College-educated voters, especially White ones, are flocking toward Kamala Harris' corner, often after settling in suburbs of cities like Atlanta and Detroit

Kamala Harris attracts college-educated voters in record numbers (ABC)

Kamala Harris is on track to to win White college graduates by the largest margin in recorded history, according to reports yesterday at multiple news outlets. Citing the work of CNN data analyst Henry Enten, this is from a report at Mediaite: 

CNN’s data analyst Harry Enten presented some big numbers in favor of Vice President Kamala Harris that pointed to a potentially historic margin.

In a segment about 2024 election voters with college degrees, Enten told anchor John Berman that Harris was on track to win the largest margin of voters with college degrees in recorded history, seeing numbers that outdid the two most recent Democratic presidential candidates -- former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Joe Biden. But it was Harris’s gains with White college voters that were particularly notable to Enten:

Enten: Let’s start with White college grads, because White college grads have been this group that have been moving further and further to the left. Alright, this is the Democratic margin among White college grads. Look, Hillary Clinton won ’em by five points. Then Joe Biden won ’em by nine. Look at this margin that Kamala Harris is pulling up in the polls right now among White college grads. It’s an 18-point margin, double the margin that Joe Biden had just four years ago.

Enten: I went back through the record books. This would be the largest win for a Democratic presidential candidate among White college grads in recorded history. That is all the way back since the early 1950s. You could probably go back even further. But the bottom line is that Kamala Harris amongst this group is doing ridiculously, ridiculously well. And it’s one of the main reasons that she has been able to counter Donald Trump’s rising support among voters without a college degree. It’s because she’s doing very well among White voters with a college degree.

         Berman: What about all voters, not just White voters?

Enten: All right. So we looked at White voters with a college degree. How about all voters with a college degree? It’s basically the same story. It’s historically high support for a Democratic candidate. You see right now, Kamala Harris leads in the polls by 21 points with college-educated voters. That’s three points higher than Joe Biden did four years ago, at six points higher than Hillary Clinton did eight years ago. The bottom line is this, Mr. Berman, the electorate is becoming more polarized along education. And Democrats, at least among those with a college degree, are the beneficiaries of it. And Kamala Harris is doing historically well for a Democrat among voters with a college degree.

Berman then brought up another part of the equation — how many voters have college degrees? Enten had those numbers too. 

Enten: So, this is the second part, the key nugget here. An increasing share of the electorate — you know, you go back 44 years ago, just 21 percent of the electorate had a college degree. You go back 24 years ago, 31 percent. You go back four years ago, you’re up to 40 percent. This year, it looks like a historically high proportion of the electorate, 41 percent will have a college degree. You know who those voters are, they’re in the suburbs of places like Philadelphia, of Detroit. You go obviously to Madison, Wisconsin, right? A rising tide. More and more voters with a college degree. It’s what flipped the great state, and part of what flipped the great state of Georgia, right? Those voters with a college degree in the suburbs of Atlanta. 

This is a big reason Kamala Harris is still running a tight race right now, because even though she [is] losing a little bit of support among voters without a college degree, she’s gaining rapidly among those with a college degree, specifically White voters with a college degree. Either way, you look at it, historically high support at this particular point. 

Berman: So, put it in one sentence: More voters than ever with a college degree, she’s doing better than ever with voters with a college degree. Enten replied: That's exactly right, Mr. Berman.

After a deluge from Hurricane Helene, right-wing hucksters create torrents of conspiracy theories in an effort to garner attention from death and destruction

Devastation in North Carolina from Hurricane Helene (AP)

 

We are preparing a series of posts based on evidence that Donald Trump is woefully unfit to serve as president of the United States. Our first post in the series (published 10/1/24) shows Trump is frightfully ignorant of how government works, and we consider that to be the No. 1 reason he is unfit.

Today's post focuses on Trump's tortured relationship with the truth. He is a documented liar, and his false statements have serious consequences. In fact, we saw more examples of that over the weekend, and it involved matters of life and death. David Klepper of Associated Press (AP) provides details under the headline "After the deluge. the lies: misinformation and hoaxes about Helene cloud the recovery." Klepper writes:

The facts emerging from Hurricane Helene’s destruction are heartrending: Businesses and homes destroyed, whole communities nearly wiped out, hundreds of lives lost, hundreds of people missing.

Yet this devastation and despair is not enough for the extremist groups, disinformation agents, hucksters and politicians who are exploiting the disaster to spread false claims and conspiracy theories about it and the government’s response.

According to former President Donald Trump, the federal government is intentionally withholding aid to Republican disaster victims. Far-right extremist groups warn on social media that officials plan to bulldoze affected communities and seize the land from residents. A tale straight from science fiction asserts that Washington used weather control technology to steer Helene toward Republican voters in order to tilt the presidential election toward Democratic nominee Kamala Harris.

The claims, according to experts and local officials dealing with disaster response, say less about the reality of the widespread damage from Helene than they do about America's fractured politics and the fear and distrust shadowing an election year marked by assassination attempts and escalating global tension.

Debunking conspiracy theories takes time away from recovery efforts

As rescue work continues and authorities try to separate fact from fiction, the conspiracy theories are not helping. Elected leaders from both parties have had to set the record straight and urge people not to give into fear and rumor.

"If everyone could maybe please put aside the hate for a bit and pitch in to help, that would be great,” posted Glenn Jacobs, the retired professional wrestler known as Kane, who is now the Republican mayor of Knox County, Tennessee. Jacobs' post was intended to rebut rumors that workers from the Federal Emergency Management Agency were seizing relief supplies from private citizens.

Many of the conspiracy theories focus on hard-hit North Carolina, a state key to winning the White House. Rumors circulated that FEMA was raiding storm donations and withholding body bags, forcing local hospitals to stack the bodies of victims. One claim suggested federal authorities would condemn the entire town of Chimney Rock and prohibit resettlement in order to commandeer a valuable lithium mine nearby.

False claims of blocked relief flights and aid withheld from Republicans

Elon Musk, the owner of Tesla, X and SpaceX, posted that private relief flights to North Carolina were being blocked by the Federal Aviation Administration, a claim dismissed as false by Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

Despite the tradition of Democrats and Republicans putting aside politics for disaster response, many conspiracy theories suggest Democrats such as President Joe Biden or North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper are intentionally withholding aid from Republicans. Trump has pushed the claim, as has North Carolina's lieutenant governor, Mark Robinson, the embattled GOP nominee for governor.

“They’re being treated very badly in the Republican areas,” Trump told Fox News, ignoring reports and photo and video evidence of recovery efforts underway throughout the region. “They’re not getting water, they’re not getting anything.”

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones endorsed Trump's fact-free allegation. Jones, the founder of InfoWars, popularized the idea that the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Connecticut that killed 20 children in 2012 was faked. “Exclusive: Victims of Hurricane Helene Confirm The Federal Government is Purposely Blocking Rescuers and Stealing Aid In an Attempt to Keep Deep Red Areas From Voting," Jones posted Thursday on X.

Disinformation campaigns by China and Russia amplify the misleading claims

State-run media and disinformation campaigns run by China and Russia have amplified false and misleading claims about the response to the storm. Both countries have used social media and state news stories to criticize responses to past U.S. natural disasters, part of a larger effort to stoke division and distrust among Americans.

State and local officials from both parties have condemned the conspiracy theories as rumors, saying the focus should be on recovery, not political division and hearsay. Responding to the hoaxes is taking up time that should go toward assisting victims, said North Carolina state Sen. Kevin Corbin, a Republican who urged his constituents not to give into hoaxes.

“Friends can I ask a small favor?" Corbin posted Thursday on Facebook. “Will you all help STOP this conspiracy theory junk that is floating all over Facebook and the internet... Please don’t let these crazy stories consume you.”

After Robinson, the GOP candidate for North Carolina governor, posted that state officials had not prepared for the storm, a spokesman for the governor accused Robinson of mounting “an online disinformation campaign.” North Carolina officials say the response to Helene is the largest in state history, including thousands of members of the National Guard and other recovery workers, millions of meals, dozens of aircraft and more than 1,000 chainsaws.

Trump has tried to tie the hurricane’s aftermath to immigration, a leading issue of his campaign. He falsely claimed that FEMA had run out of money because all of it had gone to programs for undocumented immigrants.

The agency's funding for disaster aid is stretched, but that is because of the many parts of the country dealing with the effects of hurricanes, wildfires and other calamities. Disaster aid is funded separately from other Department of Homeland Security programs that support immigration-related spending.

Far-out tales of space lasers, fake snow and weather control technology

Bizarre stories proposing that the government used weather control technology to aim the hurricane at Republican voters quickly racked up millions of views on X and other platforms.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., endorsed the idea, posting Wednesday on X: “Yes they can control the weather. It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”

Far-out tales of space lasers, fake snow and weather control technology -- sometimes tinged with antisemitism — have spread after recent natural disasters, including a snowstorm in Texas and last year’s wildfire in Maui.

Experts who study conspiracy theories say big events like disasters — or the Sept. 11 attacks or the COVID-19 pandemic — create perfect conditions for conspiracy theories to spread because large numbers of anxious people are eager to find explanations for shocking events.

Responding to the volume of false claims about Helene, the Red Cross urged people to consult trustworthy sources of information and to think twice before reposting conspiracy theories.

“Sharing rumors online without first vetting the source and verifying facts ultimately hurts people — people who have just lost their homes, neighborhoods, and, in some cases, loved ones," the organization wrote in a public plea.

Jack Smith's sweeping new filing in D.C. court case shines hot light on the criminal mindset that drove Trump's effort to overturn the 2020 election results

Donald Trump and Steve Bannon (AP)

Three days before the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump knew he was going to claim victory whether the vote tabulations showed that result or not, according to a New York Times report on Special Counsel Jack Smith's sweeping new court filing that is the most detailed account yet of Trump's efforts to overturn the election results -- and those efforts are at the heart of Smith's attempt to hold Trump accountable in the election-interference case in Washington, D.C., before U.S. Judge Tanya Chutkan.

Under the headline "Trump saw 2020 election results as an obstacle, not an outcome; A court filing offers insight into his thinking and makes it hard to see him accepting another loss," The Times' Jess Bidgood writes at the paper's On Politics newsletter:

Three days before the 2020 election, one of former President Donald Trump’s closest advisers told a private gathering of his supporters that, no matter what happened on Election Day, the president was going to say he had won.

“He’s going to declare victory,” said the adviser, according to a new court filing by the special counsel investigating Trump’s efforts to hold onto power after that election.

“That doesn’t mean he’s the winner. He’s just going to say he’s the winner,” said the adviser, whose name is redacted but who appears from other details to be Stephen Bannon.

The filing is a step in the effort by the special counsel, Jack Smith, to prove that Trump is not immune from prosecution for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

But, one month before Trump is on the ballot again, it also offered new details that paint a chilling picture of the way the former president and current candidate seems to think about elections: as an exercise in which the vote total is entirely beside the point. In his world, adverse election results were an obstacle, not an outcome.

“It doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election,” Trump told family members at one point, according to the filing. “You still have to fight like hell.”

Coming at a time when his allies, including his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, have tried to downplay Trump’s efforts to hold onto power four years ago, the filing offers a glimpse of Trump’s thinking that makes it difficult to imagine him accepting a loss in November.

“Trump is in to the end,” Bannon said shortly after the 2020 election.       

In a section that might make some readers reach their "puke point," Bidgood shows            that Trump and his Republican allies had little regard for the actual vote totals; they            were mainly interested in creating an environment of chaos and confusion that would            allow them to steal the election for Trump. Bidgood writes:

The filing sheds new light on the way Trump and his advisers viewed the number of votes he had won as little more than a trifling detail. Trump and his allies have argued that he contested the results in any way he could because he genuinely believed they were fraudulent.

The filing lays out the ways Trump dismissed the real numbers. He sidelined advisers who knew that results, as they were, meant he had not won, and relied instead on the counsel of allies like Rudolph Giuliani, the former New York mayor. He ignored or even threatened swing state Republicans who presented him with inconvenient truths, as when a person who appears to be Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, said the state had found evidence that only two voters who had died had cast ballots — not thousands, as Trump had claimed.

“You know what they did and you’re not reporting it,” Trump said, according to the filing. “That’s a criminal, you know, that’s a criminal offense.”

The notion of Trump accusing someone else of committing a criminal offense is breathtakingly rich. From The Times report: 

As they looked for ways to gum up the electoral-certification process at any level, Trump and his allies knew confusion and conjecture were their most important tools.

“We don’t have the evidence,” a person who appears to be Giuliani told state legislators in Arizona in early December, “but we have lots of theories.”

They also seemed to understand that just the existence of lawsuits would help legitimize Trump’s claims in the minds of the public. That might be why Trump showed so little concern when he was told by an adviser that Giuliani’s false claims of fraud could not be proved in court.

“The details don’t matter,” Trump said.

Jack Smith's new document, and Bidgood's reporting on it, combine to present a classic portrayal of a criminal mind at work. That this criminal happened to still be president of the United States, makes a reasonable mind ask, "How did anybody ever vote for this guy, in 2016 or 2020? Of more import at the moment is "What about the 2024 campaign, which is about to head into its final month? Polling shows Trump has enough support to make the race with Kamala Harris a virtual tie right now. And that raises this question: We know Trump is a one-time convicted felon, the Smith case could make him a two-time convicted felon, he has been adjudicated a rapist in a New York court, he has been sued twice by the same woman (E. Jean Carroll) and found liable for sexual abuse and defamation, he has been caught on tape bragging about grabbing women by the genitals, which effectively was a confession to sexual assault. After having extramarital sex with a porn star (Stormy Daniels), Trump paid hush money to keep her quiet and preserve his political viability.

It's bad enough that anyone voted for this guy the two previous times he ran for president, but how could anyone seriously consider a vote for Trump in 2024, when we know he is a walking, talking crime spree? Are some Americans so dim-witted that they actually believe we need a two-time felon, an adjudicated rapist, a sexual assaulter, a man who had sex with a porn star while his wife was home with an infant. At the heart of all these criminal and civil cases, is a mountain of deceit -- but some people think this guy belongs in the White House. of all places? If you are old enough to vote, how you vote is your business, but I suggest you do us all a favor and stay home on election day, or better yet, show up at the polls and vote for someone who actually is fit to serve - Kamala Harris.

And please, don't try to con the rest of us with any claims that voting for Trump in 2024 was your patriotic duty. You might be an American, but you are not a patriot, in any sense of the word. In fact, your vote for Trump is an act of disrespect -- like spitting on the graves of true patriots (including my father) who risked their lives to protect our democracy. 

What about this year's election on November 5, 2024? My prayer is that enough Americans have sufficient common sense to reject Trump (and his wannabe-dictator dreams), ensuring our democracy will survive and thrive well into the future. 

Let's return to Jess Bidgood's reporting for her thoughts on that subject:

It was only three days ago that J.D. Vance sought to dismiss Trump’s efforts to overturn the election as a thing of the past. When Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota asked him on the debate stage this week if the election had been stolen, Vance said breezily that he was “focused on the future.”

Trump repeated his false claim that the 2020 election was “rigged” earlier this week.

And, reading Smith’s court filing now, there are striking parallels between Trump and his allies’ actions in 2020 and certain steps they are taking today — and it’s something Democrats and allies of Vice President Kamala Harris are warning about as they make the case that Trump is a danger to democracy.

“We’re setting ourselves up for another bad election-certification process,” said former Representative Dave Trott of Michigan, a Republican who has endorsed Harris.

The Republican National Committee has started a flurry of lawsuits, some of which are premised on false claims, that voting-rights experts say appear to be part of preparations to contest the results of the 2024 election.

“Putting false claims in the form of a lawsuit is a way to sanitize and add legitimacy,” Jessica Marsden, a lawyer at Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan group that monitors elections, told my colleagues last week.

At his rallies and in social media posts, Trump has also been promoting false claims that immigrants who are not citizens will vote during the election, echoing the way his false claims about mail-ballot fraud before the 2020 election sowed the seeds of distrust in those results.

“A lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote. They can’t even speak English,” he said falsely during his debate with Harris last month.

And, with election results expected to take days in key states, the country could face the same kind of lag in vote-counting that Trump moved to exploit last time by declaring victory right away.

In 2020, Bannon had told the group of supporters that they knew more Republicans would vote on Election Day, while more Democrats would vote by mail, so the ballots counted in the days after Election Day were more likely to break for Joe Biden.

“They’re going to have a natural disadvantage and Trump’s going to take advantage of it,” Bannon said, “that’s our strategy.”

Tim Walz unmasks J.D. Vance in VP debate as a liar and election-denier, a true-believing Trumper who has no answers to problems of everyday Americans

Mary Trump on Last Word With Lawrence O'Donnell

 

Tim Walz was not expected to dazzle anyone at Tuesday night's vice presidential debate. And for most of the evening, it was clear that J.D. Vance was the slicker debater on stage. But Walz, after a slow start, gained his footing and gave substantive answers to questions about issues that likely will receive plenty of attention between now and election day. Perhaps most importantly, Walz waded through Vance's lies, which were so voluminous, they were hard to keep up with. For example, many of Vance's answers included statements that went something like this: (1) We're not doing a good job with that issue, and we need to do better (although he usually offered no policy statements on how we could do better); (2) Kamala Harris is to blame for that problem. (You would have thought Harris had been president the past four years, not Joe Biden.)

As the debate was winding down, Walz asked the question that unmasked Vance as an election-denying traitor who is little more than a shill for the guy at the top of the Republican ticket, Donald Trump. In putting Vance on the spot, Walz produced what probably will be the most memorable moment from any of this year's debates. And he probably disabused anyone of the notion that Vance is just a younger, more coherent version of Trump. Unless Vance falls out of Trump's good graces -- and lots of people in Trump's orbit seem to fall out of his good graces -- he is likely to be around for a while. And Walz showed that Vance is a true believer of Trump's ideas (or what passes as a Trump idea), which means some form of Trumpism disease could be with us for some time. That's a problem Americans will have to deal with at some point in the future -- unless Trump loses at the ballot box in November or winds up in jail (or both). But the present is our current topic. and Mary L. Trump -- clinical psychologist, best- selling author, Substack writer, frequent guest on news programs, and Donald Trump's niece, is our focus. Mary has been a vocal opponent of her uncle's efforts to reclaim the White House, knowing far better than most of us that he is off-the-charts unfit for the job. So, she watched Tuesday night's debate with an unusual set of concerns and insights. She provides her analysis at her Substack site ("The Good In Us"), under the headline "More Than One Way to Win; More than one way to lose. Here are Mary Trump's thoughts on the debate and the important role Tim Walz played in revealing J.D. Vance to simply be a repackaged Donald Trump, one who doesn't seem to have a mind of his own. Mary Trump writes:

If any of you who watched our livestream of the vice-presidential debate at Mary Trump Media (Tuesday) night, you probably know I was pretty unhappy with the way things unfolded.

Maybe it’s because we’re so used to the IV drip of poison that Donald has injected into the body politic—just think about the massive amounts of stress that often warp our expectations—but it’s almost as if we've lost touch with what's normal.

One could argue that, from a certain perspective, this was a normal debate. There were no fireworks, nobody ranted and raved, the participants were generally civil. So, yes, if we look at the debate through the lens of what a debate should be in normal times, nothing unexpected happened.

If, however, you look at the debate through the lens of what’s at stake in this election, and what it meant that J.D. Vance was even on that stage, the evening did not go as I thought it would. Right before the debate started, the last thing I said was that, although I was worried Vance was going to be normalized in some way, I was much more concerned that he was going to be seen as viable.

The thing is, even though this might sound paranoid and hyperbolic, in an "everything is stacked against the Democrats" sort of way, my paranoia was not without grounding. Corporate media, for example, have spent the past nine years normalizing a business failure, racist, traitor, criminal, and sexual assaulter of women. It is in large part because of this normalization that Donald Trump is able to run for the presidency again.

Then, of course, there’s the electoral college. Democrats have to run 3 to 5 points ahead nationally in order to win. And because of the Supreme Court’s corrupt illegitimate super-majority, we can’t even be certain that winning will be enough.

With the deck so stacked against us, when we are presented with opportunities to gain advantage over our opponents, we need to seize them with both hands. And Tim Walz didn’t do that last night, at least not toward the beginning.

In the hours since the debate, I’ve come to feel differently than I did while watching it. In many ways, Walz did what he needed to do in appealing to swing voters. I think, on balance, he won—not on style, perhaps, but on substance. If only that were enough.

Because J.D. Vance is a notorious misogynist who hates women in a way that is deep and multi-faceted, the discussion on abortion rights gave Walz an opportunity to do what he does best—make the conversation personal and heart-felt. He had one of his best moments when he talked about Amber Thurman, a 28-year-old woman who died from complications after taking abortion medication. She sought help in an Atlanta-area hospital but was forced to wait 20 hours before doctors were willing to treat her.

“She happened to be in Georgia, a restrictive state,” Walz said. “Because of that, she had to travel a long distance to North Carolina to try and get her care. Amber Thurman died in that journey back and forth. The [fact of the] matter is, how can we as a nation say that your life and your rights, as basic as the right to control your own body, is determined on geography? There’s a very real chance, had Amber Thurman lived in Minnesota, she would be alive today.”

I think we can say almost unequivocally that Amber would absolutely be alive today if she had lived in a state that believed women were first-class citizens who had an unfettered right to health care.

It took more than an hour and a half, but the moderators finally got around to asking about January 6^th. This is when Walz showed up in the way I’d hoped he would have from the beginning. Not only was his answer pitch perfect, but his exchange with Vance revealed that Donald’s running is an anti-American, election-denying traitor.

“[Donald] is still saying he didn’t lose the [2020] election,” Walz said. And then he turned to Vance and asked, “Did he lose the 2020 election?”

“Tim,” Vance said, “I’m focused on the future.” 

And that’s when Gov. Walz gave his best response of the night:

“That is a damning non-answer.”

Having had time to reflect, I do think Walz accomplished much of what he set out to accomplish. But he did something else that will reverberate outside of the confines of the debate and this election.

J.D. Vance’s running mate is an almost 80-year-old fascist and authoritarian who also happens to be deeply unwell, both physically and psychologically. Forty-year-old Vance is also a fascist and, if Donald gets back into the White House, he will almost certainly become president at some point during the next term.

Last night Vance did one of the things he needed to do, considering most Americans don’t know what a vile, creepy, cruel, and violent man he is—he seemed reasonably measured and, at times, even thoughtful and almost sincere. Of course, he had to lie almost 100 times in order to create that impression, but since the moderators didn’t bother to fact check him, he got away with it.

Walz knew this debate was not going to be fact checked; he knew J.D. Vance is an inveterate liar, a despicable racist, and a misogynist, so I found the concessions he made to his opponent shocking; I could not believe how much ground he ceded. When you have a really decent guy like Walz say to a really bad guy like Vance: “I agree with you;” “I can meet you halfway;” “You have a point,” it becomes concerning. Vance, one of the most abnormal and dangerous politicians in America, not only gets normalized, he actually seems viable.

Polls before the debate showed that Vance was the most unpopular vice-presidential candidate in American history, with only 30% of Americans viewing him favorably. After the debate, that number jumped 11% to 41%. That’s a problem. It's also a sign that Walz' agreeableness helped Vance be viewed favorably, and that certainly was not one of Democrats' goals going into the debate. Mary Trump says:

Democrats need to understand that you don’t make common cause with fascists. You just don’t.

Harris is poised to win all seven key swing states -- she leads in Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, with a 3.3 percent overall margin

Nate Silver (Getty)

 

Vice President Kamala Harris is in position to win all seven crucial swing states over Donald Trump, according to a report at the New York Sun, citing one of the nation's most prominent pollsters. Under the headline "Vice President Kamala Harris Poised for Swing-State Sweep in Nate Silver’s Latest Forecast; Separate Projection from the FiveThirtyEight founder also shows the Democratic candidate leading nationally by 3.3 percent," the Sun's Perry Chiaramonte writes:

The latest projections from a leading polling analyst show Vice President Harris in a consistent scenario where she wins all seven of the crucial swing states in November’s election.

Nate Silver, the founder of polling aggregator FiveThirtyEight, said in a presidential model he released on his Substack over the weekend, which shows that the Democratic presidential nominee has the most frequent combination involving a sweep of all seven battleground states.

Mr. Silver, who is no longer affiliated with FiveThirtyEight, said his new projection model shows all seven swing states  —  Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, and Nevada — polling within two percentage points. The most common outcome throughout 70,000 simulations was Ms. Harris winning in all the aforementioned states, adding that she came out on top in 15,273 projections.

President Trump had the second most likely scenario, winning all swing states in 13,912 simulations.

“[T]here is roughly a 40 percent likelihood that either candidate could sweep all swing states in this election cycle,” Mr. Silver said in his Substack post.

The encouraging news for Harris did not end with Silver's analysis of swing states. It carried over to projections in other states, Chiaramonte writes:

President Trump had the second most likely scenario, winning all swing states in 13,912 simulations.

“[T]here is roughly a 40 percent likelihood that either candidate could sweep all swing states in this election cycle,” Mr. Silver said in his Substack post.

According to Mr. Silver’s presidential model, Ms. Harris is currently leading over Trump in Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, while he is ahead in the states of Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina.

Mr. Silver’s projections show that the race is still close. Ms. Harris has a 57.3 percent chance of winning the Electoral College, while Trump has a 42.5 percent chance.

In terms of the national popular vote, Mr. Silver shows the vice president ahead by 3.3 points, or 49.3 percent, versus Trump, who is at an even 46 percent.

Mr. Silver’s projections also point out that the vice president has a nearly 25 percent chance of winning the popular vote but losing the Electoral College.

As Trump attacks Harris with noxious language, he proves that he has no clue how government works, perhaps the No. 1 reason he is unfit to be president

Joyce White Vance of MSNBC

 

When Donald Trump recently called Kamala Harris "mentally impaired," it was unusually nasty and nonsensical -- even by his standards. More importantly, it might have been the strongest sign in a growing body of evidence that Trump has neither the temperament nor the intelligence to serve as president. In recent comments to Axios about Trump's baseless attacks on Harris, one of our nation's foremost historians seemed to be thinking along those lines.

It is not unusual for Trump to use dark, fear-mongering language -- seemingly as a means to keep his MAGA fan base in a state of agitation. But his words directed at Harris were one of several recent instances where his language seemed particularly vile and outside the boundaries of normal political discourse. Do we run the risk of allowing Trump to normalize rude, insulting language in a way that could coursen a public environment that already is marked by divisiveness and tension? An expert on presidents and their use of words hints that she thinks the answer is yes.

Here at Legal Schnauzer, this is the first in a series of posts that will show Donald Trump is wildly unfit to be America's president. His main interest -- according to words straight from his own mouth(see here, here, here, and here.) -- is to discard our democracy and replace it with an authoritarian regime that would operate way outside the boundaries of our constitution, surely pleasing the strongmen" he so admires, such as Vladimir Putin of Russia, Viktor Orban of Hungary, Kim Jong Un of North Korea, and Xi Jinping of China.

We soon will be presenting a string of posts, which will  include powerful evidence that Trump should never be allowed anywhere near the White House. For one reason, we now have plenty of data that shows Trump was a dreadful president the first time around, and many experts suspect a second Trump term would be even worse. 

But first, let's examine Axios' reporting on Trump's verbal assaults against Kamala Harris. Under the headline "Dark Trump: Former president calls Harris “mentally disabled,” Mike Allen writes:

Former President Trump, in a self-described "dark speech," told a rally in Wisconsin recently that his opponent, Vice President Harris, is "mentally impaired" and "mentally disabled."

• "Joe Biden became mentally impaired," Trump said during a riff about immigration. "Kamala [mispronounces name] was born that way. [Laughter.] She was born that way. And if you think about it, only a mentally disabled person could have allowed this to happen to our country." (Video)

Why it matters: Even for Trump, it was weird, nasty and nonsensical — when he needed to be swaying "national security moms" and other undecideds, 38 days out from Election Day.

• Trump told the rally in Prairie du Chien (prairie of the dog): "This is a dark speech."

• The big picture: Presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin — whose latest bestseller is The Leadership Journey: How Four Kids Became President — told me, "While former President Trump's latest outrageous claim about Vice President Harris does seem beyond the pale even for him, and even in our country's long history of political invective, what is even more disturbing is that it will now be taken as a matter of course, demonstrating we've become inured to his degrading language."

• "Think back to 2015," she added, "in the very early days of his first campaign when he said John McCain was not a war hero because he was captured. The N.Y. Post predicted that his campaign would implode. The front-page headline declared: 'Trump is toast ... DON VOYAGE!"

The other side: The Harris campaign, highlighting Trump's comment that he was giving a "dark speech," said he "gave a gloomy review of his angry, rambling diatribe."

Trump went off on other tangents that made him sound even more like a madman in the making. Allen writes:

Other comments by Trump during the hour-plus remarks at the rally, which was moved inside at the last minute because of security concerns:

• He clarified that in addition to his plans to prosecute any 2024 election cheaters if he wins, "and if we can, we'll go back to the last one [2020], too, if we're allowed. But we're gonna prosecute people." (Video) (Trump can't seem to get over the notion that presidents are prosecutors, who direct the charging or non-charging decisions of the Department of Justice. They aren't, and they don't, no matter how many times Trump tells the worn-out lie that Joe Biden was behind the charges in his hush money case.

• There's no evidence of widespread fraud during the 2020 election. And Trump continues to claim that the only way he'll lose in November is if Democrats cheat.
• On Harris and the border: "She's letting in people who are going to walk into your house, break into your door and they'll do anything they want, they'll do anything they want. These people are animals. ... These are stone-cold killers. ... It's also the fact that they're taking all of our Black population's jobs and our Hispanic population's jobs." (Video ... Fact check)
• On his debate performance: "All the stupid people — the anchors, back there — no, they say: "He fell into a trap' — her trap. She can't set a mental trap." (Video)

• Joyce White Vance, MSNBC legal analyst and former U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama, has an answer for Trump's tall tale, under the headline "Donald Trump's plot to prosecute Joe Biden without probable cause is based on a lie and ignorance, as MSNBC analyst Joyce White Vance makes clear. From a Legal Schnauzer post dated 4/9/24:
• Donald Trump and his allies are plotting to prosecute President Joe Biden if Trump wins the November election, according to a report from Axios. After months of Congressional inquiries, no evidence of wrongdoing by Biden has surfaced, so it is unclear what would form the basis of a Trump-fueled prosecution. But this much appears to be clear: Trump apparently wants to prosecute Biden because he believes Biden had him prosecuted -- even though Trump has offered no evidence to support that claim. One prominent legal analyst has stated that Biden did not have Trump prosecuted and could not have done so. Those matters come down to grand jurors; more on that in a moment.

• Also, the Axios report suggests Trump has no problem violating roughly 40 years of U.S. policy that holds the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is to operate independently of the White House -- that presidents are not prosecutors, and they are to be excluded from decisions to charge or not charge suspected wrongdoers.

  Trump might be determined to seek revenge against Biden, and other perceived political enemies -- as Trump repeatedly has said he intends to do in a possible second term. But for now, Trump only has managed to make himself look bad, adding to the substantial evidence we already had that he is wildly unfit to serve as president. In this instance, Trump's unfitness manifests itself in this indisputable fact -- he simply has no idea how government works, even after spending four years in the White House during a chaotic and dysfunctional administration that numerous experts have described as a failed presidency. 

  The plot to wrongfully prosecute Biden, and perhaps members of his family, goes beyond Trump to include members of the Republican Party, as reporter Stephen Neukam writes under the headline "Scoop: Trump, GOP plot 2025 criminal probe of Bidens":

  Republicans' impeachment probe of President Biden is unraveling because of a lack of evidence — but their work could become the basis for federal investigations and even prosecutions of the Biden family if Donald Trump wins re-election, Axios has learned.

  Why it matters: Trump has vowed retribution against his enemies if he wins in November. House Republicans have struggled to show Biden has done anything illegal, but people close to Trump are still plotting to use the Justice Department against Biden and his family.

• A source close to the Trump campaign said that "everything you have seen from the Biden DOJ," in terms of the charges against Trump, "you can expect to see from the Trump DOJ."

• Driving the news: House Republicans have alleged that Biden should be impeached because he illicitly benefited from lucrative foreign deals arranged by his son Hunter.

• Despite their difficulty proving that, Trump has said he thinks Biden should be prosecuted anyway — because Trump is being prosecuted now.
• "By weaponizing the DOJ against his Political Opponent, ME, Joe has opened a giant Pandora's Box," Trump posted on Truth Social in January.

The items highlighted in blue above get to the heart of the matter -- Trump wants to prosecute Biden because he believes, contrary to evidence, that Biden is having him prosecuted. In other words, Trump is playing a tit-for-tat game. Prosecutions, however, are serious matters, and it helps to understand at least a few basics of criminal procedure. For example, a criminal investigation is not to begin until there is evidence of a crime.That seems simple enough, but Trump apparently cannot grasp it. The standard to meet is called probable cause. The link in the previous sentence notes that probable cause is found in the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, in the Bill of Rights. But apparently Trump is ignorant when it comes to key provisions of our founding documents. Still, chunks of the American electorate, particularly the MAGA chunks, claim to support a presidential candidate who is clueless about a concept as simple as probable cause, which is front and center in the Bill of Rights. That tells me a lot of GOPers who claim to support Trump aren't taking the 2024 election seriously -- and themselves have no idea what Trump does, or does not, stand for. (Hint: Trump has made it clear he does not know, or intend to abide by, the U.S. Constitution. And some on the right seriously think he is fit to be president.) . . . 

Almost every issue raised in the Axios article grows from the idea that Joe Biden is having Trump prosecuted. In Trump's diseased, narcissistic brain, that has to be true because Trump cannot be responsible for anything that goes wrong. But this is a lie, one Trump apparently is convinced his MAGA followers are gullible enough to believe. But here is the truth, as stated by MSNBC legal analyst and former Alabama U.S. Attorney Joyce White Vance:

Joyce White Vance, former U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama and current legal analyst for MSNBC, stated in a recent tweet: "Joe Biden didn't indict Trump. Prosecutors must go before a grand jury, made up of citizens, including Republicans & Democrats. These citizens hear evidence & vote on whether a defendant should be charged. Different grand juries have now done that with Trump 91 times."

So it all comes down to grand jurors. But Trump apparently realizes there are too many grand jurors to keep track of, and their deliberations generally are conducted in private, so Trump has to blame one guy, Biden.This is the kind of thinking that, in a president, could cause the U.S. to bomb Iran for a supposed wrong that Saudi Arabia committed. That is the kind of mishap that could spark a world war. But Trump displays that kind of rattled thinking on an almost daily basis.