan gun-control bill, a major extension of health-care benefits for veterans, and the CHIPS Act, which provides more than fifty billion dollars in subsidies to spur domestic semiconductor production. On August 4th, Michael Bennet, of Colorado, told me, “This might be the most productive ten days that I’ve seen in thirteen years being here.”

Three days later, after an all-night session, the Senate passed an unprecedented reconciliation bill, with the Vice-President casting the tie-breaking vote. The Inflation Reduction Act, as it was called, cut the cost of prescription drugs, expanded health-care subsidies, raised taxes on large corporations, and financed an unprecedented set of tax incentives for green energy. “Did Democrats Just Save Civilization?” Paul Krugman asked in the Times, adding, “This is a very big deal.” Schumer told me, “The whole mood turned around in that second week in August. You felt it everywhere.” Still, even some of the bill’s strongest supporters didn’t expect it to swing the upcoming midterms in their favor. In the hours before the chamber passed the reconciliation bill, Chris Murphy, the Democratic senator from Connecticut, told me, “I’m a believer that this election is going to be much more about choice and personal freedom and Republican radicalism than it is going to be about the reconciliation bill, which is weird because this is the most popular, most comprehensive piece of legislation we passed in a long time.”

Now, a week before the midterms, which tend to punish the President’s party in any year, high inflation and fears of a recession have darkened the picture for Democrats. The Party is almost certain to lose the House majority. The Senate may still be within reach—owing, in part, to a slate of weak Republican candidates. The Times recently reported that many Democratic candidates were not mentioning the Party’s $1.9-trillion economic rescue plan because it “has become fodder for Republicans to attack Democrats over rapidly rising prices, accusing them of overstimulating the economy.” In a number of critical races, candidates have largely avoided touting the Party’s other legislative successes, instead boiling down their components into a series of “kitchen-table” issues, such as the cost of prescription drugs and energy prices. “What we have going for us is what we’ve accomplished, and I think what our views are is much closer to what people believe,” Schumer told me. “What’s going against us is the natural, you know—the sourness in the land.”

When I met Schumer last week, at his apartment in Brooklyn, he was sitting in his socks in his living room, home for a short spell between campaign stops. “Lots of legislation was cooked up right here,” he told me, nodding at our surroundings. He referred to the room as his “little command center.” On one wall was a framed poster from an old F.D.R. campaign. On another, beside a doorway leading into the kitchen, was a poster from the 1928 Presidential campaign of Alfred E. Smith, the New York governor, with the slogan “Honest, Able, Fearless.”

Earlier that afternoon, Schumer had been on the phone with two senators in tight races: Mark Kelly, who is holding onto a narrow lead in Arizona, and Catherine Cortez Masto, who is running about even with her opponent, Adam Laxalt, in Nevada. The Democrats’ hopes to retain control of the Senate hinge on these races, and also two others. In Georgia, Raphael Warnock has struggled to fend off Herschel Walker, whose campaign has been dogged by a series of significant scandals. In Pennsylvania, John Fetterman, the state’s Democratic lieutenant governor, had been leading Mehmet Oz, the television doctor turned Republican challenger, for much of the race. But Fetterman’s weak performance in a recent debate—the result of a stroke he suffered in the spring—has made him vulnerable. If Democrats lose in just two of these states, and the results everywhere else conform to the expectations of the polls, Republicans will retake the majority in the Senate.

Schumer dismisses any suggestion that Democrats’ current troubles stem from ignoring the precarities of the economy. “People say now, ‘Well, maybe you spent too much money,’ ” he said. “We would have had the Great Depression had we not spent it. Obviously, we have to deal with some of the aftereffects, but it was a necessity. And I remember at the moment how vital it was. I had mayors and governors and sheriffs—everyone—calling me and saying, ‘You can’t let us go dry.’ ”

The primary cause of inflation, he went on, was the pandemic and a cascade of problems with the global supply chain. “We’re the people in the various bills that have done stuff about it,” he said. He mentioned a bipartisan bill, the Ocean Shipping Act, designed to reduce supply backlogs, which “got no attention.” A number of other bills—to reform the U.S. Postal Service, to lease weapons to Ukraine—barely made it into the public eye. “When we pass things that have no partisan fighting,” Schumer said, “no one covers it.”

I asked Schumer if it was perhaps wrong to assume that the electorate still responded to policy. “Look, the whole Senate caucus, and much of the country, feels very proud of what we did,” he said. “Now you get into the Sturm und Drang of campaigns, and, obviously, the Republicans tried to attack it. But I gotta tell you this: when everyone predicted that we would have no chance to keep the Senate, the fact that we got these things done means we’re in the ballgame now. And it’s neck and neck. That never would have happened without this. So it did have a very positive effect.”

With midterm voting under way , it’s easy to forget the sense of abject failure that dominated the first half of the summer. On July 14th, Schumer was stuck at home, with COVID, when Manchin informed him that he was abandoning months of conversations on the reconciliation bill. New inflation figures had just been released, showing a nine-per-cent increase over the previous year, giving Manchin a pretext to scrap the talks. “The only thing Manchin would support was a prescription-drug reform and a two-year extension of subsidies for the Affordable Care Act,” another Senate staffer told me. “Chuck was demoralized.”

Four days later, Manchin’s staff got back in touch. “There was a feeling of ‘Oh, God, not again,’ ” according to the staffer. But Schumer was open—“persistent” is the word he uses. “We had many bad turns,” he told me. “Everyone gave up three or four times. Joe Biden gave up!” Schumer and Manchin met secretly in the basement of the U.S. Capitol building and eventually agreed to a round of private talks that became the basis of the Inflation Reduction Act. Schumer takes a historic view of what he managed to do against the odds; he considers this Senate session the “most successful in decades.” “Lyndon Johnson had sixty-some senators,” he told me. “Roosevelt had some seventy-odd senators. Even Obama had fifty-six, fifty-seven, fifty-eight, fifty-nine.”

Chris Murphy was part of the Democrats’ Senate majority in 2013, when Harry Reid led the caucus. “Reid was running a Senate where regular order still ruled the place,” he told me, in September. “Reid had a more decentralized process. Chuck had a more centralized process.” Several senators and top aides told me that what distinguished Schumer’s leadership style was his adaptability, taking a more active role on big-ticket policies, while letting his members take the lead on other initiatives. This summer, Murphy and Sinema, neither of whom chair a committee nor occupy a leadership post within the caucus, convinced a group of Republicans to back a measure to tighten background checks on gun buyers. During the negotiations, Murphy said, Schumer took his cues from them—at least to a point. “I probably got ninety calls from Schumer in those thirty days,” Murphy told me. “Reid was a brilliant leader. But I wouldn’t have gotten ninety calls.”

In his Brooklyn living room, Schumer offered to show me his “secret weapon.” As he reached for the flip phone in his pocket—“every one of my colleagues has my direct number”—it rang, as though on command. “Off the record,” he told me, but he didn’t get up from his seat to take the call. When he hung up, he looked to one of his aides. “The President will call at six-forty-five,” he said.

Three days later, Biden would be in New York to deliver a speech in a gymnasium at Onondaga Community College, in Syracuse. Schumer, who himself is up for reëlection, would be there, along with Kirsten Gillibrand and Kathy Hochul, whose unexpectedly competitive gubernatorial race has given Democrats further cause for alarm. Earlier in the month, as a result of the passage of the CHIPS Act, the semiconductor company Micron had announced that it would invest as much as a hundred billion dollars throughout the next two decades to build a complex of factories in upstate New York. Construction is set to begin during the following two years, and the plan is expected to generate some fifty thousand jobs and a five-hundred-million-dollar fund to train the local workforce.

Because of Biden’s low approval ratings, the President has been mostly avoiding the campaign trail, so his appearance in Syracuse served as a kind of closing argument. He spoke about union jobs and a renaissance of manufacturing. Micron, Biden said, “was making the largest American investment of its kind ever, ever, ever, in our history.” The U.S. “invented” chips, he continued, but “today we’re down to producing only ten per cent of the world’s chips. . . . We’re turning things way around.” In a thirty-minute speech, he frequently used the phrase “not hyperbole” to underline the figures he rattled off—on job creation, infrastructure investment, and low unemployment. It was impossible not to feel a sense of strain. He could lambaste MAGA Republicans and decry the profiteering of oil companies, but was there any way to get the positive message to register?

The district in which the event was held is represented by John Katko, a retiring moderate Republican, who voted to impeach Trump last year. In 2020, Biden won the district by nine points, Katko by ten. The Republican on the ticket this year is calling for Biden’s impeachment. Earlier that day, when Biden arrived at the Syracuse airport, Schumer met him on the tarmac to share an update on the Senate races. A hot microphone picked up what he’d said. “It looks like the debate didn’t hurt us too much in Pennsylvania, as of today,” Schumer told Biden. “So that’s good.” He continued, “I think we’re picking up steam in Nevada,” adding, “The state where we’re going downhill is Georgia. It’s hard to believe that they will go for Herschel Walker.”

When we spoke in Schumer’s apartment, a consensus seemed to be solidifying among the pollsters and prognosticators that November 8th would be a grim day for the Democrats. The Majority Leader didn’t bother to argue the point. Last year, in an obscure deal, a Chicago businessman made one of the largest donations ever to a political nonprofit—$1.6 billion to a group called the Marble Freedom Trust, run by the conservative activist Leonard Leo. The sum, which isn’t taxable, was more than all of the money spent in 2020 by the fifteen most politically active Democratic-leaning nonprofits, according to a Times analysis. “That has set us back, because in the last month they’ve just poured money into this,” Schumer told me. “We’re in a difficult situation.” At another point in our conversation, he said, “I think we’ve done the very best we can. I don’t have any regrets about that.” He added, “I live with the stress.” ♦

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greenleopard49 · 5 months

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youtube

Please look at the math of the Winner-Take-All system, and the issues that come from voting Third Party under this system.

The problem is the Spoiler Effect.

The better that a Third Party candidate does, the more it hurts its own voters by guarenteeing a loss for the party they most agree with and a win for the party they disagree with. Republicans know how the system works and will donate money to which third party is doing the best to insure that they win by making the Democrats lose. People on the right are willing to stick with the Republican party no matter what. Case and point MAGAs.

I know that you don't want to vote Biden and your reasons for not voting for him are completely valid. But there are other ways to not vote for Biden and still insure that the Republicans don't take the white house.

Vote out Biden in the Democratic Primary and provide a new candidate of our choosing.

Support the Alternative Vote, also known as Ranked Choice Voting.

youtube

3. Help to eliminate the electoral college through National Popular Vote Act.

Please support the agreement amongest the states to elect the president by "National Popular Vote". As of August 2023, the National Popular Vote has been adopted by sixteen states and the District of Columbia.

youtube

Please go to National Popular Vote website to show your support!

#third parties #president biden #donald trump #2024 presidential election #democrats #republicans #claudia de la cruz #genocide joe #palestine #lgbtq #blm #leftist #socialism #social justice #Youtube

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brotheralyosha · 11 months

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Yesterday, frequent Sunday talk show panelist and humiliation fetishist Chris Christie joined the race for the Republican nomination. He joins a group of ten(!) candidates who have already declared for the race. He also joins a group of five other mainstream politicians—Tim Scott, Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, Asa Hutchinson, and Mike Pence—competing for the “Not Trump” vote. A few more candidates might still be coming. There are varying calculations that go into running for president, and everyone is motivated to some degree by the thought that the free media that goes with a campaign might be good for their careers even if they lose, but on the whole, each one of these candidates is making the implicit argument that they will be the one who will rally the party’s majority—the 60 or 70 percent of Republican voters who are not solid for Trump—to their side, and sweep to victory.

They won’t. Instead they will divide the vote and Trump will win the primaries. (Unless he drops dead.) Watch.

The single funniest political story I have read so far this year was this Politico story detailing the pitch that Ron DeSantis’s advisors were giving to top donors on the even of his campaign launch.

They conceded that the former president would likely not go below roughly 35 percent support in a primary but that such a floor allowed for DeSantis, his strongest rival, to take a larger share of the remaining 65 percent of the vote.

Uh, sure. That’s one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is “you are starting out 35 points in the hole.” Another way to look at it is, “ten of us will fight like dogs over two-thirds of the electorate, each huddling in our corners with a small percentage in our mouths, while Donald Trump luxuriates in a series of 35/17/17/15/9/7 victories.” DeSantis’s straight-faced pitch to donors sounds like a losing football coach telling his team at halftime, “We may be down by four touchdowns but there are potentially dozens of touchdowns left to be scored, so we are actually ahead.” If you suspected that major Ron DeSantis donors are dumb, you are onto something.

If the Republican Party had any remaining grip on itself, it would have viciously intimidated and bribed as many people as necessary to clear the field for a single main opponent to Trump. But Trump broke it quite thoroughly. The Republican Party as a party today operates in the sort of bumbling, ineffectual way that Democrats have long imagined their own party. A single sick bastard with TV charisma was enough to steamroll all of the party’s power brokers. They are still afraid to attack him. Watching candidates flood into the Republican primary and do their little campaign simulacrums and strenuously pretend that they will be able to dislodge Trump from their party without ever saying a bad word about him—by outsourcing all Trump criticism to Chris fucking Christie, of all people, my god—is one of the most pathetic spectacles I ever hope to witness. Unlike in 2016, today they do not even have the excuse of saying that nobody saw this coming. We have seen this same movie, exactly, before.

I do not consider this analysis to be a demonstration of some profound wisdom. I just want to give you the option of saving yourself a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth over the next year. If ten or a dozen people are competing for 51% of a pie and one guy starts out with 35% of the pie it is not looking good for everyone else. If you had the opportunity to design a crusade to defeat the guy with the 35%, the very first conclusion you would draw would be “we better not have ten people running against him.” Republicans have already failed that test. We have all spent the past eight years inventing reasons why Trump is just about to collapse. I covered the 2015 cattle call primary event in Iowa where Trump got on stage and said about John McCain, “I like people who weren’t captured.” As soon as he said that, all the full time campaign trail reporters leapt up and ran out to file stories about how Trump had just torpedoed his chances. That, like the many insane remarks and scandals that were still to come, was not the case. It seemed like a reasonable assumption at the time, sure. We can’t expect people to be psychic, but we can expect people to learn from the past.

Donald Trump’s base is a statistical minority of the Republican Party. Their inability to outmaneuver him is perhaps the first time in history that Republicans have failed to figure out a way to persecute a minority. The problem is that they are all cowards. With few exceptions, Republican politicians are barnacles who are happy to go down with the ship as long as they can continue clinging safely to its side. You will hear some of these candidates launch some attacks on Trump when they finally conclude that they have no choice. They may even say, as they have at certain opportune times before, that he is a bad, dangerous person. But when they lose to him, they will do the thing that is in their nature: They will fall in line.

#us politics #current events #hamilton nolan

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somethingusefulfromflorida · 11 months

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I had confidence in the 2024 election because Democrats had a better than expected midterm (they only lost the House by a slim margin, gained a seat in the senate, and held all the improtant secretary of state and attorney general races), but going state by state it's much closer than I'm comfortable with.

Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming are solid red (127/438)

California, Colorado, Connecitcut, Delaware, DC, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington are solid blue (195/438)

Arizona is likely to flip red because Krysten Sinema is unpopular and will split the senate vote as an independent spoiler making the Democrats appear disorganized and distressed, very likely siphoning votes from the presidential candidate (138/438)

Florida is solid red no matter how you slice it. 60-40 if it's DeSantis, 55-45 if it's Trump (168/438)

Georgia could go either way, but I see Republicans flipping it back red because the state legislature will do everything in its power to disenfranchise black voters after they flipped it blue four times, once presidential, thrice senatorial (184/438)

Maine splits its electoral college votes by congressional district. I think three will go blue (198/438) and one red (185/438)

Michigan will probably go blue because Democrats made massive gains in 2022, flipping both houses of the state legislature and maintaining control over the important statewide positions (213/438)

Minnesota is the only state to vote against Ronald Reagan twice, having not gone red since 1972. Republicans made gains in the state legislature, but Democrats were able to flip it back in 2022, so I think the statewide race is solid blue for sure (223/438)

Nebraska, like Maine, splits its votes by district. Even though one district is nominally bluer than the others, I have a feeling all five Nebraska votes will go red (190/438)

Nevada could go either way. Democrats held the senate and secretary of state races but lost the governorship. I'd tentatively call it blue, but we won't know the results until a week or two after election day, so let's instead say it's undecided.

New Hampshire could go either way, but leans blue even though both houses of the legislature and the governorship went red. it's very small, so it's unlikely to play kingmaker one way or the other (227/438)

North Carolina is red. it'll be close, maybe 49-51, but close only counts in horseshoes. it has a blye governor, but the legislature is gerrymandered deep red and the regularly override his vetoes. The NC Supreme Court said its electoral maps were unconstitutional in 2022, but the legislature used them anyways, so not even the highest authority in the state could stop them from fucking over the people. It'll be red with very lower turnout (206/438)

Ohio is deep red, not even a contest. It's the worst of Florida and North Carolina, illegal maps, deep red gerrymander, total clusterfuck shitshow (223/438)

Pennsylvania will probably go blue because Democrats flipped the senate and one house of the legislature in 2022 (246/438)

Texas is red. See Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Ohio (263/438)

Virginia is entirely up in the air. I can't make a prediction one way or the other until we see how the state legislature races go this fall. Democrats have a razor thin majority in the senate, Republicans have a razor thin majority in the house, so this November will decide who has the advantage going into 2024. They have a deep red governor, but two blue senators and a consistently blue presidential track record sine 2008. I don't know.

Wisconsin will probably go blue because Democrats managed to hold onto the secretary of state and attorney general seats in 2022, and flipped the state Supreme Court blue just a few months ago. Republicans have majorities in both houses due to gerrymandering, but statewide the Democrats have the advantage (256/438)

Oh dear. Neither party had 270 votes, and Nevada and Virginia are going to be the kingmakers.

If Dems win both, they win 275-263.

If Republicans win both, they win 282-256.

If Republicans win Virginia but not Nevada, they still win 276-262

If Democrats win Virginia but not Nevada, the electoral college is tied 269-269. It would be up to the House to pick a president in a contingent election, though there's no telling how many faithless electors would flip either way.

This is going to be a real nailbiter. No two presidential elections have ever gone the exact same way. There's no way it'll be a repeat of 2020; one or more state will flip, it's just a matter of which. If Dems can hold Arizona or Georgia, they're golden. That's really what it's gonna come down to, Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and Virginia. Democrats could take back the House, but Republicans will almost certainly take back the Senate, which means Game Over no matter who wins the presidency.

If Biden wins, he gets no more judges, zero, zilch, nada.

If Trump or DeSantis win, God have mercy on us all.

#2024 #2024 election #2024 presidential election #election #presidential election #usa #predictions #state by state #god help us all

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alto-tenure · 11 months

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So this post crossed my path again, and it makes me wonder what it might look like to toss a Presidential Candidate Lex Luthor into a later election.

I think there's theoretical merit into having COVID be the equivalent of The Clench in the DCU, and then the Cataclysm, and then No Man's Land, just in time for 2024 -- but the 2024 election hasn't even happened yet. We don't even know who the candidates are. Maybe in about a year and a half after the 2024 election I'll go back and update this, but...not sure!

Anyways: Lex Luthor in a later election! I think for the sake of everything I'm going to go with 2016 instead of 2020.

For the record: Lex Luthor running as a third-party candidate and getting a lot of votes isn't entirely unprecedented! For those of you who aren't aware of post-Vietnam US history, in the election of 1992 there was a rich third-party candidate by the name of Ross Perot. He was fairly moderate by US standards.

I don't know much about Lex's campaign beyond the little bit I saw in NML, but Lex strikes me as someone who cares less about policy and more about image. Lex Luthor is not a wonk.

Donald Trump vs Hilary Clinton vs Lex Luthor: FIGHT!

I think the thing is that Donald Trump and Lex Luthor probably come across as similar to the public; they're both very very rich people that are "political outsiders" trying to build a crowd. If I had to guess, Lex would get a lot of the moderate Republican vote from people who dislike Trump, but also didn't like Clinton enough to vote for her. He would also probably sweep Gotham, seeing as he pretty much saved their asses. Generally home states tend to go for "their" candidate, too. Beyond that, I changed some of the swing states to Democrat because I think that Lex acts as more of a spoiler candidate to make the Republicans lose.

There are a lot of different ways to get to the required amount of electoral votes. I don't know how Lex was elected in canon, but I think this is how it goes in my vision -- disclaimer that I didn't look up how much certain states were won by either candidate:*

See that? No one got to 270. Skill issue, am I right?

This means the House of Representatives would get to pick the president, and the Senate would pick the VP. I think Lex would win over Congress by playing on their guilt about what happened to Gotham, and making sure they were all painfully aware of the suffering while NML existed. So I think even with just a couple states' worth of electoral votes Lex could still end up President. It would be very unconventional and everyone would hate how it went down! But that's how I could conceivably see it going.

The altered political landscape of a Trump loss in 2016 to someone who is a lot like a less policy-extreme version of Trump is really interesting, though. There's some speculation that Trump wasn't running because he was actually interested in politics and was never truly interested in the presidency in favor of 1) upholding his reputation and 2) avoiding punishment for his many crimes. A Trump that loses 2016 is permanently laughed out of the political sphere. He will never have that back.

The US is also probably less authoritarian as a result of Trump not becoming president. Apparently Lex didn't go full dictator, so there's something.

The ramifications this has for the 2020 election are pretty high. I feel like so many politicians wouldn't be able to come back from having endorsed Trump and backing the Trump train. And Biden only ever ran for president because of Trump's election!

So you have a 2020 election that looks very, very different. I suppose there's a possibility of Ted Cruz for President 2020? Not sure who runs on the Democrat end of things.

I don't think this is the most interesting "toss Lex Luthor into an election that isn't 2000 and figure out how he wins" version of events. Like I said earlier, I think I would prefer a version where COVID replaces the Clench for the Contagion arc, and then NML happens around the time of the 2024 election instead, but that is still in the future, so alas we won't know how that election goes for a while.

*the source also didn't say whether Maine and Nebraska's votes were split or not but I doubt it based on the map I saw? the amount of votes stays the same even if the districts didn't all vote the same way

#dc #batman: no man's land #lex luthor #us politics #meta #<- i guess???#this is a very weird post to be making but. i guess lmao #long post

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nicklloydnow · 9 months

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“Kennedy crowed to me about his horseshoe coalition gathered round a campaign he views as fundamentally populist. And it’s quite a band he has put together: crunchy Whole Foods–shopping anti-vaxxers, paunchy architects of hard-right authoritarianism looking to boost a chaos agent, Nader-Stein third-party perma-gremlins, some Kennedy-family superfans, and rich tech bros seeking a lone wolf to legitimize them. Their convening can give the impression of weightiness, but if you so much as blew on them, the alliance would shatter into a million pieces. The only thing that seems to bind them is Kennedy, the current embodiment of a warped fantasy of marginalization and martyrdom that has become ever more appealing — and thus politically significant — in an age of disinformation and distrust in government and institutions.

That’s not to say Kennedy’s campaign is a joke. He is both an addled conspiracy theorist and an undeniable manifestation of our post-pandemic politics. He is an aging but handsome scion of America’s most storied political family, facing off against an incumbent who many in his own party worry is too old and too unpopular to win a second term. Far from an exile, he is an extremely well-connected person with unparalleled access to the centers of influence in New York, Hollywood, and Washington, D.C., who either has no idea what kind of fire he’s playing with, or does and is therefore an arsonist.

He is running a surprisingly potent campaign that, thanks to the lurid dynamics of social media and the boosts he is receiving from some of the wealthiest, most listened-to people in America, stands to grow even more disruptive, his deep thoughts on Rogan’s podcast translating into overflow crowds at his rallies. Lesser threats than Kennedy have played spoilers in elections before, and if he succeeds in helping burn us all to the ground, it will not be because he is an outsider, as he claims, but because of a political and media culture that has protected and encouraged and fawned over him his whole life — handing a perpetual problem child, now 69 and desperate for attention, accelerant and matches.

(…)

His vaccine beliefs hooked him up with a broader world of conspiracy theorizing. In 2006, Kennedy wrote a lengthy story, again for Rolling Stone, claiming the Republican Party had “mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004,” stealing the election in Ohio via Diebold voting machines — a specious claim that was seductive to Democrats who simply could not believe George W. Bush had won his reelection bid against John Kerry. Kennedy’s doubts in electoral results have persisted, and he recently equivocated to the Washington Post’s Michael Scherer about the 2020 election, saying, “I don’t know. I think that Biden won.”

Kennedy has also come to believe many other things that run the gamut from unproven to ludicrous to dangerously irresponsible. They begin with his conviction that the CIA played a role in the murders of both his uncle and his father and that Bobby Sr. was killed not by Sirhan Sirhan but by a security guard assigned to protect him; he actively campaigned for Sirhan’s release from prison against the wishes of most of the Kennedy family, including his mother.

(…)

Kennedy has also suggested that 5G high-speed-internet towers are being used to “harvest our data and control our behavior”; posited a link between mass shootings and antidepressant use; told Rogan that Wi-Fi pierces “the blood-brain barrier,” causing “leaky brain”; and claimed the presence of atrazine in the water supply has contributed to depression and gender dysphoria among boys since atrazine is known to clinically castrate frogs when dumped into their tanks.

Again: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been polling as high as 20 percent.

(…)

But he does not really emphasize reducing costs and making medicine and health-care treatments more broadly available to more people. If this were important to him, he would not have allowed Rogan to pit him against Dr. Peter Hotez, the Texas physician-scientist making open-source, patent-free vaccines available to poor populations around the world, undercutting the extortionate pharma companies. Kennedy’s fight is about vilifying lifesaving medical treatments in favor of others that he has decided, based on inscrutable metrics of his own, are more holistic.

(…)

American Values is also a laundering of a lot of dirty Kennedy linen. There is but one mention of Chappaquiddick and lots of florid encomiums about how devoted everyone was to one another with little mention of the famously chronic infidelity that ran rampant in the family. He lauds ancient Grandma Rose for her “curiosity about people of all backgrounds,” including “fishermen, actors, cabbies, political leaders, bus drivers, tourists, movie stars, heads of state, strangers in elevators,” a list that suggests that the full and dazzling range of humanity may fall into three categories: famous people, people who transport them to places, and others they may meet by chance on Cape Cod.

(…)

He is leaning hard into his family in this contest; his logo even borrows the iconography of his father’s 1968 campaign. It makes it all the more awkward that almost no members of the Kennedy family are supporting him. Many have already publicly endorsed Biden, who employs at least three Kennedys in his administration. Kennedy’s sister, the filmmaker Rory Kennedy, told CNN, “Due to a wide range of Bobby’s positions, I’m supporting President Biden.” On the day Kennedy filed his paperwork with the Federal Election Commission, his cousin Bobby Shriver tweeted that it was “a good day” to remind everyone he had been an early supporter of Biden in the 2016 primary.

(…)

Kennedy and his second wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy, the best friend of his sister Kerry, announced their separation in 2010. In 2012, Mary hanged herself in an outbuilding of their home in Mount Kisco. More than a year later, the New York Post published excerpts of a diary from earlier in his marriage in which he kept an account of the 16 women he’d had sex with that year. In 2014, he married Hines.

One of the keys to Kennedy’s appeal with a certain segment of the population is his view of himself as an outcast and victim. When his inaugural campaign speech went long, he joked with the crowd, “This is what happens when you censor somebody for 18 years.”

(…)

Being shunned in any way for ideas that, when it comes to vaccines, are not just about individual choice but about our collective responsibility is perhaps anathema to people raised to assume their voices would be heard and understood as legitimate. Public-health directives during COVID were crude and sometimes wrong — messaging on masking changed repeatedly, masking outdoors now seems silly, the school closures lasted longer than they should have — but the objections made by people like Kennedy were not rooted in special advance scientific knowledge. Rather, they stemmed from the fury of normally powerful people affronted by the argument that their individual impulses put them on the wrong side of a moral question of communal engagement and compassion. It is a dynamic many managed to reframe as their willingness to stand in patriotic challenge to weak-minded, compliant, vaccinated sheep. And it is the type of environment in which men born with immense wealth and power — the kind who casually mention that governors have called and offered them Senate seats that they have turned down — can recast themselves as martyred heroes.

(…)

But of course he’s a poser. This entire campaign is a pose, as is his outsider stance. He is a Kennedy. He is the fifth member of his family to run for president. His sister Kerry was married to the man who would become the governor of New York, whose brother was a television journalist; his cousin Maria was married to the governor of California, who also happened to be a movie star. His grandfather owned a movie studio. He has written, in American Values, of attending the 1960 Democratic convention at which his uncle was nominated; he was 6, and his family stayed at the home of Marion Davies, the actress and the mistress of his grandfather’s good friend William Randolph Hearst. At that convention, Frank Sinatra hosted cocktail parties celebrating his family. Kennedy’s own wife is a star whom he met through another television star, his friend Larry David, who recently offered the Times this classic clarification about his relationship with the candidate: “Yes love and support, but I’m not ‘supporting’ him.”

Over lunch in New Hampshire, I asked Kennedy how his conversation with Republican New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu had gone following his address to the state legislature; Kennedy told me, “It was nice. I knew his father” — who was also governor. It can seem as if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. knows the father of every powerful person in America. Perhaps more important, they knew his father and his uncles and his grandfathers.

So he gets traction where no one else would. His relationship with the political media, which has published him, written about him, and seen him as a full and flawed and interesting human, has always been guided by his core identity as an insider, a member of the family that this country was taught to love above all others and to pity in their many public tragedies. As a journalist who has been told for decades that my empathy for the female candidates I often cover is probably overemotional and built too strongly on personal identification, let me just tell you that you should never stand between a white male political journalist over the age of 40 and his feelings about the Kennedys.

I was a young person in journalism in New York at the turn of the millennium when a lot of people I worked for and with were Kennedy’s dining companions, buddies, and neighbors. Peter Kaplan (another of my former bosses), then editor of the New York Observer, had been his roommate at Harvard and was one of his best friends. Kennedy and his cousin John Jr. — who ran the magazine George — were big handsome puppies who frolicked among a generation of political junkies who had grown up worshipping their dads and then wound up at the same schools, jobs, and parties as the sons. I saw this at Talk and the Observer and Salon; it was true at The New Yorker and the New York Times and The New Republic and The Atlantic and the places that published Kennedy from the 1970s on, providing him the mainstream credentials he cited when I asked him about his preparation for the presidency. For what it’s worth, in those same years, I was often asked to cover Trump, then a local celebrity and bargain-basement version of a Kennedy himself, an easy call to get a quote to fill a column, with every mention making his name more recognizable, his words more legitimate. How do we think these guys got here?

(…)

If he can have that effect on me, what must his draw be for those who have not spent hours reading about thimerosal and AZT and Diebold machines just double-checking that all this stuff he says with such assuredness is, indeed, nonsense? Imagine how strong it could be for millions of scared Americans who look at him and see shadows of people they’ve lost, of men the country has lost.

If he were your uncle, you would likely consider that he is fighting some serious psychological headwinds. His own uncle was assassinated when Bobby was 9. He was pulled from school at 14 and flown to the deathbed of his father, also assassinated. His cousin drove a plane into the sea on the way to Bobby’s sister’s wedding. One brother died in a skiing accident, another of a drug overdose. His wife died by suicide. All this in a family in which his grandfather’s dictum was “There will be no crying in this house.”

(…)

And it’s not benign. Because while, no, he is certainly not likely to win the Democratic nomination or ever become president, he could do well in a rogue New Hampshire primary in which Biden is declining to participate, and his performance in that state could trigger further distrust in our elections and throw more fuel on the legitimacy crisis that is raging across this democracy — a crisis that is dangerous, insurrectionist, violent, and terrifying. This campaign will mean his views gain a broader audience, and that too is terrifying when it comes to the erosion of the public’s understanding of disease, science, and public-health measures.

And then there is the bracing reality that, here in Trump’s America, another clearly damaged man, a man whose own close-knit family has waved red flags about his fitness for office, is getting this far in the anti-Trump party.

(…)

Not so distant from this performance of retro white machismo is the fact that at least some of the blame for this wretched state of affairs lies with Biden and the Democratic Party. When elected, Biden promised to be a bridge president: to formulate, alongside the equally senescent leadership of his party, a succession plan of some sort. But these aging leaders have not done that, so here we are with some of the anti-Biden energies among Democratic voters getting directed toward a man who looks like the saviors of old, a glitchy hologram of fabled politicians who once represented youth and hope.

He never, ever, ever should have been here. In this position. In these pages, in this context. He should never have been a politician or a public figure at all. He should have been a veterinarian.

In American Values, amid all his bizarre hagiography of his family members and rehashing of the Bay of Pigs, is story after story after story of pure delight and joy and love and fulfillment: There are the falcons and hawks and pigeons, the Komodo dragons, the matricidal coati, a red-tailed hawk named Morgan. There’s a California sea lion, Sandy, who “took up residence in our swimming pool” and “ate mackerel by the barrel, devouring everything but the eyeballs, which we found scattered like marbles across the pool, patio and lawn.” One day, after causing a traffic jam on the Georgetown Pike, Sandy, like the dragons, winds up at the National Zoo. And how about Carruthers, the 16-pound leopard tortoise brought back from Africa under the diplomatic protection of his uncle Sargent Shriver in Ethel Kennedy’s Gucci suitcase? Carruthers spent 21 years roaming the house at Hickory Hill in Virginia alongside “ten horses, eleven dogs, a donkey, two goats, pigs … a 4-H cow, chickens, pheasants, ducks, geese, forty closely related rabbits” and Hungarian homing pigeons, a nocturnal honey bear who “slept away his days in the playroom crawl space,” and a jill ferret who “fed her pups under the kitchen stove.”

(…)

But this country, with its political system built around white patriarchal ideals of who powerful men are supposed to be, and its very limited view of what other kinds of power might look like, has created too irresistible an opportunity for someone with a famous name, a tremendous ego, and a persecution complex. So here we are, eight years after Trump descended the elevator in Trump Tower, listening to a man talking about ivermectin and the fascism of Fauci and the castration of frogs and watching him run riot in a Democratic primary.”

“I’ve been doing my best to ignore the farcical presidential candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. His noxious views on vaccines, the origin of AIDS, the alleged dangers of wi-fi and other forms of junk science deserve no wide hearing. Polls showing he’s favored by 20 percent of likely Democratic voters over President Biden are almost as laughable as Kennedy’s views. It’s early; he’s got iconic American name recognition; and there’s almost always an appetite, among Democrats anyway, for anybody but the incumbent. His lies have been thoroughly debunked by Judd Legum at Popular Info, Michael Scherer in The Washington Post, Naomi Klein in The Guardian, and Brandy Zadrozny on NBC News.

But I’ve come to believe I have a responsibility to write about Kennedy because of my own shameful role in sending his toxic vaccine views into public discourse: I was the Salon editor, in partnership with Rolling Stone, who 18 years ago published his mendacious, error-ridden piece on how thimerosal in childhood vaccines supposedly led to a rise in autism, and how public health officials covered it up. From the day “Deadly Immunity” went up on Salon.com, we were besieged by scientists and advocates showing how Kennedy had misunderstood, incorrectly cited, and perhaps even falsified data. Some of his sources turned out to be known crackpots.

(…)

Now, Kennedy insists, as the The New York Times paraphrases him, that “Salon caved to pressure from government regulators and the pharmaceutical industry.” He repeated the false claim in his three-hour podcast conversation with Joe Rogan, another conspiracy loon, rehashing the debunked claims of “Deadly Immunity” and claiming that Salon pulled the piece after “pressure from the pharmaceutical industry.”

That’s just another lie. We caved to pressure from the incontrovertible truth and our journalistic consciences.

(…)

The pushback began almost immediately. I’ve already linked to our corrections, which with hindsight seem not to correct what were revealed to be the worst errors. Seth Mnookin, who happened to also write for Salon occasionally, was one of the most dogged debunkers, and his 2011 book The Panic Virus, which features a chapter on Kennedy and the Salon/Rolling Stone mess, ultimately helped convince us to retract the piece entirely.

Mnookin showed, among other things, how Kennedy misrepresented what went on at a 2000 meeting on vaccine safety convened by the Centers for Disease Control, at the Simpsonwood conference center outside Atlanta, where the claims of a link between Thimerosol and autism were discussed. Mnookin wrote, “Kennedy relied on the 286-page transcript of the Simpsonwood meeting to corroborate his allegations—and wherever the transcript diverged from the story he wanted to tell, he simply cut and pasted until things came out right.”

(…)

I tell this story, incompletely and imperfectly given the 18 intervening years, because Kennedy continues to peddle the lies he published and claim that dark forces cowed us and forced us to retract his story. The odious Joe Rogan has been going after vaccine scientist Dr. Peter Hotez on Twitter, after Hotez tweeted that the Kennedy interview was “awful,” “absurd,” and promoting “nonsense.” He offered Hotez “$100,000.00 to the charity of your choice if you’re willing to debate [Kennedy] on my show with no time limit.” Twitter troll and site owner Elon Musk has been amplifying Rogan and Kennedy and going after Hotez. On Sunday a Q-Anon believer came to Hotez’s Houston home demanding that he debate Kennedy.

(…)

I regret the role I played in spreading Kennedy’s anti-vaccine propaganda, and however it helped foment the harassment of Hotez. The vaccine-autism lie isn’t the only big lie Kennedy’s told. But it’s the only one I can debunk personally.”

“I'd prefer to explore what a noted misogynist who reportedly tormented his second wife — and then vilified after she killed herself — says about the 2024 election.

Here was actor Billy Baldwin on Twitter in April, posting a photo of RFK Jr. and his late wife Mary — who, he said, spent many a time crying on his shoulder about her terrible husband:

'If Bobby were half a man she would still be alive today. It will all come out. His campaign will be over in weeks. If these walls could talk.'

Mary, according to those who knew her well, was in agony over RFK Jr.'s ceaseless womanizing. He kept sex diaries, which Mary discovered and gave to a trusted friend. Should anything happen to her, the world might know who we're really dealing with.

In the back of each diary were ledgers listing all the women Bobby had been with — many friends of Mary's or women in their social circle — numbered from one to ten, indicating, like a teenage boy, how far each sexual encounter had gone.

(…)

After Mary's death, Bobby sanctioned friends, relatives and at least one sympathetic Kennedy historian to tell his version of events: Mary was a drunk, a hysteric, a crazy woman. It was a miracle he even survived the marriage.

The greatest smear job came via a Newsweek cover story, which branded Mary's suicide part of the Kennedy Curse — oh, the terrible things that just keep happening to this family!

Somehow, the author got access to a sealed 60-page affidavit in which Bobby accused Mary of having a personality disorder, of beating him in front of their son, of drunkenly face-planting into her dinner.

Mary's siblings called the report 'scurrilous' and 'full of lies.'

(…)

Nonetheless, Bobby went to court to fight Mary's siblings, who hated him, for her remains.

Once he won, he made a big show of having Mary buried in the Kennedy family plot in Massachusetts, the media getting unobstructed photos of Mary's casket.

Not two months later, without the required permits, Kennedy secretly had Mary's coffin exhumed from her grave and buried alone on the other side of the cemetery, no gravestone.

He didn't tell her siblings. In my opinion, this was his final revenge — if Mary dared to humiliate him by killing herself — because it's all about Bobby Jr., all the time — in life, he would do the same to her in death.

(…)

This is a man who smeared the mother of his four children in the most public way possible, who made her life a misery and who gaslit the nation into thinking he was the victim.

He is, in my opinion — and I'm not alone — not just mentally ill. He's a bad man.

The Kennedys have this generational sickness, their abhorrent treatment of women.

Why aren't we talking about it?

How is it that no one's drawing parallels to Bobby's Uncle Ted, the last famous Democrat to challenge an incumbent Democratic president — you know, the uncle who left a young campaign aide named Mary Jo Kopechne to die alone after driving off a bridge at Chappaquiddick?

The party line on Ted was always that he was terrible to women in his personal life but great at legislating for us.

Tell that to the women he destroyed, his wife Joan among them, painting her as the family drunk, the political liability. Sound familiar?

Women, to Kennedy men, are scapegoats.”

“By now, you undoubtedly know presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said at a press dinner last Tuesday night that COVID-19 was an “ethnically targeted bio weapon” designed by the Chinese government to be deadly for Caucasians and Blacks, but spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.

(…)

The stunning moment was surreal and incomprehensible. But I’ve seen the video and heard the audio, so I know it’s true.

“COVID 19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people,” said Kennedy. “The races that are most immune to COVID-19 are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”

Sitting next to Kennedy at that moment was an Ashkenazi Jew, New York Post reporter Jon Levine. Check out his baffled expression on the video.

Contrary to Bobby’s hair-brained theory, I got the coronavirus. My son, brother, sister-in-law, aunt, uncle, nephews, niece, cousins and friends also got COVID. My neurologist’s medical partner got COVID and died. Ashkenazi Jews all.

Bobby knows who I am. My wife, Liz, and I donated to his Riverkeeper nonprofit organization and watched him fly falcons at the Hudson River home of then-Gov. George Pataki. Bobby should also know that Frydman is a Jewish name of European ancestry. I’m not Sephardic. I’m fair-haired and light-skinned. That makes me Ashkenazi.

You’d think his campaign manager, former Ohio congressman and Cleveland Mayor Dennis Kucinich, and staff would’ve prepped Bobby about the probability of Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese journalists being in attendance. In fact, there was a Chinese reporter from the Epoch Times at the table.

(…)

But even Klein, a prominent anti-vaxxer and good friend of RFK Jr. who’s advised him on Israel, is reportedly “worried” about Bobby’s kooky COVID comments.

“This is crazy,” Klein was quoted as saying. “It makes no sense that they would do that. I read everything. I was totally against the vaccine…I wanted to convince myself it was correct not to take it. I have never seen anything like this.”

The Anti-Defamation League also weighed in. “The claim that COVID-19 was a bioweapon created by the Chinese or Jews to attack Caucasians and Black people is deeply offensive and feeds into sinophobic and antisemitic conspiracy theories about COVID-19 that we have seen evolve over the last three years.”

StopAntisemitism added, “We have no words for this man’s lunacy.””

#kennedy #robert kennedy jr #rfk jr #conspiracy theory #conspiracy theories #anti vaccination #anti vaxxers #antisemitism #misogyny

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