State of the Race

I'm on a bit of a very refreshing holiday and finding it hard to focus on the realities, but this seemed especially hilarious: 

Per CBS News, 

A company called TheBestWatchesonEarth LLC, which is licensing Trump's name for the watches, lists its address as a suite located in a building in Sheridan, Wyoming, the same address as the company selling Trump's $499 sneakers. The suite is near a Wendy's fast-food location and Sherwin-Williams paint store. 

New York's Chas Danner and Matt Stieb have reported of the sneaker operation, however, that the Sheridan company that licensed Trump's name for the sneakers, 45FootwearLLC, as well as the company that did the digital Trump trading cards, is the creation of an "asset-protection consultant" called Andrew Pierce, who specializes in creating LLCs for clients who could like to keep their transactions inside layers of misdirection, apparently quite a big business in Wyoming (see Pandora Papers), in these cases the not-at-all illegal fact that Trump actually owns the businesses himself, and the buyer of these cheap sneakers from a "low-cost Asian country", smelling of glue (that's said to be a bad sign) and marked up something like 900%, who probably thinks he is benefiting the Trump presidential campaign, or the equally dubious Tourbillon watches, is actually giving the money straight to Donald. 

And with those those kinds of markups, he's definitely got the tariffs covered, if the goods are subject to any.

Then there's the way he's restructured the Republican National Committee, taking the management away from that loyal tool Ronna McDaniel and turning it over to his daughter-in-law, the aspiring pop singer Lara Trump, and Michael Whatley, whoever that is (he's a North Carolina lawyer and an election denier). They are pledged not to use the party funds to pay Trump's legal fees, for whatever that's worth, but they've allocated their energies in a sort of weird way, devoting themselves mostly to fighting against the election results before the election takes place, with 120 lawsuits in 26 states, while the party's normal get-out-the-vote activities have been wholly outsourced to outside groups, Charlie Kirk's Turning Point USA, the "America First Works" run not by political operatives but by theoretically sane celebrity veterans of Trump's old cabinet (Linda MacMahon and Larry Kudlow), and most splendidly a superPAC aligned with former genius Elon Musk, AmericaPAC, which is said to be doing most of the work but adopting a somewhat peculiar strategy, aimed at a relatively small number of unlikely voters:

The former president’s campaign has unleashed an untested canvassing and voter-contact model that could reap a big payoff if successfully executed. Gone are the days of the Republican National Committee leading the charge and aiming to hit the highest number of contacts possible.

Now, the Trump team is tailoring its effort, carried out in conjunction with outside groups, to be focused primarily on what it has dubbed “low-propensity voters” — the people who are showing up in poll after poll saying they did not vote in 2020 but are breaking Trump’s way by a significant margin this time.

I think there's a genuine kind of insight behind this, whoever is orchestrating it—a recognition that Trump's margin of victory in 2016 came from the uninformed and disengaged, people who are relatively less likely to vote any year. But it's an unjustified leap to suppose you could duplicate that this year, though it may have seemed that way three months ago. Since the candidacy of Harris the situation is plainly much more like that of 2020, a particularly high-turnout year, when a huge preponderance of the least likely voters by conventional measures are the new registrations of young and in many cases dark people anxious to stop Trump to protect abortion rights and such of the welfare state as still exists, and the menace of the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025:

When it comes to what specific policies within Project 2025 Americans dislike, the University of Massachusetts poll found that a majority of respondents disagreed with policies like "firing thousands of federal employees and replacing them with appointees loyal to the president" (-56 percent net support) or "reducing federal civil rights protections for lesbian, gay, and transgender people" (-29 percent net support). A YouGov poll in early July found similarly low support for policies like withdrawing federal approval for the abortion pill mifepristone (-26 percent net support) — though other proposals were somewhat more popular, like deploying the military to help with arrests along the U.S.- Mexico border (+11 percent net support) or outlawing pornography (an even split).

(I wish there were more anxiety about the Project 2025 effect on efforts against climate change, but the things that do get singled out are pretty important.)

But more and more I get the impression that Trump himself is just readying himself to lose, in the face of disasters like the Vance choice and the Trump-Harris debate,and his campaign falling into helplessness reaction. I don't think their plans to contest the 2024 election are going to work very well, though they're capable of bringing on plenty of violence and confusion.

Beginning to wonder whether Trump is grifting so hard bc he recognizes that his brand may be irredeemably harmed with his rubes if a Black woman beats him. Does the conman worry that, once that happens, he'll lose half his cult members?

— emptywheel (@emptywheel.bsky.social) September 29, 2024 at 7:18 AM

Whatever the Democrats are doing wrong, and there's no doubt plenty, they've got a fairly firm idea of winning in mind, and a fair amount of enthusiasm in the ranks, and I'm starting to think the GOP is so poorly prepared that they aren't even going to be able to cheat with their accustomed skill. They look like losers.