The department told the outlet that they apologize for his behavior and that Rodgers has received “received a written reprimand for a violation of the department’s social media policy and will remain on duty.”

Oh, he got a reprimand. Well that should take care of everything. I’m sure he’s learned a valuable lesson. Public trust restored.

He could give actual blowjobs on stage after getting the words “filthy whore” tattooed on his forehead and it wouldn’t crack the top ten things he’s done to drive away potential voters.

Harris holds on to the support of nearly all Democrats, with 97% saying they will support her and 0% saying they will support Trump.

But she also gets 5% of Republicans who say they will vote for her over Trump. Trump holds 89% of Republicans.

The poll shows a small universe of people who say they previously supported Trump and have now switched their vote to someone else.

Among those not supporting Trump, 16% say there was a time when they supported him, while 81% say they have never supported him. Another 3% are not sure.

This is a factor that very few polls ever look for. There are so many reasons to oppose Trump which transcend partisan politics. We’ve had so many Republicans endorse Harris, but you don’t see many polls looking for the voters that are making the same jump.

The implications are huge. Every voter that switches from Trump to Harris is a net gain of 2 votes. And if they are still registered Republicans, any early voting data will likely be interpreted with them in the Trump column until they are actually counted. And of course, any voter turnout efforts paid for by the Trump campaign will likely be turning these people out as well, which is just delightful.

We’ll see how accurate this is on Tuesday. But if Iowa really does go blue, it seems likely that it won’t be the only surprise that night.

All the recent talk of Epstein has been bringing back memories.

Local employye owned grocery chain is consistently the best place to shop, didn’t inflate prices across the board like everyone else, and the workers actually get treated like human beings. It’s proof enough for me that this model should be far more common

There are some additional reasons to be optimistic.

First, the poll numbers have been getting skewed by Republican affiliated pollsters that consistently show Trump in a better position than the nonpartisan polls. The race is definitely close, but if these partisan polls really are just trying to give the impression of a surge in Trump support and aren’t actually more accurate than the nonpartisan polls, then that potentially pushes some states from a narrow Trump lead back to a narrow Harris lead. And it’s not like there isn’t a precedent for this, it’s exactly what happened with the polls in 2022.

Second, while Republicans are casting a higher percentage of the early votes than in 2020, that increase is largely coming from people who voted on election day in 2020. Moving a vote from election day to early voting is a net change of 0. And the Harris gotv machine appears to be much stronger than the one Trump outsourced to Musk, which seems to be targeting the least reliable voters while also using the least reliable canvassers. It’s no wonder Musk resorted to buying votes petition signatures.

Harris has a stronger lead among women than Biden or Clinton did, and the gender gap in turnout so far is also higher in the previous elections. In addition, Harris is leading among voters over 65, a reversal from previous elections and particularly important because they are by far the most reliable voters.

And the news cycle has not been kind to Trump this past week. It turns out that insulting groups that make up a sizable chunk of the voting population in certain key swing states isn’t a good move. Will it make a difference by Tuesday? Hard to say, but it sure as hell isn’t helping him.

None of this is terribly solid, it’s just trends and indicators, no one should be getting complacent here. But it’s enough for me to feel cautiously optimistic that Harris will be able to secure Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, with a reasonable chance of picking up at least one more state.

If the Republican gotv gamble backfires and their election day turnout advantage doesn’t fully materialize, we could see more states flip. More importantly, it could be enough to flip the House (currently a toss up) and maybe even hold the Senate (requires defying expectations in at least 2 out of 3 races, so a long shot but not impossible).

Worked for Captain America

It would fascinating to see how the next hundred years unfold depending on the outcome of this election. I would love to be able to compare the two timelines and see just how wildly different they can be.

Unfortunately, we only get one timeline, so we better not fuck it up.

Oh he knew the spoiler effect was a thing. He just didn’t think it was Trump that he’d be hurting.

Well, I generally agree that party leaders have way too much power, but that seems to be an issue across many different systems. Your example is from a FPTP system. Is there some reason to think it would be worse if we had proportional voting?

It’s not that it would be worse, it’s that it would be the norm. The party would always be the one with the final decision on who actually represents you.

I mean I can see how party leaders might have more power in some ways. But on the other hand it’s much easier to abandon them for another ideologically similar party if they abuse it. Yes it means abandoning AOC or whoever your favorite is but they can also jump ship if need be. I think we need a different solution to overly powerful party leaders.

Which makes it an all or nothing proposal. You can have the entire party or none of it. You can’t vote out a particular shithead, you can only take the nuclear option and abandon the whole party. That makes it a lot harder to hold each individual representative accountable to the people they are supposed to be representing.

To bring this back to real world examples, the only reason Kari Lake and Mark Robinson are not likely to win their elections is because the voters get to vote on a specific candidate. Both would easily have the support of their party’s leadership, and the party’s supporters would certainly vote for their party, but a large number of those who support the party don’t want those candidates. That ability to say “no, not you” is not something we should give up when trying to reform the system.

But the thing is, there are so many things I would want to change about the Democratic Party, but I can’t abandon them because my only alternative is far worse. If we had a diversity of somewhat similar parties then it would be much much easier to pressure them into doing what voters want.

Not suggesting we keep the status quo, Just suggesting that any reform should keep representatives directly accountable to voters.

Ranked choice would do this to some extent as well, so I broadly support both. However, I have concerns about election security with ranked choice. Unless the election authorities share their ballot data, it’s very very difficult to determine who the true winner should be from exit polling or similar. There was a major fiasco in Alameda co California where the wrong candidate was seated by accident and no one even noticed until a later audit was done by a non-profit group.

Transparency absolutely needs to be the rule. If we move to RCV, we need to have the full dataset released with each election. Results should be published showing the percentage each candidate got for 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. and the order in which they are eliminated. It would take a while for everyone to get used to it, but the data should be straightforward and it isn’t hard to figure out how to fit into a simple enough graphic for people to understand.

The issue isn’t just one of partisan extremes. Just look at the near miss in the Democratic primaries this year. Biden was the choice of the party leadership and it took his public humiliation and a massive pressure campaign to get a replacement. The people calling the shots at the party level do not necessarily have same interests as the voters, even when they are politically aligned.

Sure, you can jump ship and go to a new party, but that only works when enough voters care to make them jump ship, and when there is a worthwhile alternative. That also means abandoning anyone you support in the party, because they are all lumped together and there’s no separating the people you want to vote for from the people you oppose. Building a new party from the ground up is a much more extreme reaction than just voting for a different person.

I wouldn’t have the same objection if we had a system where we were had proportional representation spread across specific candidates voted into office. I would have some questions about how it would work, but it would address the issue I’m bringing up.

My concern with proportional representation is that it typically means you are voting for a party, not a specific person. Imagine voting for the Dems and not knowing if you’re getting AOC or Joe Manchin.

With Ranked choice, you can know exactly who you are voting into (or out of) office. I’d rather let the voters be the ones who choose candidates directly and not have the party do it for us.

That just leaves the other 999,993 reasons to cover.

It also assumes that people are fully aware of how much celebrity endorsements affect their opinion. People generally aren’t that self aware, especially when looking back through a haze of memory at past decisions.

You might not say to yourself “Jack Black approves, and that’s good enough for me” as you do a 180 on an issue, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t have some effect. The fact that it’s a celebrity saying it might be the thing that gets the message to you in the first place. It might be that the bandwagon effect shifts your thinking without you realizing it. And it might be one of many things that all contribute to a gradual change.

Why are we doing this? Because we believe America’s future is decided locally – one race at a time,” Antón continued. “And with more than 200 publications across the nation, our public service is to provide readers with the facts that matter and the trusted information they need to make informed decisions.”

Local elections are important, but I’m pretty sure that the one race that’s going to have the biggest impact on America’s future is the presidential race. You’d think think they’d have something to say on the topic if it was America’s future they were thinking about rather than just their own.

In general, people are more likely to vote when they perceive their side as being in the lead or more popular. It’s why there’s a long history of partisan polling, and why campaigns are eager to be seen as having momentum. It’s much better for them to say they are cautiously optimistic than it would be to say nothing and leave their supporters feeling demoralized by all the people saying the opposite.

Best case scenario, there is an injunction now, a civil suit that brings evidence out into the open during discovery, and criminal charges at both the state and federal level once they have an overwhelming case built up that can eviscerate any defense his army of lawyers might put forward.

I wish they could just slap cuffs on him now and toss him in jail, but unfortunately the richest man in the world is not going to be easy to prosecute.

Trump doesn’t apologize, admit mistakes, or accept anything resembling accountability. It’s worked in the past because there haven’t been lasting consequences and the more he gets away with shit the lower expectations get.

The problem for him here is that short term consequences now could become long term consequences after election day. If there’s enough outrage to shift a small portion of the vote in a single swing state, that could cost him the election.

Will it actually make a difference? Who knows, but it sure as hell isn’t going to help. While I’d rather he lost by such an unexpectedly large margin that it can’t be blamed on this, I would still laugh if it all comes down to a sudden shift in the Puerto Rican vote in PA.

Puerto Rico has no electors. But there are a lot of Puerto Ricans living in the states, and as US citizens they can vote in the election.

For a lot of them, I don’t think it goes any farther than: “Yeah he says things I don’t necessarily agree with, but groceries are more expensive than ever and I just want things to be different.”