Which Side are You On?

Glenn Greenwald's resignation from The Intercept is one of those rare "which side are you on" moments of brilliant illumination. Yves Smith has a helpful synopsis this morning with links to all the key pieces.

The story in a nutshell is that editors at The Intercept refused to publish co-founder Greenwald's story about evidence of influence peddling found on Hunter Biden's laptop. In response, Greenwald announced his resignation and set up shop on Substack.

I subscribed to Greenwald's substack, as well as Matt Taibbi's. Taibbi's take on Greenwald's resignation is definitive. I hope you read it. 

Taibbi plots the rise of Russophobia starting in 2016 as the key organizing principle of the Democratic Party. Russia went from being dismissed by Obama as barely a regional power to an omniscient many-headed hydra controlling U.S. democracy.

To me it has always seemed obvious that the the target of this new McCarthyism is the voting population of the United States. How to maintain fealty to a neoliberal order that produces more than anything else foreign wars and inequality? Gin up terror over foreign subversion by an official enemy.

As for The Intercept, its support for the war on Syria (Robert Mackey, Mehdi Hasan) and Russiagate (James Risen) shows it's squarely aligned with the U.S. national security state. On the other hand, I think Ryan Grim's reporting on progressive electoral politics is indispensable, and Ryan Devereaux has done great work on the Thin Blue Line.

In the end, does anyone doubt that Hunter Biden, a fucked up young guy, was peddling his father's name for personal advantage? I don't. At the same time, since I have never believed that Joe Biden is some kind of moral exemplar, I had no trouble voting the Democratic ticket. The battles yet to be fought are against the Democratic Party once it attains control of the federal government.

The 2020 General Election: It's Another Blue Wave

As I emerge from the chrysalis of my COVID illness I am confronted with increased demands at work. I am now working a ten-hour day Monday to Thursday and a five-hour day on Friday. Where I used to wake up and spend 90 minutes on this page I am now heading to the office first thing so I can be at my desk by 7 AM. I work through lunch -- pre-lockdown I would walk ten minutes to a coffee shop and read the paper for 40 minutes -- then I scurry home at 4 PM where I work remotely until 5 PM.

It's going to be this way for the foreseeable future. Social distancing at work means I am the principal person in the office most days -- a one-man band answering the phones, processing the daily mail, receiving deliveries, etc. Also, the building where the office is located has been sold, and we have a vacate date sometime at the end of winter. Herculean chores must be performed the next few months.

With the general election a little more than a week away I wanted to get my prediction down, for what it is worth.

I was wrong, as were most others, about 2016. I thought the gender gap was real and that Trump would lose the suburbs as a result. It didn't end up that way, but it is coming to pass in 2020. Trump is losing the suburbs. For instance, Maricopa County, home to the Phoenix metropolitan area, is polling strongly for Biden.

A recent national poll shows Biden up by 9 points. Biden is up in the industrial swing states -- Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin; plus, Biden is also up in Arizona and Florida. For all intents and purposes Trump has no path to victory without Pennsylvania and Florida.

The diehard Republican has a couple responses when confronted by the slew of polls and other markers of Democratic strength like record-breaking Dem early voting and ActBlue fundraising totals. 

The first GOP argument, which cannot be discounted, is a significant voter registration advantage in big swing states like Florida and Pennsylvania. Republicans apparently earned this advantage by door-knocking during the pandemic. Good for them. You can't fault the party for working hard. Whether increased registration translates into a significant increase in votes is another question. It is of course better than nothing, but just because someone comes to your door and registers you to vote doesn't mean that you will actually fill out a ballot, let alone vote for Trump.

The second Republican argument is that all the polls in 2020 are even more off than they were in 2016 because of a "social desirability bias." The American Conservative summarizes this argument as follows:

Two pollsters who got 2016 right think that the mainstream polls are wrong again, and although they grant that the election is very close, at this point they predict a Trump electoral college victory. Patrick Basham of the Democracy Institute predicted a Trump win in ’16 and also got the Brexit referendum right as well. Basham, in his latest poll for 2020 predicts an easy electoral college victory for Trump with all battleground states ending up in Trump’s column. Robert Cahaly of Trafalgar Group in his 2016 polls predicted the exact number of electors awarded to Trump. Now Cahaly predicts that most battleground states will go for Trump with an electoral college victory in the mid-270s.

What both these pollsters are aiming to tackle is what is called social desirability bias in the polls. Social desirability bias is when a poll interviewee gives an answer to a question based on what he considers socially acceptable, rather than his true opinion on the subject. It has been observed that voters were more likely to choose Trump in a poll that felt more anonymous, such as a poll that used an automated, interactive voice response system instead of a live caller.

For me, this doesn't pass the smell test. It would mean that the United States is a Bizarro world of inverted McCarthyism where the fellow traveler is a closet QAnon revolutionary. It just doesn't add up. Trump has completely fucked up the federal response to the pandemic, and he fomented a race war over the summer, not to mention his overt messaging to the militia movement. Do you think a Grosse Pointe Park soccer mom is cheering for the Wolverine Watchmen?

So Trump loses. He holds the Confederate States of America minus North Carolina and Virginia. Trump's performance in Georgia and Florida will tell us whether the election will be a rout. If Trump holds on in Florida and Georgia he'll limit the size of Biden's margin in the electoral college.

In Florida Trump is doing much worse this go-round with senior citizens due to his handling of COVID. I think Biden wins there. In Georgia Biden has a real shot. Remember, Stacey Abrams lost in the 2018 gubernatorial race by just 50,000 votes despite a massive voter purge by the GOP.

All in all it's another Blue Wave.