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Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of October 28
This thread is posted weekly - please try to post all relevant US political content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate topic, but almost all should be posted in here.
This is an inherently political thread; please try to avoid antagonistic arguments and bickering matches. Comment threads that devolve into unproductive arguments may be removed so that the overall topic is able to continue.
'Washington Post' flooded by cancellations after Bezos' non-endorsement decision
200,000 cancellations by midday today, an 8% drop.
Washington Post social media calls out Jeff Bezos... which is wild (Tiktok)
In a wild series of events, WaPo has lost 200,000 subscribers.
Then, Jeff Besos himself wrote an opinion piece. It’s titled “The Hard Truth: Americans don’t trust the news media” (wow)
This morning, a piece covers that choice.
Edit: whoops - missed that the first link was about the drop of subscribers. Sorry, it’s been a lot this last week.
From Jeff Bezos:
In a single paragraph, Bezos managed to say that he was right twice (without evidence) while simultaneously making an absolutist claim about what Pennsylvanians think. Personally I found the rest of the piece equally uncompelling, with him offering more of a vibes-based argument than any sort factual analysis. (The closest we get is "[unlike today] in the 1990s we achieved 80 percent household penetration in the D.C. metro area" and implying the reason is because the news is too partisan. Besides the fact that this is obviously not the reason -- the decline of journalism correlates strongly with the rise of free alternatives on the internet -- Bezos certainly knows better, from which we can only conclude that he is being dishonest. )
I'm reminded of this article from The Atlantic back in August, which dealt with Musk's interview of Trump but could be said about billionaires more generally:
It's definitely an assertion lacking evidence, but I think without any evidence one way or another I'm inclined to agree he's probably correct.
I'm not so sure. According to this article [1] about 3% of PA's electorate is undecided. As there were about 7 million votes cast for the Presidential election in 2020 [2], that puts us at roughly 200 thousand undecided voters in PA. It is certainly conceivable that at least one of those voters would consider newpaper endorsements when making their choice; I would definitely not feel comfortable making an absolutist claim like Bezos did.
Now you might object that I'm just being pedantic -- I also doubt that The Washington Post's endorsement would have tipped the election. But I raise the point to emphasize how sloppy Bezos's logic is. He claims that his decision is more "principled" than The Post's prior position, but mostly he just expects us to take us at his word. He claims that Presidential endorsements are harmful to The Post's financials, but he provides no evidence for the claim. Bezos believes that partisanship is harmful to journalism, but then he barely grapples with the impact of his own meddling in the newsroom.
Insofar that there is evidence that The Post's partisan bias impacts its financials, the evidence points the other way -- hundreds of thousands of people have since unsubscribed because of Bezos's actions. Personally I don't mind if the Washington Post is a little biased; all media are a little biased. However, for journalism to be effective it must remain independent [3] -- and Bezos has single-handedly undermined that core tenet of journalism.
You make some good points and to be clear I don’t agree with Bezos’s decision or his rationale.
But I do think he’s right in the sense that newspaper endorsements aren’t what they were 20 years ago. I don’t believe that they literally don’t move the needle at all, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that, in this media environment, their effects are probably negligible.
The thing Bezos is getting wrong is the idea that just by being “objective” the traditional media can reclaim its trust. I think that ship has sailed and there’s no reason to withhold an endorsement in pursuit of a fruitless goal.
Yeah, in a vacuum Presidential endorsements are pretty weird (as @V17 also mentioned). But the larger issue in my opinion is (1) the meddling and (2) the timing. If Bezos had demanded that The Post stop endorsing from 2028 onward, I would still think that inappropriate (I don't think Bezos should be making any newsrooms decisions) but at least you couldn't argue that his decision was to the benefit of a particular candidate.
However, by making the decision after the piece had been written, Bezos created an appearance of bias much more problematic than the partisan bias he attempted to restrain, which as you mentioned was probably a pointless endeavor anyway.
A few things I'd be concerned with: why now? If one of the most significant national newspapers is going to end its longstanding pattern of endorsements, they could not have picked worse timing (or better, if you're a fascist). This is the sort of thing you roll out during the midterms, not a week or two ahead of an incredibly consequential presidential election. The absence of an endorsement, especially a no-brainer like Harris over trump, is a victory for trump.
And with the rationale employed, why even have an editorial section at all?
At first I was going to say don't give him ideas about elimitating the editorial section. But then where would he post his defenses of his own actions as the billionaire owner of the newspaper he shouldn't be interfering with?
He has already interfered with the editorial opinions. Can you restore trust in those? I don't know
Out of curiosity, does anyone in your inner circle - good friends or family - get their information from daily news papers? My dad does and it's always interesting when we talk about California propositions I'll find that he is often parroting things he has heard in the local paper - one that is "progressive" in terms of social liberty (as long as it in no way impedes property rights) but is incredibly financially conservative. When I start poking around he'll usually end up admitting he read about in the paper and saw the endorsement. If he indulges me and we run through the actual ballot measure together he'll usually change his mind (the local paper voting guide is usually opposite to my own selection). So in his case the endorsements of the paper carry a lot of weight. I can imagine that if he was on the fence in this election it would push him over the edge.
Opinion | It has fallen to me, the humor columnist, to endorse Harris for president (gift)
In praise of the Washington Post's cowardice (the hill)
Is it just me or does the video only play if you're on the tab? It's infuriating.
Uh I've never tabbed away from a Tiktok I guess since they're not long. I also have the app so I watch there generally. I don't have a mirror handy
No worries I saw the clip it was just an annoyance on the laptop
As an outsider it's still crazy to me how normalized and here obviously even demanded it is for US media to endorse their candidates.
Where I'm from this is viewed as unacceptable, journalists are expected to officially at least pretend to be impartial and comment, not explicitly endorse. The closest we got to open endorsement was in the last presidential election, when the biggest tabloid paper decided to sell a full frontpage (envelope) advert to the team of one of the candidates (who ultimately won), probably for a low price in a secret deal, but it was still explicitly a purchased ad space not officially endorsed by the owners for plausible deniability. It was unprecedented and possibly only done because the other candidate is a populist oligarch who owned several newspapers and has been using them for "covert" political advertisement, Orbán style, for years.
Yeah I think if the norm had been different here I'd have a different opinion. There's a difference between the journalists and the editorial board/opinion writers though. Many journalists, especially those on the political beat, do not disclose their personal political leanings including not voting in primaries for that reason. And I think that does make sense. It's more the institution of the paper that is doing the endorsement.
Again I get this is not the norm elsewhere, but my opinion is definitely based in this paradigm.
Sadly irrelevant I suspect. He's gotten what he's wanted out of this.
I mean it's a drop in Bezos' personal wealth bucket but it sends a message
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's message to supporters this evening:
Wanted to share since my (liberal) dad has been saying "it is a guaranteed fact that Trump will be the next president" and I'm feeling pretty defeated. This helped with that somewhat and I hope it does for anyone else who's feeling similarly.
AOC’s take relates to the one I have on dooming: while politically literate doomers may still vote, volunteer, and work to affect change; average people who come into contact with doomerism and get swept up into it are much more likely to shrug and say “why bother”. It’s not the initial person doing the dooming, it’s the ripple effect you see of other folks dooming and then checking out.
Remember valley forge and the first two years of the civil war.
Since the Madison square garden rally I have felt pretty confident. The Puerto Rican voters are strategically located in Pennsylvania.
But if we lose we move to doing what is needed then
Celebrities and politicians react to Trump rally comedian diss of Puerto Rico, Latinos, Jews and black Americans
Related - the Madison Square Garden rally where the "jokes" about Puerto Rico where made, along with a pile of other racist crap : (NPR) Off-color jokes, vitriol take over Trump Madison Square Garden rally
How far off the rails does someone have to go for the Trump campaign (but not Trump himself, of course) to distance themselves from you? This far, apparently.
Do they hear themselves? Do they understand who they sound like?
The comedian and other presentations were on a teleprompter. The content was absolutely seen ahead of time.
And yes these are loud and proud fascists
Loud and proud. This is rhetoric that is not very different than what has been spewed at Trump rallies throughout the campaign. However, this particular instance has the potential to break through because a) it is one week before the election, and will be on the minds of low-information or low-propensity voters as they head to the polls in a way it wouldn't have been if it happened a month ago and b) this happened in MSG in NYC, the backyard of a lot of legacy media. Might be harder to ignore/rationalize by the media when it wasn't in rural PA. Already I have seen multiple outlets denouncing this as explicitly racist as opposed to using the usual euphemisms — racially tinged, off-color, etc.
Shocking Iowa poll from pollster with excellent long term record has Harris up by three points
Pardon my language, but this is a big fucking deal. In 2016, the final Selzer poll had Trump at +7 (when others had Iowa as a tossup), he won by 9.4. In 2020, she had him up +7 again, he won by 8.2. Even if she’s off by her worst presidential error (2008, Obama won +10 versus predicted +17), we are still talking about a significant underperformance for Trump. One needs to be careful when extrapolating to other states (Iowa is very rural and very white), but this suggests good news for Harris in the Midwest, even if she doesn’t win Iowa. She’s also used a relatively minimalist methodology of making fewer assumptions (unlike other pollsters) like what she did in 2020 and 2016.
Even if you knew for certain who would win a few days in advance, what could you do? I guess you could make money on prediction markets, but other than that, it doesn't seem like there's a whole lot to be done about it.
I’m not sure how much recent internal polling the Harris campaign has done in non-swing states, but if there hasn’t been much, and there’s enough funds, I’d put out a last minute blitz in Texas, Florida, and Ohio; along with less likely states such as Kansas, Alaska, South Carolina, and Nebraska.
For me it's just a matter of anxiety levels.
a warning about extremist violence if Harris wins
Gen Z is watching Trump's Access Hollywood tapes for the first time
how each of the seven swing states would handle a recount
Expect recounts in basically every Pennsylvania precinct if Trump loses the state. It wouldn't be hard for his campaign to find 3 cultists in each precinct who believe his lies about widespread fraud.
I agree that's likely what will happen. I can't find if there's repercussions for lying about alleged fraud, or if those people need actual evidence that gets reviewed by a court? Or is it as simple as a few people just proclaim they think there was fraud, and that triggers a recount? If it's the latter, that seems like a shockingly low bar.
Biden administration orders nationwide police misconduct database
‘A once-in-a-generation change’: Portland, Oregon, prepares for monumental overhaul of city government
That makes sense: management-by-committee is hell in private organizations; I imagine that at the municipal level, it's similarly dysfunctional and difficult to find alignment.
Harris and Walz release fortnite map
friend foe or inmate, what happened to Trump's first cabinet
Speech - Michelle Obama motivates democrats in Michigan - 'You Know I Hate Politics!'
Pennsylvania District Attorney Sues Elon Musk for million dollar election sweepstakes
Three Trump Judges Just Issued a Shock Ruling That Could Wreak Havoc on the Election
Slight clickbait, because the ruling (for now) only applies to Mississippi, which is not in contention. But scary for the future, especially as someone who lives in a location where voting by mail is the rule rather than the exception.
It is shocking giving the timing.
Judicial precedent says you don't make changes 90 days ahead of an election. Purcell v. Gonzalez (2006)
It could wreck havoc in future elections
These judicial precedents have stood the test of time for centuries.
Every time the hammer blows away these judicial precedents, they favor only one party.
This is part of the long game that tilts the election scales in one parties favor (Citizens United v FEC, Shelby County v Holder, Brnovich v DNC)
Yet the long game also works as a short game if the election is close enough
(Bush v Gore which was initially bullshit per curiam but became even more bullshit stare decisis because it continued to favor one party)
That does sound kind of click baity -- honestly unless he's going to jail and can't actually run there's not really much point looking at news for the next week
Trump promises to use 1798 Alien enemies Act last used against Japanese detainees during WWII
Ads in swing states suggest election officials are free to not certify local election totals
an advocate for local civil disobedience against election certification trains volunteers
Two newbies to political advertising use porn sites to host anti Trump ads
To be clear this was a specific, and IMO well thought out, strategy not a new guy mistake.
I feel that it'd backfire. There are many people who watch porn who feel ashamed that they do and wish they didn't and couldn't.
edit: anecdote:
From the data I can find online, the number of Americans who feel strongly pro-porn is in the single digit %; the rest feel there should be regulation to lesser or greater degree.
I feel that very few voters will be motivated to get out to vote for Harris to keep porn; but there will be more than a few who will feel energized by the promise of a porn ban.
It might have, but it'll be hard to measure if it did.
However as the article says this was carefully targeted, I'd imagine they aimed for sites and categories of porn less commonly supported by people who are pro sex-work nor . And if you aim it at those young men (especially college age) who might feel swayed by the toxic masculinity, you might catch someone willing to be swayed back away from it by conservative Christian values.
Oh yes. It was IMHO strategic and clever.
Some significant races for health care policy
Elon musk tells voters to be ready for hardship
Don't know how much this will actually matter, but seems a bad approach on his part. With how myopically most voters seem to look at the economy, and his personal willingness to lie in service of getting trump elected, why admit that there would be any hardship down the line?
Best case scenario, this is Elon being reckless because that's what Elon does.
Poll Puerto Ricans in Florida support Harris