Why Trump’s Arlington Debacle Is So Serious. The Atlantic - Politics / by Michael Powell

 / Aug 30, 2024 at 7:42 PM

The section of Arlington National Cemetery that Donald Trump visited on Monday is both the liveliest and the most achingly sad part of the grand military graveyard, set aside for veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Section 60, young widows can be seen using clippers and scissors to groom the grass around their husbands’ tombstones as lots of children run about.

Karen Meredith knows the saddest acre in America only too well. The California resident’s son, First Lieutenant Kenneth Ballard, was the fourth generation of her family to serve as an Army officer. He was killed in Najaf, Iraq, in 2004, and laid to rest in Section 60. She puts flowers on his gravesite every Memorial Day. “It’s not a number, not a headstone,” she told me. “He was my only child.”

The sections of Arlington holding Civil War and World War I dead have a lonely and austere beauty. Not Section 60, where the atmosphere is sanctified but not somber—too many kids, Meredith recalled from her visits to her son’s burial site. “We laugh, we pop champagne. I have met men who served under him and they speak of him with such respect. And to think that this man”—she was referring to Trump—“came here and put his thumb up—”

She fell silent for a moment on the telephone, taking a gulp of air. “I’m trying not to cry.”

For Trump, defiling what is sacred in our civic culture borders on a pastime. Peacefully transferring power to the next president; treating political adversaries with at least rudimentary grace; honoring those soldiers wounded and disfigured in service of our country—Trump long ago walked roughshod over all these norms. Before he tried to overturn a national election, he mocked his opponents in the crudest terms and demeaned dead soldiers as “suckers.”

[Read: Trump calls Americans killed in war “suckers” and “losers”]

But the former president outdid himself this week, when he attended a wreath-laying ceremony honoring 13 American soldiers killed in a suicide bombing in Kabul during the final havoc-marked hours of the American withdrawal. Trump laid three wreaths and put hand over heart; that is a time-honored privilege of presidents. Trump, as is his wont, went further. He walked to a burial site in Section 60 and posed with the family of a fallen soldier, grinning broadly and giving a thumbs up for his campaign photographer and videographer.

Few spaces in the United States join the sacred and the secular to more moving effect than Arlington National Cemetery, 624 acres set on a bluff overlooking the Potomac River and our nation’s capital. More than 400,000 veterans and their dependents have been laid to rest here, among them nearly 400 Medal of Honor recipients. Rows of matching white tombstones stretch to the end of sight.

A cemetery employee politely attempted to stop the campaign staff from filming in Section 60. Taking campaign photos and videos at gravesites is expressly forbidden under federal law. The Trump entourage, according to a subsequent statement by the U.S. Army, which oversees the cemetery, “abruptly pushed” her aside.

Trump’s campaign soon posted a video on TikTok, overlaid with Trump’s narration: “We didn’t lose one person in 18 months. And then they”—the Biden administration—“took over, that disaster of leaving Afghanistan.”

Trump was unsurprisingly not telling the truth; 11 soldiers were killed in Afghanistan in his last year in office, and his administration had itself negotiated the withdrawal. But such fabrications are incidental sins compared to what came next. A top Trump adviser, Chris LaCivita, and campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung talked to reporters and savaged the employee who had tried to stop the entourage. Cheung referred to her as “an unnamed individual, clearly suffering a mental health episode.” LaCivita declared her a “despicable individual” who ought to be fired.

There was, of course, another way to handle this mistake. Governor Spencer Cox of Utah had accompanied Trump to the cemetery, and his campaign emailed out photos of the governor and the former president there. When challenged, Cox did what is foreign to Trump: He apologized. “You are correct,” Cox replied to a person criticizing the event on the social-media platform X, adding, “It did not go through the proper channels and should not have been sent. My campaign will be sending out an apology.”

[Read: Trump dishonors fallen soldiers again]

This was not a judgment call, or a minor violation of obscure bureaucratic boilerplate. In the regulations governing visitors and behavior at Arlington National Cemetery, many paragraphs lay out what behavior is acceptable and what is not. These read not as suggestions but as commandments. Memorial services are intended to honor the fallen, the regulations note, with a rough eloquence: “Partisan activities are inappropriate in Arlington National Cemetery, due to its role as a shrine to all the honored dead of the Armed Forces of the United States and out of respect for the men and women buried there and for their families.”

As the clamor of revulsion swelled this week, LaCivita did not back off. On Wednesday, the Trump adviser posted a photo of Trump at Arlington Cemetery on the social-media site X and added these words: “The Photo that shook the world and reminded America who the real Commander in Chief is …August 26th 2024 ..Mark the day ⁦@KamalaHarris⁩ and weak ⁦@JoeBiden.”

The Army, which is historically loath to enter politics, issued a rare statement yesterday rebuking the Trump campaign, noting that ceremony participants “had been made aware” of relevant federal laws “prohibiting political activities”and that the employee “acted with professionalism.” The Army said it “considers this matter closed” because the cemetery employee declined to press charges.

Meanwhile, an unrepentant Trump team kept stoking the controversy. Yesterday, LaCivita posted another photo of Trump at Arlington and added this: “Reposting this hoping to trigger the hacks at @SecArmy”—the Army secretary’s office.

It had the quality of middle-school graffiti, suggesting that Trump viewed the controversy as but another chance to mock his critics before moving on to the next outrage. For grieving families with loved ones buried in Section 60, moving on is not so easy.

How old, I asked Meredith, was your son at the time of his death? “He was 26,” she replied. “He did not have time to live. I didn’t get to dance at his wedding. I didn’t get to play with grandkids.”   

This week, all she could do was call out a crude and self-regarding 78-year-old man for failing, in that most sacred of American places, to comport himself with even the roughest facsimile of dignity.

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The Far Right Is Becoming Obsessed With Race and IQ. By Ali Breland

Read time: 9 minutes

“Race science” has returned.

An illustration of a marble bust of a head wearing a MAGA hat.

Illustration by Paul Spella / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Updated at 6:34 p.m. ET on August 20, 2024

“Joining us now is Steve Sailer, who I find to be incredibly interesting, and one of the most talented noticers,” Charlie Kirk said on his internet show in October. Kirk, the 30-year-old founder of Turning Point USA, a right-wing youth organization, slowed down as he said “noticers,” looked up at the camera, and coyly flicked his eyebrows.

That term—noticer—has become a thinly veiled shorthand within segments of the right to refer to someone who subscribes to “race science” or “race realism,” the belief that racial inequities are biological. In his interview with Kirk, Sailer noticed that “Blacks tend to commit murder about 10 times as often per capita as whites, and it’s not just all explained by poverty.” Sailer, one of the most prominent peddlers of race science in the United States, has made a career out of noticing things. (Last year, he published an anthology of his writing titled Noticing.) He has claimed that Black people tend to have lower IQs than white people (while Asians and Ashkenazi Jews tend to have higher IQs). Sailer says that nurture plays a role, but generally concludes that differences between racial groups exist in large part because of inherent traits.

Sailer has written for decades about race science, but his appearance on Kirk’s show—one of the most popular on the right—came amid a year in which he has earned newfound prominence. In June, he also appeared on Tucker Carlson’s web show. “Somehow you became a mysterious outlaw figure that no one is allowed to meet or talk to,” Carlson said from inside his barn studio in Maine. Sailer chuckled in agreement. “For 10 years—from 2013 into 2023—you basically couldn’t go see Steve Sailer give a speech anywhere,” he said. Now he was free to speak.

Sailer’s move into the spotlight, though significant on its own, marks something larger: Race science is on the rise. The far right has long espoused outright racism and anti-Semitism, especially in the Trump era. But more right-wing gatekeepers are shrouding that bigotry in a cloak of objectivity and pseudoscientific justification. They see race not as a social construction, but as something that can be reduced to genetic facts. Don’t take it from us, they say; just look at the numbers and charts.

Race science is hardly a new idea. During Jim Crow, the idea was used as justification for sterilizing Black people. In Nazi Germany, the veneer of science and biology was used as a pretense for genocide. In recent decades, race science has chugged along in the U.S., mostly subterraneously. It has occasionally popped out into public view, in many cases to be met with swift condemnation. A version of that played out in 1994, when Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein published The Bell Curve, which argues, in part, that race and intelligence are linked.

More recently, after the Unite the Right rally held in Charlottesville, Virginia, early in the Trump presidency, race science was boosted by far-right figures such as Stefan Molyneux and Richard Spencer, though not to the extent or with the conviction it is now. In 2016, Spencer, the white supremacist who gained traction in the early Trump years, said that “race is genetically coherent,” but also that “it’s not just about genes and DNA” but about “the people and the spirit.” Both Molyneux and Spencer had real followings, but were treated as fringe oddities by the mainstream right. Molyneux, who once reportedly said that immigration is “akin to importing a gene set that is incompatible with success in a free-market economy,” was banned from YouTube in 2020. Spencer was also seen as politically radioactive, which curbed his potential influence.

What’s different now is that race science is moving into the open. Sailer may have once been a fringe oddity as well, but these days his views are broadcast to the millions of people who listen to Kirk and Carlson. Neither Carlson nor Kirk pushed back on Sailer’s views: “Steve, what you’re doing is so important,” Kirk told him. Over email, I asked Sailer why he believes he’s now accepted into relatively more mainstream circles after having been pushed to the margins for years. Society is “drifting back toward sanity,” he claimed.

Other peddlers of race science also have the ear of those in power on the right. Take Nick Fuentes, a 26-year-old white nationalist whose many followers call themselves “Groypers.” He has repeatedly argued that white people are intellectually superior, and praised people who believe in race science. In a single podcast interview in 2022, Fuentes said that “there is a genetic basis” for Black people committing criminal acts and that Black people are “more antisocial and have higher incidences of sociopathy and on average a lower IQ.” His ideology has proved so infectious among Gen Z that last year, disciples of his brand of politics appeared to have taken over dozens of campus conservative groups. He has also made inroads with elected Republicans; in 2022, Fuentes dined with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago.

Like Fuentes, Bronze Age Pervert, a prominent far-right influencer on X who has dabbled with race science, is especially popular with young conservatives. His book, Bronze Age Mindset, reportedly became a popular read among congressional and White House staffers during the Trump administration. Much of his message essentially boils down to this: Some people are better than others, there is a natural order, and Black people are definitely at or near the bottom of it. Bronze Age Pervert’s real name is Costin Alamariu, and he holds a Ph.D. in political science from Yale. In a modified version of his thesis that he self-published last year to fanfare among the online right, titled Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy, Alamariu writes that “Black Africans, in particular, are so divergent from the rest of humanity that they exceed the threshold commonly used in other species to draw sub-species boundaries.”

Other anonymous far-right accounts have accrued more than 100,000 followers by posting about the supposed links between race and intelligence. Elon Musk frequently responds to @cremieuxrecueil, which one far-right publication has praised as an account that “traces the genetic pathways of crime, explaining why poverty is not a good causal explanation.” Musk has also repeatedly engaged with @Eyeslasho, a self-proclaimed “data-driven” account that has posted statistics supposedly illustrating the inferiority of Black people. Other tech elites such as Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, and Paul Graham follow one or both of these accounts. Whom someone follows in itself is not an indication of their own beliefs, but at the very least it signals the kind of influence and reach these race-science accounts now have.

The gospel of race science has not fully caught on with the broader MAGA masses yet, but you can see how it’s starting to trickle out. Race science is wrapped up in the right’s attack on Kamala Harris as the “DEI candidate.” The implication is that Harris’s success can only be attributed to her race and gender, not her intellect or experience. To a race-science proponent, that’s just what the data say.

No matter how hard people try, however, race cannot be reduced to the results of an IQ test. There is more to the complicated genetic, cultural, economic, and historical realities of race than a few lines on a chart. When I asked Sailer to explain the links between race and intelligence, he said that he doesn’t “see strong reasons to assume that intelligence is all that different from a trait like height, which is clearly driven by both genes and environment.” He cited regions of Serbia and South Sudan as having tall populations despite being relatively poor, suggesting that health and nutrition are not the primary explanation for average national height.

Genetics may play some role in the average height in these two countries, but intelligence is not like height. As three prominent psychologists have written, “Modern DNA science has found hundreds of genetic variants that each have a very, very tiny association with intelligence, but even if you add them all together they predict only a small fraction of someone’s IQ score.” Furthermore, that race is not a biological phenomenon is the consensus view among geneticists, biologists, and anthropologists, building on generations of empirical research.

Despite this, race-science adherents remained undeterred. Attempts to legitimize racial animus have a clear purpose. Even though racism persists in the U.S., overt racism is still extremely unpopular. Attempts to advance racist beliefs have to work within that paradigm. Trump’s Muslim ban was racist, but it hid under justifications of national security and counterterrorism. Trump’s attempts to stake his claim as a “law and order” candidate are a revival of Richard Nixon’s similar strategy in the 1960s to energize racist voters without being racist out loud. When Trump has accidentally pierced the veil, as he did when he referred to predominantly Black nations as “shithole countries,” he has tried to deny having said so in the first place. Race science is used as a crowbar to try to overturn the idea that racism is bigoted. Instead, its adherents insist, they are simply acknowledging a cold, hard truth about the world.

This can be particularly attractive in an era of data fetishism. Numbers and metrics have become a codex through which everything is processed: Rotten Tomatoes percentages, box-office sales, Spotify streams, Instagram followers now play an outsize role in determining what is culturally valuable. People quantify themselves by obsessively tracking their sleep cycles, heart rates, and other types of health data. To a racist, race science offers a similar certainty to another thing that’s not actually quantifiable. Sailer has likened himself to a “statistics analyst.”

The allure of a supposed truth of racial statistics is about more than data, of course. For certain white people, it can be appealing to believe that you have been shut out by a “system that doesn’t recognize your genius, because it’s set to the demands of the grubby many,” as the conservative thinker Sohrab Ahmari, who has written about the creeping eugenic tendencies of right-wing youth, told me. DEI measures in the workplace may not be why a white person hasn’t succeeded in their career, but they become easy scapegoats. This feeling of racial aggrievement can fester at a time when the cost of housing, food, and health care have all hit new highs relative to income. Economic vulnerability helps keep ideas like race science fertile. Studies have shown that, in Europe, negative perceptions about the economy correlate with upticks in support for the far right.

For those at the top of society, a belief in a natural hierarchy can work in the opposite direction: as a justification of their genius. Bronze Age Pervert speaks to disaffected right-wingers who have not attained what they thought they would, but also to those rising through the ranks of elite conservative institutions for a similar reason: “Natural inequalities exist” and “certain men are naturally more fit to rule than others,” as the former Trump staffer Michael Anton summarizes what he calls “the most reasonable of BAP’s premisses.” In other words, we are rising through the ranks of the elite because it is our natural right to.

What makes the return of race science such a problem is that once the logic has taken hold, it is hard to root out: The natural order has already been settled. The poor are dysgenic and disgusting. The rich are heroic and smart. Everything is in its place.

UPDATE / CORRECTION: 

This article originally misstated that the X account @Eyeslasho has posted about the “genetic inferiority” of Black people. In fact, the account has not directly attributed group differences to biology.

About the Author:

Ali Breland is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Why Rich Lowry Is No Longer An Anti-TrumperPosted by Martin Longman

Progress Pond

Why Rich Lowry Is No Longer An Anti-Trumper

Posted by Martin Longman | Aug 26, 2024 | Elections, Media | 0 |     

Why Rich Lowry Is No Longer An Anti-Trumper. 

When I saw the New York Times had invited National Review editor-in-chief Rich Lowry to write a guest column entitled “Trump Can Win on Character,” my eyes almost rolled off the edge of the Earth. After reading it, I’m a little more sympathetic. After all, Lowry isn’t writing for us, he’s writing for an audience of one. He’s giving advice to Donald Trump about how he can effectively improve his messaging. What better way to get his attention than to argue he can win on character?

As for the Times’ decision to print this piece, Lowry actually provides pretty good advice. The trick is that he’s not arguing that Trump can convince the American people he has better character than Kamala Harris. When Lowry talks about character in the piece, he doesn’t mean things like honesty, marital fidelity, or not committing sexual assaults or leading political coups. He’s talking about the character you need in a president. If that sounds absurd, I’ll let Lowry speak for himself:

Presidential races are won and lost on character as much as the issues, and often the issues are proxies for character. Not character in the sense of a candidate’s personal life, but the attributes that play into the question of whether someone is suited to the presidency — is he or she qualified, trustworthy and strong, and does he or she care about average Americans?

Presidential races, in this sense, are deeply personal; they usually involve disqualifying the opposing candidate, rather than convincing voters that his or her platform is wrongheaded.

It’s nice that Lowry acknowledges that it’s a political plus to be trustworthy. And I can’t really argue that his somewhat cynical take about how presidential elections are won and lost is wrong. So, the job for Trump then is to convince voters he cares about them more than Harris does, and that he’s a strong leader while Harris is a weak one.

Again, I think that’s right. And Lowry identifies a path toward doing that that is not about rank insults and demeaning nicknames. Trump should focus on Harris’s 2019-2020 campaign for president which was a pretty spectacular failure in which she went very far to the left on the issues in a desperate and fruitless effort to avoid getting outflanked.

Ms. Harris was too weak to win the Democratic primary contest this year. She was too weak to keep from telling the left practically everything it wanted to hear when she ran in 2019. She is too weak to hold open town-hall events or do extensive — or, at the moment, any — sit-down media interviews.

She has jettisoned myriad positions since 2019 and 2020 without explanation because she is a shape-shifting opportunist who can and will change on almost anything when politically convenient. Even if what she’s saying is moderate or popular, she can’t be trusted to hold to it once she’s in office.

The idea is to tie everything into her being weak compared to Trump. In theory, this would just bolster the ingrained bias that men are more natural leaders than women, but it’s not gender-dependent. As Lowry points out, Dubya Bush effectively used the flip-flopping charge to make John Kerry look weak. Harris has flip-flopped on several issues, like fracking, since her 2020 campaign. The point is, strength provides dependability, which is an element of trustworthiness.

The other prong is winning the argument about who cares about the average voter. Lowry uses the example of Barack Obama successfully convincing voters that Mitt Romney was an out-of-touch plutocrat who couldn’t be trusted to look out for the average American. Here’s how Lowry would use the same strategy to go after Harris:

She didn’t do more as Vice President to secure the border or to address inflation because she didn’t care enough about the consequences for ordinary people. She doesn’t care if her tax policies will destroy jobs. She has been part of an administration that has seen real wages stagnate while minimizing the problem because the party line matters to her more than economic reality for working Americans.

Here the argument is that Harris is out of touch with ordinary Americans, either because she’s from Berkeley or ensconced in power or because her ethnic background is unique. She’s not one of you, so she doesn’t care about you. It’s not all that different for the successful argument against Romney.

I really have two thoughts about Lowry’s piece. The first is that Trump would improve his chances if he followed Lowry’s advice, but it’s not so simple. Trump uses the feedback he gets from his social media posts and his MAGA rallies to hone his messaging, and he discovered long ago that meanness and cruelty are his most effective tools for attracting fervent support. Thoughtfulness, even if he were capable of it, lands with a thud with his base. He occasionally offers something substantive, and he always abandons it immediately when it doesn’t get likes and applause. What I’m saying is that there’s not much use offering advice to someone who is incapable of following it. I think the fatal problem is that there’s no way for Trump to feel the effectiveness of a pitch to moderate or undecided voters because they don’t give him a response. An ordinary politician would look for a response in the polling data, but that takes patience. Trump has no patience.

The second thought I have is to wonder why Lowry is trying to help Trump. His publication, the National Review, was fervently anti-Trump in 2015-2016. Did this prediction come true:

Donald Trump leads the polls nationally and in most states in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. There are understandable reasons for his eminence, and he has shown impressive gut-level skill as a campaigner. But he is not deserving of conservative support in the caucuses and primaries. Trump is a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones.

As for strength, here’s what Lowry wrote in 2016:

For someone who wants to project strength, he has an astonishing weakness for flattery, falling for Vladimir Putin after a few coquettish bats of the eyelashes from the Russian thug. All in all, Trump knows approximately as much about national security as he does about the nuclear triad — which is to say, almost nothing.

Is there anything that’s happened since to make Lowry reconsider that judgment?

No? Well how about this for January 6th prescience?

His obsession is with “winning,” regardless of the means — a spirit that is anathema to the ordered liberty that conservatives hold dear and that depends for its preservation on limits on government power.

And here is Lowry’s conclusion:

If the [Republican Party] cannot advance a compelling working-class agenda, the legitimate anxieties and discontents of blue-collar voters will be exploited by demagogues. We sympathize with many of the complaints of Trump supporters about the GOP, but that doesn’t make the mogul any less flawed a vessel for them.

Some conservatives have made it their business to make excuses for Trump and duly get pats on the head from him. Count us out. Donald Trump is a menace to American conservatism who would take the work of generations and trample it underfoot in behalf of a populism as heedless and crude as the Donald himself.

It’s pretty clear that by attempting to assist Trump now, Lowry is flip-flopping. And it’s a bigger more substantial flip-flop than Kerry on Iraq War funding or Harris on fracking and single-payer health care. And this isn’t a case where you change your position because you realize your previous analysis was wrong. Lowry has been proven correct about Trump’s crude and heedless populism and his trashing of the “the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP.” He was right about Trump’s susceptibility to flattery and inability to stand up to Putin. He even knew that he’d put “winning” over “ordered liberty” and the “limits of government power.”

But, you know what?

It turns out that the National Review cares about likes and applause just as much as Trump does. They have revenue to raise, and opposing the Republican nominee for president won’t raise it. They can get on board or they can look for new jobs, because the National Review will cease to exist before it endorse a Democrat.

 

Kamala Harris Is Rerunning Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Campaign. The Atlantic - Politics / by Yair Rosenberg

 Aug 26, 2024 at 9:12 PM.

The Democratic National Convention is over, and the verdict is in: It was a remarkable heist. “They stole traditional Republican themes (faith, patriotism) and claimed them as their own,” the conservative Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan wrote. “Democrats Show That Republicans Aren’t the Only Ones Who Can Wrap Themselves in the Flag,” read a New York Times headline. “Speaker after speaker,” CNN reported, “struck themes that have long been hallmarks of Republican rhetoric: tributes to service, sacrifice, American leadership and, above all, a repeated reaffirmation of American exceptionalism.” Or, as The Washington Post put it, “Democrats claim patriotism, God and American exceptionalism at convention.”

Oh, wait—my mistake. Those last two quotes are from coverage of the 2016 Democratic National Convention, in Philadelphia, when Hillary Clinton accepted her party’s nomination. And they’re not the only part of last week’s DNC that felt like a rerun.

In 2016, retired four-star Marine Corps General John Allen endorsed Clinton alongside dozens of Democratic veterans and former military officials, while delegates throughout the hall waved giant American flags and thunderously chanted “U-S-A!” This past week, the Arizona congressman and Marine Corps veteran Ruben Gallego took the stage with fellow Democratic elected veterans, before a sea of flags and a giant backdrop of Old Glory, to declare, “We stand united as Democrats and patriots to fight for anyone who serves.” In 2016, the billionaire and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg assailed Donald Trump and his business acumen. In 2024, Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker told delegates, “Take it from an actual billionaire—Trump is rich in only one thing: stupidity.”

[Jerusalem Demsas: Kamala Harris defines herself—but not too much]

At first glance, these parallels are not encouraging for Democrats. After all, they know what happened in 2016. So should liberals elated after their convention be concerned that its seeming success might actually be a mirage that will be dispelled in November, just as it was eight years ago? Not quite. Although Kamala Harris is reviving the Clinton playbook, she has so far managed to avoid its biggest fumbles.

Some of this is due to political skill. But much of it is because Harris has one key advantage that Clinton lacked: Thanks to the unusual way she assumed the nomination, the vice president sidestepped a bruising primary—which meant that she did not have to spend the convention mollifying left-wing critics. In 2016, Clinton had to contend with 1,831 Bernie Sanders delegates, close to half of the convention’s roughly 4,000 total. Many of them went “Bernie or Bust,” accused Clinton of stealing the primary, and repeatedly disrupted her acceptance speech and other proceedings. Harris, however, had to reckon with just 30 uncommitted delegates protesting Joe Biden’s Gaza policy, who—regardless of the merits of their critique—could ultimately be turned away with little consequence.

Freed from the need to appeal to internal opponents, Harris was able to appeal to her skeptics across the country—to embrace elements of moderation not just in style but also in substance. Consider: In her 2016 acceptance speech, Clinton barely addressed Trump’s signature issue, immigration, gesturing only briefly to “a path to citizenship for millions of immigrants who are already contributing to our economy” and “comprehensive immigration reform.” Harris, by contrast, backed up her pivot to the center on the same issue with an explicit promise:

After decades in law enforcement, I know the importance of safety and security, especially at our border. Last year, Joe [Biden] and I brought together Democrats and conservative Republicans to write the strongest border bill in decades. The Border Patrol endorsed it. But Donald Trump believes a border deal would hurt his campaign, so he ordered his allies in Congress to kill the deal. Well, I refuse to play politics with our security, and here is my pledge to you. As president, I will bring back the bipartisan border-security bill that he killed, and I will sign it into law.

In Chicago, Harris acknowledged that “there are people of various political views watching tonight” and promised “to be a president for all Americans.” So did Clinton in Philadelphia, saying, “I will be a president for Democrats, Republicans, and independents; for the struggling, the striving, and the successful; for those who vote for me and those who don’t; for all Americans.” But from the vantage point of wavering Republican voters, Clinton also muddled that message by delivering broadsides against the wealthy and making unpopular pledges to the activist class. “When more than 90 percent of the gains have gone to the top one percent, that’s where the money is,” she said, echoing her primary rival, “and we are going to follow the money.” She also declared that “Bernie Sanders and I will work together to make college tuition-free for the middle class and debt-free for all.” For Clinton, these were necessary concessions to the Sanders supporters in the room, but because Harris has not had to constantly look over her left shoulder, such rhetoric was conspicuously absent from her acceptance speech.

[Franklin Foer: It’s Sorkin again in America]

This is not the only area where Harris has been buoyed by being able to shed concerns that dogged her predecessor. In 2016, Clinton, as the first woman to be nominated for president by a major party, had to contend with skepticism over her gender. But in 2024, Harris has largely been able to avoid the issue, thanks to Clinton normalizing the idea of a woman as commander in chief, just as Barack Obama normalized the idea of a Black president. “Together, we’ve put a lot of cracks in the highest, hardest glass ceiling,” Clinton told delegates on the opening night of last week’s convention. She is personally responsible for many of them.

There are still 71 days to go until the election. In the months ahead, Harris will need to sidestep the same factional traps that snared Clinton, while also navigating press conferences and media interviews where she will face questions that she has thus far evaded about her policy shifts. But if she succeeds in maintaining the approach that made the convention so effective, her 2024 campaign may prove to be the rare reboot that exceeds the original.

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DNC: The Breakout Star Was Actually YIMBY - Bloomberg. By Matthew Yglesias

August 25, 2024 at 12:00 PM UTC

Read time: 4 minutes

Barack Obama’s speech at last week’s Democratic National Convention marks what is almost certainly the high-water mark for the political visibility of the YIMBY movement.

Taking a cue from one of the main themes of the week — “We’re not going back” — the former president noted that the nation needs “to chart a new way forward to meet the challenges of today.” For example, he noted, “if we want to make it easier for young people to buy a home, we need to build more units and clear away some of the outdated laws and regulations that have made it harder to build homes for working people in this country.”

For us veterans of the land-use reform movement, it was a thrilling moment. Not that these ideas are brand new to Obama. His administration embraced the basic analytic viewpoint of YIMBYism during his second term, most clearly in its 2016 Housing Supply Toolkit but also in various budget requests and remarks by administration officials over the years. President Joe Biden’s administration has similarly been officially YIMBY in a low-key way.

What we never got from either president, however, was the kind of high-profile endorsement that Obama delivered last week. Under the circumstances, it would be extremely churlish to offer any reaction other than a simple, “Thank you.”

And yet here I am.

While tackling regulatory barriers to housing construction in high-demand areas is absolutely an important long-term issue for the US economy, in the short term federal policymakers have more powerful tools.

For better or worse, the US is currently building dense housing at the highest rate since the mid-1980s. It’s true that anti-density rules are still too strict, and that rolling them back would have large economic benefits. But restrictions on apartments don’t explain very much about why housing-cost pressures are so much more severe today than they were a decade ago. What’s happened instead is that construction of single-family homes is running at a dramatically slower rate than in the 1990s, to say nothing of the aughts.

Focus on Mortgage Rates, Not Building Regulations

Homebuilders would increase their pace of construction if the federal government made it easier for homebuyers to borrow money

In 2010 or 2014, nobody found the low rate of housebuilding remarkable. There had just been an enormous housing market crash, after all, and homebuilding was recovering from a low level. But the slow recovery has basically plateaued since the pandemic, even though demand keeps rising. What gives?

Some analysts, such as Kevin Erdmann at the Mercatus Center, point the finger at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac noting that tighter lending standards adopted after the financial crisis mean that mortgage lending to lower-income families has dried up.

Without any eligible purchasers of cheap starter homes, it doesn’t really make sense to build them. Despite the hype around private equity funds investing in single-family homes as rental properties, single-family rentals are a very small and unproven business. The majority of investment in purpose-built rental housing is multifamily apartments, just as it’s always been.

Investment in this sector is in fact up in response to the rise in demand, but it is running into the regulatory constraints Obama is talking about. Lifting these constraints is important and useful, but a series of state-by-state, city-by-city, zoning-board-by-zoning-board battles is a generational struggle — it’s not a quick fix for suffering families. Mortgage lending standards, by contrast, are set nationally by the Federal Housing Finance Agency (and to an extent the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau) and could simply be made more lax.

Would this be courting another financial catastrophe?

I’m skeptical. For starters, the rules can be altered without going all the way back to the “liar loans” of yesteryear — there’s such a thing as an overreaction to a real problem. More to the point, trying to avoid financial crises at that end of the funnel is just a slightly odd idea. The federal government regulates the overall riskiness of banks’ loan portfolios with regulations on stuff like capital and liquidity. The recent trend at the Federal Reserve has been toward weakening these rules in pursuit of economic growth. It would make more sense to be lax on mortgage lending and strict on bank capital, letting investors risk their money on loans if that’s what they want to do.

There is also the construction market, which is significantly influenced by the interest-rate environment. Democrats are aware of this when they talk about their hope that the Fed will cut rates this fall. But they are less aware that the capacity of long-term rates to fall — unless unemployment surges — is limited by the size of the budget deficit.

Fiscal discipline and bank deregulation was the housing-policy formula of another former Democratic president who spoke last week: Bill Clinton. But ever since the financial crisis, he hasn’t liked to talk about it so much — even though, as housing policy, it worked pretty well.

America’s current home dearth is a reminder that every choice in life comes with trade-offs. There are downsides to getting too lax with mortgage origination rules, and downsides to getting too strict. And over time, the US does really need to address zoning and other land-use practices that block apartment construction from too many communities.

But America suffers from a housing shortage right now, and if Democrats want to fulfill Kamala Harris’ pledge to end it, then they will need some powerful, fast-acting tools. That means making use of the federal government’s vast power over home financing instead of its limited influence over local building regulations.

How RFK Jr.’s Arc Bent Toward MAGA. The Atlantic - Politics / by John Hendrickson

RFK Jr's running mate may endorse Trump

 Aug 24, 2024 at 12:06 PM

In the spring of 2023, not long after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. launched his chaotic presidential campaign, I asked him a straightforward question. What do you see as more harmful to America: another term of Joe Biden, or Donald Trump returning to power? “I can’t answer that,” Kennedy replied.

This morning, Kennedy finally stopped being cagey: He announced that he was suspending his campaign and throwing his support to Trump. During a rambling, nearly hour-long speech at the Renaissance Hotel in downtown Phoenix, Kennedy shared that the two had been talking for more than a month, and that he had visited the former president at Mar-a-Lago. “In a series of long, intense discussions, I was surprised to discover that we are aligned on many key issues,” Kennedy said. He correctly noted that his announcement would cause “difficulty” for his family members. “Our brother Bobby’s decision to endorse Trump today is a betrayal of the values that our father and family hold most dear,” five Kennedys said in a statement this afternoon. “It is a sad ending to a sad story.”

Kennedy’s evolution from member of a Democratic dynasty to a soldier in the anti-democratic MAGA movement will no doubt confuse casual observers. Trump once called Kennedy the “dumbest member” of his famous family and Kennedy once suggested that Trump was a sociopath. The main reason for Kennedy’s conversion may be pure desperation. This summer, Kennedy made overtures to both major-party candidates; only Trump reciprocated. But the Trump-Kennedy pairing makes a certain kind of sense. To be sure, Kennedy doesn’t share Trump’s anti-immigrant sentiment, nor does he lean on white-identity politics or nationalism. Instead, it’s Kennedy’s conspiratorial, anti-establishment, burn-it-down ethos that makes him fit into the MAGA universe.

[Kurt Andersen: RFK Jr. Was My Drug Dealer]

At the hotel, I noticed Jim Hoft, the founder of the far-right website The Gateway Pundit, sitting in the front row, just a few feet from the stage. “I think it’ll be huge,” Hoft said of Kennedy’s Trump endorsement. “I align with Robert, probably, on a majority of topics—it’s just interesting how that’s playing out right now. I think he’s a natural ally for Trump. I think it’s going to help Trump tremendously.”

As Kennedy lashed out against the Democratic Party this afternoon, he sounded like a jilted lover searching for answers. He noted that he had attended his first Democratic National Convention at the age of six, in 1960. And he attempted to draw a contrast between the party of his father and uncle, and today’s “shadowy DNC operatives” who staged “a palace coup” against Joe Biden. The Democratic establishment, he claimed, had weaponized government agencies against him and his campaign. He accused Biden of colluding with media companies to “censor” him and bemoaned his relative lack of cable-news interviews. He also sounded daft. “In an honest system, I believe that I would have won the election,” Kennedy said.

Three key factors forced Kennedy’s withdrawal. The first and most obvious was money. Despite tapping Nicole Shanahan, the wealthy Silicon Valley businesswoman, to be his running mate, Kennedy’s fundraising had recently dried up. Recent FEC filings showed that his campaign had just $3.9 million on hand at the end of July. The second factor was ballot access. Nick Brana, the campaign’s ballot-access director, told me that, as of today, the Kennedy-Shanahan ticket was certified in only 22 states. Kennedy was recently disqualified from the New York ballot after a recent court case, making the goal of all 50 states a virtual impossibility. The third factor was perhaps the most obvious: his core proposition had become moot once Biden dropped out.

All along, Kennedy’s pitch had relied on the fact that a sizable chunk of voters didn’t want a Biden-Trump rematch. But after Harris took Biden’s place as the nominee, she began to win back some of the disaffected Democrats, independents, and undecideds who had “parked” their support in the Kennedy column. Kennedy’s polling average had fallen to about 5 percent, from a 2024 high of around 10 percent. Kennedy shared that his team’s polling showed him drawing more votes from Trump than from Harris in battleground states—something outside pollsters had confirmed to me earlier this month.

My conversations with Kennedy confidants, staffers, and supporters before and after the event painted a murky picture of what’s next for his movement. Jeffrey Rose, Kennedy’s friend of 30 years, had tears in his eyes as we spoke. “The DNC invited this,” Rose said. “As a Democrat, it’s not easy for me.” I asked him if he planned to follow Kennedy’s directive and vote for Trump. “What choice do I have?” he replied. Rose was among the Kennedy allies who would soon head to the nearby Trump rally, where Kennedy would be the special guest. Daniel Adams, who had helped raise money for Kennedy’s super PAC, American Values, told me that he expected “most” RFK Jr. supporters to pivot to Trump, but acknowledged that Trump’s vaccine policy had been a source of dissatisfaction. Casey Westerman, a 38-year-old supporter in a blue Kennedy hat, said she had voted for Trump in 2020 and 2016, and had been drawn to Kennedy this cycle because of his messages about “corporate capture” of the CDC and FDA. “I trust Kennedy,” Westerman said. “Whoever he chooses to support is who I’ll support.”

Others were less committed. Dicky Barrett, the former lead singer of the ‘90s ska band the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, was milling about the room with a look of resignation on his face. “In the world as it currently is, nothing surprises me anymore,” Barrett told me. “What I wanted ultimately, and still want, is for Bobby to be the 47th president of the United States. Anything short of that, I haven’t properly processed.” Barrett said he did not want Kennedy to endorse Trump. “I have great admiration, huge respect, and a lot of love for Bobby Kennedy. He was there for me when I needed him—I don’t have that for the other candidates in this race. Even remotely.”

Drea de Matteo, who won an Emmy for her role as Adriana on The Sopranos, was among those scheduled to partake in a “star-studded sunset cruise” with Kennedy and his wife, Cheryl Hines, next week in Southern California. Today she was in Phoenix to lend her support. De Matteo told me that she’s a lifelong liberal, but described herself as “anti-government.” She said she had never voted before 2020, when she voted for Biden, which had been a “huge” mistake. “I don’t know what I’m going to do yet,” she said of her 2024 plans. “I’m gonna go to this rally today and I’ll make up my mind.” (It would be her first Trump rally.) “I think most Americans want an independent candidate now, because no one believes in either party,” she added. Kennedy, she said, had been “completely, for lack of a better word, cock-blocked by the DNC.” She told me she was at least willing to hear Trump out.

[John Hendrickson: The first MAGA Democrat]

Kennedy’s campaign was built on contradictions. Although he has one of the most recognizable names in politics, he pitched himself as a benevolent outsider, a unifier, and often leaned into something akin to earthy mysticism. I interviewed him at length both this year and last year. He would be admirably candid one minute and obfuscate or lie the next (especially when discussing his record on vaccines). He would draw false equivalencies and peddle misinformation. On the stump, Kennedy used to talk about the divisions that seemed to be cutting American society into pieces. It doesn’t have to be this way, he’d say. Now, sticking to his contradictory theme, he’s thrown in his lot with the most divisive figure in recent history.

At the Trump rally tonight, Kennedy walked out to Foo Fighters’ stadium-rock anthem “My Hero” and shook Trump’s hand. The crowd roared. Not too long ago, Kennedy called Trump “a terrible human being.” Tonight he bent the knee, asking, “Don't you want a president who's going to protect America's freedoms and who is going to protect us against totalitarianism?”

Like the man he’s just endorsed, Kennedy has an outsize ego, a tenuous grasp of reality, and is given to bizarre turns of phrase. “The naysayers told us that we were climbing a glass version of Mount Impossible,” Kennedy said at the Renaissance Hotel today. Shortly thereafter, he suggested he could still become president as the result of a contingent election, if no candidate received the requisite 270 electoral votes. “This is a spiritual journey for me,” Kennedy said. He may not believe it’s over but the ending has come into view. Was it worth the trek?

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Kamala Harris Defines Herself — But Not Too Much. The Atlantic - Politics by Jerusalem Demsas

Harris and Obamas energize DNC

Aug 23, 2024 at 1:36 PM//keep unread//hide

The election is a “fight for America’s future,” Kamala Harris said in her speech to the Democratic National Convention tonight. She painted a picture of what a second Trump presidency might look like: chaotic and dangerous. Donald Trump would take the country back, whereas she would take the country forward. “I will be a president who leads and listens, who is realistic, practical, and has common sense, and always fights for the American people,” she said.

How she’ll fight, well, that’ll be worked out after Election Day. Harris did mention some specifics in her speech: she’ll push through the recently derailed bipartisan immigration bill, for instance. For the most part, though, Harris pointed to large goals like ending the housing shortage or affirmed general commitments, like supporting NATO.

According to multiple campaign advisers and Democratic officials, this campaign is for laying out a vision, for convincing voters Harris is on their side, and for getting to 270 electoral votes. In 2019, I worked briefly for Harris’s primary campaign before becoming a journalist, and I remember how wonky the environment felt. Over the four days I spent among the Democrats in Chicago this week, I didn’t hear the words “white paper” or “study” one time.

In fact I probably heard more about Trump’s policy agenda than Harris’s. Democrats have repeatedly brandished Project 2025 on stage, calling attention to the 900-page presidential transition blueprint produced by the Heritage Foundation. Harris mentioned it tonight, too. But Harris has no Project 2025 equivalent. And Democrats seem at peace with that.

[Franklin Foer: Kamala Harris settles the biggest fight in the Democratic Party]

Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz told me outside the convention center yesterday that the policy-lite approach has two advantages. “One is that you are simply giving your opponents less to shoot at, mischaracterize.” Fair enough. Trump has sought to distance himself from Project 2025 and its controversial right-wing proposals while trying to tar Harris as a “radical leftist lunatic.” Both of these efforts, so far, have failed.

Schatz also believes that avoiding policy prescriptions is actually “a little more honest with the voter.” According to Schatz, even if Harris wins, her policy agenda will be constrained by the makeup of Congress and committee assignments. Why get into details that won’t matter?

But perhaps the greatest advantage of a blank policy slate is that it allows for wishcasting. Why, I asked Schatz, did both progressive and moderate Democrats seem excited by Harris? “When a party is united, members of the coalition project their hopes and dreams onto their nominees,” Schatz replied.

So that’s what all the much-discussed good vibes are about. For the time being, the major factions of the Democratic Party seem to believe that when push comes to shove, they can win out.

In 2020, a bitterly fought Democratic primary resulted in unity panels where the progressive and moderate camps came together to find middle ground. Four years earlier, Hillary Clinton similarly forged connections with the Bernie Sanders side to form a consensus platform. But Harris, who of course achieved the nomination without suffering any primary at all, achieved unity without any policy fight at all.

DaMareo Cooper, the co-executive director of the progressive organization The Center for Popular Democracy, told me he thinks the “moderates are reading [Harris] wrong” and that “everyone moves to the middle when they’re in the presidential campaign.” Cooper doesn’t disapprove of “someone who’s running for president [to say] I’m representing all people in this country.” But as his co-executive director, Analilia Mejia, put it, Harris represents a continuation of the “most progressive administration in my generation.”

That’s not what moderates believe. ”Kamala Harris was a center-left candidate and Tim [Walz] was a center-left member of Congress and so we know we can work with this administration,” Kuster said at a centrist Democrats roundtable on Tuesday.

The debate over Harris’s price-gouging proposal captures this wishcasting dynamic. On August 15, the Harris campaign announced it would put forward measures to “bring down costs for American families.” One of those measures was a “first-ever federal ban on price gouging,” which some commentators took to mean Harris would try to impose price controls. But when Harris delivered a speech on the subject days later, many observers came away with the impression that the Vice President merely intended to expand protections many states already have and go after a few bad actors. Advisers spread the word that the policy would only apply during crises and to food, and would have no automatic triggers.

[Ronald Brownstein: Why the Blue Wall looms so large]

Is Harris’s plan radical, moderate, or something else? Democrats’ perception of it seems to have a lot more to do with their personal preferences than with anything objective.

Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, a centrist Democrat, told me that “price gouging statutes have been around a long time” and pointed to his own use of them: “People are making a big deal out of it, but it’s not new at all.” Similarly, Representative Annie Kuster, Chair of the New Democrats Coalition, a moderate faction of the party, immediately rejected the idea that Harris was proposing anything extreme: “She’s not talking about price controls,” she said, waving her hands dismissively. “She’s talking about lower prices and lowering costs for hardworking American families.”

But Senator Bob Casey was under the impression that Harris had effectively endorsed the expansive price-gouging bill he co-sponsored with Senator Elizabeth Warren, which prohibits the practice in all industries. He said as much in a press release and noted that Harris will fight price-gouging in his remarks to the convention this evening.

[Derek Thompson: The new law of electoral politics]

When I asked the Harris campaign for clarity, a senior campaign official told me that Harris was not supporting price controls, nor would her proposal to go after price-gaugers apply beyond food and grocery stores. After some prodding, the official confirmed this meant that Harris had not endorsed the Warren-Casey bill, but didn’t rule out that someone on the campaign had told the senators otherwise. The official also echoed Schatz’s argument that adding in too much detail could be deceptive given that the real policymaking process requires time, effort, and negotiation.

At any rate, vagueness is politically useful. Hints at economic populism buoy the progressives while whispers of moderation let centrists feel nothing major is afoot. Win-win-win. But how long can it last?

As she campaigns for the presidency, Harris is getting to be everything to everyone, the generic Democrat that does so well in surveys. But once she starts laying out specific policy proposals, some Democrats are going to have their hopes dashed. They’re going to remember the divisions that had wracked the party so thoroughly during the Biden administration and the infighting will be cutthroat. But, as Colorado governor Jared Polis told me this morning, those debates are for “after the election.”

Why the Blue Wall Looms So Large. The Atlantic - Politics by Ronald Brownstein

Aug 22, 2024 at 8:21 PM//keep unread//hide

American politics over the past generation has experienced the equivalent of continental drift. The tectonic plates of our political life have shifted and scraped, toppling old allegiances and forging new demographic and geographic patterns of support. The turmoil has shattered and remade each party’s agenda, message, and electoral coalition. And yet, no matter what else changes, the most direct path to the White House always seems to run through a handful of blue-collar states in the nation’s old industrial heartland.

This year is no exception. Strategists in both parties consider Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin the pivotal states that are most likely to decide the winner in 2024—just as they did in 2020 and 2016. Although taking this trio of Rust Belt battlegrounds is not the only way for Vice President Kamala Harris to reach the necessary 270 Electoral College votes, “if you look at the history of those states … then you have to believe they are the fastest way to get there,” says the longtime Democratic operative Tad Devine, who managed the Electoral College strategy for the Democratic presidential nominees in 1988, 2000, and 2004. Republicans consider those three states equally indispensable for Donald Trump.

If Harris can sweep Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, which offer a combined 44 Electoral College votes, and hold every state that President Joe Biden won by three percentage points or more in 2020, and win the congressional district centered on Omaha in Nebraska (one of two states that award some of their electors by congressional district), she would reach exactly the magic 270 votes. In turn, even if Trump sweeps all four of the major Sun Belt battlegrounds—North Carolina and Georgia in the Southeast, and Arizona and Nevada in the Southwest—he cannot reach 270 without carrying at least one of the big three Rust Belt states (unless he achieves a major upset in one of the states that Biden won last time by at least three percentage points).

The priority on Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin is evident in both the time and the money that each campaign is expending there. Both sides are bombarding these states with personal appearances and television advertising: Pennsylvania ranks first, Michigan second, and Wisconsin fourth (behind Georgia) in the ad-spend total, at more than $200 million so far for the three states, according to figures from AdImpact. And for the Democrats gathered in Chicago, Harris’s prospects in the three Rust Belt states is a perpetual topic of discussion, excitement, and anxiety.

“Let me just say, in conclusion,” former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told the Michigan delegation at the convention yesterday morning. “No pressure: The future of the nation is riding on you.”

[Ronald Brownstein: How the Rustbelt paved Trump’s road to victory]

Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin were a significant part of what I termed in 2009 the “Blue Wall”—the 18 states that ultimately voted for the Democratic presidential nominee in all six elections from 1992 through 2012. That was the largest bloc of states consistently won by the Democrats over that many elections since the formation of the modern party system in 1828. The 2016 election broke that pattern: Trump won the presidency by dislodging the big three of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin from the Blue Wall by a combined margin of about 80,000 votes. In 2020, Biden reclaimed all three—and with them, the White House—by a combined margin of nearly 260,000 votes.

Charles Franklin, the director of the Marquette Law School Poll, has calculated that in both 2016 and 2020, Wisconsin was the tipping-point state that provided the 270th Electoral College vote (first for Trump and then for Biden). Priorities USA, a leading Democratic super PAC, projects that Pennsylvania is the most likely such fulcrum this year. Perhaps because of this tipping-point effect, my term Blue Wall has morphed into a shorthand for these crucial states—even though they were simply the three bricks that fell out of the rest of the wall in 2016.

At a breakfast meeting of the Pennsylvania delegation that kicked off convention week in Chicago on Monday, speakers talked about defending the Blue Wall across Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin against Trump as urgently as characters in Game of Thrones would discuss fortifying the Wall in the north against the White Walkers.

“It is no secret; we are the keystone state of the Blue Wall,” Sharif Street, the Pennsylvania party chair, said. “As goes Pennsylvania, so will go America.”

A little later, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Harris’s vice-presidential nominee, popped into the meeting with a similar message. “I just came from the Wisconsin breakfast, and the Blue Wall is solid, people,” he told the large crowd in a hotel ballroom.

Another special guest, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, dwelled on the topic. “Can we all agree we are going to be the Blue Wall again in 2024?” she asked. “Thank you for helping to save the world with us a few years ago. Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin: This race once again is going to come down to our big states.”

[Franklin Foer: Kamala Harris settles the biggest fight in the Democratic Party]

Before these states became the three-headed decider in presidential elections, campaigns usually considered Ohio—a demographically and economically similar neighbor—to be the tipping-point state. Early in the 1988 presidential race, I interviewed Lee Atwater, the legendary GOP strategist who was running George H. W. Bush’s campaign, and he told me that the campaign’s entire Electoral College strategy was to lock down so many states that Democrat Michael Dukakis could not reach 270 without winning Ohio, and then to defend Ohio with what Atwater called a “gubernatorial” level of campaign spending.

Sixteen years later, Karl Rove, the chief strategist for George W. Bush’s reelection campaign against the Democrat John Kerry, likewise considered Ohio “the key state,” he told me this week. Bush eventually won a second term (by the second-narrowest Electoral College majority for a reelected president ever) when he outstripped Kerry in Ohio by about 120,000 votes.

The state remained vital for Barack Obama, who carried it in both his 2008 and 2012 victories. But since then, Ohio has moved solidly toward the Republican Party, which has established overwhelming advantages in the state’s small towns and rural areas. Ohio no longer functions as a fulcrum in the presidential race; it is no longer even a state that Democrats contest at that level.

As Ohio has faded, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin have together filled its former pivotal role in presidential contests. An earlier generation of political analysts and operatives viewed Ohio as decisive partly because it seemed to capture America in miniature, due to its racial, educational, and economic mix and rural/urban makeup. Yet that microcosm thesis doesn’t explain the prominence of the new big three. Demographically, the states are not all that representative of an America that is inexorably growing more diverse: All three are whiter and older than the national average, with a lower proportion of college graduates and immigrants, according to census figures. The national trends regarding educational attainment and ethnic diversity that have unfolded in many other states, especially across the Sun Belt, have evolved much more slowly in the big three Rust Belt states.

In particular, white voters without a college degree, who fell below 40 percent as a proportion of the national vote for the first time in 2020, according to census data, still cast about half the vote in Michigan and Pennsylvania that year and nearly three-fifths of it in Wisconsin, according to calculations by William Frey, a demographer at Brookings Metro, a center-left think tank. Voters of color, who in 2020 cast about three of every 10 votes nationally, constituted only about one in five voters in Michigan, one in six in Pennsylvania, and one in 10 in Wisconsin.

[Derek Thompson: The new law of electoral politics]

If these Rust Belt battlegrounds still wield great influence in presidential races without being representative of the country overall, what explains that continued prominence? Experts I spoke with offered three persuasive explanations.

One is that a critical mass of voters in these states are conscious of their fulcrum role and therefore devote more attention to presidential contests than most voters do elsewhere. Rove likens the role that Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin now play in the general election to the part that Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina have typically played as the early states on the primary calendar. “There may be something to be said for them taking their roles seriously,” Rove told me. “Like, ‘We are going to pay a little bit more attention to this, and our politics are going to be slightly more robust.’”

Another explanation for these states’ central role is that they have remained highly competitive in presidential elections when so many other states “have made a very rapid transition,” as Rove put it, into the camp of one party or the other. Mark Graul, a GOP operative who ran George W. Bush’s Wisconsin campaigns, told me that the Rust Belt battlegrounds have remained so close because, within them, all of the big political changes over the past generation have largely offset one another. For example, although Democrats are benefiting from better performance in the growing white-collar suburbs around such cities as Philadelphia, Detroit, and Milwaukee, those gains have largely been matched by increasing GOP margins among the substantial small-town and rural portions of these states. In the long run, Graul told me, Republicans won’t be able to sustain that trade-off, because their strongholds are either stagnant or losing population. For the near term, though, these states “have been able to weather the demographic and geographic voting shifts and still remain incredibly closely divided,” he said.

The third explanation—identifying perhaps the most important dynamic at work—centers on these states’ powerful tendency to move together in elections. The big three have voted for the same party in every presidential election since 1980, with the sole exception of 1988 (when Wisconsin went with Dukakis, while Michigan and Pennsylvania backed Bush). Even more remarkably, in this century the same party has controlled the governorship in all three states simultaneously, except for one four-year period when Democrats held Pennsylvania while the other two elected Republicans.

Devine told me that because of the demographic and economic similarities and their proclivity for moving in tandem, the three states should be “considered a single entity,” which he calls “Mi-Pa-Wi.” With its 44 combined Electoral College votes, Devine said, Mi-Pa-Wi is in effect the last true swing state of that size, given that the states of comparable magnitude—California, New York, Florida, and Texas—all tilt solidly blue or red. “These three states are really one big state that is going to decide the election,” he said.

[Read: The DNC is a big smiling mess]

On paper, that should be an ominous prospect for Democrats in the Trump era. The foundation of Trump’s electoral coalition is non-college-educated white voters—and they constitute a significantly larger share of the vote in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin than they do nationally.

Yet, at their national convention this week, Democrats from these states clearly feel more optimistic about their prospects now than they did when Biden was the presumptive nominee. “I think this race has been reset,” Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, told me after the delegation breakfast on Monday. A recent survey from the New York Times/Siena College poll showed Harris with a four-percentage-point lead over Trump in all three states. Other surveys have shown the two candidates more closely matched, but almost all polls show Harris gaining.

Her revival builds on the larger trend across the region. After Trump’s upset victories in 2016, Democrats have regained the initiative in all three states. In 2018, each of them elected a Democratic governor; then each backed Biden in 2020; and in 2022, all three elected Democratic governors again—in every instance by a larger margin than in 2018. Democrats now also hold five of their six U.S. Senate seats.

The winning formula for Democrats in all three states has been similar. Although the party has rarely captured a majority of working-class white voters, its winning candidates—such as Whitmer, Shapiro, Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers, and Biden in 2020—have routinely performed a few points better with those voters than the party does elsewhere. Democrats have also posted huge advantages among young people, especially in such college towns as Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Madison, Wisconsin. And in all three states, Democrats are benefiting from expanding margins among college-educated voters in the suburbs of major cities—an advantage that widened after Dobbs, the 2022 Supreme Court decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion. (Later that year, Whitmer, Shapiro, and Evers each won about three-fifths of college-educated white voters: a crushing margin that improved on Biden’s performance, according to exit polls.) These formidable gains with white-collar voters have enabled the party to withstand disappointing turnout and somewhat shrinking margins among Black voters in Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee, and other midsize cities.

Democrats hope that Harris can reverse that electoral erosion in Black communities, while expanding the party’s advantages in well-educated suburbs, especially among women, and recapturing young people who had soured on Biden. Her biggest challenge in the region will be holding as much as possible of Biden’s support among older and blue-collar white voters, who are probably the most receptive audience for the coming Republican attack ads claiming that Harris is a “woke” liberal extremist who is soft on crime and immigration.

Dan Kildee, a Democrat who is retiring after this session as the House representative of a district that includes Flint, Michigan, told me that this sort of hard-edged message will find an audience among some working-class white voters, but he believes Harris can keep those losses to a manageable level. “There’s a whole segment of that cohort of the electorate that now has evidence of what a Donald Trump presidency looks like,” Kildee said, “and will weigh that against the more hopeful and optimistic message that Vice President Harris brings.”

The margin is very tight: Even if Harris does everything right, an optimal outcome for her in these states might be winning them by one or two percentage points. Shapiro could have been speaking about all three states when he told reporters on Monday: “You can get to a race that’s sort of basically statistically tied, and getting that last point or two in Pennsylvania is really, really tough.”

But unlike what happened in 2016, when Hillary Clinton famously, fatally, took her eye off Michigan and Wisconsin to focus on campaigning elsewhere, Democrats are singularly focused on cementing Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin back into the Blue Wall. At the Pennsylvania breakfast, Whitmer told the delegates: “Josh [Shapiro] and I and Tony [Evers] are talking about a Blue Wall strategy. The three of us together, in all three of our states, turning out the voters, getting people pumped up, educating people.” If they can celebrate victory after that effort, she said, it will mean they can “say ‘Madam President’ for the first time in the history of this country.”

The MAGA Aesthetic Is AI Slop - The Atlantic. By Charlie Warzel

Read time: 6 minutes

Far-right influencers are flooding social media with a new kind of junk.

A glitchy hand holds a MAGA flag

Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Sources: Getty.

August 21, 2024, 12:34 PM ET

A glitchy hand holds a MAGA flag

Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration.

Taylor Swift fans are not endorsing Donald Trump en masse. Kamala Harris did not give a speech at the Democratic National Convention to a sea of communists while standing in front of the hammer and sickle. Hillary Clinton was not recently seen walking around Chicago in a MAGA hat. But images of all these things exist.

In recent weeks, far-right corners of social media have been clogged with such depictions, created with generative-AI tools. You can spot them right away, as they bear the technology’s distinct image style: not-quite-but-almost photorealistic, frequently outrageous, not so dissimilar from a tabloid illustration. Donald Trump—or at least whoever controls his social-media accounts—posted the AI-generated photo of Harris with the hammer and sickle, as well as a series of fake images depicting Taylor Swift dressed as Uncle Sam and young women marching in Swifties for Trump shirts. (This after he falsely claimed that Harris had posted an image that had been “A.I.’d”—a tidy bit of projection.)

Trump himself has been the subject of generative-AI art and has shared depictions of himself going back to March 2023. He’s often dressed up as a gun-toting cowboy or in World War II fatigues, storming a beach. Yet these are anodyne compared with much of the material created and shared by far-right influencers and shitposters. There are plenty of mocking or degrading images of Harris and other female Democratic politicians, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. On X, one post that included a fake image in which Harris is implied to be a sex worker has been viewed more than 3.5 million times; on Facebook, that same post has been shared more than 87,000 times. One pro-Trump, Elon-Musk-fanboy account recently shared a suggestive image depicting a scantily clad Harris surrounded by multiple clones of Donald Trump; it’s been viewed 1.6 million times. There are images and videos of Harris and Trump holding hands on a beach and Harris wearing a crown that reads Inflation Queen. On the first night of the DNC, MAGA influencers such as Catturd2 and Jack Posobiec supplemented their rage tweets about Democrats with stylized AI images of Tim Walz and Joe Biden looking enraged.

Although no one ideology has a monopoly on AI art, the high-resolution, low-budget look of generative-AI images appears to be fusing with the meme-loving aesthetic of the MAGA movement. At least in the fever swamps of social media, AI art is becoming MAGA-coded. The GOP is becoming the party of AI slop.

AI slop isn’t, by nature, political. It is most prevalent on platforms such as Facebook, where click farmers and spammers create elaborate networks to flood pages and groups with cheap, fake images of starving children and Shrimp Jesus in the hopes of going viral, getting likes, and picking up “creator bonuses” for online engagement. Jason Koebler, a technology reporter who has spent the past year investigating Facebook’s AI-slop economy, has described the deluge of artificial imagery as part of a “zombie internet” and “the end of a shared reality,” where “a mix of bots, humans, and accounts that were once humans but aren’t anymore interact to form a disastrous website where there is little social connection at all.”

What’s going on across the MAGA internet isn’t exactly the same as Facebook’s spam situation, although the vibe is similar. MAGA influencers may be shitposting AI photos for fun, but they’re also engagement farming, especially on X, where premium subscribers can opt in to the platform’s revenue-sharing program. Right-wing influencers have been vocal about these bonuses, which are handed out based on how many times a creator’s content is seen in a given month. “Payout was huge. They’ve been getting bigger,” Catturd2 posted this March, while praising Musk.

Although many of these influencers already have sizable followings, AI-image generators offer an inveterate poster the thing they need most: cheap, fast, on-demand fodder for content. Rather than peck out a few sentences complaining about Biden’s age or ridiculing Harris’s economic policies, far-right posters can illustrate their attacks and garner more attention. And it’s only getting easier to do this: Last week, X incorporated the newest iteration of the generative-AI engine, Grok, which operates with fewer guardrails than some competing models and has already conjured up untold illustrations of celebrities and politicians in compromising situations.

It’s helpful to think of these photos and illustrations not as nefarious deepfakes or even hyper-persuasive propaganda, but as digital chum—Shrimp Jesus on the campaign trail. For now, little (if any) of what’s being generated is convincing enough to fool voters, and most of it is being used to confirm the priors of true believers. Still, the glut of AI-created political imagery is a pollutant in a broader online information ecosystem. This AI slop doesn’t just exist in a vacuum of a particular social network: It leaves an ecological footprint of sorts on the web. The images are created, copied, shared, and embedded into websites; they are indexed into search engines. It’s possible that, later on, AI-art tools will train on these distorted depictions, creating warped, digitally inbred representations of historical figures. The very existence of so much quickly produced fake imagery adds a layer of unreality to the internet. You and I, like voters everywhere, must wade through this layer of junk, wearily separating out what’s patently fake, what’s real, and what exists in the murky middle.

In many ways, political slop is a logical end point for these image generators, which seem most useful for people trying to make a quick buck. Photography, illustration, and graphic design previously required skill or, at the very least, time to create something interesting enough to attract attention, which, online, can be converted into real money. Now free or easily affordable tools have flooded the market. What once took expert labor is now spam, powered by tools trained on the output of real artists and photographers. Spam is annoying, but ultimately easy to ignore—that is, until it collides with the negative incentives of social-media platforms, where it’s used by political shitposters and hucksters. Then the images become something else. In the hands of Trump, they create small news cycles and narratives to be debunked. In the hands of influencers, they are fired at our timelines in a scattershot approach to attract a morsel of attention. As with the Facebook AI-slop farms, social media shock jocks churning out obviously fake, low-quality images don’t care whether they’re riling up real people, boring them, or creating fodder for bots and other spammers. It is engagement for engagement’s sake. Mindlessly generated information chokes our information pathways, forcing consumers to do the work of discarding it.

That these tools should end up as the medium of choice for Trump’s political movement makes sense, too. It stands to reason that a politician who, for many years, has spun an unending series of lies into a patchwork alternate reality would gravitate toward a technology that allows one to, with a brief prompt, rewrite history so that it flatters him. Just as it seems obvious that Trump’s devoted followers—an extremely online group that has so fully embraced conspiracy theorizing and election denial that some of its members stormed the Capitol building—would delight in the bespoke memes and crude depictions of AI art. The MAGA movement has spent nine years building a coalition of conspiratorial hyper-partisans dedicated to creating a fictional information universe to cocoon themselves in. Now they can illustrate it.

Joe Biden's Gifts to the Democratic Party and to the United States. By The Rude Pundit

Aug 21, 2024 at 9:12 AM//keep unread//hide

Look, I don't know whether or not President Joe Biden is pissed off about giving in to the pressure put on him to drop out. If I were to venture a guess, I'd say that one thing he's angry about is that he didn't get to punch Donald Trump in his stupid, bulbous Tang-toned face. Rhetorically, of course. He wanted a knockout on Election Day. But rather than boxing, this has become tag-team wrestling, with Biden high-fiving Vice President Kamala Harris to enter the ring and finish the job.

If there is one thing that has come through since Biden first started running for president in April 2019, it's that he fucking hates Donald Trump. I mean, viscerally, savagely hates Trump with his whole body and soul. Even before Trump and his shit-flinging lunatic brigade decided to try to destroy Joe Biden by eviscerating his son, Hunter, Biden has held Trump in contempt, palpably disgusted that Trump even exists, let alone that he actually was able to become president and wreck Biden's beloved federal government. Biden destroyed Trump in 2020, but he left Trump strong enough to return, and so Biden wanted to, as he said so often when he was running, finish the job.

At the Democratic National Convention last night, Biden gave what was likely a variation of what would have been his acceptance of the nomination, turning into a valedictory speech, taking the well-earned victory lap on everything that he accomplished. He is absolutely one of the most consequential presidents in history. He took us from the depths of a pandemic that had been exacerbated in lives and in the economy by the rank incompetence and rampant narcissism of Donald Trump and raised us up. He pulled us back, using all the skill and tenacity he had accumulated and earned in his many decades in DC. 

Unencumbered by having any fucks left to give or needing to resupply his fucks for the future, Biden bore into Trump. In his 2020 DNC speech, Biden didn't say Trump's name. He didn't use the word "lie." He was aghast at what Trump had done as president, but he kept that personal hatred in check. Now, in 2024, after years of Republicans denigrating him and his family, he didn't have to pretend to be above it all. The working class kid could drag the rich dick into the street and brawl him there. He said, "In America, they’re safer today than when we were under Donald Trump.  Trump continues to lie about crime in America, like everything else" and "Trump continues to lie about the border" and "Typically Trump — once again putting himself first and America last."

The abject rage came out when Biden talked about Trump's routine and unrepentant denigration of the military. He fumed, "Who in the hell does he think he is?  Who does he think he is?" And he continued, "They are the words of a person not worthy of being commander in chief, period.  Not then, not now, and not ever." Biden brought up how Trump says he won't accept the election results if he loses (again) and that it will be a "bloodbath." "If anybody else said that in the past, you’d think he was cra- — he is crazy," Biden said, "but you’d think it was an exaggeration.  But he means it."

One of the gifts Biden gave to the Democratic Party and to the United States last night was that his remarks implied a blessing for the end of Democratic hesitancy to dive into insults and attacks, that the language of politicians, especially presidential candidates, had to stay elevated and high-minded, even when going negative. To their eternal credit, Harris and her campaign said, "Fuck that." When traditional consultants said she and Tim Walz shouldn't use "weird," she said, "Fuck that," and leaned into it. By finally being so open in such a high-profile setting about calling out lies and craziness, Biden was telling Harris, the Democrats, and the rest of us, "Fuck that. Take this asshole down any way you can." Hillary Clinton did the same in her speech, especially when she didn't try to silence the chants of "Lock him up." Her smile and nod was as clear as if she said, "Fuck you, Donald." Adios to going high when they go low. Let's get in the gutter and rumble.

Another gift Biden gave the nation was that, whatever he was feeling in private, his public statements on giving up on his re-election have demonstrated grace, self-awareness, and, above all, patriotism in its purest sense, not in the hateful, nationalist perversion of it that the GOP has contorted patriotism into. "I love the job, but I love my country more," he said. And then later in the speech, "I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my career, but I gave my best to you.  For 50 years, like many of you, I’ve given my heart and soul to our nation." That's one of the most meaningful things Biden will leave us with: the presidency doesn’t belong to a person. It belongs to the people. And the nation itself takes work, the work of all of us, not one person. 

Finally, Biden passed the torch at the end to Kamala Harris. And if this story ends like it's supposed to, with the orange hell-giant defeated by a spontaneous movement of a unified people, with Harris, the first woman president, triumphant and, recognizing the path forward is not going to be easy or without conflict, the belief in our national soul restored, this country could never thank Joe Biden enough for the gift of this joyful rejuvenation of the American spirit. 

The New AOC - The Atlantic. By Yair Rosenberg

Read time: 4 minutes

The progressive congresswoman is no longer speaking solely to the left wing, but to the party as a whole.

AOC speaking behind a lectern

Photograph by Jordan Gale

August 20, 2024, 2:30 PM ET

The evolution of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as a political force in American politics is fully apparent from just two speeches. The first was delivered at the 2020 Democratic National Convention, two years after the insurgent progressive from New York was elected to Congress. In it, Ocasio-Cortez declared her “fidelity and gratitude to a mass people’s movement working to establish 21st-century social, economic, and human rights” and pledged to “recognize and repair the wounds of racial injustice, colonization, misogyny, and homophobia, and to propose and build reimagined systems of immigration and foreign policy that turn away from the violence and xenophobia of our past.” The brief speech was essentially a laundry list of leftist principles that would appeal largely to her own supporters rather than to everyday voters—narrowcasting rather than broadcasting.

Ocasio-Cortez’s performance last night at this year’s DNC could not have been more different. Connecting her personal biography to populist policies, the 34-year-old congresswoman electrified the crowd of Democratic Party faithful and left them thunderously chanting her name. Gone was the jargon of elite progressive circles, replaced by accessible and memorable one-liners about herself and Kamala Harris. “I, for one, am tired of hearing about how a two-bit union buster thinks of himself as more of a patriot than the woman who fights every single day to lift working people out from under the boots of greed trampling on our way of life,” she said. “Ever since I got elected, Republicans have attacked me by saying that I should go back to bartending. But let me tell you, I’m happy to—any day of the week—because there is nothing wrong with working for a living.”

There are some prosaic reasons for the stark contrast between these two speeches. The first was given without a live audience during the coronavirus pandemic, at a convention where Ocasio-Cortez had been tapped by the Joe Biden campaign to unite the left behind him, not to unite the Democratic Party itself. But there is also a more significant reason the AOC of 2024 has diverged from the AOC of 2020: She now has her sights set on shaping the future of the Democratic Party for years to come.

The paradox of Ocasio-Cortez is that she contains two personas that sometimes seem at odds with each other. There is the bartender from the Bronx—an everywoman who took on the political machine and won—and there is the Boston University–educated activist who speaks in the language of a graduate-student seminar. The conflict between these characters exists more in style than in substance. But in politics, the way you speak reflects whom you aspire to reach. And in recent years, Ocasio-Cortez has elevated her aspirations, seeking to speak not just for a leftist movement but also for an entire party.

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Once an outsider staging sit-ins in Nancy Pelosi’s office, she is now an insider invited onstage during prime time at the DNC. Ocasio-Cortez accomplished this not by abandoning her progressive principles, but by playing politics to advance them—accepting a seat at the table and making her case there. Formerly a factional leader against the Democratic establishment, she has positioned herself as a bridge between the party’s mainstream and progressive wings. And unlike less successful members of “the Squad,” she has transformed herself into a power broker rather than marginalized herself as a perpetual protester. Her political choices, like her rhetorical choices last night, are those of someone who seeks not to fight the Democratic Party, but to lead it.

Ocasio-Cortez’s turn has not gone unnoticed—or unopposed. Last month, the Democratic Socialists of America rescinded their endorsement of their former standard-bearer over her insufficiently anti-Israel politics. In reality, Ocasio-Cortez has been a consistent critic of Israel’s conduct in Gaza and the Biden administration’s approach to the conflict. But she has also acknowledged and condemned anti-Semitism within the anti-Zionist movement and spoken with Jewish leaders about the issue—an unforgivable offense to some of her erstwhile allies and a reversal of her past reluctance to critique progressive activists.

By choosing to engage with those who disagree with her on Palestine and attempting to navigate the complexities of the issue with mainstream Jewish voices, Ocasio-Cortez failed the DSA’s purity test. But it was not her or her views that were marginalized as a result. On the DNC stage, Ocasio-Cortez was the first speaker to reference Gaza, calling for both a cease-fire and “bringing hostages home.”

Afterward, even some of her most inveterate critics in the political center were compelled to compliment the caliber of her performance. Jay Jacobs, the chairman of the New York State Democratic Party, has previously said that Ocasio-Cortez’s “far left” brand of politics can’t win across the state. For her part, she’s repeatedly called for his resignation. But speaking today with New York Democrats at a delegation breakfast, Jacobs reportedly quipped, “I thought [Ocasio-Cortez] was outstanding last night. Don’t tell her I said that, will you?”

If Ocasio-Cortez manages to maintain her trajectory and escape the pull of factional infighting, the day may soon come when political players like these discover that she doesn’t need them—they need her.

The Pro-Palestinian ‘Elect Trump’ Movement - The Atlantic. By David Frum

Read time: 7 minutes

Protesters made a tiny footprint at the RNC in Milwaukee.

Other than a modest daytime march on Monday afternoon, the first day of the Republican National Convention, there were virtually no protests over the event’s four days and nights.

Obviously, the story from the Democratic National Convention in Chicago is already proving different.

This is part of a pattern. Gather any large number of Democrats together, in almost any city or state, whether at rallies, fundraisers, or presidential appearances, and pro-Palestinian protesters will try to wreck the event. These actions have been building to threats of outright violence. Pro-Trump and Republican events, meanwhile, are almost always left in peace.

Of the two big parties, the Democrats are more emotionally sympathetic to Palestinian suffering. The Biden administration is working to negotiate the cease-fire that the pro-Palestinian camp claims to want. The administration has provided hundreds of millions of dollars of humanitarian assistance to Palestinians in Gaza. President Joe Biden’s terms for ending the fighting in Gaza envision a rapid movement to full Palestinian statehood.

By contrast, former President Donald Trump uses Palestinian as an insult. His administration moved the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, and recognized Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights. In 2016, Trump campaigned on a complete shutdown of travel by Muslims into the United States; Trump now speaks of deporting campus anti-Israel protesters. He has pledged to block Gaza refugees from entering the United States.

Trump wants to tell the story that he and his party will enforce public order. He alleges that Democrats cannot or will not protect Americans against chaos spread by extremist elements. The pro-Palestinian movement works every day to create images that support Trump’s argument. As a visibly annoyed Vice President Kamala Harris asked protesters in Detroit earlier this month: Do they want to elect Donald Trump?

Not all pro-Palestinian demonstrators are thinking about the election. Many seem driven by moral outrage or ideological passion. But for those who are thinking strategically, the answer is obvious: Yes, they want to elect Trump. Of course, they want to elect Trump. Electing Trump is their best—and maybe only—hope.

To understand why, cast your mind back a quarter century.

In the election of 2000, Vice President Al Gore faced Texas Governor George W. Bush. Gore probably would have won in a straight two-way contest. But that same year, the progressive advocate Ralph Nader entered the race as a third-party challenger—and he pulled just enough of the vote to tip the Electoral College and the presidency to Bush.

Nader later professed regret for running as a third-party candidate. But at the time, Nader understood exactly what he was doing. Defeating Gore and electing Bush was the intended and declared purpose of Nader’s candidacy. Nader detailed his logic in many speeches, including this one to the summer-2000 convention of the NAACP:

If you ever wondered why the right wing and the corporate wing of the Democratic Party has so much more power over that party than the progressive wing, it's because the right wing and the corporate wing have somewhere to go: It's called the Republican Party. And so they’re catered to and they’re regaled—like the Democratic Leadership Council, they’re catered to and they’re regaled.

But if you look at the progressive wing … they have nowhere to go.

And you know when you’re told that you have nowhere to go, you get taken for granted. And when you get taken for granted, you get taken.

To paraphrase his argument even more bluntly: If progressives caused the Democrats to lose the presidency in the election of 2000, then Democrats would take progressives more seriously in all the elections that followed.

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Nader’s logic was not altogether wrong. In many ways, the post-2000 Democratic Party has shifted well to the left of where the party was in the 1980s and ’90s. But catering to the party’s left has cost Democrats winnable races, and with them, key priorities: It brought the Iraq War and 20 years of inaction on climate change head the list of progressive disappointments since the 2000 election, and the list extends from there. Whether or not the shift was worth the price, Nader was neither ignorant nor deceived. He identified his goal and he willingly accepted the risks for himself and his movement.

So it is now with the pro-Palestinian demonstrators of 2024.

They start with a fundamental political problem: Their cause is not popular. Solid majorities of Americans accept Israel’s war in Gaza as valid and fiercely condemn the Hamas terrorist attacks as unacceptable. The exact margin varies from poll to poll depending on how the question is asked, but when presented with a binary choice between Israel and the Palestinians, Americans prefer Israel by a factor of at least two to one.

The brute fact of those numbers makes it very difficult for pro-Palestinian activists to win elections. In this cycle, despite all the emotion stirred by the Gaza war, two of Israel’s fiercest critics in Congress lost their primaries to pro-Israel challengers.

From the point of view of any practical politician: If a cause is so unpopular that it cannot help its friends, why listen to its advocates?

The only answer to that question, again from the practical point of view, is the message of the protesters in Chicago: Maybe we can’t help you if you do listen to us, but we can hurt you if you don’t!

Think of it another way. Since the bloody attack by Hamas on October 7 and the Israeli response, pro-Palestinian protesters have marched and agitated all over the United States. They have occupied college campuses. They have impeded access to Jewish schools, businesses, and places of worship. They have posted impassioned words and images on social media.

Yet all of their militant action has barely budged U.S. policy. Arms, intelligence, and economic assistance continue to flow from the United States to Israel. U.S. military forces cooperate with Israel against Iranian proxies in Lebanon and Yemen. Although the U.S. has imposed restraint on some Israeli operations, Israel has mostly been allowed to fight its own war in its own way.

These were President Biden’s decisions, not Vice President Harris’s. But she was the second-highest-ranking member of the administration. If Biden’s deputy inherits Biden’s office, the message is clear: His administration’s record of support for Israel carried no meaningful political price. All of those street demonstrations and campus occupations will have amounted to so much empty noise. All of those articles arguing that Gaza explained Biden’s troubles with young voters would be exposed as ideological wishcasting.

If Harris wins, the pro-Palestinian movement will have lost.

If Harris loses, however, pro-Palestinian protesters can claim that they were responsible for her defeat. That claim might not be true—in fact it probably would not be true—but try disproving it. The pro-Palestinian movement would have at least some basis to argue: You lost because you alienated us.

If Harris wins, she may want to do something about the pro-Palestinian cause—for humanitarian reasons, for reasons of diplomacy and geopolitics, for reasons of Democratic constituency management in particular congressional districts. But she won’t have to do it. She’ll know that the protesters tried to beat her and they failed.

If Harris loses, however, future Democratic candidates will tread more carefully on Israeli-Palestinian terrain. Even if they privately doubt that the party’s position on Gaza explains anything truly important, they will be worried by advisers and donors who will believe it or who will want to believe it.

But what about Trump? Why aren’t the pro-Palestinian demonstrators in Chicago more fearful of Trump’s possible return to the presidency?

Although the pro-Palestine cause attracts support from progressives, it is not exactly a progressive cause. Americans associate progressivism with secularism, feminism, and gay-rights advocacy, among other causes. The Palestinian national movement, especially now that Hamas has effectively replaced the Palestine Liberation Organization as leader of “the resistance,” has become markedly religious, patriarchal, and socially reactionary. But it is also a movement fiercely opposed to American global hegemony—and that is its “anti-imperialist” appeal to Western progressives.

If you oppose American global hegemony, Trump is your candidate (as a long list of anti-American dictators have already figured out). Trump fiercely opposes the alliances and trade agreements that magnify American power and make the U.S. the center of a huge network of democratic, market-oriented countries. Trump’s “America First” bluster is actually a pathway to American isolation and weakness that will further remove American power from the world.

If you wish America ill, of course you wish Trump well. The far left and far right of U.S. politics may disagree on much, but they agree on that.

The protesters in the streets of Chicago are not acting aimlessly or randomly. The people on the receiving end of their protests would benefit from equal clarity. The protesters want chaos and even violence in order to defeat Harris and elect Trump. They are not ill-informed or excessively idealistic or sadly misled. They are not overzealous allies. They are purposeful adversaries.

The Chicago convention delegates should recognize that truth, and act accordingly.