*Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine denounced baseless rumors about Haitian immigrants eating pets.
*DeWine emphasized that the claims were false and called for the discussion to stop.
*However, he repeatedly refused to blame Donald Trump or JD Vance for spreading the falsehoods.
An Ohio sheriff this weekend urged residents in his county to collect the addresses of homes sporting signs for Vice President Kamala Harris, arbitrarily suggesting that there would be an influx of undocumented immigrants if she wins the presidential race.
Bruce Zuchowski, the sheriff of Portage County who is seeking reelection, made the incendiary remarks Friday in two identical posts on his personal and professional Facebook accounts.
“I say … write down all the addresses of the people who had her signs in their yards!” Zuchowski (R) said. That way, he said, when undocumented immigrants — which he referred to as a “locust” — flooded in, “We’ll already have the addresses of their New families … who supported their arrival!”
The sheriff’s posts sparked tension across Portage County, which President Donald Trump carried by 12 points in the 2020 election. Some residents accused Zuchowski of voter intimidation ahead of November’s election. One Republican official described the post as “bullying” and stepped down from a role with a county GOP committee, the Portager reported.
Alongside his caption, Zuchowski posted photos of Fox News coverage showing footage from Springfield, Ohio, and Aurora, Colo. — two cities that have been in the national spotlight in recent weeks as former president Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), have publicly repeated baseless, inflammatory claims about the immigrant communities there.
[...]
Of the TV news photos Zuchowski posted Friday, one showed Springfield with the chyron: “Kamala’s open borders are destroying small towns.” Zuchowski wrote that if residents made note of the homes with Harris campaign signage, they would “already have the addresses” of immigrants who came to Portage County after the election. He also took a jab at Harris’s laugh, another dig Trump and his allies have used against the vice president.
[...]
Anthony Badalamenti, a Republican county commissioner, said in a video that he would resign from the county’s Republican Central Committee, according to the Portager.
Zuchowski’s call to write down addresses, Badalamenti said, “prompted” him to make the video, in which he said the remark “scares people, it’s called bullying from the highest law enforcement in Portage County.”
Romine said the local NAACP chapter called an emergency meeting for later this week to talk about how to address the community’s concerns ahead of November.
“What a world it would be if we could all have our own opinions and still get along in that space,” she said. “You know, what happened to that?”
In the week since Trump’s disastrous debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, MAGA Republicans appear to be melting down. As Republicans commandeer the disaster news, the Democratic presidential nominee appears to be trying to stay out of their way. Harris sat for an interview with media host Stephanie Himonidis Sedano, known as “Chiquibaby,” of the Spanish-language U.S. audio Nueva Network, an interview that will air tomorrow on more than 100 radio stations.
For the third day in a row, officials today had to evacuate two elementary schools in Springfield, Ohio, citing threats that have led to safety concerns. The city has also canceled “CultureFest,” its annual celebration of diversity, arts, and culture, and the local colleges are meeting virtually out of safety concerns. The Bureau of Motor Vehicles has had to close, as has the Ohio License Bureau.
Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, said that there have been “at least 33” bomb threats against schools and public offices after Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and his running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, spread the lie that Haitian immigrants to Springfield have been eating the pets of their white neighbors. DeWine reiterated that the immigrants in Springfield are there legally, and noted that he has authorized troopers from the Ohio State Highway Patrol to provide additional security at the district's 18 school buildings.
On CNN yesterday morning, Vance admitted to Dana Bash that he had created the story of Haitian immigrants eating pets. He justified the lie that has shut down Springfield and endangered its residents by claiming such a lie was the only way to get the media to pay attention to what he considers the crisis of immigration. Once the pet-eating story was debunked, Vance said that Haitian immigrants are spreading HIV and tuberculosis in Ohio; in fact, new diagnoses of HIV dropped from 2018 to 2022, and the director of the Ohio Department of Health says there has been no change in TB rates.
That a politician of any sort would lie to rally supporters against a marginalized population comes straight out of the authoritarian playbook, which seeks to build a community around the idea that the people in it are besieged by outsiders. But when that politician is running for vice president, with the potential to become the president if anything happens to his 78-year-old running mate, who is the oldest person ever to run for president, it raises a whole factory of red flags.
Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times noted the support of racist ideologue Alfred Rosenberg of the Nazi Party for the antisemitic text “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a text fabricated in the early twentieth century by officials in czarist Russia. Rosenberg stood by the “inner truth” of the text even though it was fake. Like Rosenberg, Hitler’s chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels wrote, “I believe in the inner, but not the factual, truth of The Protocols.” While Democratic Ohio representative Casey Weinstein has called for Vance to resign, aside from DeWine, Republican lawmakers have not repudiated Vance’s lie.
Astonishingly, Vance is trying to rise to power on lies about the people of his own state, the people he is supposed to represent. Not only have Democratic politicians demanded that he stop, but also amidst the chaos, the Republican mayor of Springfield and two Republican county commissioners would not commit to voting for Trump. The popular backlash against this lie has also been swift and strong. The Ohio-based Red, Wine, and Blue organization has organized the #OHNoYouDont campaign to reiterate on social media their stance against the division Vance and Trump are stoking.
Trump seemed to try to regain control of the political narrative on Sunday by posting on social media, “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT,” a comment that looked like an attempt to change the subject from the backlash to the pet-eating lie, the continuing disparagement of Trump’s debate performance, and increasing attention to Trump’s attachment to right-wing provocateur and conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer.
In the days since Trump took Loomer to a commemoration of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001—which she has suggested were an “inside job”—the media has paid more attention to the 31-year-old extremist who has been Trump’s close companion since Spring 2023. Loomer has cheered the drowning of 2,000 migrants and called for “2,000 more.” In June she said that Democrats should not just be prosecuted and jailed, but “they should get the death penalty. You know, we actually used to have the punishment for treason in this country.”
When some commenters suggested her relationship with Trump was sexual, she countered with a truly vile statement about Vice President Kamala Harris. The increasing visibility of Loomer near Trump has made those Republicans trying to run a more traditional campaign beg him to cut her loose, but Trump seems reluctant to distance himself from her. Sam Stein of The Bulwark today wrote that those Republicans worried about Trump being surrounded by conspiracy theorists are a decade late. After listing Trump’s many years of conspiracy theories, Stein wrote, they’re not “worried that Loomer will turn Trump into a raving lunatic. They’re simply worried that Trump might lose.”
As Trump seems increasingly detached from reality, Vance has become the face of the Republican presidential campaign. He seems desperate to turn the media cycle from Trump and the extraordinary unpopularity of the plans outlined in Project 2025 and toward immigration. It’s a hard sell, since voters correctly note that it was Republicans, egged on by Trump, who killed the strong bipartisan border bill in the spring. On Thursday, September 12, Vance said on CNBC that if immigration were the path to prosperity, “America would be the most prosperous country in the world.”
Outside of the hellscape in MAGA Republicans’ mind, it is. The Federal Reserve recently noted that as of the second quarter of 2024, U.S. household net worth is growing by a strong 7.1% a year. The stock market is also strong, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average rising 228 points today to set an all-time high.
On Sunday afternoon, shortly after Trump’s Taylor Swift post and another calling the “failing” New York Times a threat to democracy, as Trump was golfing at his club in West Palm Beach, Florida, Secret Service agents noticed and fired on a man holding a rifle with a scope. Today, Carol Leonnig, Josh Dawsey, and Isaac Stanley-Becker of the Washington Post reported that authorities have warned Trump of the risks of golfing at his own courses because of their proximity to public roads, but Trump insisted they were safe and kept using them.
The acting director of the Secret Service, Ronald Rowe Jr., said today that Trump’s plan for golfing on Sunday was unscheduled, so the secret service used an emergency plan for protecting Trump. Rowe said the suspect, Ryan Wesley Routh, a convicted felon with a history of apparent mental illness, did not have a line of sight to the former president and did not shoot. He escaped and was later caught. Cell phone records suggest he was in the vicinity for 12 hours before being flushed out of the bushes.
Democratic leaders again denounced violence and said it has no place in our country. Observers noted that it was Trump who signed a bill revoking gun-checks for people with mental illnesses put in place by President Barack Obama and that he promised the National Rifle Association (NRA) that he would roll back all the gun safety provisions President Joe Biden has put in place if he wins in 2024. But the Trump campaign called for donations on a website suggesting, as MAGA Republicans did after the shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, that Democrats were complicit in the threat to Trump. “There are people in this world who will do whatever it takes to stop us,” Trump’s campaign said.
Unfortunately, two attempts on a president’s life in such short order are not unprecedented. As Tom Nichols pointed out today in The Atlantic, Gerald Ford survived two attempts in 15 days in 1975. But, as Nichols also points out, Ford did not fundraise off the attempts or blame his opponents for them.
Opponents are pointing out that it is Trump and the MAGA Republicans, not the Democrats, who are stoking violence. Marcy Wheeler of Emptywheel noted that in July 2023 Trump posted an address for former president Barack Obama on his social media network, prompting a stalker, and that in four different jurisdictions, Trump’s lawyers have argued that the First Amendment protects Trump’s right to attack the judges, prosecutors, and witnesses in the cases against him, as well as their families. Other’s recalled MAGA’s “jokes” about the brutal attack on then–House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul.
Trump supporter Elon Musk, who owns the social media platform X, wrote, “And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala,” a post he later called a “joke” after observers asked about the national security implications of a defense contractor who has $15 billion in federal contracts suggesting the assassination of the president and vice president. Musk’s post had more than 39 million impressions before he deleted it.
After his own incendiary post, Musk wrote: “The incitement to hatred and violence against President Trump by the media and leading Democrats needs to stop.” Conservative lawyer George Conway retorted: “What utter nonsense.”
Indeed, the MAGA attempt to tie the shootings near Trump to the Democrats is pretty clearly an attempt to stop Democrats from talking about the issues of the campaign by claiming that any public discussion of Trump’s own unpopular policies and hateful words will gin up violence against him.
One of the biggest issues MAGA Republicans would like to stop people from talking about is abortion. Reproductive healthcare journalist Kavitha Surana explained in ProPublica today that every state has a committee of experts that meet to examine women’s deaths during or within a year of pregnancy. Those committees operate with a two-year lag, meaning that we are now learning about women dying after the Supreme Court overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized the constitutional right to abortion.
Georgia’s state committee has recently concluded that at least two women have died in Georgia from preventable causes after hospitals in the state denied them timely reproductive healthcare.
Amber Nicole Thurman died just weeks after the Georgia abortion ban went into effect. She went into sepsis from unexpelled fetal tissue after an abortion she obtained legally in North Carolina. Georgia’s law made the routine dilation and curettage procedure, or D&C, a felony with vague exceptions that make doctors worry about prosecution if they perform it. Reports show that doctors repeatedly discussed a D&C for Thurman but put it off even as her organs began to fail. By the time they performed the procedure, it was too late.
Surana notes that Georgia governor Brian Kemp said he was “overjoyed” when the law went into effect, and that it would keep women “safe, healthy, and informed.” Attorneys for the state of Georgia accused abortion rights activists who said the law endangered women of “hyperbolic fear mongering” just two weeks before Thurman died.
She left behind a 6-year-old son.
What Are Politics Are
Our politics. What are they, at this juncture, so crucial in human history?
They go like this.
One side won’t admit how bad things are. Scholars call this an age of polycrisis, and there’s plenty of discussion and debate in circles from climate science to social science about just how things got this bad. What isn’t debated much is if things are bad.
This is the side of liberalism. It refuses to truck with basic facts about reality at this point. Our economies are in crisis, unable to create enough good jobs to yield a stable social structure. As a result, middle classes are dying off—while in poorer countries, where they were supposed to emerge, like India and China, they never did.
Meanwhile, a range of other existential threats now afflicts our civilization. There’s climate change, of course—but liberals won’t engage much with the fact that carbon emissions are still rising. There’s democratic decline and implosion, and only recently have liberals begun to speak about authoritarianism and fascism, yet even now, they don’t really place things in historical perspective. There’s mega-inequality, with which liberals seem perfectly fine, but why should any human being have more wealth than they could spend in a thousand lifetimes? Is this ancient Rome?
Maybe.
Liberalism, in other words, is a paradigm now trapped by itself. Unable to confront and face its own failures, it simply goes on telling us that things are OK, great, wonderful, economies are booming, societies are fine, families are OK, generations have it good, and so forth.
None of this is true. We only need to glance at the statistics for a moment to see that, and I won’t repeat them at length, but well over half of people struggle to pay bills, live paycheck to paycheck, or feel overwhelmed and numb, and so on.
None of this is…true.
And that creates a Very Big Problem.
It drives people into the arms of the right. The right, by now, is extreme.
Yet it does one thing liberalism won’t. It acknowledges that we have Serious Problems. It speaks to the working and what’s left of the middle class, and admits that they’re struggling. It will say that our economies aren’t delivering. It points to social structure collapsing, and social ties rupturing. It even goes so far as to speak of civilizational breakdown.
And then of course it turns around and blames it all on a convenient set of scapegoats. Those scapegoats are what took away your job, wife, country, society. Purify them away, and your fortunes will be restored.
It’s a silly fairy tale.
But in an age where liberalism won’t admit that there are any problems, Big Ones, it ends up being incredibly seductive.
Why We Play Along With Our Broken Politics
This is why our societies are so “polarized.”
It’s because our politics are broken.
One side won’t admit there are problems, and those of us who feel uncomfortable with, or even repelled by, authoritarianism and fascism, play along, because at least this side supports democracy, equal rights, some measure of progress.
But I suspect many of us play along uncomfortably with liberalism. Wondering when, if ever, it’s going to act on climate change, inequality, downward mobility, the implosion of the middle class, in some robust, meaningful way—not just with a smattering of anodyne policies here and there.
Where’s the New New Deal? Where’s the Great Society of the 21st Century? Where’s the New Bill of Rights?
We play along because we can’t, in our hearts of hearts, support the other side, which demonizes, hates, rages, openly calls for the end of democracy.
We settle for the lesser evil, which is what grown ups do, but at this point, we’re not going to lesser-evil our Big Problems away. They must be solved.
Meanwhile, there are our alter egos on the other side.
They don’t like the rage, hate, spite. They’re shamed by it, disgusted by it, tired of it. And yet they play along, too, with their side, because at least that side will say things like the working and middle class deserve better, that there are serious problems afflicting the economy and society, that our institutions are broken, that our institutions are captured by elites.
There’s more than a grain of truth in all that.
Even if the solution that side offers is repellent.
One Side Has Terrible Answers, the Other Side Won’t Admit There Are Big Problems
So. Liberalism won’t much admit there are Big Problems. Conservatism, meanwhile, admits it, but offers more and more noxious solutions to them, at this point, more or less openly fascist and authoritarian. Where does that leave most of us?
I suspect that on both sides, there are a whole lot of people playing along.
Wearily. Sort of almost guiltily. Hey, I can’t support all that—camps, deportations, hate, spite. So here I am, on the other side. And yet this side, my side, it still leaves me wondering. Does it really care about any of these Big Problems? Is this all it’s going to do—a policy here, a policy there, as if all that’s going to fix climate change, downward mobility, lost generations, the implosion of the middle class, and so on?
Hey, I can’t support that side. They don’t seem to care about the middle and working class. They keep telling me the economy’s great, wonderful, awesome, when here I am, working two jobs, and I still can’t pay the bills. I’m not sure I like the hate, spite, and venom—in fact, I don’t. But I’ll shake my head at it, maybe they don’t really mean it, and play along.
See what I mean a little bit?
Are you like this? I know I am. And that doesn’t mean I’m not excited by Kamala and Tim, that I don’t share the enthusiasm. I do. But at the same time, I have to admit, insofar as actually solving any of our Big Problems goes…I’m playing along. I like them. Coach Tim is a solid dude. Kamala’s inspirational. But…let’s get real. The problems we have are going to take more, and it’s OK if these are first steps, but it’s not OK if they’re last ones.
I fear that I disappoint you with my honesty sometimes. That I hurt you, even. But I don’t mean it in that way. I feel weary. Tired.
Of playing along.
I feel guilty, a little bit, too.
And I wonder, deep down, if you do too.
What I do know is this.
How Societies End Up Polarized—and Paralyzed
How do societies end up polarized like this? Let me now summarize.
When one party won’t acknowledge society’s and people’s Big Problems, but at least it’s not a danger to democracy and society. When the other one will, but it emphatically is.
Let me put that another way.
When one side offers will barely acknowledge the Big Problems that people are the most concerned with. While the other offers poor, misguided solutions to those very same Big Problems.
This leaves people in a bind. Which side should they play along with? There’s not one that most can support with heartfelt enthusiasm, at least not over longer time horizons than a single election.
So societies split right down the middle.
One group of people is repelled by awful, immoral solutions to their Real Problems. The other side is happy, at least, that those problems are acknowledged.
For the first group, preserving democracy is worth any price, even letting Big Problems fester. For the other one, they don’t support, necessarily, the end of democracy, but they support the agenda of taking back society and institutions from corrosive elites, and so they minimize the risk.
All this is precisely what we see in America.
Society is polarized because our politics are broken. Not the other way around, which is how pundits tend to suggest thinking about it.
So what do we with all this?
Why We Need a New Politics
I think that we need a new politics now.
One that acknowledges all our Big Problems. Admits they’re real. And offers sensible solutions for them.
Isn’t that sort of just…obvious? By now?
A politics that can admit no, our economies aren’t delivering, yes, our social structures are in decline, no, the middle and working class isn’t doing well, yes, inequality is a serious issue, the average person can’t seem to live a decent life, working hard doesn’t pay off like it used to, generations are in downward mobility, and, of course, as the planet burns, those factors will only all intensify.
And then offers some pretty reasonable solutions to them. Not just hopes to Hitler them away, with social purification and hate and spite.
That’s a paradigm shift.
We’re not close to it.
No, Kamala and Tim’s smattering of policies don’t get us there. First steps, like I said, but not a shift in paradigm just yet. The same is true in Europe. It’s true in Canada, too, where people are turning their backs on liberalism for precisely the reasons above. It’s true in China and India, where the political class offers no real solutions for widespread stagnation.
This is one of the great challenges of our age.
Our politics is broken. One side hopes we’ll play along with its non-answers, because at least it’s still democratic. The other one banks on our alter egos, who play along with it, and dismiss authoritarianism as a stunt, hewing to that side’s acknowledgement of the bitter plight most face.
None of this is adequate.
And until we have a more sensible politics, built for this age, we’ll continue to destabilize. Violence will grow, as distrust spirals, and people feel lost, afraid, and alone. That’s the bad news.
The good news is that I don’t think the above is that hard. It’s just sensible at this point. That, though, in times like these, can often be the most difficult task of all.
When a young man took a shot at Donald Trump in July it was the first time political assassination, attempted or otherwise, had intruded into presidential politics in more than 40 years. Now it appears to have happened a second time in two months. What’s going on here? It comes almost a week after Donald Trump and JD Vance began a campaign of racist anti-immigrant incitement focused on Springfield, Ohio, an effort so destructive and reckless that the Republican mayor and at least two of the three Republican County supervisors have either begged Trump to stop or publicly questioned whether they will even vote for him because they’re so upset about it. The city has been rocked over the last week by repeated bomb threats, school evacuations, the shuttering of one local college which has moved to remote study. This isn’t even counting the experience of Haitian migrants who are being terrorized by the pro-Trump extremists Trump and Vance have incited against them.
And yet, it’s Trump who seems to have been targeted by an almost belief-defying two assassination attempts in little more than two months. We’ve already discussed the case of Thomas Crooks, the shooter in the first attempt in July, who was himself killed by a Secret Service sharpshooter moments after opening fire. Crooks had a negligible political footprint — registered as a Republican, apparently making a single small dollar donation to a Democrat-aligned get-out-the-vote group a few years earlier. The clearest through-line in Crooks’ life story is that he was into guns. Very into guns. The best theory of his crime — the one apparently adopted by FBI investigators — is that he was planning a “typical” mass shooting incident and then decided to make the Trump rally his venue when he found out Trump was coming to town. Whatever the specifics, it seems clear that Crooks’ motivation was that of a “typical” mass shooter, an angry and isolated young man’s desire to make his mark in a final, apocalyptic explosion of violence. Tying it to Donald Trump and presumably killing Donald Trump as part of it was simply a way to up the ante as opposed to achieve any specific political or ideological goal.
Now we have Ryan Routh, who current reporting suggests is what you might call a swing extremist. He apparently voted for Trump in 2016, then voted for Biden in 2020 and had been supporting Vivek Ramawamy in 2024. The biggest through-line in Routh’s story is one of mental instability and a tendency toward violence. In 2002 he was arrested after barricading himself in a building with a weapon in a stand off with police.
Republicans are now predictably demanding that Democrats in essence stop campaigning against Trump because they’re inciting their supporters to try to assassinate Trump. That’s absurd. Neither of these men is in any sense a supporter of Democrats or even of more marginal groups that could in any sense be identified with “the left.” But two men have seemingly tried to kill Trump in two months. In the first, that was clearly the intent. In the second, it seems highly likely to be the case, though it’s possible further investigation could complicate the picture. So what is happening? I think there are two levels on which to answer this.
Assassination attempts, like school shootings, mass shootings, even suicides in a small towns, are contagious. People already on the brink get the idea and then take the plunge themselves. One detail from the rapid review of Routh’s social media trail has him saying that Biden and Harris should visit the people who had been wounded in the Butler, PA assassination attempt since Trump never would. Unsurprisingly but clearly he was aware of that incident. And it focused his attention. I suspect yesterday’s incident never would have happened absent the shooting in Butler.
There’s precedent for this. On September 5th, 1975 a Charles Manson follower named Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme tried to shoot President Ford. She pointed a gun directly at Ford’s face when he was out in public before a Secret Service agent grabbed her arm and disarmed her. Two weeks later on September 22nd, 1975, Sara Jane Moore, an accountant and a divorced mother of four fired a .38 pistol at Ford but missed. Moore was on the radar of San Francisco police as a possible threat to Ford and had a history of psychiatric issues.
The Trump and Ford cases have an uncanny similarity. Moore seems to have been the more considered attempted assassin. (Fromme was a deranged cultist.) But whatever predisposition Moore may have had, it seems highly unlikely she would have taken the decisive step had Fromme not done so first. So political violence and attempted assassinations are in this sense contagious.
But on a broader level, Donald Trump is simply himself a source of unrest and conflagration. He’s a vortex of violence. His rhetoric is violent. He has friendly paramilitaries like the Proud Boys that he encourages to come to his aid. He was the one who incited a violent mob to storm the U.S. Capitol. He’s provoked numerous supporters to acts of mass violence, from Pittsburgh to El Paso. The mix of bomb threats and marches in Springfield over the last week are only the latest example.
His partisans now claim that Joe Biden’s or Kamala Harris’ rhetoric is inciting violence against him. And gullible reporters will no doubt go in for some of this. But it’s an argument that simply collapses under the weight of its own ridiculousness. The man is talking about himself. The most generous read of what Republicans are saying is that simply identifying what Trump either has done (tried to overturn the results of an election with violence) or says he will do (govern in a second term with quasi-dictatorial means) are too dangerous to say publicly. In other words, Trump’s own extremism, violence and anti-constitutional actions paradoxically and absurdly make it too dangerous to criticize him.
But we shouldn’t run too deep into the rabbit holes of Trump’s supporters’ logic. He is himself a vortex of instability and violence. As his supporters like to put it, he likes to “stir the pot.” And he does. Attention, in his vision, is the only real currency in business or politics or media. So he keeps upping the ante and pushing new limits to get it. Like a heroin addict he has to keep upping the dose to get the same fix. The externalities of that behavior have been lapping up, splashing onto countless other people for almost a decade. Now they’re also splashing up onto him. Trump’s supporters ask rhetorically, if it’s not Biden and Harris who are doing it, are you really saying that Trump is inciting people against himself? The answer is actually yes. He’s now twice almost been consumed by the fires he himself is lighting.
The bottom line
It’s obviously possible for politicians (as well as journalists and voters) to pay too much attention to the horse race. Any politician who adopted an agenda based only on poll results would not be demonstrating leadership. And polls are obviously imperfect guides to public opinion; Hillary Clinton lost to Trump in 2016 partly because her campaign put too much faith in polls that wrongly showed her to be ahead.
But it is also possible to make the opposite mistake — to pay so little attention to the horse race as to be disdainful of public opinion. Polls, after all, are not describing an actual horse race. They are describing something much more important: public opinion in a democratic system that is supposed to be responsive to that opinion.
If you’re a Kamala Harris supporter, you probably felt pretty good about last week. With Donald Trump’s constant bait-taking during the debate and the endorsement by Taylor Swift, with less than two months until Election Day, on the surface, things have started to look like they’re falling into place for a Harris win. On Friday, I was a guest on “Real Time With Bill Maher,” and Mr. Maher, who has never been one to underestimate Mr. Trump’s appeal, declared that he thinks it’s finally over politically for the former president.
On the show, I disagreed. I still don’t think any of us should feel confident that we know how this will go. Does Ms. Harris have fund-raising momentum? Yes. Did she win last week’s debate? According to post-debate polls, yes. Did Ms. Swift direct a lot of potential voters to research how to register, presumably to vote for Ms. Harris? Yes. Did J. Ann Selzer, the oracle of Iowa, just release a poll showing Mr. Trump ahead by only four points in the Hawkeye State? Yes. So why am I holding off on joining the “it’s over” chorus?
First, there’s not a lot of evidence that the debate helped Ms. Harris’s numbers in a meaningful way — at least not yet. ABC News/Ipsos polling showed her with a six-point lead among likely voters before the debate and showed the same result after. Her margin in several averages of national polls hovers around two points, a margin that makes the possibility of an Electoral College-popular vote split reasonably likely. (The analyst Nate Silver says the odds of such an outcome are around one in four.)
And if you look at the polling averages from a variety of different sources, in the seven battleground states that receive the greatest attention, the race is extremely close. Mr. Trump tends to hold a negligible lead in some of the Sun Belt tossup states, as Ms. Harris does in Wisconsin and Michigan. Neither candidate leads by more than two points in any of those states. Pennsylvania, the biggest prize of them all, consistently shows a difference in the tenths of a percentage point.
The reality is that the debate may have done more to fire up or reassure Ms. Harris’s existing supporters than to add new voters to her ranks in large numbers. While the ABC/Ipsos poll found that Ms. Harris’s supporters back her more strongly than Mr. Trump’s supporters back him, it also still found that nearly half (47 percent) of respondents think Ms. Harris is too liberal. It’s of course better to have your side more energized than your opponent’s, but an enthusiastic vote doesn’t count more than a begrudging one so long as they both turn out.
Maybe the vibes are a leading indicator and the polls will catch up in the coming days. Or maybe the polls are simply missing something happening on the ground that is not being captured in the data. Either way, while Ms. Harris may be slightly favored at this point, the emphasis remains heavy on the “slightly.”
Popular vote-wise, the race favors Ms. Harris. But in the states that are going to be decisive in the Electoral College, it remains either’s race to win.
The poll numbers may very well be quite different seven weeks from now. We'll see.
As far as the presidential election goes, I wouldn't count on the results as reported the next day. And unless there's a landslide and a strong showing in electoral votes I wouldn't count on a Harris presidency until she's been sworn into office.
(which I've personally visited Twice!)
So now, since the Sheriff's Facebook comments have gained national attention, Bruce now feels he's "misunderstood," with this official statement:
As the Chief Law Enforcement Officer of Portage County, I have sworn to protect ALL citizens of my County. Recently, I placed a post on my personal facebook page that may have been a little misinterpreted??
I...as the elected sheriff, do have a first amendment right as do all citizens. If the citizens of Portage County want to elect an individual who has supported open borders (which I've personally visited Twice!) and neglected to enforce the laws of our Country...then that is their prerogative. With elections, there are consequences. That being said...I believe that those who vote for individuals with liberal policies have to accept responsibility for their actions! I am a Law Man...Not a Politician!
I would also like to Thank...The Overwhelming Support I am receiving from many people in Portage County who are afraid or are Not allowed to agree with me publicly!
Stay Strong and God Bless!! 🇺🇸
Yeah, I still take issue with this. The local paper editorial said this:
But yesterday he posted on his official account claiming he had been misunderstood but without clarifying exactly how. Nor did he explain his choice of racist language for immigrants. (He said they are "locusts.") And he seemed to double down on the premise of the earlier post, saying "those who vote for individuals with liberal policies have to accept responsibility for their actions." (By housing immigrants? It's not clear from the post.)
"If the citizens of Portage County want to elect an individual who has supported open borders ... and neglected to enforce the laws of our country...then that is their prerogative. With elections, there are consequences," Zuchowski wrote.
The response also claimed that the original post was made to his personal account. That's not entirely true. It was also posted to the official account of Sheriff Bruce D. Zuchowski. As of Tuesday evening, both posts can still be found at that page.
It's so weird to know my little County, one out of 88 in Ohio, makes national news in the most disturbing way. I have been heavily into local politics since last year when Ohio's Republicans tried with the first Issue One then again with the 2nd Issue One and Two, Abortion rights and rec marijuana. Now, a new Issue One to have an independent council to redraw the illegal gerrymandered districts is on the ballot. Maybe, just maybe Gym Jordan's reign won't stretch from Indiana to almost PA.
