Maybe We Should Just Cancel the November Elections

Based on My Weekend Doom Scrolling

Tomorrow is Super Tuesday, the day we’ll be told that former president Donald J Trump will become the Republican nominee president this year. He won’t actually have the delegates needed, and the party’s convention is five months away, but, hey, “everybody knows.”

In fact, according to a New York Times/ Siena poll, President Biden should just throw in the towel, because he’s fixin’ to be whooped anyway.

Here’s the lede at Politico, which has cornered the doubting Thomas election coverage.: 

• Former President Donald Trump has a 4 percent advantage over President Joe Biden in a New York Times/Siena College poll of likely voters released Saturday.

• Of respondents who said they were likely to vote, 48 percent said they would vote for the former president if the presidential election were to be held today, with 44 percent responding they would vote for Biden. Among registered voters, Trump had support from 48 percent of respondents and Biden 43 percent.

This sort of news has some Democrats I know barfing in despair. Even if the NYT/Siena poll was accurate (it’s very flawed), we’re a long way from November. And the very stable genius is getting more wacko every day, what with him flat out offering a trial judge a seat on the Supreme Court if she gives a hand.

However, it’s now safe to assume that no matter how deranged or how many court cases he loses, there is a hard core MAGA base that won’t be moved. As Trump said yesterday, there are no moderates left in the Republican Party, and if there were, MAGA was getting rid of them.

Via Mediaite:

• MSNBC’s The Weekend played a clip of Trump making the claim at a Get Out The Vote rally in North Carolina Saturday:

• “And they say, always try to demean, “Well, MAGA really represents 48% of the Republican Part —” No. It represents 96%, and maybe 100%. We’re getting rid of the Romney’s of the world! We want to get Romneys and those out. But they know that we are the only ones who can stop them.”

The biggest problem –I think– with President Biden as far as his campaign ending up on the rocks is potentially the war in Gaza/Israel. Netanyahu is a right wing nut, and getting Trump elected is just a side benefit of continuing to slaughter Palestinians. 

When the New Republic dares to ask if Zionism Has Lost the Argument, people should take note. Editor/Publisher Marty Perez is no longer there, but the tradition of blinders on when it comes to Israel would be hard to shake. And it should be clear that the American public is shifting on this issue, even with the public shaming associated with a lack of unconditional support. 

Younger voters and Arab Americans generally don’t see any reason for the administration’s abject tolerance of a war run amok. As unstable as that situation is, things could look a lot different in six months. No amount of polling is going to predict where this is going.

Back to the survey, specifically the cross tabs which give plenty of insight into how the top line numbers were achieved. Some of these specifics are damning, which is not to say the poll was made up, it represented the views of the people asked by surveyors.

Jay Quo was all over this. He spotted three things that should have made the NYT/Siena  crew pause before releasing their conclusions.

# 1– Women. 

• As LSU professor and political historian Robert Mann noted,

• I do not believe Biden is tied with women nationally 46-46… Biden got 57% of women in 2020. You're telling me that, post-Dobbs, his support among that demo group will drop to 46? Not credible.

#2– Democrats for Dean Phillips 

• The NYT/Siena poll has Phillips at 12 percent support among Democrats.

• Really? Because last time I checked, in the actual official contests that have been held, his actual vote haul averages 1.5 percent. 

#3-- Young People

• The news in this poll was partway decent for Biden when it came to young voters age 18-29. He leads Trump by 13 points among them, 54 to 41 percent—but that’s still around half the spread that other major polls have on this age group. But when it comes to messaging on the youth vote, the NYT prefers to emphasize the negatives, and its own data seems at odds with itself.

• For example, as former pollster and turned sometime polling industry critic Adam Carlson notes, the NYT/Siena poll of swing states conducted back in late October showed Trump actually leading in this age group in AZ and GA, while being tied with Biden in MI. On this contrary, surprising and incorrect result, Nate Cohn of the Times did a whole serious write up about what it could mean.

• But when the new poll shows Biden actually leading nationally within this group by 14 points, Carlson observes, the NYT analysis completely ignored this.

He also points out the oversampling of Latino voters who spoke American; only 3% of that Latino group sampled were native Spanish speakers, who just happen to be among the most reliably Democratic voters.

I could go on here, but what’s the point if The York Times is preaching doom and gloom?

As Erin Evers, Ph.D says over at The Jumping-Off Place*, it’s the little things that matter, like showing up.

• I see my classroom as a series of meetings, where conversations about social problems ranging from health disparities to animal cruelty are quickly followed by conversations about what we can do, now, to address these problems. Some of my students go on to do activism and I hope they carry the classroom ethos to the constant meetings they attend, where they are creating spaces for building solidarity, identifying good ideas, and extinguishing the bad ideas.

• This is, in fact, what deliberative democracy in the U.S. is supposed to look like, without the tentacles of neoliberalism and corporate America polluting those discursive spaces. Social change requires deliberation and all of the conflict and resolutions that accompany deep critical discussions. This can appear mundane, and small, and moot, but the U.S. constitutional design is intended to quash revolution by facilitating slow and small legislative changes. But discourse can be revolutionary.

• Seemingly small wins, like having a group of passionate people show up to discuss a problem and how to address it, should be appreciated as the most important of mundane wins. 

(*Shameless plug for the publication that Kelly Mayhew, Jim Miller, and myself launched today)

***

Lead image by Ted Eytan, under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license .

***

Monday News You Should Read

***

Nike's New MLB Uniform Pants Are See-Through and Everyone Is Furious by Molly Knight at The Long Game

• The pants are so sheer that after a Giants player posed for an official portrait yesterday to be used in team promotional materials this year, his testicles made the New York Post. I was going to use what happened to Casey Schmitt as the opening photo to this newsletter, but then I realized it might be non-consensual pornography. People are making jokes all over the worldwide web, but had this happened to a young woman I doubt many people would find it funny at all.

• I thought about not writing about it as I did not want to add to Schmitt’s embarrassment (how would you feel in his shoes???). But, honestly: I can’t not write about it because Nike, Fanatics and MLB need to be held accountable for the enshittification of these uniforms at everyone’s expense except for the billionaire executives they enrich.

***

American Taliban? The Existential Threat of Christian Nationalism by Brad Willis at Perspectives

• Its advocates are, in effect, an American Taliban using religion as a front for political insurrection. We must continue to expose them and steadfastly resist their efforts to subvert our government on the national and local levels.

• This is why we must be vigilant about Awaken Church of San Diego, which is seeking to establish a permanent presence in our community. Awaken is an ardent purveyor of Christian Nationalism.

• Its founder and lead "pastor" spews endless hate on social media, including calls for torture and public executions. He vows to "take the crown" of our Crown City, condemns those who oppose him demonic, unholy, perverted and unclean, and threatens to drive us out of town.

****

How cars get in the way of sports by Brendan Dentino at Out in Left

• The Padres also opened a new ballpark in 2004, but they returned to downtown after decades in suburban Mission Valley. (My urban-suburban distinction is based on land uses, not municipal boundaries.) Today, Petco Park is one of the best urban sports venues in the U.S., but the powers that be made one crucial mistake: they brought parking with them. 

• The ballpark was approved by a 1998 ballot measure, and to placate a heavily suburban electorate the city guaranteed 5,000 new parking spaces downtown, ensuring there was almost as much parking near the new Petco Park as there was at the old Qualcomm Stadium. Petco Park opened before all the parking was built, though, and in that brief, glorious window transit ridership to games was estimated at 50%. (I wrote about the Padres’ connection to urbanism in my third essay for Out in Left.)

• Transit ridership was that high because cars can’t park in spots that don’t exist, and traffic doesn’t automatically get worse when land uses are intensified or when roads are closed, as Petco Park required. This is called “traffic evaporation,” and it happens whenever the public is told to avoid a certain route or driving altogether because of a planned road closure.