Tag: election

Trump’s biggest fans aren’t who you think

Posted on by Lone Candle

“In 2020, three political scientists studied how location and income affected white voters’ voting decisions. They found that, on a national level, poorer white people were indeed more likely to vote for Trump than richer ones.
But when you factored in local conditions — the fact that your dollar can buy more in Biloxi than Boston — the relationship reverses. “Locally rich” white people, those who had higher incomes than others in their zip codes, were much more likely to support Trump than those who were locally poor. These people might make less money than a wealthy person in a big city, but were doing relatively well when compared to their neighbors.

Put those two results together, and you get a picture that aligns precisely with Hochschild’s observations. Trump’s strongest support comes from people who live in poorer parts of the country, like KY-5, but are still able to live a relatively comfortable life there.

So what does this mean for how we understand the Trump-era right? It cuts through the seemingly interminable debate about Trump’s appeal to “left behind” voters and helps us understand the actual complexity of the right’s appeals to region and class in the United States. America’s divisions are rooted in less income inequality per se than is widely appreciated, and often tied to divisions inside of communities and social groups.

In Stolen Pride, Hochschild locates the heart of Trump’s appeal to rural voters in emotions of pride and shame — including pride in their region’s traditions and shame in what it’s become in an era of declining coal jobs and rising drug addiction.

For Roger Ford, a KY-5 entrepreneur and Republican activist who serves as Hochschild’s exemplar of Trump’s “locally rich” base, Trump helps resolve those emotions by offering someone to blame. Ford may not be suffering personally, but his region is — and Trump’s rage at liberal coastal elites helps him locate a villain outside of his own community.

“He based his deepest sense of pride, it seemed, on his role of defender of his imperiled rural homeland from which so much had been lost — or, as it could feel, ‘stolen,’” she writes.

Ford’s comments to Hochschild shift seamlessly between economic and cultural grievances. In discussing his opposition to transgender rights, he situates it as the latest in a long line of dislocations that people in his region faced.

“With all we’re coping with here, we’re having a hard enough time,” he tells Hochschild. “Then you make it fashionable to choose your gender? Where are we going?”

This comment might make it seem as if economic concerns are somehow prior to cultural ones, and people like Ford are angry at transgender people because of economic deprivation in coal country. But high-quality research tells a different, more complicated story.

In 2022, scholars Kristin Lunz Trujillo and Zack Crowley examined the political consequences of what they call “rural consciousness” for politics. They divide this consciousness into three component parts: “a feeling that ruralites are underrepresented in decision-making (‘Representation’) and that their way of life is disrespected (‘Way of Life’) — both symbolic concerns — and a more materialistic concern that rural areas receive less resources (‘Resources’).”

When they tried to use these different “subdimensions” of rural consciousness to predict Trump support among rural voters, they found something interesting. People who saw the plight of ruralities in cultural and political terms were most likely to support Trump, while those primarily concerned about rural poverty were, if anything, less likely to support him than their neighbors.

Taken together, these findings suggest that the story isn’t simply that economic deprivation breeds cultural resentment. Trump’s strongest supporters in rural areas tend to be angry that their regions don’t set the social terms of American life: that they don’t control the halls of power and that, as a consequence, both political and cultural life is moving away from what they’re comfortable with. Economic decline surely exacerbates this sense of alienation, but it isn’t at the heart of it.”

https://www.vox.com/politics/369797/trump-support-class-local-rich-arlie-hochschild

Crypto is betting it all on the 2024 elections

Posted on by Lone Candle

“Crypto has spent a record $119 million in the 2024 federal elections, magnitudes more than it has ever spent before. This huge number means that crypto accounts for almost half of all corporate political contributions in this cycle. Its spending since 2010, totaling $129 million, puts the industry second only to fossil fuels, according to a report from the progressive consumer advocacy group Public Citizen.

“It’s already 15 percent of all known corporate contributions since the Citizens United ruling,” says Rick Claypool, a research director at Public Citizen who authored the report on crypto election spending, referring to the landmark 2010 Supreme Court decision that opened the floodgates for virtually unlimited corporate spending in elections through outside groups.

Crypto’s ballooning political war chest and voracious appetite to dangle money in front of lawmakers speaks to the power it has amassed over the past decade and a half, even as it has struggled to gain any real traction with the public.

Three-quarters of Americans who’ve heard of crypto aren’t confident in its safety and reliability, a 2023 Pew Research survey found, and only 7 percent of Americans used crypto last year, according to the Federal Reserve. Crypto’s reputation suffered in particular from the controversy surrounding crypto companies in the last few years, especially the catastrophic meltdown of FTX. Though the first cryptocurrency was launched in 2009, it still hasn’t penetrated as a mainstream payment method, with very few retailers allowing customers to pay directly with cryptocurrency. It remains mostly a vehicle for speculative investment.

Despite that — or because of it — crypto companies have redoubled their efforts to help elect pro-crypto politicians and lobby for policies that would boost the sector’s growth. The industry wants the influx of money it’s spending to send the clear message that the crypto craze isn’t over — and in fact, isn’t a craze at all, but the lasting future of finance. “Crypto is here to stay,” Paul Grewal, Coinbase’s chief legal officer, recently wrote in public comments regarding regulation.

The sector’s most strident champions want you to believe that it’s a key issue for voters in the upcoming election, right next to inflation and health care. The industry is shouting from the rooftops that politicians can’t ignore crypto — and trying its hardest to make sure we won’t be able to either.”

…

“After a rough few years of being walloped by scandals and government crackdowns, crypto is facing an existential crisis. There are already some patchwork regulations governing the world of digital currencies, but one key issue remains hotly debated: Which government agency should oversee them?

In the US, securities like stocks and bonds have to be registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which comes with a host of disclosure requirements and other rules to protect investors.

As far as the SEC is concerned, the law already puts most cryptocurrencies squarely under its purview, and the agency has been aggressively pursuing enforcement against crypto exchanges like Coinbase and Binance, alleging that they’re running unregistered securities exchanges. But the crypto industry doesn’t want to be regulated by the SEC — it wants to fall under the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) instead.

“The CFTC is a much smaller agency with far fewer resources,” says Molly White, a crypto researcher and critic who has been tracking the industry’s political spending.”

…

“One major change this election cycle is how much more visible and vocal the Trump-supporting faction of crypto proponents has become. Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who founded the crypto exchange Gemini, tried to donate roughly $1 million worth of bitcoin each directly to the Trump campaign, apparently unaware it would exceed the FEC contribution limit. Venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz have both affirmed that they’re joining Team Trump too. Other backers include Jesse Powell, co-founder of the crypto exchange Kraken, and Charles Hoskinson, co-founder of the ethereum blockchain.

It’s worth noting that when Bankman-Fried was still the biggest face of crypto, he was known as a Democratic megadonor. We only found out later that he’d contributed roughly the same amount to Republicans through dark money groups.

Trump, for his part, was a harsh crypto critic in the past, but has recently done a 180, saying he would end Biden’s “war on crypto,” and that he would fire Gensler, the SEC chair. He even recently announced a family crypto project, run by the Trump Organization, called The DeFiant Ones — a play on “decentralized finance” — that would, according to Trump, help Americans who have been “squeezed by the big banks and financial elites.”

But crypto’s partisan inclinations are more complicated than simply supporting Republicans.

The industry’s spending is funneled mostly through the pro-crypto super PAC Fairshake, which has already spent $93.8 million this election cycle and is the second best-funded super PAC in the election, after Trump-backing Make America Great Again Inc. Fairshake’s backers include Coinbase, which has contributed a total of $50 million to the 2024 elections so far, and Ripple, a blockchain payment network that spent $49 million. (Both Coinbase and Ripple have faced SEC lawsuits.) Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz has also contributed $47 million to Fairshake.

Fairshake largely focuses on House and Senate races, and has been largely nonpartisan, supporting and opposing politicians of both parties based on their crypto stance.”

https://www.vox.com/money/371597/crypto-politics-spending-2024-elections-trump

America’s looming election crisis, explained in 3 charts

Posted on by Lone Candle

Trump supporters thrive in falsity and anti-democratic attitudes.

“If Trump loses, about a quarter of Republicans said they think he should do whatever it takes to ensure he becomes president anyway, according to a September PRRI poll.”

“among Republicans, Trump proved by far the most trusted source of information about election results, well above local and national news outlets. In an Associated Press/NORC/USAFacts poll from earlier this month, more than 60 percent of Republicans said they believe Trump himself is the best place to get the facts about results.”

“Trump’s long-running insistence that he won in 2020 appears to be having an effect over time, with several surveys measuring greater buy-in of his lies about the election from voters today than in the past. A December Washington Post/University of Maryland poll found that 36 percent of US adults did not believe Biden was legitimately elected, compared to 29 percent two years prior. And in a Pew Research poll conducted earlier this month, 27 percent of US adults said that Trump did nothing wrong in trying to overturn the election results, up from 23 percent in April.”

https://www.vox.com/politics/372863/2024-election-lies-trump-overturn-harris

Trump’s latest push to steal a Nebraska electoral vote appears to have flopped

Posted on by Lone Candle

Trump’s latest push to steal a Nebraska electoral vote appears to have flopped

https://www.vox.com/politics/2024/4/3/24119984/nebraska-electoral-college-vote-trump-biden-kirk

Tim Walz Keeps Lying

Posted on by Lone Candle

“For Tim Walz, in vitro fertilization (IVF) is a deeply personal issue—or at least he made it seem that way. In several recent interviews, the Minnesota governor and Democratic vice presidential candidate implied or outright suggested that his own two children were conceived using IVF.
One problem: It’s not true. Walz’s children were conceived using intrauterine insemination (IUI), not IVF. These are two very different things, and the policy conversations about them are fundamentally distinct; many religious conservatives want to prohibit IVF—which can result in the destruction of unused fertilized embryos outside the womb—but not IUI.

Yet Walz tried to link his own personal experience with potential efforts by Republicans to ban IVF. This is misleading, since he and his wife used IUI, not IVF.

It was an oft-repeated error. On Facebook, Walz wrote that his family had taken advantage of reproductive health care options like IVF, which is true enough. But then he told the Pod Save America podcast that his two kids were born “that way,” in reference to IVF. Worse still, on MSNBC, he flatly stated: “Thank God for IVF, my wife and I have two beautiful children.”

It makes sense that some people who have little familiarity with either procedure use IVF as shorthand for both. But Walz should have a more granular understanding of what they involve. Moreover, he has accused his opponents of wanting to ban IVF. Walz attacked his rival, Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, saying: “If it were up to him, I wouldn’t have a family, because of IVF, and the things that we need to do reproductively.””

…

“The best major media exposé on Walz’s incautious truth telling came from CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski, who revealed that Walz repeatedly lied about his 1995 arrest for drunk driving when he ran for Congress a decade later.

Walz was stopped for driving 96 mph in a 55 mph zone and admitted to police that he had been drinking. His blood alcohol level was .128.

“But in 2006, his campaign repeatedly told the press that he had not been drinking that night, claiming that his failed field sobriety test was due to a misunderstanding related to hearing loss from his time in the National Guard,” wrote Kaczynski. “The campaign also claimed that Walz was allowed to drive himself to jail that night. None of that was true.”

These were direct lies, and there’s no excuse for them.”

https://reason.com/2024/08/22/tim-walz-keeps-lying/

J.D. Vance Says It Does Not Matter Whether ‘Rumors’ of Pet-Eating Migrants Are True

Posted on by Lone Candle

“It seems clear that neither Trump nor Vance is interested in a rational conversation. “With this rhetoric,” Bettina Makalintal noted on Eater last week, “the Republican party is picking from the most predictable xenophobic playbook and invoking time-worn fear mongering.” The idea that “immigrants ‘eat pets,'” she wrote, “is meant to signify their backwardness, danger, and inferiority, ” which “then justifies the Republican party’s efforts to curtail immigration.”
For politicians “perpetuating this false narrative,” Makalintal observed, “the truth has taken a back seat to the intended message: that immigrants are not ‘like us’ and therefore pose a threat to hard-won American lives.” Trump and Vance, she said, are implicitly drawing a contrast between “white ‘Americans’ with household pets like Fluffy and Fido as members of the family” and dark-skinned immigrants who are “trouncing on that which is held dear.”

Implicit racism aside, Vance is proving to be just as impervious to reality as the man he once condemned as a “total fraud” who was shockingly xenophobic, “reprehensible,” “a moral disaster,” and even possibly “America’s Hitler.””

…

“All of this is reminiscent of Trump’s attitude toward claims of fraud during the 2020 presidential election, which he was eager to accept no matter how outlandish and unsubstantiated they were. During the notorious telephone conversation in which he pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” the votes necessary to reverse Joe Biden’s victory in that state, for example, Trump mentioned a rumor that election officials had “supposedly shredded…3,000 pounds of ballots.” That report, he conceded, “may or may not be true.” Yet within a few sentences, Trump had persuaded himself that the allegations were reliable enough to establish “a very sad situation” crying out for correction.

Where does Vance stand on Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen through systematic fraud? He recently argued that Trump had raised concerns that were valid and troubling enough to justify “a big debate” about whether electoral votes for Biden from battleground states should have been officially recognized, although “that doesn’t necessarily mean the results would have been any different.” Alluding to “the problems that existed in 2020,” Vance said that if he had been vice president at the time, “I would’ve told the states like Pennsylvania, Georgia and so many others that we needed to have multiple slates of electors, and I think the U.S. Congress should’ve fought over it from there.”

Just as he refuses to definitively say whether he believes Hatians actually have been eating people’s cats and dogs in Springfield, Vance has declined to explicitly endorse or reject Trump’s stolen-election fantasy. In both cases, he seems to think the fact that someone made a wild allegation is enough to justify “a big debate” about whether it might be true, even when there is no evidence to support it.

You can either live in the real world or be Donald Trump’s running mate. Vance has made his choice.”

https://reason.com/2024/09/15/j-d-vance-says-it-does-not-matter-whether-rumors-of-pet-eating-migrants-are-true/

Former governors urge successors to certify election results

Posted on by Lone Candle

Trump tried to steal the last election, and may do so again, so former governors are trying to convince current state officials to not go along with such democracy-ending actions.

“A bipartisan group of former governors is launching a campaign to convince their successors to certify their states’ votes after the upcoming November election — and defy possible pressure from former President Donald Trump.
Nearly 20 ex-governors have signed onto the effort, which launches Tuesday on National Constitution Day, and more are expected in the weeks ahead. The push, organized by pro-democracy group Keep Our Republic, is sending a letter — shared first with POLITICO — to all 50 statehouses that urges sitting governors to certify election results by the December 11 deadline prescribed by federal law.

Four years ago, Trump failed in his push to have a pair of Republican chief executives in battleground states – Brian Kemp in Georgia and Doug Ducey in Arizona – overturn the voters’ will in their states. But the former executives fear he may do so again this winter and succeed this time, even though federal law has been strengthened to clarify that each governor’s role is simply to certify the winner of the popular vote.”

…

“Trump’s plan four years ago centered on some battleground states submitting dueling sets of electors that would muddle the Electoral College certification process on Jan. 6 and have both sets voided. That would have allowed, according to the plan, then-Vice President Mike Pence to toss them out and give the election to Trump.

Former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett, a Republican, said he was “disappointed” that the nominee of his party refused to admit he lost in 2020 and appeared to be laying the groundwork for suggesting that this year’s election would be rigged.

“When you make allegations, you better have some evidence,” Corbett said. “And I have not seen any evidence.”

The group of former governors is hoping to provide political cover for those GOP executives who Trump may pressure.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/09/17/former-governors-urge-successors-certify-2024-election-results-00179445