Dark Money Disinformation

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses party organizations and campaign finance.

Anna Massoglia at Open Secrets:

An initiative called Progress 2028 that purports to be Kamala Harris’ liberal counter to the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is actually run by a dark money network supporting former President Donald Trump.

Building America’s Future, the dark money group at the helm of the network, has steered money to a constellation of groups and initiatives boosting Trump’s agenda and spreading messaging aimed at chipping away voters from Harris. The dark money group reportedly received over $100 million in funding from billionaire Elon Musk, along with other donors, the New York Times recently reported.

The newest effort to benefit from their largesse is Progress 2028. Building America’s Future registered to use Progress 2028 as a fictitious name on Sept. 23 and the website was created three days later, OpenSecrets’ analysis of corporate filings and DNS records found.

The Progress 2028 site appears to be created by IMGE LLC, a firm run by Republican political operatives that the New York Times described as the “hidden hand” behind Building America’s Future, and a page on the Progress 2028 site includes the firm’s sizzle reel.

IMGE LLC has also done work for Elon Musk’s America PAC and several other Republican political committees, including a super PAC funded by America’s Future Fund named Future Coalition PAC, as first pointed out by Brendan Fischer, Deputy Executive Director of Documented, an investigative watchdog and journalism project.

The Progress 2028 manifesto draws clear parallels to Project 2025, a controversial blueprint for restructuring the executive branch under the next Republican administration. The Project 2025 blueprint was developed by the Heritage Foundation and written by many conservatives who worked in or with Trump’s administration. Project 2025 has drawn intense criticism, and the former president has said it does not reflect his own priorities should he return to the White House.

Some of the policies listed in Progress 2028 highlight disproven and misleading claims about Harris’ positions. Policies listed include “Empowering Undocumented Immigrants, Building Our Future” and “Expanding Medicaid to Undocumented Immigrants.”

Abortion on the Ballot

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections.

Alejandra O’Connell-Domenech at The Hill:

Voters in 10 states will decide this November whether to adopt constitutional amendments that could shape the future of abortion access in their states.

Most of the measures seek to protect abortion access until fetal viability, or the point at which a fetus could survive outside of the uterus, which typically comes around 24 weeks into pregnancy.

Adam Edelman and Bridget Bowman at NBC:

Constitutional amendments to expand or protect abortion access will be put in the hands of voters this fall in 10 states, including the presidential battlegrounds of Arizona and Nevada and the Senate battlegrounds of Montana and Florida.

Polls show that the ballot measures are broadly popular in many of the states, findings that are in line with the success similar initiatives have had in other areas of the county following the backlash to the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade in 2022.

But the surveys also reveal a noticeable gap in support between the pro-abortion-rights amendments and the Democratic presidential and Senate candidates who are campaigning on a pro-abortion-rights platform.

With the future of abortion access appearing directly on the ballot, some voters — particularly Republicans and independents — have effectively divorced the issue from the candidates in the other races they will decide on.

Money in 2024 Congressional Elections

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections.

Paul Kane, Theodoric Meyer, and Clara Ence Morse at WP:

Powered by small-dollar donors, Democrats have seized control of the fundraising game in the battle for the House and the Senate, leaving Republicans at a disadvantage — and increasingly reliant on a small clutch of mega-rich donors.

In 25 of the 26 most competitive House races, the Democratic candidate raised more than the Republican in the third quarter, including 16 races in which the Democrat raised at least double their GOP candidate, according to a Washington Post analysis of reports filed Tuesday to the Federal Election Commission.

In the Senate, Republican candidates trailed their opponent in all 11 of the most competitive races. In eight of those, the Democratic campaign more that doubled the financial haul of the GOP campaign, including three that tripled their margin.

...

Democrats have learned that massive fundraising does not guarantee victory. In 2020, three of their Senate candidates set fundraising records in Kentucky, Maine and South Carolina, about $300 million combined, and all three lost by big margins.

But GOP leaders have been concerned about their cash problems for several years. Rep. Richard Hudson (N.C.), chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, has issued public and private warnings about the cash disadvantage for GOP candidates.

... 

To make up for this disparity, Republicans have relied on mega-rich donors who write seven- and eight-figure checks to the Congressional Leadership Fund, the House GOP super PAC, and the Senate Leadership Fund, the Senate GOP super PAC.

Violence and Threats

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good. 

 Some Republican leaders -- and a measurable number of rank-and-file voters -- are open to violent rebellion, coups, and secession.  

Trump and his minions falsely claimed that he won the election, and have kept repeating the Big Lie.  And we now know how close he came to subverting the Constitution.   

He is planning an authoritarian agenda and would take care to eliminate any internal dissent.

Meryl Kornfield at WP:

Former president Donald Trump did not directly respond to a question about whether he would respect and encourage a peaceful transfer of power after the election, and he falsely claimed that “you had a peaceful transfer of power” in 2021 when a violent mob assaulted the U.S. Capitol.

Speaking to an audience of mostly business people at the Economic Club in Chicago, Trump was interviewed by Bloomberg News editor in chief John Micklethwait about economic policies, but toward the end of the hour-long question-and-answer session, he took issue with Micklethwait’s questioning on politics and democracy.

“It was love and peace,” Trump said of the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection in which Trump supporters trying to stop the affirmation of Joe Biden’s win assaulted 140 police officers, damaged the Capitol and destroyed government property

Lisa Lerer and Michael Gold at NYT:

With three weeks left before Election Day, former President Donald J. Trump is pushing to the forefront of his campaign a menacing political threat: that he would use the power of the presidency to crush those who disagree with him.

In a Fox News interview on Sunday, Mr. Trump framed Democrats as a pernicious “enemy from within” that would cause chaos on Election Day that he speculated the National Guard might need to handle.

A day later, he closed his remarks to a crowd at what was billed as a town hall in Pennsylvania with a stark message about his political opponents.

“They are so bad and frankly, they’re evil,” Mr. Trump said. “They’re evil. What they’ve done, they’ve weaponized, they’ve weaponized our elections. They’ve done things that nobody thought was even possible.”

And on Tuesday, he once again refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power when pressed by an interviewer at an economic forum in Chicago.

With early voting underway in key battlegrounds, the race for the White House is moving toward Election Day in an extraordinary and sobering fashion. Mr. Trump has long flirted with, if not openly endorsed, anti-democratic tendencies with his continued refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election, embrace of conspiracy theories of large-scale voter fraud and accusations that the justice system is being weaponized against him. He has praised leaders including President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary for being authoritarian strongmen.

But never before has a presidential nominee — let alone a former president — openly suggested turning the military on American citizens simply because they oppose his candidacy. As he escalates his threats of political retribution, Mr. Trump is offering voters the choice of a very different, and far less democratic, form of American government.

Kim Wehle at The Bulwark:

REGARDLESS OF WHETHER DONALD J. TRUMP is ever held accountable for January 6th—a prospect, always uncertain, made even more tenuous by the Supreme Court’s ruling creating immunity for presidential crimes—that dark day’s legacy endures within the worsening culture of political violence in America. With less than a month to go before the 2024 election, fear among election workers is palpable. Statistics show that threats to local election officials are surging, up 73 percent since the same time in 2022. Election officials are preparing with things like panic buttons, bulletproof glass, and sheriff’s deputies at every polling place, while election-worker turnover has reached historic highs.

 

Harris: Woman, Asian, Black, Christian

In Defying the Odds, we talk about the social and economic divides that enabled Trump to enter the White House. In Divided We Stand, we discuss how these divides played out in 2020. Our next book will discuss the extraordinary fight between an elderly white ex-president and a younger Black/Asian woman. 

Karthick Ramakrishnan and Sara Sadhwani

Recent data released by AAPI Data and Asian and Pacific Islander American Vote (APIAVote) indicate that gender representation plays a stronger role than racial representation in shaping voter support for her candidacy. The survey, conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago in September asked respondents, “Thinking specifically about Kamala Harris, how important to you are the following aspects of her identity?” providing choices that included “her identity as an African American,” “her identity as an Asian Indian or South Asian,” “her identity as a woman,” and “her age.”

Given the amount of news coverage and social media engagement around Harris’s racial identity as both Indian and Black, Asian American voters would be expected to give the highest importance to her Indian and South Asian heritage and her African American identities, with gender and age identities far behind. The survey results showed the opposite (see figure below).

The figure above, from the 2024 AAPI Voter Survey, reveals a significant gender gap among AAPI voters in regard to the importance of Harris’ gender identity

Well over a third of Asian American voters (38%) say that Harris’ identity as a woman is “extremely important” or “very important” to them, with significantly smaller proportions indicating the same about her racial identities as Indian/South Asian (25%) and as an African American (24%) or about her age (25%). The findings were not statistically different among Indian American voters, who arguably share even closer ethnic affinity to Harris.

Notably, the “gender boost” in identity representation was driven entirely by the opinions of Asian American women. About a half (49%) of Asian American women said that Harris’s gender was important to them, nearly double the proportion among Asian American men (25%). This gender gap was also noticeable in questions about the importance of having more elected representatives who are women (56% of Asian American women said that this was extremely important or very important to them, when compared to 36% of Asian American men), and about their intention to vote for Harris (72% among Asian American women and 59% among Asian American men).

Kamala Harris: “I grew up in the Black church. I grew up attending 23rd Avenue Church of God in Oakland, California.”

Rev. Solomon Kinloch, Jr: “That’s church.”

Harris: “My pastor is Amos C. Brown of Third Baptist Church.”

Charlamagne: “God is good.”

Harris: “All the time.” pic.twitter.com/t1X71KId9f

— Keith Boykin (@keithboykin) October 15, 2024

Whether they're religious or not, I believe people want a leader who is driven by compassion not cruelty, one whose values are rooted in hope and not fear, whose moral convictions yield inclusion and not separation.https://t.co/sj872MkZKo pic.twitter.com/IixEWa3EDv

— John Pavlovitz (@johnpavlovitz) October 16, 2024

Trump Fascism

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good. 

 Some Republican leaders -- and a measurable number of rank-and-file voters -- are open to violent rebellion, coups, and secession.  

Trump and his minions falsely claimed that he won the election, and have kept repeating the Big Lie.  And we now know how close he came to subverting the Constitution.   

He is planning an authoritarian agenda and would take care to eliminate any internal dissent.

Tom Nichols at The Atlantic:

Over the past week, Donald Trump has been on a fascist romp. At rallies in Colorado and California, he amped up his usual rants, and added a rancid grace note by suggesting that a woman heckler should “get the hell knocked out of her” by her mother after she gets back home. But on Sunday morning, he outdid himself in an interview on Fox News, by saying that “the enemy within”—Americans he described as “radical left lunatics,” including Representative Adam Schiff of California, whom he mentioned by name—are more dangerous than Russia or China, and could be “very easily handled” by the National Guard or the U.S. military.

This wasn’t the first time Trump suggested using America’s armed forces against its own people: As president, he thought of the military as his personal guard and regularly fantasized about commanding “his generals” to crush dissent, which is one reason former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley reportedly told Bob Woodward that he sees Trump as “fascist to his core.”

Trump Mental Acuity

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.

One thing is certain about the current campaign:  Trump isn't getting any younger.  He is sundowning.

Marianne LeVine at WP:

The town hall, moderated by South Dakota Gov. Kristi L. Noem (R), began with questions from preselected attendees for the former president. Donald Trump offered meandering answers on how he would address housing affordability and help small businesses. But it took a sudden turn after two attendees required medical attention.

And so Trump, after jokingly asking the crowd whether “anybody else would like to faint,” took a different approach.

“Let’s not do any more questions. Let’s just listen to music. Let’s make it into a music. Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?” he said.

For 39 minutes, Trump swayed, bopped — sometimes stopping to speak — as he turned the event into almost a living-room listening session of his favorite songs from his self-curated rally playlist.

Harris is now going directly at Trump's mental acuity.

 

Hope he's okay. https://t.co/WGhGteFpjm

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) October 15, 2024