2024 U.S. Election of President and Vice President

[tbm3fan]

Can you fill in the blanks and keep it "secret"? G E S T _ _ _?

[TopHatter]

Can you fill in the blanks and keep it "secret"? G E S T _ _ _?

Gestalt?

[tbm3fan]

Gestalt?

Well at least you haven't completely lost your sense of humor but after your last post in 2023 Political Scene it is probably hanging by a thread...

[Albany Rifles]

I was going to go GESTAPO but that's too many letters

[TopHatter]

Well at least you haven't completely lost your sense of humor but after your last post in 2023 Political Scene it is probably hanging by a thread...

A tiny fraying thread, yeah...

[TopHatter]

I was going to go GESTAPO but that's too many letters

No it isn't

[tbm3fan]

I was going to go GESTAPO but that's too many letters

Well Wheel of Fortune will not be your game

[Monash]

Can you fill in the blanks and keep it "secret"? G E S T _ _ _?

I was going to go with Gestate. (You know, the thing ALL women should be forced to do against their will regardless of any underlying medical or psychological issues.)

[TopHatter]

I was going to go with Gestate. (You know, the thing ALL women should be forced to do against their will regardless of any underlying medical or psychological issues.)

It's those slut's fault for having sex in the first place (yep, actual reason given by conservatives for forcing a woman to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term)

[Monash]

It's those slut's fault for having sex in the first place (yep, actual reason given by conservatives for forcing a woman to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term)

I was actually thinking some of the most anit-abortion States in the US should actually set up a register consisting of all voters who nominate as being anti-abortion. All women with unwanted pregnancies would still be forced to carry them to turn but at birth a lottery based system would assign the child in question to a random anti-abortionist to raise. Seems fair, they can live what they preach.

[TopHatter]

I was actually thinking some of the most anit-abortion States in the US should actually set up a register consisting of all voters who nominate as being anti-abortion. All women with unwanted pregnancies would still be forced to carry them to turn but at birth a lottery based system would assign the child in question to a random anti-abortionist to raise. Seems fair, they can live what they preach.

There would of course be exceptions for the wives, girlfriends and daughters of conservative politicians and their donors...

[TopHatter]

3 reasons the 2024 election will be very different from 2020


With every passing poll, it looks more and more likely that the 2024 presidential general election will star the same two protagonists as 2020: President Biden and former President Donald Trump.

In the Republican primary, Trump now leads his nearest rival by 46 percentage points, according to the latest Yahoo News/YouGov survey. On the Democratic side, Biden is ahead by 61.

History says that such leads tend to be insurmountable.

Yet even if America ends up with a Biden-Trump rematch, that doesn’t mean November 2024 will be a rerun of November 2020.

In part that’s because Trump and Biden have changed, with the former now facing four criminal trials and the latter fending off questions about his advanced age.

But it’s also because key electoral dynamics have been changing as well.

The map
The Electoral College has long favored Republicans, and that advantage has grown in recent elections. Both Trump and George W. Bush were able to win the presidency while losing the popular vote because they fared far better in the pivotal battleground states than they did nationwide.

But a recent New York Times analysis notes that the GOP’s Electoral College edge might be fading.

The main reason is that Trump has been improving his standing among nonwhite voters at the same time Biden has been holding his ground among white voters (especially college graduates).

Nonwhite voters are generally underrepresented in critical battleground states such as Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, and overrepresented in solidly blue states like California and New York. As a result, “Trump’s gains among nonwhite voters nationwide would tend to do more to improve his standing in the national vote than in the battleground states,” as the Times put it. Trump flipping a voter in Democratic Oregon is worth less than Biden flipping a voter in purple Pennsylvania.

Recent special-election outcomes in swing states like Wisconsin and New Hampshire reflect this emerging shift. So far in this year’s special elections, Democrats have been performing better than expected by an average of 11 percentage points, according to FiveThirtyEight.

That doesn’t mean Biden is heading for a blowout in 2024. In fact, current polling suggests a closer race than last time, when Biden won by more than 4 points.

But it may mean a shifting landscape. While more diverse battlegrounds such as Arizona, Georgia and Nevada are likely to retain their nail-biter status, the whiter swing states across the Northeast and Upper Midwest could become harder for Trump to win — and a state like North Carolina (which Biden lost by just 1.35% in 2020, and where Republicans face brewing abortion-ban backlash) could play a bigger role than ever before.

The electorate
The nominees might not be different in 2024, but the electorate certainly will be. According to Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, 1 in 5 eligible voters will now be members of Gen Z, born in the late 1990s or after.

Compared to their older counterparts — two and a half million of whom die each year — that figure represents a net gain of 52 million potential Gen Z voters since 2016.

It also represents a potential advantage for Biden in a rematch with Trump. It’s not that Gen Z voters are loyal to the elderly president (or to any politician or party, for that matter). But 48% of them identify as people of color (compared to baby boomers, who are 72% white), and they’re more likely to be highly educated, to support LGBTQ rights and to list racism among their greatest concerns than the generations that preceded them.

Driven less, then, by party or personality than by “strong passion on one or more issues” — such as climate change or abortion access — young people in recent years have “vote[d] more frequently for Democrats and progressive policies than prior generations did when of similar age,” according to Lake.

Although still voting at much lower rates than older people, they’ve also turned out to vote in greater numbers than their forebears. As Lake writes, “average turnout by young voters (defined here as voters under 30) in the Trump and post-Trump years has been 25 percent higher than that of older generations at the same age before Trump — 8 percent higher in presidential years and a whopping 46 percent higher in midterms.”

The third-party spoilers
A third-party candidate ran in 2020: Libertarian Jo Jorgensen. But her candidacy barely registered, attracting just 1.2% of the vote. The Green Party’s Howie Hawkins did even worse (0.26%).

The possibility of a spoiler could be a lot higher this cycle, however.

For one thing, the left-wing Green Party is running a far more prominent candidate in Cornel West, the charismatic Princeton philosophy professor.

Meanwhile, the centrist group known as No Labels is also barreling ahead with a controversial plan to field a third-party “unity” ticket in 2024 — one Republican, one Democrat. Two politicians with ties to the group, former Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican from Maryland, and Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia, have already expressed interest in teaming up.

No Labels has said it has until March 2024 to decide whether to get into the race — and that it will announce its candidates no later than April 15, 2024, ahead of the group’s own convention in Dallas.

In the meantime, the group is amassing $70 million — from donors it has repeatedly refused to disclose — to purchase its own presidential ballot line in all 50 states. In 34 of those states, No Labels can hold a spot on the 2024 ballot for a potential third-party ticket by collecting and submitting a certain number of signatures. The group has already cleared that bar in Arizona, Colorado, Alaska and Oregon, and it says it’s “on track” to add another 24 states “by year’s end” (including battlegrounds such as Florida, North Carolina and Nevada). Elsewhere, it’s up to the candidates themselves — if any end up materializing — to secure their own ballot access.

Democrats fear that No Labels would siphon anti-Trump voters away from Biden — and help Trump win back the White House.
_________

[TopHatter]

Poll workers are afraid to work 2024 election. Take Trump, MAGA mob's threats seriously. | Opinion

Utah’s Republican Sen. Mitt Romney announced last month that he will not be seeking re-election for another term in office, basically because he’s fed up. The "why" is not much of a mystery.

Romney, whose father George Romney was once governor of Michigan, was one of the very few Republicans willing to oppose Trump publicly. He was the only Republican who voted to convict on Trump’s first impeachment, and one of 10 who voted to convict for the second impeachment. Following the Jan. 6 insurrection, when Romney became one of those Republicans targeted by the mob for his unwillingness to fall in line, the Detroit native (he was born at DMC Harper University Hospital in 1947) was forced to shell out $5,000 a day for private security to protect his family.


At roughly the same time, Georgia poll worker Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss, for example, who were falsely accused by Trump’s personal pitbull Rudy Giuliani of tampering with ballots in favor of President Joe Biden during the 2020 election, experienced the kind of racist threats that make what Romney had to endure look like sandbox bullying. No $5,000 per day security for them, however.

Nevertheless, it’s all part of the same twisted circus led by Trump that has caused Special Counsel Jack Smith, who has also received threats, to request a legal muzzle for the defendant, who is actively making threats of his own as well as encouraging his base to rise up and raise hell on his behalf. Specifically, Smith has requested that Judge Tanya Chutkan (also the subject of threats made by the same MAGA crowd) issue a “narrowly tailored” gag order to shut the man up. The purpose is to protect the sanctity of the judicial process ― including the safety of potential jurors and the jury selection process ― from an obviously dangerous and deranged individual who has far more power to wreak havoc on a massive scale than your average defendant.

Which is why a gag order has virtually no power to stop what’s coming in 2024, if not sooner. It was a worthy effort, but this particular threat escaped Pandora’s box long ago with a specific directive: raise havoc. And it has been working.

I doubt we’ll see another insurrection like what happened in 2021. But when a ridiculously wealthy white man who happens to be a member of the U.S. Senate is forced to spend $5,000 per day to protect his family from the realization of lethal threats and intimidation spewed by the white followers of a white nationalist cult leader incensed that this wealthy individual would not bow down and kiss the hairpiece, that should give you an idea of the reckoning that is on America's horizon.

Because it isn’t often that you see a wealthy white Republican conservative male targeted by an angry white mob.



It gets even more interesting when that same angry white mob has come after two Black female poll workers (Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss), a Black female judge (Tanya Chutkan), a Black female District Attorney (Fani Willis), a Black male District Attorney (Alvin Bragg) and a Black female State Attorney General (Letitia James).

And all of them were targeted for the same reason; standing up for democracy and facing down a clear and present danger to the same.

The fact that the threats are becoming more random and less organized makes them more dangerous, not less.

Which takes me back to the potential problem this poses for the 2024 elections.

I keep seeing polls that say the race between Trump and President Joe Biden is neck-and-neck, and that this is evidence of how divided the country is. I’ll buy the fact that the country is divided, but it has been divided for a long, long, lonnnnng time. We didn’t just get that way.

I do not buy the polls showing President Biden running neck-and-neck with a twice-impeached, quadruply indicted man who has been declared a rapist by a civil court judge. America may be divided, but we’re not bat-guano crazy either. Not the majority of us. So I’m sorry, I just don’t buy it.

What we should be paying attention to isn’t another politically manufactured horse race designed to keep viewers breathless and panting. We should be focused on is the threat of a corrupted electoral process led by a desperately violent mob pulling the strings of a willing and pliable body of elected officials ready and willing to pervert the outcome of the most important and consequential election in modern American history.

Because that warped crew has had four years to figure out how to get it right this time around, and intimidation has played a large role. Already, hundreds of election workers across the country have decided against fulfilling those roles ever again after the harassment they endured during the 2020 election. Who knows how many more have been scared away from even trying it for the first time?

This is the type of fear that leads good people to believe nothing can be done, which leads to paralysis, which is what the forces of havoc are counting on. Because it’s all they have.
_________

[statquo]

Exclusive: John Kelly goes on the record to confirm several disturbing stories about Trump

(CNN) — John Kelly, the longest-serving White House chief of staff for Donald Trump, offered his harshest criticism yet of the former president in an exclusive statement to CNN.

Kelly set the record straight with on-the-record confirmation of a number of damning stories about statements Trump made behind closed doors attacking US service members and veterans, listing a number of objectionable comments Kelly witnessed Trump make firsthand.

“What can I add that has not already been said?” Kelly said, when asked if he wanted to weigh in on his former boss in light of recent comments made by other former Trump officials. “A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them.’ A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because ‘it doesn’t look good for me.’ A person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family – for all Gold Star families – on TV during the 2016 campaign, and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are ‘losers’ and wouldn’t visit their graves in France.

“A person who is not truthful regarding his position on the protection of unborn life, on women, on minorities, on evangelical Christians, on Jews, on working men and women,” Kelly continued. “A person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about. A person who cavalierly suggests that a selfless warrior who has served his country for 40 years in peacetime and war should lose his life for treason – in expectation that someone will take action. A person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.

“There is nothing more that can be said,” Kelly concluded. “God help us.”

In the statement, Kelly is confirming, on the record, a number of details in a 2020 story in The Atlantic by editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, including Trump turning to Kelly on Memorial Day 2017, as they stood among those killed in Afghanistan and Iraq in Section 60 at Arlington National Cemetery, and saying, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?”

Those details also include Trump’s inability to understand why the American public respects former prisoners of war and those shot down in combat. Then-candidate Trump of course said in front of a crowd in 2015 that former Vietnam POW Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican, was “not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” But behind closed doors, sources told Goldberg, this lack of understanding went on to cause Trump to repeatedly call McCain a “loser” and to refer to former President George H. W. Bush, who was also shot down as a Navy pilot in World War II, as a “loser.”

CNN reached out to the Trump campaign Monday afternoon, telling officials there that a former administration official had confirmed, on the record, a number of details about the 2020 Atlantic story, without naming Kelly, and seeking comment. The Trump campaign responded by insulting the character and credibility of retired Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Mark Milley, who had nothing to do with this story.

The Atlantic article also described Trump’s 2018 visit to France for the centennial anniversary of the end of World War I, where, according to several senior staff members, Trump said he did not want to visit the graves of American soldiers buried in the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris because, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” During that same trip to France, the article reported, Trump said the 1,800 US Marines killed in the Belleau Wood were “suckers” for getting killed.

And Kelly’s statement adds context to a story in the book “The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021,” by Susan Glasser and Peter Baker, in which Trump, after a separate trip to France in 2017, tells Kelly he wants no wounded veterans in a military parade he’s trying to have planned in his honor. Inspired by the Bastille Day parade, except for the section of the parade featuring wounded French veterans in wheelchairs, Trump tells Kelly, “Look, I don’t want any wounded guys in the parade.”

“Those are the heroes,” Kelly said. “In our society, there’s only one group of people who are more heroic than they are – and they are buried over in Arlington.”

“I don’t want them,” Trump said. “It doesn’t look good for me.”

The story squares with another recent story from Goldberg in The Atlantic, a profile of retired Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley, in which Trump does not react well to seeing severely wounded Army Captain Luis Avila singing “God Bless America” at a welcome event for the new chairman. “Why do you bring people like that here? No one wants to see that, the wounded.”

Kelly’s statement also refers to a remark Trump made in response to that same article, which describes Milley, in the closing days of the Trump presidency in 2020, receiving intelligence that the Chinese military feared Trump was about to order a military strike on it. Milley, in a call authorized by Trump administration officials, reassured his Chinese counterparts that such a strike was not going to happen.

That call was first reported in 2021 in the book “Peril” by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, but Trump said this past week on his social media site that the call was “an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH.”

Asked for reaction to the suggestion that he deserves execution, Milley told Norah O’Donnell of “60 Minutes” that he wouldn’t “comment directly on those, those things. But I can tell you that this military, this soldier, me, will never turn our back on that Constitution.”

Kelly’s statement to CNN comes days after former Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson sat down with CNN in an interview promoting her new book, “Enough,” and warned the public that “Donald Trump is the most grave threat we will face to our democracy in our lifetime, and potentially in American history.”

“Enough,” interestingly, contains a scene in which Hutchinson and then-White House communications director Alyssa Farah Griffin push back against Goldberg’s 2020 story. Griffin issued a statement to The Atlantic after that story posted denying the report.

Reached for comment over the weekend, Griffin said, “Despite publicly praising the military and claiming to be the most pro-military president, there’s a demonstrable record of Trump bashing the most decorated service members in our country, from Gen. Mattis to Kelly to Milley, to criticizing the wounded or deceased like John McCain. Donald Trump will fundamentally never understand service the way those who have actually served in uniform will, and it’s one of the countless reasons he’s unfit to be commander in chief.”

No other presidential candidate in history has had so many detractors from his inner circle. His former secretary of defense, Mark Esper, told CNN in November 2022, “I think he’s unfit for office. … He puts himself before country. His actions are all about him and not about the country. And then, of course, I believe he has integrity and character issues as well.”

Trump’s former attorney general, Bill Barr, told CBS in June that “he is a consummate narcissist. And he constantly engages in reckless conduct. … He will always put his own interests, and gratifying his own ego, ahead of everything else, including the country’s interests. Our country can’t, you know, can’t be a therapy session for you know, a troubled man like this.”

———————

Would bold excerpts but the whole article and confirmation from Gen. Kelly is damning. Imagine if Obama or any elected politicians ever said anything even remotely similar to any of this.

[TopHatter]

Exclusive: John Kelly goes on the record to confirm several disturbing stories about Trump

I wish he hadn't taken so long to confirm what we've always known...but ultimately it doesn't matter.

Would bold excerpts but the whole article and confirmation from Gen. Kelly is damning. Imagine if Obama or any elected politicians ever said anything even remotely similar to any of this.

Yeah but what about Trump's policies??

Cult45 will never disown Trump, and Kelly will be (at best) dismissed as a lying RINO/communist/marxist/leninist/trotskyite/maoist/socialist/progressive/globalist/leftist.