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Michael Podhorzer

@Mike_Podhorzer

Jan 4

A thread on how Trump “won” the popular vote.

I put “won” in quotes because it wasn’t his win, but Harris’s loss. The results were not a “swing right” embracing Trump/MAGA, but a vote of no confidence in Democrats (and in our system as a whole).
weekendreading.net/p/how-trump-won

First, here’s what we know about how and why Harris lost ground.

Based on VoteCast data, we can estimate ~19 million people who voted for Biden four years ago stayed home.

(40% of those voting in 2024 had voted for Biden in 2020, and 40% had voted for Trump. From there, it’s simple arithmetic.)

VoteCast also asked whether voters cast ballots “for” the candidate they chose or “against” the other candidate. The results show that about 15 million fewer votes were cast “against” Trump in 2024 than in 2020.

That’s a lot of missing anti-MAGA votes!

Read 16 tweets

Michael Podhorzer

@Mike_Podhorzer

Nov 1, 2024

If they think they can get away with it, the Roberts Court majority won’t hesitate to throw the election to Trump.

But many doubt this because SCOTUS rejected Trump’s 2020 election cases. Those rulings are “exceptions” that prove the most important rule we need to understand about the Roberts 6: Whenever Trump’s or the Republican Party’s interests conflict with those of key plutocratic business interests, the business interests win out.

The Roberts 6 are not political partisans; they are interest group partisans, loyal to the Federalist Society and the coalition of pluto-theocratic interests behind it.

For more, read my new post: weekendreading.net/p/politicians-…

Why didn’t the Roberts Court help Trump in 2020? In the 2020 post-election, corporate America was on Team Stability. Unlike in 2000, where choosing a president “only” required overturning one VERY close state, Biden was presumed the winner in 2024, leading by tens of thousands of votes in multiple states.

Especially given the business community’s clearly stated commitment to a peaceful transfer of power, such a dramatic intervention was out of the question. Plus, with the presumption that Dems would lose the Senate, they figured Biden would be a harmless one-term president and they could get rid of Trump for good.

Read 7 tweets

Michael Podhorzer

@Mike_Podhorzer

Oct 29, 2024

We now live in a political system sponsored by billionaires and built by the Roberts Court—where the richest Americans dominate political spending, where rewarding them for their backing is legal, and where an insurrectionist is shielded from criminal prosecution by the judges he appointed.

The egregiously reasoned immunity decision, and the delay created in reaching that decision, prevented Trump from standing trial even for what limited conduct could still be prosecuted.

As this timeline shows, a Trump criminal trial for the insurrection could easily have been as early as May.

Consider this chart, and ask yourself if it’s a coincidence:

-Every time he has faced a grand jury, Trump has been indicted;
-Every time he has faced a trial jury, Trump has been found guilty;
-Every time his cases have come before judges he didn’t appoint, including those appointed by previous Republican presidents, Trump has lost;
-Whenever surveys have asked, a majority of Americans say Trump has committed crimes;
-BUT: Every time he has come before the justices and judges he appointed, Trump has had his way.

Before Citizens United and other Roberts Court campaign finance decisions, outside spending was effectively illegal. Now it’s everywhere—and it’s overwhelmingly funded by the richest Americans.

Read 6 tweets

Michael Podhorzer

@Mike_Podhorzer

Oct 25, 2024

Have you heard that even most Latino voters support Trump’s mass deportation plans? That’s because of what I call “poll-washing”—using surveys to “reveal” popular support for something the survey-takers don’t fully understand. It’s time for pollsters to poll the policies, not the euphemisms for the policy.

The same surveys show even higher Latino support for a path to citizenship—for the same people Trump wants deported!

Trump and his allies have described their intentions toward immigrants in openly fascist terms. (“Getting them out will be a bloody story.”)

This poll-washing is very dangerous for two reasons:

1) A potentially decisive number of voters (not just Latinos), who would vote for Harris if they knew Trump's actual plans, could stay home or vote for Trump; and
2) Should Trump win, it will appear that he has a mandate for his mass deportation plans.

The shock value of “Latinos support mass deportation” is also exaggerated because of how the category “Latino” is constructed by pollsters.

Compare the NYT chart on the left to one I made using the same survey data (and others for comparison). More important than education, age, or even gender are 1) religion (Evangelical or not), and 2) identity (how important they personally consider their identity as a Hispanic/Latino person).

Depending on which survey you trust, the Latino gender gap is anywhere from 8 points (Pew) to 30 points (NYT/Siena).

But the religion gap is 69 points, and the identity gap is 46 points.

Read 6 tweets

Michael Podhorzer

@Mike_Podhorzer

Oct 18, 2024

We should be alarmed by how unalarmed we are about a second Trump administration.

This race is closer than it would be if more people understood what a second Trump term would actually mean for them. 🧵

Take the New York Times front page coverage, for example.

Comparing the past month of coverage with the same time period in the last two election cycles, the 2024 election has received about half as much front-page attention as 2020, and even less than 2016.

We have more evidence this cycle than last about Trump’s authoritarian intentions—yet those have been consistently overlooked or downplayed.

For instance, no front page NYT coverage of how Trump:

-Said critics of the Supreme Court should be jailed (9/23)
-Proposed “one really violent day” of policing to end crime (9/29)
-”Resorted to crimes to try to stay in office,” per Jack Smith’s unsealed court motion (10/3)
-Sent COVID testing equipment to Putin for his personal use at the height of the pandemic, per Woodward’s book (10/8)
-Said he’d use the same law that justified Japanese internment camps (10/10)
-Suggested using the military against Americans on Election Day (10/13)

Read 5 tweets

Michael Podhorzer

@Mike_Podhorzer

Oct 11, 2024

Many are wondering whether the Roberts majority will intervene in the election to “select” the next president, a la Bush v. Gore.

As if they haven’t already intervened repeatedly and profoundly on behalf of Trump—shielding him from prosecution via delays and the completely unjustifiable immunity ruling, and by disabling the insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment.

But, as I explain in today’s Weekend Reading post, as much as we worry that Trump will follow through on his pledge to be a “dictator on day one,” we have allowed Roberts’s “institutionalist” sheen to blind us to the fact that his majority has operated as an unaccountable dictator for nearly 7,000 days now.

Apologists for the Roberts Court say that other courts have also overturned major precedents. But other courts were not specifically installed for that purpose.

Think of it this way: The justices on the Warren and Burger Courts who gave us Brown, Roe, and Gideon did not come out of a multibillion dollar pipeline constructed by civil rights activists, feminists, or indigent prisoners.

But the six members of the Roberts majority DO owe their positions to a cabal of 1) plutocrats, who directly benefited from rulings like Citizens United and Loper Bright, and 2) theocrats, who have a fierce ideological commitment to outcomes like Dobbs and Hobby Lobby.

Moreover, nearly every major precedent overturned by earlier courts were achieved with unanimous or near unanimous rulings, while nearly every one of the Roberts rulings was accomplished with only the votes of the five (now six) Republican-appointed justices.

These plutotheocratic interests fund the Federalist Society, which over the last three decades has literally planned and executed an unprecedented transfer of unchecked political power to its own loyalists.

It’s not unusual for a Supreme Court to rule in favor of the wealthy and powerful. But the Roberts Court has created a ratcheting death spiral for democracy unlike any we’ve seen.

Decision after decision has shifted more and more electoral power to the FedSoc Six’s plutotheocratic sponsors—who in turn used that power to take greater control of Red state governments and purge Republican congressional caucuses of RINOs—which in turn was used to place more and more Federalist Society true believers on the Federal bench, and eventually the Supreme Court.

In short order, the Roberts majority tag-teamed with Mitch McConnell to ensure that the former never faced congressional oversight and accountability, and the latter never needed to secure majorities to accomplish the Republicans’ substantive agenda.

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