Two weeks elections away!
The old-guard sane Republicans are hoping that they’ll lose Florida, Texas, and Iowa, because that’s the sort of thing that’s needed for us to end up with an actual conservative party again.
Hmm, interesting idea.
A whole bunch of old guard sane Republicans just publicly endorsed Harris.
- More than 100 Republican former lawmakers and officials endorsed Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.
- The group argued that former President Donald Trump, their own party’s nominee, is “unfit to serve again.”
- The group includes former Trump administration officials, as well as officials who served under former Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush.
In the letter, shared by the Harris campaign Wednesday, 111 former national security and foreign policy officials said that despite their disagreements with the vice president’s policies, “we believe that she possesses the essential qualities to serve as President and Donald Trump does not.”
THE Mo Green, yes!
(I was typing in the rain on my phone, and may have edited inexpertly there).
No Mo, sadly. Just the mayor and vice mayor and a few other folks. Two were especially interesting:
- Walz himself was introduced by a local undergrad college student, who made up for his lack of polish with earnest enthusiasm. The choice of a college guy for the position of honor was of course deliberate.
- Bob Orr spoke. He was a longtime Republican member of the NC Supreme Court, and he spoke on behalf of Republicans who feel alienated from their party. He spoke about how many of Harris’s themes of liberty and opportunity used to be Republican talking points, and I was too far away to shout at him about how 90s Republicans were fucking awful on questions of personal liberty, and anyway he didn’t need shouting at. Orr’s speech, and its connection to @MulderMuffin’s post right above mine, is what got me to return to this subthread.
All in all, an excellent rally.
Ask and ye shall receive. Times/Siena for PA and nationally released today:
“The race is deadlocked nationally. Yet in the critical battleground state of Pennsylvania, Ms. Harris has a lead of four percentage points — a slight edge that is unchanged since early August. She has reassembled much of the core Democratic coalition in the state, winning the support of Black voters, younger voters and women there.”
“The share of voters who said they still wanted to learn more about Ms. Harris was nearly identical, both before and after the debate, suggesting that she might have missed an opportunity to address doubts or provide more details to the public.”
The guy from The Godfather, presumably. 
I’m sure Trump will tout this as Iran being scared of him and colluding with “that fascist Kamala.” And ignore the Russians in his own corner. Not that Iran likes Harris anyway-this way they can hurt both candidates.
Two completely different names form two apparent homonyms and both are found in South Asia. When you transcribe the long vowels, which also indicates stress accent, they stop being homonyms: Sanskrit Kāmala ‘lotus’, the vice president’s name. Arabic Kamālah ‘perfection’, Ms. Marvel’s name.
If written in Arabic or Devanagari, the differences become more apparent:
Kāmala كاملا कामला
Kamālah كمالة कमाला
Hope that clears it up.
Not a bit, but thanks for trying.
Not just any Bob Orr? The Bobby Orr?
Bobby Orr, THE Bobby Orr – either/orr.
These people are lying. There are going to vote for Trump and there is nothing Harris can do about it. They just want to find the right mask that makes it acceptable in their minds to do so. Trump hasn’t found anything that sticks so they are going with the “I just don’t know enough about her” line. Trump repeated this in the debate a few times as well.
This is, IMO, one of the primary reasons polls tend to understate Trump’s support (not the GOP in general, just Trump). People know he is a bad person and leader, they know he is a criminal, and they know he is wrong with his claims about immigrants and Democrats destroying the country. But these claims still resonate strongly in their Id, and at the end of the day many of them will vote for him because they are scared and angry and he speaks to that part of them very deeply.
How quickly they call a state has more to do with how they count ballots than with how close it is these days.
Thanks, yes it does!
This needs to be stickied at the top of the “How could Trump possibly win at this point” thread.
Exactly.
Just like most people who say “the economy is terrible.” You press them on it, and most of them are doing fine, if not great. Just bought a sweet pickup truck. Wages are going up. Things are great. But the “economy”? Oh, it’s terrible!
They’re lying. They see that the presidency has a “D” next to the name, therefore economy=bad; the second there’s an “R” there, economy=good.
All those contortions and lying, just for the privilege of supporting someone who hates the same people they hate. It’s that simple (and that stupid).
off-topic reply hidden
I believe VP Harris’ ancestry is specifically South Indian. Any change in pronunciation when borrowed by a Dravidian language (e.g., Tamil)?
I’m guessing the stress is the same – emphasis on the pre-penultimate, like in many Dravidian words – but the unstressed vowels are different. I hear a lot of schwa-like vowels in Tamil, while in the original (Indo-European) Sanskrit, I assume they’re more like “full” mid-vowels as in Spanish.
If so, the especially “lax” way Americans pronounce unstressed vowels would happen to match Ms. Harris’ Dravidian style better than the Sanskrit or Hindi versions.
Ask and ye shall receive again! Emerson dropped a poll today (Times/Siena dropped theirs last night – see earlier posts, by me and others, for that).
Warning – It ain’t pretty:
“In Georgia, 50% support Trump, 47% Harris. In Arizona and Wisconsin, 49% support Trump, 48% support Harris. In Pennsylvania, 48% support Trump, 47% Harris. In Nevada, the candidates are tied with 48% support each. In North Carolina, 49% support Harris, 48% Trump. In Michigan, 49% support Harris, 47% support Trump.”
(Emphasis mine).
I know it’s “just one poll”…but this is the first time since Biden dropped out that I feel there’s a good chance Trump will win, and we need to start preparing mentally for that possibility. I’ve worried a lot until now, but now it’s not just worry, it’s facing what the reality of that happening would mean. (I’m not articulating this well, but it’s a real shift, for me).
Of course Harris can still pull this off, and I’m hoping she will.
Moderating:
OK, enough of this sidebar. There is only one right way to pronounce her name anyway. She was nice enough to present the how-to during the DNC:
How to Reply as a linked Topic
Click Reply, in the upper left corner of the reply window is the reply type button, looks like a curving arrow point to the right.
Choose Reply as linked topic and it starts a new thread. As an example, you can choose GD, IMHO or The Pit for it.
That is actually the best method.
I’m serious, next word on how to pronounce Kamala in this thread will earn a warning.
Not to sidetrack the thread, but it’s not just Trumpers who’ve complained about inflation, for instance. Plenty of blue-leaning folks have pointed out that they are paying far more for groceries today than pre-pandemic. You don’t have to be a Trumper to grimace at the price you see at checkout at HEB.
Of course, that’s more the fault of Covid than Democrats, but the economy-is-terrible talk isn’t fiction spun out of thin air. Many people are indeed suffering.
Back to topic: on the subject of battleground states, any lead of less than 4% for Kamala should be considered unsafe. IIRC, that was roughly the amount of surprise-gain that Trump posted on Election Night 2020; outperforming his polling by about 3-4%.