Better headline: “Trump tries to steal election by preventing Pennsylvanians from voting.”
It’s just really weird to frame an article about the possibly that voter suppression leads to a result opposed by most people as a question of whether polls will fail to account for suppression.
“Boss, it looks like Trump is trying to suppress enough votes to steal the election!”
“Oh my god this is a huge story —quick, write an article about whether polls will appear to have been wrong!”
Donald Trump could shoot a man on 5th Ave and the New York Times headline would be about a bus schedule getting an M2 arrival time wrong. (Subhead: “Bus was on time until traffic jam caused by controversial Trump action”)
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Something that isn’t properly understood (particularly among journalists) is that The Right spent hundreds of millions of dollars and decades creating a facade of intellectualism and a key part of that was marketing nitwit partisans as “brilliant..”
And a lot of journalists were active participants in this, both because they got suckered by dumb arguments and because praising the intelligence/seriousness of this right-wing faux intellectuals was a easy way to demonstrate their own seriousness and “objectivity”
Barrett was nominated by a president who lost the popular vote, confirmed by a Senate majority that represents fewer people than the Senate minority, and gives the Supreme Court a majority of members who were appointed by presidents who took office after losing the popular vote.
John Roberts wrote the decision gutting the Voting Rights Act.
When people act like that doesn’t matter, they’re showing you who they are.
And it isn't just the Voting Rights Act -- though that would be enough. John Roberts is a right-wing judge. Here's a piece from @AaronBelkin and @SeanMcElwee last year explaining:
Also, there is a *huge* difference between "having countermajoritarian capacity" and being dominated for 50 years (and decades to come) by America's minority party.
This is the right's "we must have tyranny of the minority in order to prevent tyranny of the majority" BS.
The NYT should retract that article. But it should also publicly explain the process by which it came to portray a GOP campaign consultant and a GOP official as regular swing voters.
How did @elainaplott make contact with them? Did a GOP flak set it up? Did she research them?
Trump’s gonna get through the first twelve minutes without using a racial slur and reporters will write their “new tone” ledes, which they will refuse to reconsider over the next hour.
and the day ends the way it was always fated to end
To be more precise, I should have said “with time,” not “in time.” The “in time” part is in doubt … though I’m working on it.
The explanation — the *real* explanation — is that John Roberts & his fellow conservatives on the court are as hostile to democracy as the Republicans who appointed them, and want to help those Republicans govern via minority rule by white conservatives.