An LA Times poll shows that Kamala Harris has surged in California:
Harris leads Trump 59% to 34% in the electoral-vote-rich Golden State, a margin 7 points larger than President Biden held earlier this year.... Fueling the surge by the vice president are much higher levels of support that Harris receives from younger voters, ages 18 to 29, whose backing of the Democrats grew by 23 percentage points; and Black voters, whose backing jumped by 16 percentage points.... 11 points among liberals and 10 points among Latinos,
This doesn't matter electorally since Harris was always going to win California anyway. But it's strong evidence that she's doing really well at increasing enthusiasm and support among traditional Democratic base groups who had been reluctant to support Biden. I mean, 23 points among young voters. That's unreal.
Harris has given millions of people instant permission to back the Democratic nominee, which they wanted to do all along. Only Biden's age was holding them back.
I'm not sure it was Biden's age per se. It was his inability or unwillingness to aggressively promote himself to the voters and to counter the attacks coming from the other side.
Trump was keeping up a constant drumbeat that Biden had turned the country into some kind of hell hole, and despite all the evidence to the contrary, we basically heard crickets from Joe. It was a problem long before the debate. I kept telling myself that he was keeping his powder dry for the last months of the campaign, but the debate was the time to shift gears and he failed miserably.
If this all has a happy ending, the historical irony will be that the debate that we were all so depressed about may have been the luckiest thing to ever happen. It was early enough to put the problem front and center when there was still time (barely) to do something about it.
+ for the first paragraph.
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+ for the third paragraph.
+1/2 for the first paragraph
+ for the second paragraph
+++ for the third paragraph
Yes. (Why doesn't WordPress have a thumbs up function, or most other normal things?)
No bucks, no buck rogers. If I recall correctly, this is a site based on a free offering of WordPress, and without advertising.
+1
I always thought it was the tone and focus of the campaign that was the biggest problem. The negative focus on the threat to democracy wasn’t moving the needle. Harris has turned that around, running a positive, hope-filled campaign with impressive results.
I really thought it was Biden's inability to articulate his accomplishments and what will happen if Trump is elected. He really seems to have aged significantly over the past year and his speech does not carry any confidence when speaking. Dems really needed someone to continually point out Trump's lies and contemptuous behaviors. Harris is doing that and voters are noticing.
Joe Biden has long been a mediocre campaigner at best, the weakest of any Dem president in my life. To his credit, he's been a remarkably effective president, the best since at least LBJ.
He didn't run a great 2020 campaign to propel him to the White House. At the time, I thought his weak communication skills would keep him from winning the nomination. But he won the nom, then the election over Trump. If he had an advantage, it was universal name recognition in a crowded field, a simple theme, and the desire within the party to stop Bernie Sanders from winning the nomination. The party rallied behind Joe when he won SC.
Age didn't make him a poor communicator in 2024, though he has slowed down. But this year the party never rallied behind him. There's been plotting to find a replacement for a long time. The aftermath of the debate is when it went public and in the end took him out.
It looks like a happy ending may be in store. But I don't think the back-room plotters won the day. I think Joe won in the end. There's a division in the Dem party, with the Pelosi and Obama people on one side. They maneuvered to get Joe out, but lost on the decision of a successor. They didn't want Kamala. Joe did. And that's the future of the party. A long way still to go, but Harris-Walz appears to be on its way to a historic win.
I think it's important to remember that he basically promised to be a one-term President when he ran in 2020. "A bridge to a new generation" came out of his mouth many more times than once. But he got to love the perks too much, and people were seriously disappointed.
He was specifically asked about this a few times during the 2020 campaign and he explicitly refused to commit be a single-term president. It was various Biden handlers who hinted that this might be the game plan; Biden was not onboard with it.
Biden's unconditional support of the Gaza genocide in the form of an endless stream of bombs and other munitions was also a problem. Harris is being super cagey on this issue, which is smart, but she has said that there needs to be a cease fire so the door is slightly ajar as opposed to bolted shut. This is probably enough for AIPAC to start dumping money into the Trump campaign.
Saw this in a Nation magazine article today:
"Palestinian Americans have learned that the Democratic Party will bomb your homeland, kill your family, use your own money to do it, and still expect your vote."
Ignoring the fact that Republicans would atleast do the same or worse. It was Trump that recognized Jerusalem as Israels capital. If they think the Democrats are bad, they're in for a shock if Trump wins.
Yup - in elections this close, they are truly cutting off their nose to spite their face
The quote still stands. I remember when Bill Clinton invoked the same argument after he "ended welfare as we know it" and pushed "3 strikes and you're out" laws. "HA HA HA Who else ya gonna vote for? Thbbb!"
And the Republican alternative to those would have been worse. There is no perfect candidate in politics. We get to pick the best of the worst most of the time. Harris is far preferable to Trump. As was Biden.
Sadly this has been the excuse Dems have used over and over ad infinitum to disappoint their base every election. It is true, but it is also why they can barely defeat someone as despicable and blatantly unqualified as Trump, when not losing to him.
Harris is surging because younger people have not seen this play out so many times that they have lost any hope Harris will actually be better.
The day will come when Democrates actually follow through on what is both popular and the right thing to do, but is it this day? I'm not a young voter but I keep hoping....
I don't understand this attitude. We just had almost 4 remarkable years of Dems doing what they said they would. It is amazing what the Biden administration and the Democrats and Congress have managed to do in the face of Republican obstructon. Bernie Sanders would not have gotten half of this done but he would have righteously bemoaned his failures to make the other side do what he wanted. There are no magic wands in a democracy of 340 million people..
Yes, thanks for the realist perspective. We live under a system with many in-built features designed to keep a majority from getting everything it wants (a few too many such features, but changing the Constitution is difficult). We are fated to be disappointed sometimes and elated other times. I'm elated that we're on track to take action on climate change, that the administration took steps to increase health-care coverage and reduce costs, that it adopted an industrial policy that will pay dividends. Disappointed that we didn't get Build Back Better, but Joe Biden got more through a badly broken Congress than anyone thought possible.
Yes and I remember when Ralph Nader, that vain self righteous idiot said there was no difference between Al Gore and George W. Bush. How'd that work out ?
People opposing the Israeli action seem to consistently overrate the electoral downside of Biden's policies in that regard. Kind of human nature to do so --- we read some essay that suggests that, and we want it to be true and give it more credibility than it deserves.
BTW, while there are many bad nouns and adjectives that can be attached to that operation, genocide is not one of them.
"But another part of my apprehension had to do with the fact that my view of what was happening in Gaza had shifted. On 10 November 2023, I wrote in the New York Times: “As a historian of genocide, I believe that there is no proof that genocide is now taking place in Gaza, although it is very likely that war crimes, and even crimes against humanity, are happening. […] We know from history that it is crucial to warn of the potential for genocide before it occurs, rather than belatedly condemn it after it has taken place. I think we still have that time.”
I no longer believe that. By the time I travelled to Israel, I had become convinced that at least since the attack by the IDF on Rafah on 6 May 2024, it was no longer possible to deny that Israel was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions. It was not just that this attack against the last concentration of Gazans – most of them displaced already several times by the IDF, which now once again pushed them to a so-called safe zone – demonstrated a total disregard of any humanitarian standards. It also clearly indicated that the ultimate goal of this entire undertaking from the very beginning had been to make the entire Gaza Strip uninhabitable, and to debilitate its population to such a degree that it would either die out or seek all possible options to flee the territory. In other words, the rhetoric spouted by Israeli leaders since 7 October was now being translated into reality – namely, as the 1948 UN Genocide Convention puts it, that Israel was acting “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part”, the Palestinian population in Gaza, “as such, by killing, causing serious harm, or inflicting conditions of life meant to bring about the group’s destruction”.
Former IDF soldier and historian Omer Bartov
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/13/israel-gaza-historian-omer-bartov
Bibi has two advantages in deflecting accusations of Genocide-
1- He’s a serious hawk but still the referee for any investigation into war crimes
2- Gazan’s knowingly elected an organization known for using human shields. Did they think some Oct 7 hostages would make any difference?
A deadly recipe for brutal collateral.
Go fuck yourself. The United States is not bombing Gaza.
Go fuck yourself. The IDF is using U.S. bombs. When the Hutus started hacking the Tutsis to death the U.S. made no attempt to stop them. On the other hand, the U.S. didn't manufacture a bunch of machetes and airlift them to the Hutus.
Such a clever and appropriate rejoinder. /s
Apparently my position needs a little clarification.
IMHO Harris will make a far better president than Trump ever would and I hope she wins. To do this, she has to avoid the overconfidence that lost Clinton the Electoral College in 2016. Specifically, Harris should not take the Muslim-American voters for granted. AIPAC is laser focused on a single issue and it should not surprise anyone if a Palestinian American who is a U.S. citizen with a job 'n everything and who has loads of extended family members in Gaza and the West Bank is likewise laser focused on what's going on in Gaza. Is a Palestinian American going to follow Anandakos' lead and say "well, sure, the U.S. is providing all the materiel for the bombing but that doesn't count?" I doubt it.
So, yeah, Trump is a horrible person and was a horrible president but to the Muslim American community the question is how different his Gaza policy would be from Harris' Gaza policy. This is the problem with every single-issue voter. Harris does not want these people to sit out the election.
It's a mistake Democrats make often. They think the results should speak for itself. It rarely does with the amount of disinformation blaring from right wing media and to some extent the msm. I honestly don't think Biden had the stamina for another election cycle, in addition to his cognative problems.
The media are in control of promotion at this stage, and the objective of the main outlets was to de-promote Biden. They basically took up Trump's argument that Biden was too old and ignored Biden's real accomplishments, not to mention the obvious negatives of Trump. Turning to Harris gives them exciting new events to write "news" pieces about. Evidently "Trump lies again" is too boring.
Maybe this will turn out for the good, but let's hope the media do not turn to some new horserace topics. Are they really going to concentrate on issues and real qualities of the candidates?
> Are they really going to concentrate on issues and real qualities of the candidates?
Rofl.
Trump made blatant dishonesty boring. Now that's an accomplishment.
It worth noting that it is intentional.
Trump is not dishonest, he is anti-honest. He wants to make lying preferable to telling the truth, and on the political right he went quite far with that, because they were already very dishonest.
No, he's a bullshit artist, in the sense of bullshit meaning stuff spoken or written without caring whether it is true of false. Trump doesn't care if what he is saying is true or false, he just wants the opportunity to spew some incoherent, unanchored stream of consciousness.
Well, he succeeded to mislead you too.
Ofocurse he doesn't care if what he says is true or not, or if it is coherent. But he does care if it helps him achieve what he wants to achieve. What he says is not "unachored", it just anchored in his own interests, rather than anything else (including reality).
You're agreeing with me that he's a bullshit artist.
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691122946/on-bullshit
.. but not that what he says is unanchored and that he doesn't try to do anything except bulshitting. He is trying to achieve various things, and some of them he does (by using bulshit and other dishonest tricks).
More CA $$$$ for Harris to spend in battleground states.
"Harris has given millions of people instant permission to back the Democratic nominee, which they wanted to do all along. Only Biden's age was holding them back."
Nobody likes old people.
Even old people don't like old people.
Man, I do not want to go into a nursing home. It's full of old people.
What a bunch of crap re: old people. Maybe talk to a few. I am old and you're FOS.
+1
"Harris has given millions of people instant permission to back the Democratic nominee, which they wanted to do all along. Only Biden's age was holding them back."
To put this another way: Millions of people failed to notice that Biden in a coma would be a better President than Trump with all his faculties (such as they are) intact. The problem with democracy in a nutshell (wasn't it Churchill who said that democracy was the worst form of government except for all the others?)
Said better than I could.
Yes - whether or not he likes or does well in all formal public situations, he remains able to speak knowledgably about .national & world issues, albeit more slowly & less confidently than previously. And if he no longer joyously bikes around Delaware on weekends due to a foot injury, he's still not the exercise-adverse, unhealthy in mind soul, & body trump.
I & many others would have voted for him again. Maybe he wouldn't have won - I join
others in wishing that he had cut off Netanyahu in short order to protect Palestinians & his own reputation, but know he would still have faced major & hypocritical attacks from Republicans, as well as some criticism from. Democrats.
I'm glad that he endorsed Kamala & appreciate the way that she has handled it.
There's a lot of admiration for his accomplishments as president, & we really ought to thank him.
Yes. Biden will be remembered in history for the Biden Doctrine: bringing manufacturing back to America, rebuilding infrastructure, starting to seriously reduce greenhouse gas emissions, getting us out of Afghanistan, improving relations and cooperation with our allies. Or, more concisely, strengthening American leadership.
Also: increasing ACA subsidies, increasing affordability and participation rate; reducing prescription-drugs price burdens; leading the democracies in sanctioning and opposing Russian imperialism.
Biden was biking in Delaware this past weekend! He's still in excellent shape for his age. It's his talking ability that sunk him IMO and his need to limit events per day that were sinking him.
So, was that poll taken before, or after https://apnews.com/article/israel-gaza-20-billion-weapons-us-aid-b6a99129c88a5dcc4a4753e20b5e19ec broke?
Harris has taken millions of people off the hook for ageism.
Now, had you put it as "Only Biden's seeming infirmities/decline was holding them back." it might be another matter.
Trump will no doubt claim that California does not exist, and that Harris simply "A.I.’d it."
He claims he won California. Really! He says the “fix” is in here and he won by a lot.
The current House delegation from California:
52 reps total
40 D reps
12 R reps
Of the 12 R reps:
(a) 4 from blue districts
(b) 6 from single-digit R districts
(c) 2 from double-digits R districts
(a) and most of (b) are toast.
The Dems take the House. (That'll be true long before the CA vote is counted.)
If there's any downside to the Dem wave in CA, it's that Harris may need more than a 2% to 3% margin in the national vote to carry the swing states. But she looks to be on her way.
Let's hope so. Are you far enough down this rabbit hole that you could point us to the districts? Some of us (Yikes) might send some dough to the Dem candidates as this is crazy important.
Alternatively, source so we can look it up if so inclined.
Thx.
Here's the current delegation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_delegations_from_California
You can follow the links to district info and who's running this year.
There are six California districts listed on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s Red to Blue page:
https://redtoblue.dccc.org/
CA-13, CA-22, CA-27, CA-41, CA-45, and CA-47
I live in CA-41 (Coachella Valley + parts of western Riverside County), where Will Rollins is on track to defeat the longest serving California Republican in the House.
https://willrollinsforcongress.com/
thanks for the replies! I know we should all do our own research but, as I say thanks.
Looks like a lot of ageism still exists.
I don’t think it’s ageism to notice that an 81 year old man doing a job that is notorious for aging everyone who does it has clearly declined in the last couple years and to have serious doubts that he could keep doing the job until he is 85.
If Biden was hooked up to a ventilator with a priest standing by I would still have voted for him over Trump of course, but I feel a lot better voting for Harris.
It's weird though to say "I'm not sure Biden can make it to 85, therefore I have to push him over the cliff now at 81." In both scenarios - Biden gets reelected and dies, Biden is pushed out before the election - Harris is his replacement. I understand people suck at logic and reason and gaming out the future, but the end result would have been the same, if everyone gung-ho for Harris now had just committed to voting for Biden back then. (It's the entire purpose of having a VP: to jump in as soon as the Pres dies.)
+1
You assume he dies. That's a morbid prediction. What if he doesn't? You also assume he would have won. Given the alternative, not even Biden thought it was worth the risk. He sacrificed part of his legacy for the sake of beating Trump. Something Trump would never do.
Exactly. There are a lot of dumb, selfish people out there who don't pay attention to the RESULTS of politics -- i.e. "governance" -- but are consumed with the Horse Race. They were falling for Trump's jeers at Biden who wasn't defending himself effectively, but they look at Harris and say, "She's obviously not 'dumb'!" and that's one more nick in Trump's armor.
The concern went beyond merely his age. He was losing his train of thought and remembering things wrong way too often to be excused away as gaffes.
So much worse than the megalomaniac spouting nonsense, considering eliminating the Constitution, & only a few years short of Biden's age, but in obviously worse physical health, right?!
Bidens debate performance and his very public memory issues caused concern about his electability, and rightfully so. It's a completely separate issue from Trumps own issues which are numerous. The fact that Harris has been able to close the gap in the polls in such a short amount of time proves that Biden made the right call. Something Trump would never do. And for the record I would have voted for Biden because Trump is not fit for any public office, let alone the POTUS.
Stop it. It's over.
Biden, despite everything good about him and his accomplishments, wasn't working as a candidate.
Harris/Walz is. End of story. Insert beating a dead horse GIF.
Yeah, it's not ageism when both candidate show clear signs of below average cognition.
Excitement at the top has the potential to down-ballot effects, wiping out Republicans at every level, whether local, state, or federal (House).
So yes, stronger enthusiasm to vote does matter, even in blue states. Let's get that blue wave going.
????????????????????
Politics on all levels has a greater national component than in the days of Tip O’Neill. If California is showing such large shifts, we will see similar in the rest of the country.
It's exactly the opposite. People have continued to sort themselves, and the national component doesn't matter in the face of red state vs blue state. At best you can argue it's urban vs rural, and the California shift is an indicator of the urban shift. But the election is still going to be determined in the handful of states that aren't clearly urban/rural/blue/red.
"People have continued to sort themselves"
Yes and no. Biden got more votes in 2020 in Texas than he did in New York; a California poll is of course most relevant to California, but that doesn't mean that polling data relevant to 39 million people is somehow irrelevant to the rest of the country because of "sorting."
Nor is it "urban vs rural" necessarily; Vermont is extremely rural yet deep blue, and both Utah and Florida are extremely urban and yet reliably red. Similarly, Texas is more urban than both Oregon and Washington State, yet it's a safe bet that their EVs will be going separate ways.
So, yeah, I don't take Harris being up in California to mean that she's got a shot in Arkansas, but it's another data point pertinent to what is happening nationally.
You are almost completely accurate, but I do think that Texas might very well tip radically and quickly, at least at the State Executive and National level. There are a LOT of highly educated people being dragged to Texas by the narcissistic cheapskate CEO's of their companies. And, though they probably love the Hill Country as seemingly everybody does, IT'S NOT CALIFORNIA by a long shot.
Most of those people dragged there are kind of pissed about it and will be very happy to poke those narcissistic CEO's in the eye [virtually] by voting for people the CEO's don't like.
"I do think that Texas might very well tip radically and quickly, at least at the State Executive and National level"
Your lips to god's ears, but, as somebody who lives in Texas and hence among Texans, I'll advise you to, unfortunately, not hold your breath.
Did you say that Utah was "extremely urban" ?
More urbanized than New York: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_States
Yes, I suspect you meant something like "fraction of population that is in urban areas".
That's a perfectly OK definition of "urbanization", but it's also a bit misleading. The fraction of land in Utah that has a population density above 5/acre is vanishingly small.
Land doesn’t vote, ppl do.
It is the definition in use by demographers, planners, etc.
That's a fairly silly criterion. It doesn't measure urbanization so much as it measures overall population density. Utah has a relatively small population for its total area; if that population is mostly urbanized, you would expect to see a few densely populated cities taking up a small fraction of the state's area and a lot of the state's area almost unpopulated. On the other hand, a country like Bangla Desh that has a very high overall population density will have a fairly high fraction of its area showing population densities above 5 people per acre without being heavily urbanized.
That isn't at all the opposite of my statement; sorting patterns are not such as to make states less similar. I have seen a number of polls of the 'most important issues' to voters; all of the top issues are national (immigration, climate change, the economy, etc.). I haven't seen anything that shows the concerns of voters in the 'swing states' are markedly different from those in other states.
Hopefully the Blue Wave is coming and it will be covered in cat fur.
Trump is going to get a lot more desperate. The actions of him and his cultists in government are also going to be drastic and desperate. I tend to fear the worst, but this time I think my fears are justified. We are in for some serious ???? come November. I hope the Democrats are up to the challenge.
It is not just the Democrats, it is also the law-enforcement authorities. In 2020 it was mostly non-criminal and border-criminal actions (J6 was exceptional, they didn't do mob attacks until then) . This time there will be a lot of criminal actions (mainly violence against election officials and systems).
The astonishing gains are simply the undecideds making the anticipated decision. The prior poll was from February, before the primaries and before Haley dropped out of the race.
The super impressive polls still shows Harris trailing Bidens performance in 2020.
But its amazing what a dedicated narrative can do for a set of facts.
> Harris has given millions of people instant permission to back the Democratic nominee, which they wanted to do all along. Only Biden's age was holding them back.
It just emphasizes human irrationality. A vote for Biden was always a vote for Harris if it turned out Biden was actually unfit to hold office.
More importantly, it was a vote for democracy. But not enough American voters care about democracy.
A vote for Biden was always a vote for Harris if Biden died. "Unfit to hold office" is a matter of opinion; fitness is on a continuum. It is entirely conceivable that Biden might be unfit in many people's opinion but not so egregiously unfit as to trigger 25th amendment processes.
And then there's the contrast with the unfitness of the alternative. No one has ever described Donald Trump as a responsible person, or, in fact, sane.
And now he's coming apart like the core of a golf ball I once chopped in half, (it explodes all over the place, carooming frenetically off every surface in the room until all these thousands of tiny rubber bands unravel and seem to disintegrate right into the air).
Exciting news?? When did CA become a battleground state?