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Five Ways to Find New Voters and New Activists

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In a tweet yesterday, Cook Political Report analyst Dave Wasserman explained how Kamala Harris has changed the dynamic of the Presidential race. Her lead among highly committed voters remains the same as Joe Biden had in May. But she has eaten into Trump’s lead among low and mid-engagement voters.

These voters include young voters, busy working class voters, but also Double Haters whose disgust by their choice of candidate might have led them to sit out.

Understanding that that’s how you break up a tie race — by motivating people who otherwise might not to come out to vote — explains a lot about what Democrats have been doing in the one month since Kamala took over from Joe. It explains why Tim Walz joined TikTok — and why Pete Buttigieg is bragging that he already has more followers on TikTok than JD Vance.

Below, I’ve laid out five ways that the DNC has tried to find ways to reach out to voters last night.

One group they are not fully reaching out to, though, are Muslims and Arab-Americans. At the end of yesterday’s convention, multiple people, including AOC, reported that the convention will not allow a Palestinian-American to speak on the main stage. We may learn more about the circumstances of this (I’m sure it doesn’t help that Biden and Harris are trying to pressure Bibi Netanyahu to accept a ceasefire this week); it was a failure of planning that it didn’t happen earlier in the week. We may never know the cost of this. But it is ethically and morally wrong to exclude some voice to speak for the people of Gaza.

Update: The UAW has issued a statement on the import of providing a platform for a Palestinian American to speak.

If we want the war in Gaza to end, we can’t put our heads in the sand or ignore the voices of the Palestinian Americans in the Democratic Party. If we want peace, if we want real democracy, and if we want to win this election, the Democratic Party must allow a Palestinian American speaker to be heard from the DNC stage tonight.

Coach Walz

You don’t need me to explain why Tim Walz expands the field of potential voters (though polling doesn’t, yet, show him helping, much, in rural areas). At the very least, he’s virtually guaranteed to ensure Harris-Walz wins the Omaha electoral vote that puts the ticket at 270 in a thin Blue Wall strategy.

There are three things about his speech that merit notice, however. First, bringing Walz’ football players on stage was great theater, just like having Kamala and Coach pack a Milwaukee venue and the Chicago convention at the same time. It continues to highlight a different kind of white masculinity, besides the toxic aggression Trump offers.

The image of Gus Walz weeping for his father is yet another expression of the love that has drenched the Democratic side this year, even as Melania has shied from Trump’s kiss.

There’s also a line in Walz’ stump speech — that Sarah Longwell, the publisher of The Bulwark who has been doing non-stop focus groups for the last two months — says works with all swing voters: “We made sure that every kind in our state gets breakfast and lunch every day.” Walz went on, “So while other states were banning books from our schools, we were banishing hunger.” A focus on schools — yes to food and books, no to guns — has the power to make sense of all this.

Notably, in Florida, Ron DeSantis’ efforts to pack school boards with people censoring books had a huge setback on Tuesday.

Oprah

After Oprah endorsed Barack Obama in 2007, there were scholarly and polling articles that tried to track the value of her endorsement. The answer was — at a time when she was at the height of her influence — it probably had more impact on the belief of those who might already vote for Obama that he could win, not in convincing others to vote for him. Oprah gave Obama credibility, and the timing and publicity of it gave him a way to match up to Hillary.

Obviously, Oprah’s endorsement of Hillary in 2016 was not enough to defeat Donald Trump.

More recently, Oprah’s influence has been more important in undercutting those whose careers she had launched, most notably Dr Oz when he ran against John Fetterman. That ought to concern JD Vance, whose Hillbilly Elegy Oprah platformed in her book club. Oprah quipped that when a house is in on fire, that homeowner’s neighbors don’t ask their religion or party before they move to help. “And if the place happens to belong to a childless cat lady, welp, we try to get that cat out too.” Equally important, for a woman who taught Middle America to read again, it matters that she warned against, “People who’d have you believe that books are dangerous, and assault rifles are safe.”

I think Oprah did one more thing. She paid tribute to John Lewis and spoke at length of the import of Tessie Prevost-Williams’ role in integrating New Orleans schools. Too many white people don’t know — haven’t had to think about — the import of school integration, or the impact of efforts to reverse it. Oprah used Tessie’s story to explain the import of Kamala’s role in integrating Berkeley’s schools. Oprah, who like Donald Trump built her credibility by joining Americans in their living rooms for years, broke ground for what might be far more focus on the historic opportunity of Kamala’s candidacy, including a tribute to Fannie Lou Hamer, like Oprah a Mississippian, who demanded she be seated as a delegate 60 years ago today.

Trump responded to Oprah’s speech by releasing the letter Oprah sent almost a quarter century ago when Trump wrote, in a book, that Oprah would be his first choice for a Vice President candidate.

Americans respect and admire Oprah for her intelligence and caring. She has provided inspiration for millions of women to improve their lives, go back to school, learn to read, and take responsibility for themselves. If I can’t get Oprah, I’d like someone like her.

I’m not sure how Oprah’s polite denial in 2000 helps him, since his description of Oprah as the ideal Vice President sounds so much like Kamala and nothing like JD Vance.

Geoff Duncan

The party has made a concerted effort to do what Trump hasn’t for anyone beyond Nikki Haley herself: reach out to Never-Trumpers. On Tuesday, former Trump press secretary Stephanie Grisham described how Trump attacks his supporters as “basement dwellers.” Before Geoff Duncan, former Homeland Security aide Olivia Troye described how she — a conservative Latina Catholic of the sort Republicans have been working hard to attract — was terrified if Trump would return to the White House.

Geoff Duncan made voting against Trump a matter of integrity. He looked into the camera and addressed, “the millions of Republicans and Independents that are at home that are sick and tired of making excuses for Donald Trump.” As all the Republicans speaking did, he described that voting for Harris didn’t make one a Democrat, but instead a patriot — reappropriating the term Trump’s thugs have adopted. And he described how, as his family was hunted by other Republicans sent by Donald Trump, his son reminded him of the family motto: “Doing the right thing will never be the wrong thing.”

[Update: Spelling of Duncan’s first name corrected. My apologies to him.]

Bill Clinton

Bill was self-indulgent, he went long, he occasionally mispronounced Kamala’s name, and — as someone younger than both Joe Biden and Donald Trump — he made it easy to understand how age can slow you down. “Let’s cut to the chase. I am too old to gild the lily. Two days ago I turned 78. Oldest man in my family for four generations. And the only personal vanity I want to assert is I’m still younger than Donald Trump.”

But 25 minutes in, the old white southern spouse of failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton warned against getting complacent.

As somebody who spends a lot of time in small towns and rural areas in New York and Arkansas and other places, I want, I urge you to talk to all your neighbors. I urge you to meet people where they are. I urge you not to demean them, but not to pretend you don’t disagree with them if you do. Treat them with respect. Just the way you’d like them to treat you.

I’m not Bill Clinton’s audience. But right now, Kamala is retaining a surprising amount of older white voters after Biden’s drop. And the kind of conversation Bill espouses is the kind of conversation that the Tim Walz pick makes possible, if people are willing to engage.

Pete Buttigieg

Buttigieg’s talent is well known from his Fox News appearances (which he joked about), but it was especially apparent in comparison with all the historic speakers at the convention. He still shone.

Buttigieg found a way to attack JD Vance for both his commentary about childless people and his attacks on Walz’ military record — by noting that, “When I deployed to Afghanistan, I didn’t have kids then. Many of the men and women who went outside the wire didn’t have kids either. But let me tell you: Our commitment to the future of this country was pretty damn physical.”

More importantly, he found a way to explain why politics matters. Without ever mentioning he’s gay or naming his husband Chasten, Buttigieg reminded that nothing about his nuclear family was possible two decades ago. None of it was possible without the political fight to win equality.

There is joy in it, as well as power. And if all of that sounds naive, let me insist that I have come to this view not by the way of idealism, but by way of experience. Not just the experience of my unlikely career — someone like me, serving, in Indiana. Someone like me, serving in Washington. Someone like me, serving, in uniform. I’m thinking of something much more basic. I’m thinking of dinner time in our house in Michigan. When the dog is barking and the air fryer is beeping and the mac and cheese is boiling over and it feels like all the political negotiating experience in the world is not enough for me to get our 3-year old daughter and our 3-year old son to just wash their hands and sit at the table. It’s the part of our day when politics seems the most distant. And yet the makeup of our kitchen table — the existence of my family — is just one example of something that was literally impossible as recently as 25 years ago when an anxious teenager growing up in Indiana wondering if he would ever find belonging in this world.

Since Walz has been chosen, several things have reminded me of my early involvement in a renewed sense of politics since the Iraq War. Like Tim Walz, I attended Wellstone Action. Folks I’ve known for decades — in VoteVets and from the new political spinoff from Daily Kos, The DownBallot — reminded that they backed Walz in 2006 and 2008, when his win was considered an impossibility. Rayne would kill me if I failed to mention Howard Dean in it all, which is where we got to know each other IRL.

As happened with Obama (and in response to the Iraq War), Kamala’s race has the power to convince ordinary Americans that they can be a different kind of citizen, and that kind of citizenship can improve people’s lives. There’s a lot of Democrats celebrating other Democrats at the convention. But there’s also a real effort to offer something for those low-turnout voters who could decide the race, or novice Democrats who could step up for the first time.

Those Complicit in Trump’s False Story about the Election Are Willingly Damaging This Country

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Trump is telling a story — a false story — about his loss. The story, by itself, is not enough to overturn his resounding loss, and because of that, a host of people are treating the story-telling as relatively harmless. That’s a mistake, not least because Trump may intend this story-telling to justify other activities, such as a crack-down on people who protest his actions. He may even intend to make this country ungovernable — and in that, he may well succeed. Because of that, every single person who is complicit in telling that story bears direct responsibility for what comes next, including violence and potentially an attempt to thwart the will of voters.

I’d like to look at two kinds of story-telling that are complicit with Trump’s efforts, using this WSJ story, by Rebecca Balhous and Rebecca Davis O’Brien, as an example (though there are a slew of other possible examples).

First, there are Trump’s advisors, many of whom are described as recognizing that Trump’s claims of voter fraud won’t reverse his overwhelming loss.

Trump advisers have grown more vocal in conversations with Mr. Trump in recent days that they don’t see a path to victory, even if his legal efforts meet some success, a White House official said, though some advisers have continued to tell the president he still has a shot. An official said Mr. Trump understands that the fight isn’t winnable but characterized his feelings as: “Let me have the fight.”

One potential strategy discussed by Mr. Trump’s legal team would be attempting to get court orders to delay vote certification in critical states, potentially positioning Republican-controlled state legislatures to appoint pro-Trump electors who would swing the Electoral College in his favor, according to people familiar with the discussions.

It isn’t known how seriously the campaign has considered this idea, one of the people said.

Many of the advisers and lawyers said they doubt the effort would succeed and say it is aimed largely at appeasing Mr. Trump, who believes the election was stolen from him and expects his legal team to keep fighting.

Some of Mr. Trump’s advisers and lawyers said there isn’t an overarching legal theory or coordination behind the campaign’s efforts. The legal battle likely will conclude with Mr. Trump claiming the election was rigged against him and that he fought the outcome, the White House official said.

These people are willing to tell a story — one claiming that Trump’s legal challenges are meant to be serious legal challenges and not theater designed solely for story-telling — just to “appease” Trump. These people are all admitting that they are willing to damage the country just to allow a narcissist to claim he didn’t lose because a majority of the country, even a majority of people in states that make up an Electoral College victory, rejected him, but instead to claim he lost because over half the country did something illegitimate. These people are participating in Trump’s efforts to rebrand the act of casting a vote against Donald Trump as cheating.

No one making those admissions should be given anonymity, because they are willingly doing damage to the country.

Worse still, these anonymous sources are described as not really knowing how far Trump intends to go with the story. If they don’t know how Trump intends to use this effort, then they cannot rule out the possibility that they are telling a story that Trump intends to lay the groundwork for some kind of violent or extralegal effort to refuse to hand over power. Presumably, given that these people recognize how elections work, none of these people would willingly participate in a coup. Except they may be doing just that, by helping Trump tell a story that delegitimizes Joe Biden’s resounding win.

If this fight is not winnable, as these sources acknowledge, then participating in it can only serve to harm the country.

But it’s not just these anonymous sources who are complicit in the damage Trump is doing to this country.

This story treats the outcome of the election as a both-sides issue, one that pits Democrats against Republicans. For example, it notes that “officials in each state” have said there were no problems with the election. But then it only quotes Democrats, and labels each one as a Democrat.

Officials in each state have defended their voting processes as fair and free of major problems. Democrats said they would fight any effort to stop certification of the vote.

[snip]

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat, said the Michigan lawsuits were aimed at preventing the state from certifying results in hopes that the Republican Legislature would send Congress electors for Mr. Trump. “We are prepared to combat that,” she said on a conference call Wednesday.

[snip]

A spokeswoman for the office of Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, said Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, certifies the electors selected by the popular vote.

A spokeswoman for Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, said the office is confident it will certify election results on time. “Arizona’s courts have plenty of experience handling and expeditiously resolving election-related lawsuits within the very strict statutory deadlines,” said spokeswoman Sophia Solis. [my emphasis]

It is, frankly malpractice to treat these claims as a partisan issue, and even bigger negligence to not quote any of the numerous Republicans who have also said the votes conducted in their states were fair, such as Georgia’s Geoff Duncan, or other Republican experts saying the same, such as Ben Ginsberg or Karl Rove.

Truth is not a partisan issue, but Balhous and O’Brien are treating it as such.

This story also treats claims that have been debunked or that are meaningless as credible.

In Michigan, it has offered affidavits from Republican election challengers who say they were harassed, forcibly excluded from absentee ballot-counting facilities and witnessed tampering with scores of ballots.

[snip]

In Pennsylvania, the campaign’s lawsuit contends the state didn’t give observers enough access to ballot counters and gave voters in Democratic leaning counties more opportunities to correct deficiencies in their mail-in ballots.

It would take about ten minutes of reporting to explain how these claims misrepresent the legal guidelines surrounding official poll challengers or exploit Democrats’ far wider use of mail-in voting this year to suggest disparate treatment. There are multiple court transcripts now where Republican lawyers have admitted this.

And yet, instead of doing that reporting, these journalists treat these bogus claims as if there is some dispute about them. There is not. The facts show these claims are without merit, and including the claims without clearly noting that is irresponsible.

Finally, having spent thirty paragraphs treating these election claims as if they are serious, in spite of the overwhelming evidence they are not, the WSJ admits that they are instead intended to accomplish other objectives.

Republican leadership in Congress has supported Mr. Trump’s legal battle. Some advisers see the efforts as a way to keep the Trump base energized ahead of the runoff elections in Georgia in January that will determine control of the Senate.

The suits also offer Republicans a greater platform to draw attention to any potential voting irregularities. And they provide an opportunity for political payback by Mr. Trump, who has long complained that the special counsel investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia in the 2016 election was a way for his opponents to delegitimize his victory that year.

Responsible reporting would start with this admission. It would make the lead of the story that Republicans are lying about the viability of their challenge but are willing to do so, with all the damage that will do, to score payback because Trump was investigated for crimes he committed. But instead the WSJ buries it in the last lines, hiding their own complicity and that of Republicans they inexcusably grant anonymity where few will ever read it.

The story that Donald Trump is telling is doing tangible harm to our country. If you are complicit in telling that story — whether you are an anonymous enabler or a both-sides reporter — you also are doing tangible harm to this country.