1/. Very intelligent, very insightful interview with Michael Podhorzer who explains why
In the days following Donald Trump’s 2024 election win, Democratic politicians, journalists, and pundits have been searching for potential explanations for Vice President Kamala Harris’ defeat. We have offered up some of our own. On Monday, Rolling Stone spoke with Michael Podhorzer, former longtime political director for the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest federation of unions, to gain more insight into what went so wrong for Democrats.
Podhorzer, who chairs the Analyst Institute and is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, is an expert in data-driven politics. In a blog post Monday, he writes that the election results were not about Americans embracing Trumpism — but rather a continuation of a trend in U.S. politics: Elections are consistently “change elections,” because “Americans are simply fed up with the system not working for them.” That was the case before the Covid era — and even more so now. https://www.rollingstone.com/
“And I would say, ‘Well, what is the power of these groups — like, what is their leverage on you?’ And there was never an answer,” - Ezra Klein on how woke interest groups control the Democrats.
It was a trivial incident in the grand scheme of things. At one point in the campaign, Kamala Harris had to decide whether to go on Joe Rogan — a show with 18 million subscribers on YouTube alone. Here’s why she didn’t: “There was a backlash with some of our progressive staff that didn’t want her to be on it, and how there would be a backlash,” Jennifer Palmieri, an aide to Doug Emhoff, explained. (Palmieri later implausibly tried to walk that back, citing a scheduling conflict.)
Quick quiz: what do these three statements have in common?
1) Donald Trump won in a landslide.
2) Kamala Harris lost because she ran a terrible campaign.
3) The Democratic brand is toxic.
Answer? They’ve all been spread by the mainstream media. And they’re all false.
Let’s take a moment to fact check these classics of the gaslighting genre.
1) Donald Trump won in a landslide. FALSE.
The old adage, “As goes Florida, so goes the nation,” should be weighing heavily on Democrats. Florida has gone from blue, to purple, to pinkish, to MAGA-hat red in recent years, and America has followed. This isn’t just for demographic reasons, and it isn’t just because Republicans gained voters. It’s also
Technically, the advertising was paid for by a tiny Tea Party offshoot. But federal tax records, filed long after the election had ended, show that most of its cash actually came from a dark-money outfit controlled by the Florida Chamber of Commerce, the big business front group in Tallahassee.
There’s still no way to tell for sure who gave the Chamber all that money to go after DeSantis. That’s because chamber executives spent it through a nonprofit entity — called “Secure Florida’s Future” — that does not have to disclose its donors.
But DeSantis himself claimed at the time that the ads were ultimately the work of Florida’s sugar industry, which had clashed with him in Congress and was supporting his opponent in the Republican primary for governor.
https://jasongarcia.substack.
If my hypothesis from yesterday — that Democrats best way to win elections and regain political power is to engage in class warfare against the GOP and the billionaires that fund it — the immediate question is, “How?”
The last century has seen two presidents engage in class warfare in a big and direct way that not only won them multiple elections but also altered the electoral map of America: Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. There are multiple lessons to learn from both.
When FDR came into power in March of 1933, the nation was in shambles because of a decade of Republican mishandling of the economy. In the early 1920s, Republican President Warren Harding dropped the top income tax rate from 91% down to 25% and loosened oversight of Wall Street.
https://hartmannreport.com/p/It’s been a few days since the last edition of this newsletter, though not for lack of effort; I spent much of the weekend and the early part of this week dealing with some kind of minor virus, which made it almost impossible to sit down and write for more than a few minutes at a time. But I’m feeling better now (at least enough to write) and am excited about the piece I have for you tonight.
Spoiler alert: it’s a positive feature about a progressive election success, with important takeaways for other campaigns. There aren’t many opportunities for that right now, to say the least.
There will also be plenty to discuss in the deep news sweep that will go out to paid subscribers tomorrow.
Note: This is going to be a long four years — and perhaps much longer, if Donald Trump and his newly empowered Republican Party accomplish their goals. https://www.progressreport.
news/p/inside-progressives- biggest-win-of
When Donald Trump held a rally in the Bronx in May, critics scoffed that there was no way he could win New York State. Yet as a strategic matter, asking the question “What would it take for a Republican to win New York?” leads to the answer, “It would take overperforming with Black, Hispanic and working-class voters.”
Mr. Trump didn’t win New York, of course, but his gains with nonwhite voters helped him sweep all seven battleground states.
Unlike Democrats, Mr. Trump engaged in what I call supermajority thinking: envisioning what it would take to achieve an electoral realignment and working from there.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/There is no need to pick only a few of the many explanations of Donald Trump’s political comeback. Most of the endless reasons we have heard over the past five days ring true: inflation, incumbency, a flimsy Democratic campaign, white Americans’ seemingly eternal issues with race, and what one New York Times essayist recently called “a regressive idea of masculinity in which power over women is a birthright”. But there is another story that has so far been rather more overlooked, to do with how politics now works, and who voters think of when they enter the polling booth.
Each night, you look into your lover’s eyes and ask, “Will no legacy media outlet tell me what are the best movies on Hulu?” Luckily, Vanity Fair is here for you. One glance at the platform’s A-to-Z listing reveals that there are almost too many good movies on Hulu to choose from, and it can become a chore to figure out which to choose.
This is a great series, which I would have said was fantastic, but the ending, although a great wrap-up, was not whiz-bang. “Murder Mindfully” is an 8 on an absolute scale. One in which “Murders in the Building” is a 3. One in which “The Bureau” is a 10 and “Spiral” and “A French Village” are 9.5’s, even though I hate giving that .5 rating, splitting hairs, it’s just that I want to state how hard it is to achieve a 10, nearly impossible.
And yes, all four of the foregoing series are foreign. So if you hate subtitles you can stop reading now.
But unlike the latter three, “Murders Mindfully” is not a straight drama, it’s a drama with both serious and light tones, a good bit of comedy, if not the laugh out loud kind (no, I won’t use the word dramedy, which is an execrable Hollywood term that renders anything it is applied to mediocre and not deserving of attention).
https://lefsetz.com/wordpress/
This year marked the long-awaited return of the American film-making legend Francis Ford Coppola to the cinema, with Megalopolis: a $120m self-financed “fable” with a go-for-broke sensibility, about a time-defying architect trying to build the city of the future in the wake of his wife’s untimely death. Fans of its deranged overtures may do well to revisit Coppola’s other maximalist fable about a time-defying man grappling with his wife’s untimely death: Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
MAKE THE WOMAN HAPPY!Do something she likes, and you get points.Do something she dislikes, and points are subtracted.You don't get any points for doing something she expects.SIMPLE DUTIESYou make the bed. (+1)You make the bed, but forget the decorative pillows. (-10)You throw the bedspread over rumpled sheets. (-3)You go out to buy her what she wants (+5) in the rain (+8)But return with Beer. (-5)PROTECTIVE DUTIESYou check out a suspicious noise at night. (+1)You check out a suspicious noise, and it is nothing. (0)You check out a suspicious noise, and it is something. (+5)You pummel it with an iron rod. (+10)It's her pet Poodle. (-30)SOCIAL ENGAGEMENTSYou stay by her side for the entire party. (+1)You stay by her side for a while, then leave to chat with an old school friend. (-2)Named Tina (-10)Tina is a dancer. (-20)Tina has breast implants. (-40)HER BIRTHDAYYou take her out to dinner. (+2)You take her out to dinner, and it's not a sports bar. (+3)Okay, it's a sports bar. (-2)And its all-you-can-eat night. (-3)It's a sports bar, it's all-you-can-eat night, and your face is painted the colors of your favorite team. (-10)A NIGHT OUTYou take her to a movie. (+1)You take her to a movie she likes. (+5)You take her to a movie you hate. (+6)You take her to a movie you like. (-2)YOUR PHYSIQUEYou develop a noticeable potbelly. (-15)You develop a noticeable potbelly and exercise to get rid of it (+10)You develop a noticeable potbelly and resort to baggy jeans and baggy Hawaiian shirts. (-30)You say to her, "It doesn't matter, you have one too." (-80)THE BIG QUESTIONShe asks, "Do I look fat?" (-5) (Yes, you lose points no matter what)You hesitate in responding. (-10)You reply, "Where?" (-35)You give any other response. (-40)COMMUNICATIONWhen she wants to talk about a problem, you listen, displaying what looks like a concerned expression. (+2)You listen, for over 30 minutes (+50)You listen for more than 30 minutes without looking at the TV. (+500)She realizes this is because you have fallen asleep. (-4000)
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