However, the real candidate is not filled with tasty treats

Another thing I should have been blogging about earlier.

Living in Los Angeles, I've been hearing about Donald Trump pinatas for well over a year. If you go to a quinceañera, there's a very good chance that you will see the Republican candidate for president hung in effigy and beaten to smithereens by a group of young people. Given the conventional wisdom of as recently as 2013 that the GOP absolutely had to extend its appeal to Hispanics and younger voters, pummeling is not a good sign.

This is another instance where we need to be talking about range of data. Obviously, major parties have alienated various demographic groups, but I'd argue that Trump has done this in a unique way and to an unprecedented level. While it would be reckless to try to predict what this will lead to, it's important to be prepared for at least the possibility of something big.

On a related note, from Talking Points Memo:

Latino voters are already showing up to vote this election and could cast ballots in larger numbers than Democrats saw in recent elections.

On a call with reporters Friday, Latino Decisions– a polling group focused on Hispanic voting patters– said that Latino turnout is on track to make history next week.

On the call, Gabriel Sanchez, a principal at Latino Decisions, pointed to early voting trends that show Latino early voting is up 100 percent in Florida, 60 percent in North Carolina and up 25 percent in Colorado and Nevada.

Sanchez said at this point, Latino Decisions is projecting that between 13.1 million and 14.7 million Latinos will vote on or before Tuesday– a major increase from 2012 numbers when the group estimated 11.2 million voted.

I was joking about the Seven Days in May reference

But this summary by Josh Marshall of what we've learned about the role of the FBI's New York field office in this really is starting to read like the first chapter of a rather outlandish novel.

It's like a weird mash-up of The Manchurian Candidate and Seven Days in May

Where's John Frankenheimer when you need him?







We've got covert Kremlin operatives trying to rig the presidential election...





With the assistance of rogue FBI agents (from the Guardian).

Deep antipathy to Hillary Clinton exists within the FBI, multiple bureau sources have told the Guardian, spurring a rapid series of leaks damaging to her campaign just days before the election.

Current and former FBI officials, none of whom were willing or cleared to speak on the record, have described a chaotic internal climate that resulted from outrage over director James Comey’s July decision not to recommend an indictment over Clinton’s maintenance of a private email server on which classified information transited.

“The FBI is Trumpland,” said one current agent.

For me, though, the strangest thing about all this is how unfreaked-out everyone seems to be by all this.

The message is the same but the direction has reversed

[This is something of a follow-up to An Arkansas Tea Party group plans an anti-equality rally. Guess what happens next...]

It is difficult to put exact dates on this but if you were growing up in a small Southern town between approximately the late 60s and the early 80s, you would hear a mixture of progressive and reactionary messages. The reactionary ones were overwhelmingly local and based on word-of-mouth. Blatant racism or sexism or anti-Semitism or old-style redbaiting were the kind of thing you might hear from neighbors and acquaintances.

By comparison, the national media you consumed in that pre-satellite, pre-Internet age, strongly tended toward the progressive. Norman Lear was the king of television. Nixon was a punchline. Even the Saturday morning cartoons preached diversity and tolerance. If you look at contemporary opinion polls, you can see that this is one of the few periods where both journalists and entertainers got significantly ahead of the social curve. The myth of a liberal media today owes a lot to its relative reality forty years ago.

Today, if you go to the small Southern town I grew up in, you will still hear plenty of reactionary messages, perhaps more than you would have heard back then, but the source has changed. If you actually talk with one of the locals who is voicing some extreme reactionary sentiment, you will generally learn that this comes directly from some kind of national media, be it cable news or talk radio or a website or a tweet on a smart phone.

In local interactions, there appears to have been real progress. Unlike 50 years ago, everyone in my hometown now knows someone who is in an interracial relationship or someone who is openly gay and no one seems to consider it that big of a deal. You'll find less tolerance in these towns than you will in a  big city, but considerably more than you would have found in that small town (and perhaps in many major metropolis ) forty years ago.

In short, there's a bizarre combination of progress and regression. I know the standard explanation at this point is to go for some big sweeping social or demographic factor like economic inequality or white backlash, but I don't see how those fit what I've been seeing. I'm certain these things play a part, but more in the sense of fertile ground than direct cause.

Obviously, this is an immensely complicated problem, but if you had to reduce it to one simple hypothesis, I would say it would have to be that the rise of the Trump voter was the intended consequence of a massive and not particularly secretive social engineering experiment on the part of the conservative movement, an experiment that involved right wing media, the co-opting and in some cases simply buying off of religious leaders, and blatant Astroturf among other things. The rise of Trump is the unintended consequence of that same experiment.

I'd say something about “unintended consequences,” but that implies longer term intent

From Distracted by the large flock of black swans
December 14, 2015

In recent years, a large part of the foundation of the GOP strategy has been the assumption that, if you get base voters angry enough and frightened enough, they will show up to vote (even in off year elections) and they will never vote for the Democrat (even when they really dislike the Republican candidate).

Capitalizing on that assumption has always been something of a balancing act, particularly when you constantly attack the legitimacy of the electoral system ("The system is rigged!" "The last election was stolen!" "Make sure to vote!"). With the advent of the Tea Party movement, it's gotten even more difficult to maintain that balance.

All snark aside, when asking why Trump said something these days, the safest answer is generally that he wanted to hear his fans cheer, but it is still reasonable to talk about Trump's rigging comments as part of a strategy because they predate this election, going back to a period when calm, rational (albeit cynical) people were mapping out the plan for the GOP in great detail, particularly when it came to message discipline.

There were two obvious objectives, providing cover for voter suppression and motivating the base. In terms of the latter I suspect that the key to successful execution was to get supporters to think of rigging as a surmountable challenge. If you keep sending money, voting the straight party ticket and, most important of all, showing up for every election, the cause of right will prevail.

Comments like the following, clearly overshoot that happy medium.


From Esme Cribb writing for TPM:

Donald Trump suggested in a speech at a Colorado rally on Saturday that election officials will throw away mail-in ballots if they don't "like" them.

"I have real problems with ballots being sent," Trump said, according to a transcript by NBC's Ali Vitali and Emily Gold. "People say, oh, here's a ballot, bing. Here's another ballot, throw it away. Oh, here's one I like, we'll keep that one."

Trump claimed that there are "a lot of people" watching election officials.

"We're trying to have some pretty good supervision out there," he said. "We have a lot of people watching you people that collect the ballots."

I think this pushes us into bifurcation range, where Trump supporters are either too discouraged to vote or are willing to go to extreme measures to make sure that their vote counts.

From New York Magazine:

A Des Moines woman has been arrested and charged with voter fraud after she allegedly voted for Donald Trump a second time out of concern that her first vote for Trump would be counted for Hillary Clinton instead. The Des Moines Register reports that 55-year-old Terry Lynn Rote was charged with first-degree election misconduct on Thursday after authorities discovered that she had cast early-voting ballots at two different locations in Iowa.

“I don’t know what came over me,” Rote told the Washington Post sometime after being released on $5,000 bond Friday. The registered Republican also told Iowa Public Radio that she was afraid that her first Trump vote was going to be somehow counted for Clinton. “I wasn’t planning on doing it twice, it was spur of the moment,” she insisted, also repeating Trump’s oft-made claim that “the polls are rigged.”

Petruchio liberals

As Shaw observed, Taming of the Shrew can be difficult for modern sensibilities (Benedick and Beatrice, by comparison, stand up well and are still being repackaged by comedy writers), but recently one particular element of the story has been coming to mind.

In Verona, Petruchio begins the "taming" of his new wife. She is refused food and clothing because nothing – according to Petruchio – is good enough for her; he claims perfectly cooked meat is overcooked, a beautiful dress doesn't fit right, and a stylish hat is not fashionable.

There is a certain type of vocal liberal, almost always white and reasonably affluent, who insists on blocking virtually every viable attempt to advance a progressive agenda because nothing meets his or her standards. They feel enormously proud of themselves for refusing to compromise, despite the fact that the price of their principled stands are invariably paid by the most disadvantaged.

Lawyers, Guns and Money has spent the past year or so dismantling this silliness.

Here's Scott Lemieux:

There should be a fancy Latin term for “arbitrarily chosen deal-breakers selected to reverse-engineer a justification for not voting for a candidate you’ve decided a priori you don’t want to support.” People who actually care about how the next president will affect environmental policy evaluate the candidates on environmental policy. People who want to effectively ignore environmental policy focus solely on fracking.

Her laundry list also serves to illustrate the utter stupidity of “dealbreaker” logic. “If Hillary Clinton favored a $15 minimum wage that won’t pass Congress, I might support her. But since she only favors a $12 minimum wage that won’t pass Congress, I’ll take my chances on Trump winning.” “I used to be a Democrat, but when I found out that Hillary Clinton is insufficiently woke on GMO labeling I can live with several decades of a Supreme Court where the median justice would have to turn to the left to see Antonin Scalia.” OK.
...

First of all, with the FBI director having decided to try to throw the election to Trump, this is an odd characterization. Clinton remains a favorite and probably an overwhelming favorite, but it would be wrong to say that Trump has no chance, and if Stein got any real traction he certainly would. But, hey, not only will it not be Sarandon who might die because she can’t get medical care or be unable to get an abortion or lose her legal marriage privileges or lose her welfare assistance or have no remedy for discrimination or be denied the vote if Trump wins, she stands to gain considerably from the Trump presidency she’s urging her fans to make more likely.

And it’s worth noting again that what utter chickenshit the qualifier is. At least the “heighten-the-contradicitons” crap she was peddling earlier is an argument — a really terrible argument in the vast majority of circumstances including this one, but an argument. “Vote Stein because it won’t matter anyway” just makes you a free rider patting yourself for what a special snowflake you are. Lamest. form. of. masturbation. ever. If you think that we can’t have an omelet without Trump breaking America’s most vulnerable then own it, and if not spare us.

An emerging journalistic subgenre

From the Washington Post:

Last month, the man who's tried to turn vote prediction into a science predicted a Trump win.

Allan J. Lichtman, distinguished professor of history at American University, said Democrats would not be able to hold on to the White House.

In the intervening weeks, the campaign was rocked by a series of events. The release of the Access Hollywood tape obtained by The Washington Post was followed by accusations from a growing list of women of various improprieties on Trump's part, ranging from verbal abuse and harassment to outright sexual assault. Fix founder Chris Cillizza named Trump the winner of the inauspicious “Worst Week in Washington” award for four weeks running. At the same time, WikiLeaks released internal Clinton campaign emails, and the U.S. government flatly accused the Kremlin of being involved. And let's not forget those presidential debates.

So plenty has changed. But one thing hasn't: Lichtman, author of “Predicting the Next President: The Keys to the White House 2016,” is sticking with his prediction of a Trump victory.

If you aren't familiar with his somewhat unique prediction system, here are the basics: The keys to the White House, he says, are a set of 13 true/false statements. If six of them are false, the incumbent party loses the presidency. His system has correctly predicted the winner of the popular vote in every U.S. presidential election since 1984. Our first interview went into the keys more in-depth, and in September he said the keys were settled enough to make an official prediction of a Democratic loss and a Trump win.

From CNBC via Yahoo:

 An artificial intelligence system that correctly predicted the last three U.S. presidential elections puts Republican nominee Donald Trump ahead of Democrat rival Hillary Clinton in the race for the White House.

MogIA was developed by Sanjiv Rai, founder of Indian start-up Genic.ai. It takes in 20 million data points from public platforms including Google, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in the U.S. and then analyzes the information to create predictions.

The AI system was created in 2004, so it has been getting smarter all the time. It had already correctly predicted the results of the Democratic and Republican Primaries.

Data such as engagement with tweets or Facebook Live videos have been taken into account. The result is that Trump has overtaken the engagement numbers of Barack Obama 's peak in 2008 — the year he was elected president — by 25 percent.

Rai said that his AI system shows that the candidate in each election who had leading engagement data ended up winning the election.

"If Trump loses, it will defy the data trend for the first time in the last 12 years since Internet engagement began in full earnest," Rai wrote in a report sent to CNBC.

Election wiz predicts Donald Trump will win Oval Office

Donald Trump may be behind in most polls, but one veteran New York prognosticator still predicts he will win come Election Day.

“I think he was the strongest candidate in the primaries and that he will prevail,” Helmut Norpoth, a political science professor at SUNY Stony Brook, told The Post on Monday, even as the RealClearPolitics average shows the Republican candidate trailing Democrat Hillary Clinton by 6.1 percentage points.

Norpoth developed a model that, applied retroactively in earlier races, would have correctly predicted the winner of every presidential election since 1912 — with the exception of 2000, when predicted winner Al Gore barely lost to George W. Bush.

The model looks at which of the candidates performed better in the primaries and caucuses and concludes that the stronger performer there will enter the White House.

In retrospect, it's surprising we don't use more sewage metaphors

A few stray thoughts on the proper flow of information (and misinformation) and a functional organization.

I know we've been through all of this stuff about Leo Strauss and the conservative movement before so I'm not going to drag this out into great detail except to reiterate that if you want to have a functional  institution that makes extensive use of internal misinformation, you have to make sure things move in the right direction.

With misinformation systems as with plumbing, when the flow starts going the wrong way, the results are seldom pretty. This has been a problem for the GOP for at least a few years now. A number of people in positions of authority, (particularly in the tea party wing) have bought into notions that were probably intended simply to keep the cannon-fodder happy. This may also partly explain the internal polling fiasco at the Romney campaign.

As always, though, it is Trump who takes things to a new level. We now have a Republican nominee who uses the fringier parts of the Twitter verse as briefings.

From Josh Marshall:

Here's what he said ...

Wikileaks also shows how John Podesta rigged the polls by oversampling democrats, a voter suppression technique. That's happening to me all the time. When the polls are even, when they leave them alone and do them properly, I'm leading. But you see these polls where they're polling democrats. How is Trump doing? Oh, he's down. They're polling democrats. The system is corrupt, rigged and broken. And we're going to change it. [ Cheers and applause ]
Thank you, thank you. In an e-mail podesta says he wants oversamples for our polling in order to maximize what we get out of our media polling. It's called voter suppression because people will say, oh, gee, Trump's down. Folks, we're winning. We're winning. We're winning. These thieves and crook, the immediate, yeah not all of it, not all of it, but much of it -- they're the most crooked -- they're almost as crooked as Hillary. They may even be more crooked than Hillary because without the media, she would be nothing.

Now this immediately this grabbed my attention because over the weekend I was flabbergasted to see this tweet being shared around the Trumposphere on Twitter.

Todays Wikileaks dump revealed the DNC works w/ pollsters to skew polls in their favor by over-polling Democrats & under-polling Republicans pic.twitter.com/tVA8K6n79T

— Taylor Egly (@TaylorEgly) October 24, 2016

I don't know who Taylor Egly is. But he has 250,000 followers - so he has a big megaphone on Twitter. This tweet and this new meme is a bracing example of just how many of the "scoops" from the Podesta emails are based on people simply not knowing what words mean.
Trump had already mentioned 'over-sampling' earlier. But here he's tying it specifically to the Podesta emails released by Wikileaks. This tweet above is unquestionably what he's referring to.
There are several levels of nonsense here. Let me try to run through them.
...

 More importantly, what Tom Matzzie is talking about is the campaign/DNC's own polls. Campaigns do extensive, very high quality polling to understand the state of the race and devise strategies for winning. These are not public polls. So they can't affect media polls and they can't have anything to do with voter suppression.

Now you may be asking, why would the Democrats skew their own internal polls? Well, they're not.
The biggest thing here is what the word 'oversampling' means. Both public and private pollsters will often over-sample a particular demographic group to get statistically significant data on that group.
...  You need to get an 'over-sample' to get solid numbers.

Whether it's public or private pollsters, the 'over-sample' is never included in the 'topline' number. So if you get 4 times the number of African-American voters as you got in a regular sample, those numbers don't all go into the mix for the total poll. They're segmented out. The whole thing basically amounts to zooming in on one group to find out more about them. To do so, to zoom in, you need to 'over-sample' their group as what amounts to a break-out portion of the poll.

What it all comes down to is that you're talking about a polling concept the Trumpers don't seem to understand (or are relying on supporters not understanding), about polls that are by definition secret (campaign polls aren't shared) and about an election eight years ago. 

Is this Clinton story becoming a Comey story?

I grabbed this screen capture from the Washington Post on Saturday, immediately after the announcement.

Comey was catching considerable heat even before this broke...

From CNBC:

FBI Director James Comey argued privately that it was too close to Election Day for the United States government to name Russia as meddling in the U.S. election and ultimately ensured that the FBI's name was not on the document that the U.S. government put out, a former bureau official tells CNBC.

The official said some government insiders are perplexed as to why Comey would have election timing concerns with the Russian disclosure but not with the Huma Abedin email discovery disclosure he made Friday.

Here's Marshall with some more background:

Two stories were published today alleging or suggesting actual covert communication between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign and an effort to use Trump to advance Russian interests in the United States. One of these stories is about suspicious communication between a Trump controlled email server and Russia. The second story is much more specific in its accusation. According to David Corn, who is an experienced national security and intelligence reporter, a retired spy from a western country who now works for an American security contractor has provided the FBI with evidence suggesting that "the Russian government has for years tried to co-opt and assist Trump." Corn further reports that this retired spy found "troubling information indicating connections between Trump and the Russian government. According to his sources, he says, 'there was an established exchange of information between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin of mutual benefit.'"

The retired spy, who remains anonymous, says he's provided his evidence to the FBI and they have requested additional information from him about his sources, findings, etc. Corn knows how to do this kind of reporting. He has spoken to a US intelligence official who says this retired spy has provided credible and valuable intelligence to the US government in the past. He is considered reliable. Corn's reporting gives me a high level of confidence this retired spy is not a crank. That doesn't mean he's right or even that he's not pursuing some unknown agenda.
...

Think of it this way.

If Trump is advocating for Russia in the US political arena (he is), and Russia is conducting an espionage and disruption campaign on Trump's behalf in the US political area (highly likely), do I need to know if they're actually talking to each other while both these things are happening? I'm not sure I do.

Isn't this a much bigger deal than it has been made out to be?

R.I.P. Zacherley (September 26, 1918 – October 27, 2016)

He almost made it to Halloween.

A bit of history from Wikipedia:

In October 1957, Screen Gems released a bundle of old Universal horror movies to syndicated television, naming the collection "Shock!". They encouraged the use of hosts for the broadcasts. This is why many of the early programs were called "Shock Theater". Viewers loved the package, as well as the concept, and ratings soared. A "Son of Shock!" package was released in 1958.

Creature Features was another film package that was released in the early 1960s and added to in the 1970s. The films in this package ranged from horror and science-fiction films of the 1950s, British horror films of the 1960s, and the Japanese "giant monster" movies of the 1960s, and 1970s. This package also included an uncut print of Night of the Living Dead.

...

The first television horror host is generally accepted to be Vampira. The Vampira Show featured mostly low budget suspense films, as few horror films had yet been released for television broadcast. Despite its short 1954-1955 run, The Vampira Show set the standard format for horror host shows to follow.

Hosts were often plucked from the ranks of the studio staff. In the days of live television, it was not uncommon for the weather man or booth announcer to finish a nightly news broadcast and race madly to another part of the soundstage for a quick costume change to present the evening's monster tale.

While a few early hosts like Zacherley and Vampira became the icons of this nationwide movement, most hosts were locals. The impact of these friendly revenants on their young fans cannot be overestimated. The earliest hosts are still remembered with great affection today.

It's also worth noting that among the kids staying up late to watch Shock Theater were the aspiring film makers like Spielberg and Lucas who would be greatly influenced by what they saw when they went on to largely invent the modern blockbuster era.

Happy Halloween from the Mercury Theatre

The debut production of the Mercury Theatre of the Air, Dracula.




And, of course, the Mercury production of War of the Worlds.



While we're at it, here's a tour de force from Welles' favorite, Agnes Moorehead (don't let the corny intro turn you off) Sorry, Wrong Number.

Not so much being asked to dig your own grave, as being charged for the shovel

This appears to be our busy season so I'll just pass on the following from Charles Pierce without comment:

The indefatigable David Sirota, and his team at The International Business Times, has been doing god's work tracking how the various hedge-fund cowboys and Wall Street sharpers who have been tasked with "managing" the pension plans of various states have, in turn, shoveled millions in campaign donations to those same politicians who handed them the pension money in the first place.

Ceresney, who is head of the SEC's division of enforcement, said his team is now working with other federal law enforcement agencies to do "all we can to shine light in this opaque area." His warning spotlighted the fact that — six years after the SEC enacted its pay-to-play rule — financial executives have found ways around the strictures as they seek lucrative deals to manage portions of the nation's $3 trillion public pension system. A new International Business Times/MapLight review found that in the 2016 cycle, executives at firms managing state pension money have donated nearly $1.3 million to the Republican Governors Association, on top of the more than $6.8 million such firms gave to the RGA in 2013 and 2014. Those donors gave to the RGA while the group was helping the campaigns of governors with influence over state pension funds — funds that have invested with the donors' firms. Democrats weren't forgotten: the Democratic Governors Association received $151,000 from firms managing public pension money in states where the DGA was involved in gubernatorial races in the 2014 election cycle.

And now this Circle of Grift has come around to Massachusetts. It seems that the Wall Streeters who have been "managing" the pension money of the state's public school teachers have been plowing cash into support for the ballot question to lift the cap on charter schools. In other words, the state's public school teachers are fighting a juggernaut for which their own money paid. Again, from the IBTimes:

"This is a morally bankrupt situation," said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, which opposes the ballot measure. "These managers are using money they've earned from teacher pensions to try to destroy the same public education system that teachers have worked in mightily to help children." "It's the most insulting f___ing thing, and it makes me so angry," said Laura Henderson, an 11-year veteran of Massachusetts public schools, who now teaches English and special education in Newton. She spends many of her weekends going door to door, trying to persuade voters to oppose Question 2. For Henderson, more charters means fewer unionized teaching jobs and the erosion of public education standards. In her view, the money behind Question 2 is motivated by a desire to ultimately privatize public education.

No, Laura. It's all for poor children. Can't you see that? The noted compassion for the poor that has been a hallmark of the modern Wall Street financiers is once again in evidence. (As is their long record of careful oversight of public pension money.) And I am the Tsar of all the Russias.

Growing up in Arkansas...

Tracts from the Alamo Church and Chick Publications were ubiquitous. The latter bore a remarkable resemblance in both format and style to the notorious Tijuana bibles of previous generations and I'm sure that, at some point,  people looking for one or the other got a big surprise. Being the son of a zoology professor meant I got a disproportionate share of anti-evolution eight-pagers thrust upon me by generally well-meaning fundamentalists.

Jack Chick died this week. Jeet Heer of the New Republic has a good retrospective.

Jack T. Chick Was the Leni Riefenstahl of American Cartooning

Jack T. Chick, the cartoonist who died Sunday at the age of 92, almost certainly thought you deserved to burn in Hell. It wasn’t personal—strictly theology. Adhering to one of the most exclusionary forms of fundamentalist Protestantism this side of the Westboro Baptist Church, Chick spent a lifetime drawing cartoon warning of the eternal damnation due to all non-Christians (including Muslims and Jews), believers in false forms of Christianity (the Catholic Church was an especial object of hatred), Mormons, liberal Protestants, homosexuals, and anyone who partook of a wide range of Satanic activities (ranging from trick or treating on Halloween to playing Dungeons and Dragons). Beloved by his fellow fundamentalists, who bought his tracts by the hundreds of millions and seeded them in bus stops and diners all over the world, Chick was widely derided by the world at large where he was seen, accurately, as a producer of hate literature.

Following up on "Calling all political science grad students"

From back in August:

Consider definitely non-purple states with open primaries. We can often get the situation we have now in California where voters in the minority party know that their vote for the president will almost certainly have no impact on the outcome and they have no option to vote for a member of their own party in one or more major state-wide race. What impact might this have on minority party districts in the state?

While it is still too early to say what that impact might be, it is fair to say that it does have some people worried.


Matthew Artz writing for the Mercury News [emphasis added]:

While Democrats have little chance of winning the 30 seats needed to retake the House, they could make a bigger dent than expected in California with four Republican incumbents now facing competitive races: Jeff Denham and David Valadao in the Central Valley, Steve Knight in Los Angeles County, and Darrell Issa in the San Diego suburbs.

The nonpartisan Cook Political Report recently declared three of those races “tossups” while downgrading Valadao’s seat from “likely Republican” to “lean Republican.”

Local GOP candidates were never going to get much help from a ballot in which two Democrats are competing for the open U.S. Senate seat, and no ballot measure has captured the imagination of Republican voters. But Trump’s dismal poll numbers makes their plight even more difficult, said Bill Whalen, a former Republican operative who is now a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution.

“Twenty-eight percent is uncharted territory,” he said, noting that the worst showing by a Republican presidential nominee in California was Alfred Landon, who won 31 percent of the vote in 1936. John McCain and Mitt Romney each won 37 percent.

“Republicans should be concerned,” Whalen said. “The numbers are dreadful.”

Why I no longer wait to post speculations on the campaign

Trump as stressor -- yet another evangelical edition

I've been arguing for a while that the evangelical movement has largely been gutted of its once central religious aspects and left with little more than a social reactionary agenda and a sharp tendency to vote Republican. This gutting did create significant tension in the movement but the rumblings were fairly quiet and attracted little outside attention until the arrival of Trump threw everything into high relief.

Eric Zorn of the Chicago Tribune lists some of the reasons why devout, Bible-toting evangelicals are having so much trouble with the GOP ticket.

During a televised interview with John Heilemann and Mark Halperin of Bloomberg Politics in August 2015, …

"Are you an Old Testament guy or a New Testament guy?" Heilemann asked.

"Probably equal," Trump said. "I think it's just incredible, the whole Bible is incredible."

Later that month at a news conference in South Carolina, he said "I am Presbyterian Protestant. I go to Marble Collegiate Church ... as often as I can, a lot."

Two problems with that. First, Marble Collegiate, on New York's 5th Avenue, is a Reformed, not Presbyterian, church. And second, though the Trump family does have a history of attending Marble, officials there quickly sent a statement to CNN saying Trump "is not an active member."

[Speaking as a lapsed Presbyterian, do you have any idea how little attendance it takes to be an active member of that denomination? If you showed up for Easter service back in 2010, you're probably still on the mailing list. -- MP]

The following month, David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network asked Trump on camera why it was he expressed such fondness for the Bible.

"So many things, like you know, you take, whatever you want to say, there's so many things that you can learn from it," Trump said. "Proverbs. The chapter, 'never bend to envy.' I've had that thing all of my life where people are bending to envy."

It probably won't surprise you to learn that the words "never bend to envy" do not appear in any common translations of the Bible.

Trump plunged on in, full essay-exam mode, emulating the wheel-spinning argle-bargle of a middle school student trying to fill up the blank space under a test question with halfway plausible verbiage.

"And there's just, actually, it's an incredible book, so many things you can learn from the Bible," he told Brody. "And you can lead your life — and I'm not just talking in terms of religion I'm talking in terms of leading a life even beyond a religion. There are so many brilliant things in the Bible. … The Bible is the most special thing."


...

That unfamiliarity showed up again in April when host Bob Lonsberry of WHAM-AM in Rochester, N.Y., broached the subject in a phone interview: "Is there a favorite Bible verse or Bible story that has informed your thinking or your character through life, sir?"

"Well, I think many," answered the would-be exegete-in-chief. "I mean, you know, when we get into the Bible, I think many, so many. And I tell people, look, 'An eye for an eye,' you can almost say that."

You can, sure.

But not only is "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" an Old Testament verse that condones barbaric vengeance ("… hand for hand, foot for foot," it goes on, "burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise") it was also expressly repudiated by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount: "You have heard that it was said, 'Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.' But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also" (Matthew 5:38-39).

Is Trump the first politician to exaggerate his piety in order to win favor with the American public, 70 percent of which identifies as Christian and 6 percent of which identifies as belonging to another faith tradition?

No, but he's the worst at it — the most transparent — that we've ever seen on the national stage.

Despite all to this, Trump will probably still do well with the evangelical vote, but his long-term impact on the movement remains very much an open question.

Aspect Dominance or just reporters loking for a man biting a dog? -- repost and update

[Remember back in the summer when the bedwetting faction was busy coming up with reasons why Trump was unstoppable? One of the favorite scenarios was that the fickle millennials, having lost Sanders, would stay home or go with Stein or Johnson or even Trump. These predictions have aged very badly, but even at the time they were rather silly.]

From back in July:

The neverhillary crowd certainly can be vocal and they get a lot of press, but how much of a factor are they? 

Harold Meyerson writing for the American Prospect (via Lemieux) [emphasis added]:

As the convention began, a new Pew poll showed that 88.5 percent of voters who’d consistently backed Sanders throughout the primary season now favored Clinton. A majority of the Sanders delegates in the hall in Philadelphia also back Clinton, but a loud Blinkered minority has managed to command disproportionate media coverage, which ever favors the loud. This disconsolate fringe—not just delegates but also the demonstrators lined up outside the convention area’s fencing—is almost entirely white and non-immigrant, people, that is, with less reason than some to fear a Trump presidency will overturn their lives. Nor are the demonstrators I’ve talked to preponderantly local, but rather have come from across the country to shout their rage and discontent. In short, the Blinkered are a fraction of the left, the Naderites come again. They are people who wouldn’t normally be involved either in Democratic politics or real-world progressive organizations, who hitched their wagon to Sanders’s star while many more experienced progressive activists failed to grasp Sanders’s potential for moving the world further in their direction than any political phenomenon in years.

Obviously, it is dangerous to infer too much from the decidedly nonrandom sample of "people you know," but I am Southern California based and I work with a program that relies heavily on millennial volunteers -- pretty much Bernie ground zero -- and this is entirely in line with what I've seen. Not only did all of the Bernie Sanders supporters I knew say they would support Hillary Clinton if she won the nomination, almost all of them found the thought of doing anything else laughably absurd. Everyone I talked to considered the difference between Sanders and Clinton somewhere between minor and vanishingly small compared to the difference between either and Trump.

As mentioned above, it is dangerous to infer too much from personal experience, but when that experience is backed up with both common sense and polling data, it is okay to infer a little. Specifically. I'd  suggest that the political press has overstated the size and strength of this segment of the party.

[insert sarcastic comment about the recent performance of the political press here.]

When we finally get around to discussing range-of-data issues

From Josh Marshall [emphasis added]
 

There may be an additional factor as well. Presidential campaigns, national parties and individual candidates each have overlapping ground operations. But a big, big part of that mix is driven by the presidential campaign. We're accustomed to presidential races where the campaigns have at least broad parity. On any given Sunday the worst team in the NFL might beat the best. They're broadly comparable. But the Trump campaign's field operation might be more like a pro football team squaring off against a high school squad or no team at all. We just don't have any track record for a competition that mismatched.

Case in point (from Eric Levitz):

Clinton has led Trump in 10 of the last 11 polls of the Sunshine State; she is outspending him over the airwaves $51 million to $30 million; she has 68 offices in the state to his 29: and she has nearly erased the GOP candidate’s traditional advantage among absentee voters.
...

But the lion’s share of Trump’s troubles are self-created. The GOP nominee’s limited presence on both the ground and airwaves are a product of his refusal to put as much effort into fundraising as Romney did four years ago. And his Florida campaign got off to a late start by every metric: Two-thirds of the campaign’s TV ads just started airing this month, all but one of his Florida offices opened after September, and his absentee-ballot-“chasing” operation only kicked into full gear after Democrats briefly overtook Republicans in the mail-in vote last week.

Breaking the laugh barrier

One of the many ironies of the Trump campaign is the way that it has seriously underlined so many of the journalistic conventions that made it possible.

The laugh barrier is the strong taboo that most in the mainstream media have against reacting naturally to absurd statements. Conservatives in particular have become quite adept at using this to defuse potentially embarrassing issues. For example, the assertion that George W. Bush's war record compares favorably to that of John Kerry was laughable, but the people making this argument were reasonably confident that few if any of the interviewers would actually laugh. The objective of this tactic is generally not to convince but rather to shove the topic of into an opinions–differ limbo and move on to more favorable territory.

The laugh barrier is deeply entrenched in our journalistic culture and can withstand remarkable amounts of force, but it does have its limits.

From TPM's Allegra Kirkland:

CNN analyst Bakari Sellers launched into a summary of Trump’s past treatment of black Americans, citing the housing discrimination lawsuits his family was forced to settle for refusing to rent to black tenants and the full-page New York Times Trump took out calling for the wrongfully incarcerated Central Park Five to be executed.

“Donald Trump had nothing do with that!” [Gina] Loudon said.

“Wait, wait wait,” host Don Lemon cut in. “You said Donald Trump had nothing do for taking out ads on the Central Park Five?”

“Donald Trump himself,” she answered. “It was not Donald Trump himself.”

Lemon later showed Loudon a photograph of the ad, which bore Trump’s signature.

Things really dissolved when Sellers asked Loudon to name senior black staffers advising Trump’s campaign.

“You named Katrina Pierson. I bet you can’t name two,” he challenged.

“I could go on all day,” Loudon replied. “Omorosa. I mean I could go on all day. I’m not going to play into your little tester—”

Lemon and the rest of the four-person panel burst into laughter, and apparently some CNN staffers did as well.

“Stop. Stop it y’all. People in the studio are even laughing,” Lemon said.

The Trump campaign has effectively opened a hole in the laugh barrier. The question now is whether or not that gap will still be there the next time we have an election.

An open letter to Brian Beutler and Ed Kilgore

Dear Brian and Ed,

I am a big fan of your work but, after having read your recent pieces on the still unlikely but potentially devastating effects of a Trump election boycott, I would like to suggest that, at least during the next election, it might be worth your while to keep an eye on West Coast Stat Views.

I'm not saying you should come by every day, but at least during the campaign season, an occasional visit might tip you off to some interesting possibilities. For example, you both had columns today on the implication of Trump threatening to boycott the election.

Here's the key paragraph from the New Republic piece.

Thus, the bleakest possible scenario for Republicans isn’t that Trump loses badly and refuses to admit defeat. It’s that he rejects the notion that a fair election is even possible with him on the ticket, and announces he’s boycotting it. His supporters, only a small fraction of whom would have refused to vote for Trump turncoats down the ballot, stay home en masse instead. The Democrats take back the House.

And from New York Magazine:

But down there in the bunker of an embattled, losing campaign, despised by respectable people almost everywhere, a candidate can nourish fantasies of destructive vengeance. Does anyone doubt Trump is capable of ending this election cycle that he has dominated with one last audacious gesture that denies the clean and overwhelming defeat he has earned? The prospect has to occur to him every time he sees a GOP ad urging voters to elect Republicans to exert some control over President Hillary Clinton. That has to be so, so disgusting to him, believe me.

And here's what we were saying last year about the possible consequences of the Republican Party taking extraordinary measures to deny Donald Trump the nomination.

From: Distracted by the large flock of black swans
Monday, December 14, 2015

I don't want to get sucked into trying to guess what constitute reasonable probabilities here – – I'm just throwing out scenarios – – but it certainly does seem likely that, if he doesn't get the nomination and does not choose to run as an independent, Trump will still make trouble and things will get ugly.

Keep in mind, Trump's base started out as the birther movement. They came into this primed to see conspiracies against them. Now the RNC has given them what appears to be an actual conspiracy to focus on.

I don't think we can entirely rule out the possibility of Trump calling for a boycott of the vote to protest his treatment but even if it doesn't come to that, it seems probable that, should we see a great deal of bitterness and paranoia after the convention, the result will not help Republican turnout.

Obviously, Trump did get the nomination, but the broader argument still stands.

You also might want to check out what we said in that same post about the unintended consequences of delegitimizing the election with charges of fraud and rigging.

Sincerely,
Mark

[I had a really funny title for this post, honest]

But it played off of a Red Meat cartoon and I can't find the original online. This one has nothing to do with the topic at hand, but since I brought up the comic strip...

There are two ways of reading the collapse of traditional data journalism that started about a year ago. Neither of them had anything to do with "listening to the data." (Unless you are seriously off your meds, data never tell you anything; you draw inferences from data. That's an important distinction but we'll have to wait till later to explore in depth.)

What the data journalists were arguing was that, at that early stage of the election, certain other metrics and historical patterns (which not coincidentally happened to support the standard narrative) were far better indicators of primary results than were traditional opinion polls. This preferred set of indicators changed from week to week – – depending on how you count, there were somewhere between five or six of them – – but they always reached the same conclusions.

This could be looked at as a case of extended cherry picking, rummaging through the data until you come up with a statistic that points in a direction that does not upend your worldview. The other way of looking at it (which is not entirely mutually exclusive) is that the arguments had been valid in the past and would have been valid during the primary if things were still the same. In other words, the underlying assumptions about fundamental relationships and mechanisms were breaking down.

The second interpretation reflects much better on the people like Nate Silver who were making the arguments, but it has far more troubling broader implications. If this truly is a case of previously reliable indicators losing their predictive power, then we need to start asking serious questions about the stability of all of our models.







And range of data. We definitely need to talk about range of data.

Saying your opponents won't show up to vote may work as unintentional reverse psychology

[I wrote this Saturday with the intention of posting it Monday, but events are moving rapidly so I decided to bump it up.]

A popular sidewalk stencil in Echo Park.


I don't want to get too bogged down in the details of this specific case which may well come to nothing. The interview could, however, turn out to have legs and, even if it doesn't, it's representative of a larger class of stories.

In a strange way, the official message of the Trump campaign to both supporters and opponents has been "your vote does not matter." For supporters, the message has been that the election will be rigged, and their votes stolen. For opponents, the often explicit and always blatant strategy has been one of suppression and counting on low turnout.

These strategies have a great potential for unintended consequences and when you combine them with other aspects of this campaign such as the uniquely bad standing of Trump among Latinos, African-Americans, and women or the unprecedented imbalance in ground game, you have the potential for some serious synergistic effects.

Under those circumstances, this article by Allegra Kirkland is the last thing the Trump campaign needs to go viral.

Former Arizona governor Jan Brewer declared Friday that Arizona won’t go blue for Hillary Clinton because Hispanic Democrats “don’t vote.”

“They don’t get out and vote. They don’t vote,” she told the Boston Globe when asked if those constituents could help tip the historically conservative state to a Democratic presidential nominee.

...

Nationally, Donald Trump’s rhetoric about Latino immigrants has also helped boost Clinton’s popularity among Latino voters, with one recent Pew Research survey handing her a 39-point advantage over her Republican opponent.

...

“It’s wishful thinking on their behalf,” Brewer told the Globe of the Clinton campaign’s efforts to win the Grand Canyon State. “Donald Trump is going to secure the border and that is a very important issue in Arizona.”

Brewer was an early supporter of the real estate mogul who has praised his disparaging comments about Latinos.

After the real estate mogul made his infamous campaign announcement speech denigrating Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and “criminals,” Brewer commended him for “telling it like it really, truly is.”

And there's already evidence that the attempts at suppression are backfiring (this time from Kirkland's editor, Josh Marshall):

We're now seeing numerous examples across the country of extremely long lines and long waits to vote - especially in states which took steps since 2012 to make it harder to vote and vote early. North Carolina is one of the best examples of this. People are waiting three and four hours to vote. It's genuinely shameful that we, as a society, find this acceptable. And yet millions of people are lining up to vote. They are undeterred.

Mormons, Evangelicals and...

Having a Jesuit in the Vatican was always going to be trouble for the GOP. Having a Trump at the top of their ticket at the same time makes it potentially catastrophic.


 David Gibson Religion News Service

 Vatican City

Figuring out why Pope Francis has upended so many expectations, how exactly he's changed the Catholic church in his first year and what he might be contemplating for the future has become a Catholic parlor game that is almost as popular as the pontiff himself.

A single key can best answer all of these questions: Francis' longstanding identity as a Jesuit priest.

It's an all-encompassing personal and professional definition that the former Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio brought with him from Buenos Aires, Argentina, and one that continues to shape almost everything he does as Pope Francis.

"He may act like a Franciscan, but he thinks like a Jesuit," quipped Fr. Thomas Reese, a fellow Jesuit who is a columnist for National Catholic Reporter.

In fact, it would be easy to mistake this new pope for a Franciscan, given his emphasis on helping society's outcasts and his decision to become the first pope to take the name of St. Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of the poor. Yet he's the first pope from the Society of Jesus, the religious community whose worldly, wise intellectuals are as famous as its missionaries and martyrs.

Indeed, behind that "Jesuit" label lies a centuries-old history and a unique brand of spiritual formation that go a long way toward understanding who Francis is and where he is taking the church.

From his passion for social justice and his missionary zeal to his focus on engaging the wider world and his preference for collaboration over peremptory action, Francis is a Jesuit through and through. And as the first Jesuit pope, he brings sharply etched memories of being part of a community that's been viewed with deep suspicion by Rome, most recently by his own predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI.

From Ed Kilgore:

One of the pivotal demographic groups Donald Trump is struggling with is Catholics, who often closely represent American public opinion as a whole (Obama won them by 2 points in 2012). You might guess Trump’s “Catholic problem” is largely the result of his manifest unpopularity among Latinos, the fastest-growing category of U.S. Catholics. But no: A recent poll from the Public Religion Research Institute showed him running behind Hillary Clinton among white Catholics, a pretty reliable GOP-leaning group for many years.

It is hard to sort out cause and effect here, but Trump continues to blunder in ways that hurt him with Catholics. Trying to show his religion bona fides early in the nomination contest, the mogul talked about eating “my little cracker,” a reference to the Eucharist that probably drew a wince from a lot of Catholics (and, for that matter, Orthodox Christians or some Protestants) who are highly reverent toward the Most Blessed Sacrament. This was the same Frank Luntz interview, moreover, when Trump seemed puzzled at the idea of asking God for forgiveness, which likely offended Christians of every persuasion. Then there was the Sunday when he dropped cash in a communion plate — a pretty dramatic exhibition of his leanings toward the Church of the Golden Calf. That was shortly before he called Pope Francis “disgraceful” for questioning the compatibility of nativism with Christianity.

Perhaps justifiably frantic about Trump’s weakness among Catholics, his supporters tried to make the case that one of John Podesta’s illegally stolen batch of emails showed Clinton staffers betraying a hatred of Catholicism. This claim did not much survive the realization that all of the staffers involved in the brief discussion of Catholicism in question are themselves Catholics. And as conservative Catholic Ross Douthat quickly explained, the “anti-Catholic” utterances in those emails actually reflect differences of opinion between progressive and “traditionalist” Catholics.

I don't have time to discuss how bad this is

AT&T to Purchase Time Warner for $80 Billion in Latest Media Megamerger by Eric Levitz

Good news for anyone who thinks America’s leading telecom companies are too small and powerless — AT&T has agreed to buy Time Warner for more than $80 billion, according to the New York Times. The reported deal, which is largest merger of content and distribution since Comcast purchased NBC Universal in 2011, follows an earlier Wall Street Journal report on Friday that talks were underway.

Even the guy with the axe...

I'm not going to connect all of the dots and risk ruining the punchline, but lots of recent news stories have reminded me of closing reaction of the hitchhiker with the axe.

Do you realize we've been telling these jokes for almost thirty years?

And in all that time, the butt of the jokes has never seen the humor.

Evangelicals and clarifying shocks continued [insert Road to Damascus reference here]

Following up on this, the backlash against evangelical leaders' support of Donald Trump appears to be growing. I think there's a decent chance that Trump may have permanently affected the relationship between the GOP and the evangelical movement.

Here's Scott Jaschik writing for Inside Higher Ed:
[emphasis added]

Liberty University students issued a statement last week criticizing their president, Jerry Falwell Jr., for his endorsement of and campaigning for Donald Trump, even after the release of a video of Trump boasting about sexually assaulting women (boasts he describes as "locker room talk"). Falwell responded by issuing his own statement, criticizing the students' views but saying that their ability to speak out was "a testament to the fact that Liberty University promotes the free expression of ideas, unlike many major universities where political correctness prevents conservative students from speaking out."

Despite the rhetoric, the university prevented Joel Schmieg, the sports editor of its student newspaper, The Liberty Champion, from running a column criticizing Trump.

...

Frank D. LoMonte, executive director of the Student Press Law Center, said via email that he was concerned about any such censorship -- and he added that such censorship simply isn't effective, either. "Of course, Liberty is a private university not subject to First Amendment constraints, but the best private universities voluntarily maintain a hands-off policy respectful of the integrity of independent journalism. Leaving aside the civic and educational benefits of fostering critical-thinking skills on a college campus, it's just self-defeating in the year 2016 to think you can suppress unwanted ideas by tearing articles out of paper newspapers. When you censor an article in the 21st century, you're just guaranteeing it a wider audience. I doubt many 20-year-old sports columnists are being read across the country, but by censoring Joel's column, the university has exponentially increased its impact. There's nothing more irresistible than journalism powerful authority figures don't want you to read."

A spokesman for Liberty, Len Stevens, reached at home Tuesday night, said he heard about the controversy when President Falwell shared with him texts the president exchanged with his son Trey (as Jerry Falwell III is known). The texts confirmed that the university prevented the column from being published, but did not indicate that President Falwell was involved directly, said Stevens. Stevens said that Schmieg's column was "redundant" with another piece and was blocked because of space constraints, as an "editorial decision." Stevens did not respond to questions about how blocking a column critical of Trump might not be consistent with President Falwell's statements about free expression.

Falwell tweeted last night in a way that suggested he made the decision, and he also cited the issue of redundancy.

Schmieg noted that, as sports editor, he has a regular column that does not compete with other pieces for space. As a result, Schmieg said that he had to write another column when his piece about Trump was pulled. "It's not an issue of space," he said.

And here's Jack Jenkins, Senior Religion Reporter at ThinkProgress

Regardless, the censorship accusation comes as Falwell — a prominent leader of the Religious Right — grapples with a growing movement among students to distance themselves from the his consistent support for Trump. One group, Liberty United Against Trump, launched a online petition last week for those who are “disappointed with President Falwell’s endorsement and are tired of being associated with one of the worst presidential candidates in American history.”

Falwell has dismissed the group as only a “few students,” but the petition now boasts more than 3,200 signatures — 1,700 of whom used Liberty University email addresses — and organizers insist they represent the larger student body.

,,,

The group’s organizers also repeatedly referenced an eyebrow-raising statistic: despite Falwell’s endorsement ahead of the Virginia Republican primary, Trump received a mere 90 votes from Liberty students on election, placing fourth behind Rubio, Cruz, and Carson.

Vivendi, where the shamelessness goes to 11

Via Mark Evanier, we have yet another reminder that, while Hollywood has always leaned toward the evil, executives for the massive mass media conglomerates/walking anti-trust violations are determined to keep pushing the envelope.

This Is Spinal Tap star Harry Shearer is suing Universal parent Vivendi for what he alleges is dramatic and deliberate under-payment of music royalties from the classic spoof rockumentary.

In a lawsuit filed at the Central District Court of California yesterday (October 17), Shearer accuses Vivendi of “fraudulent accounting for revenues from music copyrights” – through Universal – as well as mismanaging film and merchandising rights through UMG sister companies such as StudioCanal.

Shearer co-created the film, co-wrote the soundtrack and starred as the Spinal Tap band’s bassist, Derek Smalls.

He claims that between 1989 and 2006, total income from soundtrack music sales for the four creators of the film was reported by Vivendi as just $98. (Yes, ninety-eight dollars.)

In addition, he claims that Vivendi ‘asserts that the four creators’ share of total worldwide merchandising income between 1984 and 2006 was $81’.

...

 “Vivendi and its subsidiaries – which own the rights to thousands and thousands of creative works – have, at least in our case, conducted blatantly unfair business practices,” Shearer continued.

“But I wouldn’t be surprised if our example were the tip of the iceberg.  Though I’ve launched this lawsuit on my own, it is in reality a challenge to the company on behalf of all creators of popular films whose talent has not been fairly remunerated.

A mean looking kid walking by a row of glass houses with a big ol' bag of rocks -- repost

[The nomination of Donald Trump was made possible by numerous failures of the news media to do its job. Therefore it is useful to look back at how things got this bad. Here's a post we did in 2013 (almost exactly three years ago) where we talked about how Paul Krugman, who would be, by far, the paper's most prescient voice in 2016, was dismissed as a loose cannon by the NYT.]


TPM has a short but fascinating revelation

MSNBC host Joe Scarborough said Thursday that a public editor at the New York Times considers liberal columnist Paul Krugman's work to be an ongoing "nightmare."

During a segment on "Morning Joe," conservative historian Niall Ferguson joined Scarborough to pile on Krugman. Ferguson said that Krugman lacks "humility, honesty and civility."

"And there's no accountability," Ferguson said. "No one seems to edit that blog at the New York Times. And it's time that somebody called him out. People are afraid of him. I'm not."

Scarborough then recalled a conversation he had with a Times editor following his televised debate with Krugman earlier this year.

"I actually won't tell you which public editor it was but one of the public editors of the New York Times told me off the record after my debate that their biggest nightmare was his column every week," Scarborough said.

Assuming that Scarborough is on the level (and putting aside Ferguson's self-awareness issues), this would seem to echo the New York Times' reaction to Nate Silver. In both cases, the supposedly liberal staff seemed to take an instant dislike to highly respected liberal writer/researchers who appear to have brought in a large number of traditional and digital subscribers. What's going on?

As regulars have probably guessed, I see this as another result of an increasingly dysfunctional culture of journalism, specifically the way that journalists react to having someone on the inside who ignores the implicit code of conduct.

This is not a left/right matter -- it cuts across pretty much all of the media establishment -- but conservatives have tended to make better tactical use of the rules we're talking about, for instance, using pox-on-both-their-houses conventions to provide cover for unpopular positions. As a result, there are more obvious targets on the right but that's a fairly trivial factor.

Silver and Krugman prompted such a strong reaction not because they were too liberal (despite seeing the world through an overwhelmingly upper class perspective, the NYT cannot be considered a right-wing paper); but because they were insiders who refused to follow the rules of the culture, and who therefore threatened that culture.

Over the past two decades, journalists have fashioned a remarkably self-serving code of conduct: de- emphasizing factual accuracy; embracing a lazy herd mentality with talk of narratives and memes; avoiding tough confrontations through false equivalencies; and passing the buck on keeping their audience informed.

When Nate Silver pointed out both that the data didn't support many of the popular narratives and that the journalists pushing those narratives were contributing nothing, he threatened reputations, business models and the underlying culture of the institutions. The fact that he was right was beside the point; he was ignoring the conventions of the journalistic establishment and there is no greater bastion of that establishment than the New York Times. By the same token, when Krugman points out that "centrist" pundits have a huge personal and professional interest in pushing the "Paul Ryan, serious policy guy" narrative, he was expressing a fact that was widely known but which was not supposed to be said aloud.

The paper has never been exactly friendly to blunt, independent writers with satirical tendencies as Molly Ivins discovered way back in the Seventies, but things have only gotten worse since then. Almost everybody lives in glass houses now and Paul Krugman does not look like someone you'd trust with a rock in that situation.

Rabbit season! Duck season! Rabbit season!

I'm planning on coming back and elaborating more on this later, but, as frequently noted here and elsewhere, while most commentators have fared extraordinarily poorly over the past year, a handful (including, yes, your not-so-humble hosts) have had a good run. Though they may not have framed it in exactly these terms, pretty much everybody who has gotten it mostly right has approached the election as the final stages of a massive social engineering experiment conducted by the conservative movement.

A key component of this experiment involved setting up radically different information streams for different target audiences. We talked about this before but one aspect that I've always wanted to address but never managed to get to is the way that this dual stream can explain seeming paradoxes in the radically different reactions of different groups of people to the same information.

In order to get a handle on this, it might be useful to think back to that time in psych 101 when the professor brought out the ambiguous pictures.The standard example is the old woman and young woman (originally captioned in a cartoon as  "my wife and my mother-in-law"). For the sake of variety, let's go with another.

The psych lecture would go something like this. Half the class was told to cover their eyes, the other half was shown a series of slides of birds. Then that half of the class was told to cover their eyes and the other half was shown a series of slides of small mammals. After being thus prepared, everyone looks at the following picture and is asked to write down what they see.

For the commentators who took the time to dig through the various media streams and put themselves in the place of each target audience (most notably Josh Marshall), it has been obvious for quite a while that those in the right-wing media bubble have a strong tendency to interpret events in a way that is consistent with the information, framing and narratives of the bubble. Donald Trump succeeded in the primaries because both his arguments and his affect seemed reasonable in the context of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh.

I'll come back and fill in some more details later but, as much as I want to avoid oversimplifying, this really is pretty simple. The journalists who have come off as sharp and ahead of the curve, have all (as far as I can tell) looked seriously at right-wing media and have asked themselves, if I actually believed everything I just heard, how would I react to the different candidates and their proposals?

This begs loads of questions and I don't want to oversell the explanatory power here, but given all of the overheated rhetoric about how chaotic and unpredictable this election has been, it's worth noting when those getting it right have something in common.

What they're reading today in Utah

Pat Bagley cartoon from the Salt Lake Tribune, Sunday, Oct. 16, 2016

A few quick notes:

1. The Salt Lake Tribune is not a particularly right-wing paper (it endorsed Obama over Romney) but it does have the city's largest weekday circulation and it obviously speaks for a substantial part of the population;

2.  The city's other major paper, the Deseret News also came out strongly  against Trump;

3. Just to be clear, the point of this and other recent posts on the subject is not that the Republican Party is about to lose the support of groups like Mormons and evangelicals. I'm just saying that there are signs that these longstanding relationships are growing unstable, which does push some interesting scenarios into the realm of the plausible.

If you're following politics, you need to be following the religious right. If you're following the religious right, you should be following Charles Pierce.

When it comes to the intersection between politics and the Catholic Church, there's no better source than the old Irishman. This bit of territory has become particularly interesting because the religious right and most of the conventional poli-sci wisdom around it evolved under John Paul II and Benedict XVI. The Vatican is now a very different place, and those differences have already started
destabilizing what a lot of people had assumed were immutable political relationships.

Here's Pierce on the reaction the comments about the Church in the leaked Clinton emails.

Just take that old post I wrote and substitute "Mormon" for "Evangelical"

When two denominations of the same religion recognize sharply different sacred texts, there will always be tremendous tension, particularly when one or both have fundamentalist tendencies. In a sense, the similarities feed the tension as much as the differences do.

With Mormons and evangelicals, the similarities are remarkable. In terms of piety and personal morality, there is a great deal of common ground and in both cases, sincere believers who tend to be conservative face a real crisis of conscience when it comes to supporting the current Republican nominees.

SALT LAKE CITY — Republican Donald Trump appears to have, in his earlier words, "a tremendous problem in Utah" as a new poll shows him slipping into a dead heat with Democrat Hillary Clinton since crude comments he made about women surfaced last weekend.

And along with the billionaire businessman's sudden fall, independent candidate and BYU graduate Evan McMullin surged into a statistical tie with the two major party presidential nominees, according to survey conducted Monday and Tuesday by Salt Lake City-based Y2 Analytics.

"A third-party candidate could win Utah as Utahns settle on one," said Quin Monson, Y2 Analytics founding partner.

McMullin may well have caught lightning in a bottle.

The poll shows Clinton and Trump tied at 26 percent, McMullin with 22 percent and Libertarian Gary Johnson getting 14 percent if the election were held today. Y2 Analytics surveyed 500 likely Utah voters over landlines and cellphones Oct. 10-11 The poll has a plus or minus 4.4 percent margin of error.

Thinking about the rigged election narrative in catastrophe theory terms

Couple of quick notes before we start. First, I haven't looked at a book on catastrophe theory for many, many years. Therefore, the chances of my saying something stupid are even higher than normal. Second, I have a feeling that we've had this conversation before, but I am kind of rushed and, to be perfectly honest, it's quicker for me to dictate this into my phone then to dig through the archives of the blog. Apologies for any disconcerting sense of déjà vu that might result.

First, a relevant paragraph from Josh Marshall:

It now seems quite likely that Hillary Clinton will win the November election and become the next President of the United States. But Donald Trump has been for months pushing the idea that the election may be stolen from him by some mix of voter fraud (by racial and ethnic minorities) or more systemic election rigging by persons unknown. Polls show that large numbers of his supporters believe this.

We are deep in bifurcation territory. Every snowflake that falls will have the likely effect of either slightly increasing the depth of the pile for sharply diminishing it.

One of the fundamental assumptions of the conservative movement has been that the angrier you get your base, the more you can count on their votes and their money. If you accept that, there is an undeniable logic behind the decision to portray lost elections as "stolen."

Unfortunately, it is also logical to assume that the argument "it is absolutely essential that you vote even though you know your vote won't matter" will eventually reach some breaking point. This can be particularly dangerous because it has the potential to strike across the spectrum of support. That's because the damage here can come both from those who question the official party narrative (who think you're a whiner) and  from those who believe it (who have no reason t go to the polls)..

And you thought #LeaveItBlank was out there

Insert Peter Thiel joke here.

From the New Republic:

On Wednesday #repealthe19th started trending among male Trump supporters, after an article by FiveThirtyEight observed that if women didn’t vote, Trump would have a far better chance of winning the presidential election.

Evangelicals and the clarifying shock

Remember our long-running thread on the curious relationship between the evangelicals and the conservative movement?

[From 2015]

I grew up in the Bible Belt and spent all of my formative years arguing with fundamentalists so I feel comfortable with the following claim: in the past 40 years, the conservative movement has had a larger impact on the evangelical community than the evangelical community has had on the conservative movement. Obviously in these situations, influence always runs both ways, but the changes on one side have been greater and far more strategically useful. The very fact that we have an alliance between conservative Catholics, Protestants, and Mormons says volumes.

There have always been tensions inherent in this relationship and they have grown over the years. Fortunately for the leaders of the evangelical movement, the GOP has generally tried to minimize those tensions by picking acceptable candidates who, in turn, went out of their way to show respect to members of the religious right.

As he does in so many contexts, Donald Trump has thrown the long-standing conflicts and contradictions into stark relief.


Sarah Jones writing for the New Republic:

Among his hardcore fans, Trump will survive these scandals; his supporters are now making that clear to his detractors. But his pious boosters can’t count on the same. Trump’s principal appeal to voters is his devotion to capitalism, not God. The religious right, meanwhile, pins itself to a claim of moral superiority. It always had more to lose.

Some evangelicals, like the Southern Baptist Convention’s Russell Moore, understand this, and have publicly criticized Trump’s convenient conversion. But their voices were never enough to sway the rank-and-file. The religious right was never as unique as it wanted everyone to believe, and now Trump has revealed the movement’s superiority to be the ruse it’s always been.

The religious right isn’t dead yet. But after this election becomes history, the movement will be forced to reckon with the consequences of its quest for power. Young adults, who overwhelmingly oppose Trump, are already leaving conservative churches, and the religious right’s Trump moment will surely only fuel this trend. If it had maintained a consistent public morality, maybe it could have retained some countercultural appeal. Now that its most visible leaders have sacrificed that authority, it has nothing left.

The statements of Perkins et al may well be considered their movement’s suicide note. Who will now believe they care for the sanctity of so-called “traditional marriage?” They anointed an infamous philanderer their standard-bearer. And who will believe they oppose abortion because they care for women? They backed a man who thinks sexual assault makes a good joke. Generations will remember their support for one of the most publicly misogynist and racist presidential candidates in American history.

In the Gospel of Matthew, Christ tells his disciples that no one can serve two masters; you’ll be loyal to one and not to the other. By endorsing Trump, the religious right chose a master—and sacrificed everything it says it stands for.

Ed Kilgore writing for New York Magazine:

Describing the Christian right as a by-product of cultural panic rather than religious fidelity is not something that would have ever occurred to the older generation of conservative Evangelical leaders. And so it does not occur to them — in public, anyway — to doubt the calculations that brought them to the awkward position of supporting Donald Trump, a man who, aside from his crudeness and prejudice and history of sexual immorality, clearly and openly worships the golden calf of worldly success.

The intergenerational tensions among conservative Evangelicals likely won’t matter at all on November 8. But down the road, the experience of sacrificing their integrity for a failed presidential campaign may have an impact on Christian conservative leaders who haven’t already traded their birthright of independence for a mess of Republican Party pottage. As it happens, America’s largest conservative Evangelical faith community, the Southern Baptist Convention, is home both to Russell Moore and to Jerry Falwell Jr., heir to the “moral majority” mantle of his late father and Trump’s earliest and most stolid clerical supporter. The two men represent very different paths ahead for the people in the pews they represent.