I don’t even want to guess what’s going to happen with Trump cabinet picks. I don’t know if Senate Republicans will hang together to approve them all. I don’t know if Congress will roll over and go into recession for more than ten days so that Trump can choose who he wants without hearings. We’ll see.

I do know that pharmaceutical stocks dropped like a rock after RFK the Lesser was announced as Trump’s choice for Health and Human Services. That shouldn’t have surprised anybody; Trump had already said he’s let the Lesser “go crazy” on health.

Obviously, all of Trump’s choices are people who are intended to both be utterly loyal to Trump and to utterly muck up whatever agency or department they are supposed to be running. It’s Trump’s revenge.

In his first term, Trump obviously was unhappy to find out that Presidents can’t just issue orders about whatever and expect people to follow them. He’s never been constrained like that, you know. The only person who could override him was his father, and Fred Trump Sr. has been gone for about 25 years now.

At some point, someone must have told Trump that the powers of the presidency are listed in Article II of the Constitution. So for a while he was obsessed with Article II, claiming it gave him “rights” to do whatever he wanted. He seemed to think he was the first person to find out about it.

But of course, Article II does nothing of the sort. Article II is very short and gives presidents very little autonomous power. Most presidential functions require the cooperation/advice/consent of Congress. And I suspect all the other presidents before Trump knew that. They’d probably actually spent the three minutes or so required to read Article II. But for Trump, hollowing out the bureaucracies that carry out the functions of government is all about revenge. All those Deep State bureaucrats who wouldn’t obey him will be sorry. And since he doesn’t understand how any of this works and what these bureaucrats do, he doesn’t see the downside.

For months, I’ve been reading that European leaders have been making plans for what they will do when they can no longer count on Pax Americana. Well, that time has come, so I understand they’re preparing to defend Europe without our help. But with the likes of Pete Hegseth at DOD and Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence, we’ll be helpless to defend ourselves before long, never mind help Europe.

Earlier today I read a commentary that said our current allies will stop sharing intelligence with us with Gabbard in charge, and they’ll probably stop trusting intelligence from us. I’m sure you regulars understand how inadequate Gabbard is. But for anyone else floating through here, see Tom Nichols at the Atlantic,  Tulsi Gabbard’s Nomination Is a National-Security Risk.  Gabbard is a big fan of Vladimir Putin, btw.

And then there’s the Israel-Gaza thing. Trump won Michigan with a lot of help from the Muslims in Dearborn. The week before the election, Trump visited a halal cafe in Dearborn and promised to bring peace to Gaza. He didn’t mention he would let Bibi Netanyahu destroy it first, but that is emerging as the plan.

Of all the people in the United States, the president-elect has settled on Mike Huckabee as his nominee for ambassador to Israel. Huckabee, a Southern Baptist, has said he does not believe in the West Bank as a concept and that it is Judea and Samaria (the biblical name for the region) and that Palestinians as a people are not real. He has also put on campaign events from the West Bank. After Donald Trump’s announcement, Huckabee was asked whether West Bank annexation was possible during the coming presidential term. “Of course,” he replied. (Huckabee is a Christian Zionist, which is to say he believes that Jews should be in Israel—an area he deems to include the West Bank—so as to trigger the Second Coming, after which Christians can inhabit the land.)

Huckabee is but one part of a larger story: In the week or so since he won reelection, Trump has announced a series of people who either explicitly support West Bank settlement or annexation or bristle at the slightest suggestion of criticism of Israel.

As Galen Jackson, an associate professor of political science at Williams College, put it, “To the extent that Israel plans to hold on to the settlements that it builds in the West Bank, then almost by definition annexation has been proceeding for decades on a gradual basis. The main difference with Trump, in that case, is that he doesn’t even protest Israeli settlement expansion or deem it in violation of international law, whereas all other U.S. administrations have.”

Huckabee isn’t the only nominee that the far right Israelis must be thrilled about. Pete Hegseth and Elise Stefanik (nominated for UN Ambassador) have a long record of being all-in on whatever Netanyahu wants.

And there’s a broad consensus that an AG Matt Gaetz will destroy the Department of Justice and burn down the rule of law. Too bad for all those people who voted for Trump because they were afraid of crime.

And I haven’t yet started on what’s going to happen to the economy. But y’all know all that.

I hate election years, but I expect I will hate next year even worse.

I’m out of metaphors to compare to Trump’s picks for his cabinet and administration. They’ve all been bad. But this afternoon, when I saw a headline that said Trump wants Matt Gaetz as attorney general and Tulsi Gabbard to be national intelligence director, I saw the English language itself surrender. There are no words.

Trump has been asking for the new Congress to go into recess as soon as it is sworn in, so that he can hire his people through recess appointments. No hearings; no embarassing questions, no votes. Right now I’m hearing some Republican senators say they are looking forward to hearings. Axios is reporting that Republicans are “stunned and disgusted” at the Gaetz appointment. Of course, that doesn’t mean they won’t fall in line and vote to confirm the appointment. He may not get his recess appointments, though. It’s possibly a good sign that John Thune will be Senate Majority Leader, and not Trump’s pick, Rick Scott. Scott had promised to give Trump everything Trump wants.

As far as Trulsi Gabbard is concerned, I second Fred Kaplan at Slate.

As I keyboard this the Senate race in Pennsylvania between Dem. Bob Casey and Rep. Dave McCormick is still too close to call. But it probably will be called by the end of the day. Control of the House is not yet called, but the Republicans are a lot closer to the finish line than the Dems.

Trying to access Will Bunch’s column at the Philadelphia Inquirer without a subscription is getting trickier, but I found a gift link to his most recent column on Threads. Try it if you hit the paywall. Highly recommended reading — 2024’s other big loser? The mainstream media. Is there any path forward? I’m starting in the middle here, after a description of how the old traditional news media are struggling to stay afloat financially these days.

And while newsroom leaders were getting a lesson (or, in many cases, not getting it) that balanced-but-bloodless journalism that equalized “both sides” would eventually drive both sides away, it’s also fair to ask whether this head-on crash between journalism and increasingly tribal ideologies even mattered that much in the end. The perfect-storm fluke of mid-20th-century media monopolies that the late David Halberstam famously described as The Powers That Be have been zapped by the electrons of the internet, creating other ways for folks to speak to each other on social media or read targeted websites that appealed to their niche interests and ideas or their prejudices.

But especially their prejudices. …

… The things that pundits have been talking about since Tuesday — an economy that hasn’t worked for the working class since the time of Ronald Reagan, anxieties among white voters about a potential end to white privilege and the patriarchy, and a Democratic Party that’s lost touch with the great American middle — all factored into this election. But nothing mattered more than this: Donald Trump was returned to power by the most badly informed electorate in modern American history.

Ultimately, it may not have mattered how brilliant Kamala Harris’s campaign was or how well crafted her proposals. Most voters saw little to none of it. They were stuck in a right-wing media bubble or getting information from other ignorant people on social media.  And they have absolutely no idea what they’ve just done.

I honestly don’t think the current Democratic party has lost touch with the American middle class, btw. The party worked hard to address middle-class issues. It’s Trump and his minions who don’t give a hoo haw about the American middle class or what it’s like to be a middle class American.

The problem with most Americans only hearing the right-wing side of political discourse has been going on for many years. I remember despairing about it during the George W. Bush years, and it was an old problem even then. I like what Bunch says about “balanced-but-bloodless journalism that equalized ‘both sides.'” A lot of this goes back to Spiro Agnew’s attacks on news media being biased toward liberals that went on to become gospel on the American Right. The news media establishment responded to the criticism by sacrificing accurate reporting in order to avoid the appearance of favoritism to liberals.

Paul Krugman addressed this in a column he wrote more than 24 years ago that’s worth reading again now. In Reckonongs, Bait and Switch, he described some blatant lies being told by George W. Bush in 2000 as he campaigned against Al Gore.

How has he gotten away with it? One answer is that voters can’t relate to big numbers. But it’s also true that the media haven’t helped them make sense of these numbers.

Partly this is a matter of marketing — insider gossip makes better TV than budget arithmetic. But there has also been a political aspect: the mainstream media are fanatically determined to seem evenhanded. One of the great jokes of American politics is the insistence by conservatives that the media have a liberal bias. The truth is that reporters have failed to call Mr. Bush to account on even the most outrageous misstatements, presumably for fear that they might be accused of partisanship. If a presidential candidate were to declare that the earth is flat, you would be sure to see a news analysis under the headline ”Shape of the Planet: Both Sides Have a Point.” After all, the earth isn’t perfectly spherical.

Mainstream media refused to change course and became mostly useless as a means ot informing the public about political candidates. And now that the pre-Nixon press has retired or expired, everyone working in news media today has been well trained to produce artifically “balanced” but bloodness reporting. And here we are.

Democrats must stop assuming that they can get their message to the people through mainstream media. That hasn’t been true for a very long time. I remember I used to complain that President Obama was making that same mistake, assuming media would accurately explain what his administration was doing and why it was doing it. It did not. He was lucky that Mitt Romney was a less ruthless candidate than Trump, or Obama wouldn’t have been re-elected.

I believe I linked to this before, but it fits here too — at Talking Points Memo, Kate Riga says that the Dems really must develop their own media to talk to the people. “Democrats need well-produced, well-funded, compelling content that can go punch for punch with the Rogans and the Theo Vons.” she said.

See also Reckonings of Contempt by Josh Marshall. And the Associated Press called Pennsylvania for McCormick.

Heather Cox Richardson began her November 8 newsletter this way:

Social media has been flooded today with stories of Trump voters who are shocked to learn that tariffs will raise consumer prices as reporters are covering that information. 

Yes, reporters are now covering that information. Why wasn’t it covered starting many weeks before the election?

One of the old justifications for tariffs was that they would bring factories home, but when the $3 billion shoe company Steve Madden announced yesterday it would reduce its imports from China by half to avoid Trump-promised tariffs, it said it will shift production not to the U.S., but to Cambodia, Vietnam, Mexico, and Brazil. 

I’ve lost the link, but yesterday I read that a lot of consumer product companies are planning to stuff their U.S. warehouses with their Chinese-made products or components as fast as possible before the tariffs are imposed. But even if they are thinking of moving their manufacturing to the U.S., it’s going to take awhile to get new facilities up and running. In the meantime, consumers are going to get slammed.

Meanwhile, Joe Biden’s Chips and Science Act was already bringing much of manufacturing back to these shores without adding to inflation. I suspect most voters never heard of the Chips and Science Act. Now companies are scrambling to get Chips and Science Act deals finalized before the new Congress can repeal it. Whatever happens, next year Trump will take credit for the new jobs being created by Biden’s policies. There will be little reporting to correct the lie.

In Salon today, Amanda Marcotte noted that in states all across the country where voters backed Trump, they also voted for abortion rights, higher minimum wage, paid sick and family leave, and even to ban employers from forcing their employees to sit through right-wing or anti-union meetings. She points out that 12% of voters in Missouri voted both for abortion rights and for Trump.

Marcotte recalled that Catherine Rampell and Youyou Zhou of the Washington Post showed before the election that voters overwhelmingly preferred Harris’s policies to Trump’s if they didn’t know which candidate proposed them.  An Ipsos/Reuters poll from October showed that voters who were misinformed about immigration, crime, and the economy tended to vote Republican, while those who knew the facts preferred Democrats. Many Americans turn for information to social media or to friends and family who traffic in conspiracy theories. As Angelo Carusone of Media Matters put it: “We have a country that is pickled in right-wing misinformation and rage.” 

In the last post I discussed the failures of media. There is more commentary on those failures now. Let’s begin with Michael Tomasky at The New Republic. I recommend reading the whole thing. Here is his basic premise:

Today, the right-wing media—Fox News (and the entire News Corp.), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeart Media (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more—sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win.

Let me say that again, in case it got lost: Today, the right-wing media sets the news agenda in this country. Not The New York Times. Not The Washington Post (which bent over backwards to exert no influence when Jeff Bezos pulled the paper’s Harris endorsement). Not CBS, NBC, and ABC. The agenda is set by all the outlets I listed in the above paragraph. Even the mighty New York Times follows in its wake, aping the tone they set disturbingly often.

I agree with him. It’s particularly obvious whenever mainstream reporters interview Democrats. The questions will all reflect right-wing media framing of the issues. Consider the interview of Kamala Harris by CNN’s Dana Bash, of which I wrote,

I started to watch that CNN interview with Dana Bash, but bailed before it was over because the questions were stupid. It was all “gotcha” (Why did you flip flop on fracking?) or bits of right-wing talking points, re-framed as questions. Instead of asking about her energy policies, Bash tries to trip her up by grilling her for changing a position on fracking. As a viewer, I found that annoying and tiresome. If I were the candidate I’d be frustrated also.

As for news coverage, even those who tune in to the standard network nightly news or scan the front page of a newspaper wouldn’t have been told anything substantive about Trump’s vs. Harris’s positions on the issues. But now reporters are shifting into “what to expect in the new Trump administration” mode, so they’re finally explaining what Trump’s tariffs are likely to do to inflation. Thanks loads, guys.

And Dan Froomkin at Press Watch echoes what Michael Tomasky wrote. Just go read it. See also Kate Riga at TPM. Mainstream media is doing an absolutely terrible job of informing news consumers about the issues and candidates’ policies, as opposed to the horse race and what nasty thing one of them said about the other that day. And the issues are being entirely framed by right-wing propaganda rather than actual facts.

Signs of the times — Trump is, apparently, refusing to agree to the standard ethics code regarding conflicts of interest, which is holding up the transition process.

While the transition team’s leadership has privately drafted an ethics code and a conflict-of-interest statement governing its staff, those documents do not include language, required under the law, that explains how Mr. Trump himself will address conflicts of interest during his presidency.

Since Mr. Trump created his transition team in August, it has refused to participate in the normal handoff process, which typically begins months before the election.

It has missed multiple deadlines for signing required agreements governing the process. That has prevented Mr. Trump’s transition team from participating in national security briefings or gaining access to federal agencies to begin the complicated work of preparing to take control of the government on Jan. 20, 2025.

Not that he abided by the “conflicts of interest” codes in his first term. Now I take it he doesn’t want to be constrained by having to pretend he’s not using the power of office to advance his personal interests.

CNN reported that Pentagon officials are actively discussing what to do if Trump issues an illegal order, such as shooting peaceful protesters Trump doesn’t like. They’re also anticipating he will fire the top brass and replace them with his flunkies.

This is only the second day post election, but already it seems the Kamala Harris campaign was something that happened a hundred years ago. Various pundits have blamed just about everyone in North America for why Harris lost, especially Harris. She went too far left. She didn’t go left enough. Blah blah blah. I don’t fault her or her campaign, which I think was brilliant. But I see now the deck was stacked against her in many ways, and her being a woman of color was just part of that.

The best thing I’ve read so far about the election is by Rebecca Solnit at The Guardian, Our mistake was to think we lived in a better country than we do. It begins:

Our mistake was to think we lived in a better country than we do. Our mistake was to see the joy, the extraordinary balance between idealism and pragmatism, the energy, the generosity, the coalition-building of the Kamala Harris campaign and think that it must triumph over the politics of lies and resentment. Our mistake was to think that racism and misogyny were not as bad as they are, whether it applied to who was willing to vote for a supremely qualified Black woman or who was willing to vote for an adjudicated rapist and convicted criminal who admires Hitler. Our mistake was to think we could row this boat across the acid lake before the acid dissolved it.

The three primary causes of our dysfunction, Solnit says, are  “the crisis of masculinity, the failure of the mainstream news media and the rise of Silicon Valley,” But let’s look first at the failure of the mainstream news media, which to me is the most obvious problem.

The media might be the simplest to describe. A democracy requires an informed citizenry, and the US media over the past eight years in particular created an increasingly misinformed citizenry.

This is a problem that goes back a whole lot further than eight years. And part of the problem isn’t really media’s fault, exactly. The media infrastructure is massively fragmented, much more so than it was back when most folks caught Walter Cronkite or Huntley-Brinkley at least a few times every week. I suspect a whole lot of U,.S. citizens have very little exposure to anything resembling “mainstream media” and instead are relying on social media and the massive right-wing media bubble. Still, mainstream media wasn’t exactly doing its job.

When people are more concerned that a trans girl might play on a softball team than that the climate crisis might profoundly devastate the biosphere and much of life on it, human and otherwise, for the next 10,000 years, the media has failed. When people worry about crime when it is low, an economy when it is thriving and immigrants when they do much of the hard work that sustains that economy and commit fewer crimes than the native-born, the media has failed.

When it came to Donald Trump, they went easy on him, and they again and again let him and the far right set the agenda. They constantly treated asymmetrical issues as symmetrical ones – if the Democrats resisted Republican outrages, both sides were “polarized”. In the media everything had two sides, even if one side was the truth and the other was the lie, one side was the human rights or the law and the other side was their violation.

The “sanewashing” of Trump and hyper-criticism of Harris were just too blatant to not notice, yet many cannot see it.  I give some credit to the New York Times and a few other outlets for sounding the alarm on Trump’s mental issues in the final three weeks or so of the campaign, but that was after us small-fry bloggers and independent media had been screaming at them about it for a long, long time,

[Update: See Ryan Cooper at The American Prospect, Time for Democrats to Abandon the Mainstream Media for another perspective.]

I’ve written about the “masculinity crisis” before, such as here. This may be a problem that goes back to the beginnings of human history, frankly. Joseph Campbell was writing about it back in the late 1940s. But exacerbating this is the rise of influence of the infinitely weatlhy Silicon Valley tech bros, like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, who now have the money and connections to remake the political landscape to their liking. These guys do all seem to have massive gender identification issues.

And another problem is that too many Americans don’t seem to know the first thing about how government actually works.

One mistake I think Joe Biden made — and Barack Obama before him — is that he didn’t find a way to communicate directly and frequently to the American people about what he was doing and why he was doing it. I’m thinking about FDR’s fireside chats, which unfortunately wouldn’t work today because of the aforementioned fracturing of media infrastructure and the nation’s attention. But it’s obvious most Americans had no clue what caused the inflation they hated or even that it was a global phenomenon and not just something Biden caused. Biden was hailed around the globe for his skill at bringing inflation down without causing a recession, but most U.S. citizens never heard any of that. They just knew eggs cost more than they used to (mostly because of a bird flu).

[Update: I just saw this at TPM, and it speaks to the previous paragraph —

From TPM Reader CK …

I’ve been a reporter in North Carolina for 30 years, covering the coast and rural counties. For many months, and continuing to this day, there are millions and millions of dollars of Biden Infrastructure and IRA funds pouring into rural communities here for projects to address needs that have been neglected or ignored for decades: wastewater treatment system upgrades, removal of lead pipes in water systems;  repairs of rotting boardwalks and docks in small waterfront and fishing communities; mitigation of saltwater intrusion in farm fields, flood resilience in low-elevations; etc, etc. They’re all necessities that will result in real honest-to-god improvements in people’s lives. Virtually none of the beneficiaries — fishers, farmers, residents in communities vulnerable to sea level rise— have any idea that Biden was the reason they have those improvements, or will be getting them soon (when Trump will no doubt take credit.)  The Democrats and the administration should have been bragging constantly and everywhere about the funds and the economic recovery. Government subsidies have lifted a nascent renewables industry into a booming profitable job-creator. Again, the messaging to the public about all of these economic factors should have been short, sweet and constant. 

Yep.]

It’s a weird thing about group psychology that has long been noted by social psychologsts. A person who talks a lot about morality is perceived as being moral even if his behavior really isn’t. The most assertive/aggressive people in a group end up being leaders even if they are morons. Likewise, Trump is always bragging about what a great job he did or is doing, no matter how incompetent he is, and somehow a least some people assume he must be doing a good job. And the news sources they may consume don’t say otherwise, at least not strongly enough.

Control of the House still hasn’t been determined, althugh at the moment Republicans are somewhat ahead. This may take a few more days, I understand.

I am heartsick, as I’m sure most of you are. I had such hope we could move forward. Now we’re about to sink into a muck of corruption and ignorance. You probably know we’ve also lost the Senate. We still don’t know which party will take the House, so there’s still some hope House Democrats can put a brake on some things the MAGAts will try to do.

Tom Nichols at The Atlantic reminds us that Democracy is not over. But we have a lot of work to do to save it.

And I need some time before I can write any more. Do feel free to express yourselves in the comments.

While we’re waiting for the first returns, do catch this bit from Rachel Maddow from last night. She doesn’t say that Elon Musk should be stripped of his citizenship and deported, but I am.

Musk is creating a serious national security problem.

As the returns come in, this map shows how states are expected to vote. As of 8:20 pm EST there haven’t been any surprises. The “swing” states are pastel. For the interactive feature you’ll need to find the map on the original page, here.

(9:30 pm EST) I was hoping the early returns would show some patterns that departed from the polls, but so far it’s been pretty much what was expected, close. And it’s probably the case that it will be a few hours if not days before the swing states are called.

Again, if results in all the not-swing states match what was predicted, Harris’s best chance is to win Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. That takes her to 270. If she falls short in Pennsylvania she will need Georgia plus Nevada or North Carolina plus Nevada (and Michigan and Wisconsin). It may really come down to Pennsylvania. But I don’t expect any calls for a few hours, and I need a break from Steve Kornacki. If any swing states are called while I’m taking a break, do add it to the comments.

Update: It’s 3 am, and I woke up and checked the news. The nation just committed suicide. I can’t cope with this.

I’ve decided it’s okay to indulge in optimism. It is very possible the polls are wrong, especially regarading Kamala Harris’s base of support. See Justin Brown at Politico, for example, who argues there are Harris voters the pollsters are missing.

In this election cycle, pollsters have made a clear effort to explore various methodologies that enable a deeper dive into Trump’s areas of support that were previously underrepresented in past polling. But when asked about the challenge of tracking an abbreviated Harris campaign in the wake of an historic candidate swap, some pollsters believed that the polling transition from Biden to Harris would be “relatively seamless.”

Justin Brown makes a persuasive argument that the polling companies, who had adjusted and fine-tuned how they “weighted” the data to be sure they were not undercounting Trump voters, have no clue about Harris voters. For example, the much discussed Ann Selzer poll that shows Harris ahead of Trump in Iowa found that older voters, expecially women, were moving in the direction of Harris. Many are also questioning if the pollsters have fully integrated the effect of the Dobbs decision into their projections. See Marcy Wheeler,  Male Pollsters Shocked — Shocked!! — When a Woman Pollster Discovers Women Voters.

It’s also the case that a lot of those older women are registered Republicans. And this takes us to another question — are the pollsters finding the “Liz Cheney” Republicans who are voting for Harris to stop Trump? See Josh Marshall on this point.

See also Final GOP push in Pennsylvania focuses on imaginary voters over real ones by Philip Bump at WaPo. He observed GOTV activity in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

As I did in 2016 and 2020, I traveled to Scranton to see how the campaigns were tackling this task. Both of my prior visits were, at least in retrospect, revealing. In 2016, I was surprised to see little activity for Hillary Clinton’s campaign and a bustling turnout operation for Donald Trump. Four years later, it was Joe Biden — who often speaks of the time he spent in Scranton as a child — who was running an effective operation. Trump’s supporters seemed to be more focused on handing out lawn signs and boisterous parades of trucks.

In other words, in 2016 and 2020, the campaigns with the more robust GOTV field operations in Scranton (and presumably across the state) ended up winning. In Scranton in 2024, that was clearly the operation being run by Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign and its allies.

On the other hand, volunteers at a Trump office were being trained to be poll watchers, not canvassers.

Those volunteers, though, weren’t going out to turn out voters. Instead, Medeiros was helping them fill out the documents they’d need to be poll watchers on Election Day. Others were being trained to be greeters, welcoming people at polling places and providing information about Republican candidates. The focus was on managing those who came out to vote, not on making sure they came out in the first place.

Back in April, the then-new co-chair of the Republican Party, the Republican nominee’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump, made clear that poll-watching would be a central focus for the party in November. It was an institutional bet on the idea that Trump’s 2020 loss was attributable not to having more Biden voters turn out, but to that pro-Biden majority being a function of some wrongdoing at the polls. Never mind that there were poll watchers in 2020, too (including some I spoke to then). The party would in 2024 have its volunteers combat imaginary illegal voters instead of turning out real, legal ones.

Well, we’ll see how that worked, or not, by the end of this week. Maybe the election will be a squeaker. But it’s very possible that the polls are wrong, and if so they are more likely undercounting Harris support than Trump support.

Looking at the closeness of the election from another angle — Matt Yglesias, in the New York Times, points out that around the world post-pandemic voters are turning out incumbents. This applies to both left-wing and right-wing incumbents. And this is mostly about inflation, apparently.

It appears that the unhappy electorates are unhappy in fundamentally the same way. Inflation spiked, largely because household spending patterns seesawed so abruptly during and after a global pandemic, and though it’s been tamed, prices of many goods have not fallen to what voters remember, and what’s more, the process of taming has involved higher interest rates, which in their own way raise the cost of living. The question of why, exactly, voters so hate inflation — which increases wages and prices symmetrically — has long puzzled economists. But the basic psychology seems to be: My pay increase reflects my hard work and talent, while the higher prices I am paying are the fault of the government.

Harris is swimming against the tide, so to speak. Yglesias thinks the real question ought to be, not why is it so close? but why isn’t Trump running away with this? And the answer is, basically, that Trump 2024 is a really terrible candidate who should have listened to his advisers and stay focused on the economy instead of pet-eating immigrants. See also Michael Tomasky at The New Republic, Donald Trump Has Lost His Sh*t.

I understand there is some indication in some polls that late-deciding voters are more often deciding for Harris, but other polls contradict that. So, basically, nobody really knows what’s going on out there. Until we know something, I say we might as well give our nerves a little rest and be optimistic.

Tomorrow I intend to be here commenting sporadically as the returns start coming in, and you are welcome to drop by.

Just keep telling yourself that by this time next week the votes will all be counted. It shouldn’t take as long this year as it did in 2020, I keep hearing. It’s possible we’ll know the outcome by Wednesday.

So last night, it’s been reported, Trump entertained his rally crowd in Milwaukee by mimicing a lewd act with his microphone holder. I understand there are videos of this all over the web. I am not going to look for them. Tom Nichols writes at The Atlantic that Donald Trump needs help. Normally if a 77-year-old man is behaving that inappropriately, one would take him to a neurologist. And keep him out of public view. Let’s just hope he keeps his clothes on when there are cameras around.

The Associated Press is reporting that Trump intends to remain in North Carolina for the rest of the campaign. That might mean something. Or not. He probably can’t afford to lose North Carolina, which everybody says is a tossup.

The Des Moines Register reports that Iowa, which has been presumed to be a Trump state, is tipping toward Harris. A new poll shows her with a three-point lead over Trump in Iowa, driven mostly by women who are likely voters.

A long, but interesting, read, by Tim Alberta at The Atlantic — Inside the Ruthless, Restless Final Days of Trump’s Campaign. It shows Trump setting fire to his own campaign because he got bored.

Today there’s a new report of a woman needlessly dying in Texas from complications of a miscarriage. Meanwhile, Republicans have been showing us who they are, big time. They are freaking out over this ad:

When they tell you who they are, believe them:

This week, the fundamentalist Christian pastor Dale Partridge argued in a series of tweets that “in a Christian marriage, a wife should vote according to her husband’s direction”. In other words, he pits his version of the religion against the constitution, which, since the 19th amendment passed a century ago, guarantees adult citizens the right to vote regardless of sex. He argues that in marriage, the husband annexes and owns his wife’s voice and rights, so that he effectively gets two votes and she gets none. The far-right preacher is not alone in this argument that women should not have the right to participate in public life and act on their views and values.

Jesse Watters, the Fox News personality, has argued that if he found out his wife “was going into the voting booth and pulling the lever for Harris, that’s the same thing as having an affair”. It violates “the sanctity of our marriage; what else is she keeping from me?” Rightwing agitator Charlie Kirk also got upset about the idea that women might vote according to their agenda and not their husband’s.

The ad was produced by an organization called Vote Common Good, not the Harris-Walz campaign. Here’s another ad featuring men that has gotten less attention:

Even now I don’t think these hyperconservative man-babies understand that women are really alarmed at women dying preventable deaths because it’s more important to Republicans to stop an abortion than to save a woman’s life, even when there’s no hope the pregnancy will produce a live baby. Women more often appreciate that while most pregnancies are routine, lots can go wrong, and go wrong catastrophically. And in some heartbreaking circumstances a pregnancy has to be terminated to save the mother.

Also, the man-babies are pretty much confirming what the right-to-abortion people have been saying for years: They’re not so much interested in saving infants as in controlling women.

See also Why are so many women hiding their voting plans from their husbands by Rebecca Solnit at The Guardian.

As in previous election cycles, people doing door-to-door outreach to voters are encountering men who prevent their wives from even conversing at the door or who believe their registered-Democrat wives are Republicans and women fearful of speaking or of disclosing their party and chosen candidates.

One Pennsylvania man who has been canvassing for several weeks told me: “So many times we … have knocked on doors and when both husband and wife or boyfriend and girlfriend have come to the door together, after hearing what we were there for so often the man stayed and the woman walked away ‘to do other things’, or the man came out to talk to us. Often the woman would come out by herself and say or whisper: ‘I’m with her and he doesn’t know it.’” Another friend reached a voter by phone, who told her that because her husband wasn’t in the car, she could admit she was voting Democratic.

Which raises the hope that there may very well be a bigger Harris vote than is showing up in the polls. Seriously, if you were to design a candidate who would disgust and repel women voters, you couldn’t do any better than Trump. His “whether the women like it or not” comment yesterday was a clear expression of Trump’s contempt for women, right down to the snear in his voice. I understand that if Harris gets even a small majority of white women, she’s probably going to be POTUS.

Another aspect of this election I haven’t gotten around to writing about is that electing Trump will probably mean handing the federal government over to a pack of billionaire tech bros. Elon Musk is one of the bros; Peter Thiel, who is J.D. Vance’s patron, is another. They have their own agenda, which has little to do with either MAGA or the good of the nation generally. Trump’s brains are fried, and his health issues are not going to go away if he’s elected. The bros will let him sit in the Oval Office as long as he’s pliable and can pose for photos in the chair, I suppose, but he won’t be running anything.

Elon Musk will want to gut safety net programs, which means I could lose my affordable and partly subsidized apartment, not to mention Medicare. Thiel’s agenda is contradictory — a mix of libertarianism and authoritarianism — but whatever it is, he’s putting a lot of money into getting Trumpy candidates elected.

He’s no tech bro, but he’s terrifying:  RFK the Lesser expects to be given control of federal agencies that oversee medical care, food, and drugs. He wants to stop all vaccinations, of course.

Four more days.

Update: Hugh Hewitt has resigned from the Washington Post. I take it he couldn’t deal with a conversation in a live event with Jonathan Capehart and Ruth Marcus, and he threw a fit and stormed off, and isn’t coming back. (Please.) This is being reported at several places, but I can’t find any trace of it at the Washington Post. And I fully expect Bezos the Spineless to hire another MAGAzoid to replace him, to keep the MAGA to normie ratio in the editorial section at 27:1.