Michelle Obama speech at the Democratic Convention | Joe Biden For President 2020

 

Good evening, everyone. It's a hard time, and everyone's feeling it in different ways. And I know a lot of folks are reluctant to tune into a political convention right now or to politics in general. Believe me, I get that. But I am here tonight because I love this country with all my heart, and it pains me to see so many people hurting.

I've met so many of you. I've heard your stories. And through you, I have seen this country's promise. And thanks to so many who came before me, thanks to their toil and sweat and blood, I've been able to live that promise myself.

That's the story of America. All those folks who sacrificed and overcame so much in their own times because they wanted something more, something better for their kids.

There's a lot of beauty in that story. There's a lot of pain in it, too, a lot of struggle and injustice and work left to do. And who we choose as our president in this election will determine whether or not we honor that struggle and chip away at that injustice and keep alive the very possibility of finishing that work.

I am one of a handful of people living today who have seen firsthand the immense weight and awesome power of the presidency. And let me once again tell you this: the job is hard. It requires clear-headed judgment, a mastery of complex and competing issues, a devotion to facts and history, a moral compass, and an ability to listen—and an abiding belief that each of the 330,000,000 lives in this country has meaning and worth.

A president's words have the power to move markets. They can start wars or broker peace. They can summon our better angels or awaken our worst instincts. You simply cannot fake your way through this job.

As I've said before, being president doesn't change who you are; it reveals who you are. Well, a presidential election can reveal who we are, too. And four years ago, too many people chose to believe that their votes didn't matter. Maybe they were fed up. Maybe they thought the outcome wouldn't be close. Maybe the barriers felt too steep. Whatever the reason, in the end, those choices sent someone to the Oval Office who lost the national popular vote by nearly 3,000,000 votes.

In one of the states that determined the outcome, the winning margin averaged out to just two votes per precinct—two votes. And we've all been living with the consequences.

When my husband left office with Joe Biden at his side, we had a record-breaking stretch of job creation. We'd secured the right to health care for 20,000,000 people. We were respected around the world, rallying our allies to confront climate change. And our leaders had worked hand-in-hand with scientists to help prevent an Ebola outbreak from becoming a global pandemic.

Four years later, the state of this nation is very different. More than 150,000 people have died, and our economy is in shambles because of a virus that this president downplayed for too long. It has left millions of people jobless. Too many have lost their health care; too many are struggling to take care of basic necessities like food and rent; too many communities have been left in the lurch to grapple with whether and how to open our schools safely. Internationally, we've turned our back, not just on agreements forged by my husband, but on alliances championed by presidents like Reagan and Eisenhower.

And here at home, as George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and a never-ending list of innocent people of color continue to be murdered, stating the simple fact that a Black life matters is still met with derision from the nation's highest office.

Because whenever we look to this White House for some leadership or consolation or any semblance of steadiness, what we get instead is chaos, division, and a total and utter lack of empathy.

Empathy: that's something I've been thinking a lot about lately. The ability to walk in someone else's shoes; the recognition that someone else's experience has value, too. Most of us practice this without a second thought. If we see someone suffering or struggling, we don't stand in judgment. We reach out because, "There, but for the grace of God, go I." It is not a hard concept to grasp. It's what we teach our children.

And like so many of you, Barack and I have tried our best to instill in our girls a strong moral foundation to carry forward the values that our parents and grandparents poured into us. But right now, kids in this country are seeing what happens when we stop requiring empathy of one another. They're looking around wondering if we've been lying to them this whole time about who we are and what we truly value.

They see people shouting in grocery stores, unwilling to wear a mask to keep us all safe. They see people calling the police on folks minding their own business just because of the color of their skin. They see an entitlement that says only certain people belong here, that greed is good, and winning is everything because as long as you come out on top, it doesn't matter what happens to everyone else. And they see what happens when that lack of empathy is ginned up into outright disdain.

They see our leaders labeling fellow citizens enemies of the state while emboldening torch-bearing white supremacists. They watch in horror as children are torn from their families and thrown into cages, and pepper spray and rubber bullets are used on peaceful protestors for a photo-op.

Sadly, this is the America that is on display for the next generation. A nation that's underperforming not simply on matters of policy but on matters of character. And that's not just disappointing; it's downright infuriating, because I know the goodness and the grace that is out there in households and neighborhoods all across this nation.

And I know that regardless of our race, age, religion, or politics, when we close out the noise and the fear and truly open our hearts, we know that what's going on in this country is just not right. This is not who we want to be.

So what do we do now? What's our strategy? Over the past four years, a lot of people have asked me, "When others are going so low, does going high still really work?" My answer: going high is the only thing that works, because when we go low, when we use those same tactics of degrading and dehumanizing others, we just become part of the ugly noise that's drowning out everything else. We degrade ourselves. We degrade the very causes for which we fight.

But let's be clear: going high does not mean putting on a smile and saying nice things when confronted by viciousness and cruelty. Going high means taking the harder path. It means scraping and clawing our way to that mountain top. Going high means standing fierce against hatred while remembering that we are one nation under God, and if we want to survive, we've got to find a way to live together and work together across our differences.

And going high means unlocking the shackles of lies and mistrust with the only thing that can truly set us free: the cold hard truth.

So let me be as honest and clear as I possibly can. Donald Trump is the wrong president for our country. He has had more than enough time to prove that he can do the job, but he is clearly in over his head. He cannot meet this moment. He simply cannot be who we need him to be for us. It is what it is.

Now, I understand that my message won't be heard by some people. We live in a nation that is deeply divided, and I am a Black woman speaking at the Democratic Convention. But enough of you know me by now. You know that I tell you exactly what I'm feeling. You know I hate politics. But you also know that I care about this nation. You know how much I care about all of our children.

So if you take one thing from my words tonight, it is this: if you think things cannot possibly get worse, trust me, they can; and they will if we don't make a change in this election. If we have any hope of ending this chaos, we have got to vote for Joe Biden like our lives depend on it.

I know Joe. He is a profoundly decent man, guided by faith. He was a terrific vice president. He knows what it takes to rescue an economy, beat back a pandemic, and lead our country. And he listens. He will tell the truth and trust science. He will make smart plans and manage a good team. And he will govern as someone who's lived a life that the rest of us can recognize.

When he was a kid, Joe's father lost his job. When he was a young senator, Joe lost his wife and his baby daughter. And when he was vice president, he lost his beloved son. So Joe knows the anguish of sitting at a table with an empty chair, which is why he gives his time so freely to grieving parents. Joe knows what it's like to struggle, which is why he gives his personal phone number to kids overcoming a stutter of their own.

His life is a testament to getting back up, and he is going to channel that same grit and passion to pick us all up, to help us heal and guide us forward.

Now, Joe is not perfect. And he'd be the first to tell you that. But there is no perfect candidate, no perfect president. And his ability to learn and grow—we find in that the kind of humility and maturity that so many of us yearn for right now. Because Joe Biden has served this nation his entire life without ever losing sight of who he is; but more than that, he has never lost sight of who we are, all of us.

Joe Biden wants all of our kids to go to a good school, see a doctor when they're sick, live on a healthy planet. And he's got plans to make all of that happen. Joe Biden wants all of our kids, no matter what they look like, to be able to walk out the door without worrying about being harassed or arrested or killed. He wants all of our kids to be able to go to a movie or a math class without being afraid of getting shot. He wants all our kids to grow up with leaders who won't just serve themselves and their wealthy peers but will provide a safety net for people facing hard times.

And if we want a chance to pursue any of these goals, any of these most basic requirements for a functioning society, we have to vote for Joe Biden in numbers that cannot be ignored. Because right now, folks who know they cannot win fair and square at the ballot box are doing everything they can to stop us from voting. They're closing down polling places in minority neighborhoods. They're purging voter rolls. They're sending people out to intimidate voters, and they're lying about the security of our ballots. These tactics are not new.

But this is not the time to withhold our votes in protest or play games with candidates who have no chance of winning. We have got to vote like we did in 2008 and 2012. We've got to show up with the same level of passion and hope for Joe Biden. We've got to vote early, in person if we can. We've got to request our mail-in ballots right now, tonight, and send them back immediately and follow-up to make sure they're received. And then, make sure our friends and families do the same.

We have got to grab our comfortable shoes, put on our masks, pack a brown bag dinner and maybe breakfast too, because we've got to be willing to stand in line all night if we have to.

Look, we have already sacrificed so much this year. So many of you are already going that extra mile. Even when you're exhausted, you're mustering up unimaginable courage to put on those scrubs and give our loved ones a fighting chance. Even when you're anxious, you're delivering those packages, stocking those shelves, and doing all that essential work so that all of us can keep moving forward.

Even when it all feels so overwhelming, working parents are somehow piecing it all together without child care. Teachers are getting creative so that our kids can still learn and grow. Our young people are desperately fighting to pursue their dreams.

And when the horrors of systemic racism shook our country and our consciences, millions of Americans of every age, every background rose up to march for each other, crying out for justice and progress.

This is who we still are: compassionate, resilient, decent people whose fortunes are bound up with one another. And it is well past time for our leaders to once again reflect our truth.

So, it is up to us to add our voices and our votes to the course of history, echoing heroes like John Lewis who said, "When you see something that is not right, you must say something. You must do something." That is the truest form of empathy: not just feeling, but doing; not just for ourselves or our kids, but for everyone, for all our kids.

And if we want to keep the possibility of progress alive in our time, if we want to be able to look our children in the eye after this election, we have got to reassert our place in American history. And we have got to do everything we can to elect my friend, Joe Biden, as the next president of the United States.

Thank you all. God bless.

Women Built the 2018 Midterm Blue Wave — but the Last One Washed Them Out

Akela Lacy


Twenty-seven years ago, Anita Hill sat before a Senate committee and explained that then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas sexually harassed her. At the time, only two women served in the upper chamber, and neither were on the Judiciary Committee.

The optics of Hill’s hearing, along with the events that led up to and followed it, drove a record number of women to action — and into the Senate.
In 1992, the year following the hearing, now famously known as the “Year of the Woman,” Americans voted four women into the Senate. That constituted a historic, 100 percent increase in the number of sitting women senators:
Barbara Mikulski’s re-election pushed the total to seven (North Dakota’s first female senator Jocelyn Burdick, appointed to fill her husband’s seat after he died, did not run for re-election). That included the first African-American woman to serve in the chamber, Carol Moseley Braun. And it wasn’t just the upper chamber: The number of women in the House almost doubled from 30 to 48.

Amid another era of historic reckoning with sexual harassment and hostility toward women in the workplace, men are again falling out of positions of power. The #MeToo movement has taken down some 200 men from the worlds of government, corporations, and media. And women have been replacing them, almost one for one.

In politics, that’s a fact most evident in the massive number of women — 589 — who have run, or said they’ll run, in races this year for the Senate, House, and governor’s mansions.

Yet the wave of women candidates is not always what it seems. Election observers tend to conflate the advancement of women in electoral politics with Democratic gains. While women are certainly, if slowly, increasing their numbers in the legislative branch and across statehouses, the correlation between Democratic victories and victories for women hasn’t always been as strong as many think. This is true even in recent elections, as this year’s momentum for a clutch of Republican women shows.

Though Democratic women have historically outnumbered their Republican counterparts, blue waves like the one that came to pass Tuesday excluded women more often than not.

People forget what happened in 2006.
Americans were beginning to sour on the Iraq War in large numbers, and swing voters who backed President George W. Bush in 2004 were moving to support Democrats.

EMILY’s List, the well-known Democratic political action committee that supports pro-choice women, endorsed 43 candidates for Senate, House, and gubernatorial races. Nineteen won — four senators, 12 representatives, and three governors. In total that year, 148 women were elected to Congress, and six became governors. The push put Nancy Pelosi in the seat of the speaker of the House — the first woman to hold the position.

Pundits and analysts memorialized the win as a teachable moment for Democrats. It was a replicable model. The party picked up 32 seats and flipped both the House and Senate for the first time in 12 years, despite criticisms that the candidates who won were too centrist. Naftali Bendavid’s popular book, “The Thumpin’,” chronicled the then-chair of the moderate Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Rahm Emanuel’s successful strategy.

These pundits, though, miss one point.

While a record number of women served in the 110th session of Congress — as has been the case each Congress since — the legislative branch was still overwhelmingly male. In 2006, Americans elected eight men and two women — Amy Klobuchar and Claire McCaskill — to begin new terms in the Senate, bringing the chamber total to 84 men and 16 women. Of 53 newly elected representatives, 10 were women, bringing the House total to 361 men, almost five times the number of women at 74.

In 40 districts rated as competitive in 2006, men won all but eight of the seats between the parties — two of those went to Republican women. The majority that came in was also male-dominated: Women who mounted primary challenges that year were all but completely wiped out.

This year, women challenged their male counterparts in record numbers. “The women who are running are very well aware of the fact that they could lose,” said Julie McClain, EMILY’s List campaign communications director.
“EMILY’s List exists because we believe you get better policy outcomes when you have more women at decision-making tables across the country, at every level of government,” she said. “With more women running, you will get more women winning.”

Still, there are reasons — especially in 2018 — for people who want to see women in power, and not just in the Capitol, to be reasonably optimistic.
While Democratic waves haven’t always included women, what has endured is the growing number of women in the pipeline. “What we find so exciting about this cycle is that we’ve had more women than ever before, by several degrees, 1,000 degrees, reaching out to us for help running for office,” McClain said. “Both this year, but for cycles to come. Women who are making running for office part of their life plans.”

This year’s surge is an equal reflection of grassroots momentum that’s been building for decades, Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., told The Intercept.

“Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of the first African-American woman elected to Congress, Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm,” Lee said in a phone interview on Tuesday. “She was elected 50 years ago on November 5. And we worked with a variety of women around the country to lift her legacy up and to encourage women, and African-American women, to run for office, to be involved in campaigns and in get-out-the-vote efforts.”

Lee pointed out that four women are poised to chair important House committees, and that three of them are women of color. Reps. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., Nydia Velázquez, D-N.Y., Eddie Bernice Johnson, D-Texas, and Nita Lowey, D-N.Y., are in line to chair, respectively, the House Financial Services, Small Business, Science, Space and Technology, and Appropriations committees.

After Rep. Robert Brady’s retirement from Pennsylvania’s 1st District earlier this year, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., is technically next in line to chair the House Administration Committee. She also serves as ranking member on the powerful Judiciary Committee, which will almost certainly be chaired by Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y. Lofgren’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
“We have an unheard of number, an unprecedented number of women of color running for state, local, and federal races this year,” Lee said. “And so I just think the moment is here where women say, ‘We’re not going back … and we’re going to run for public office,’” Lee said.

“I think it’s going to be women, really, quite frankly, who are going to take control of this country,” she continued. “Women are mounting races that are really unheard of. They’re smart, they have experience, and they’re bringing their perspective to policy, to their constituents, that has not been there. And they’re authentic.”

EMILY’s List followed the relative disappointment of 2006 by fervently backing Hillary Clinton’s bid for the White House in 2008. Her eventual loss to Barack Obama in the Democratic primary sent the group looking for ways to regain its footing.

This year has changed all of that. The number of women in Congress is expected to reach another record at 117. At the time of publication, women won 96 seats in the House and 12 in the Senate, and nine women out of the 16 who ran are headed to governors’ mansions.

More than 250 women, including 83 incumbents, won primaries this year — 233 in the House and 22 in the Senate. And, according to McClain, hundreds more are waiting in the wings.

“We believe that with more women in Congress and more women in state legislatures, the way that we prioritize legislation will be more advantageous for women and families — which is sorely lacking,” she said.
At the state level, McClain continued, that means “adding more voices of women in other communities who have not always been equitably treated by their state and local governments.”

“By adding more women to the ranks of Congress, and then seeing more women who have been serving move up in the leadership,” she said, “we will see better policy outcomes.”

How Russia Helped Swing the Election for Trump

A meticulous analysis of online activity during the 2016 campaign makes a powerful case that targeted cyberattacks by hackers and trolls were decisive.

By Jane Mayer
The Newyorker

Donald Trump has adopted many contradictory positions since taking office, but he has been unwavering on one point: that Russia played no role in putting him in the Oval Office. Trump dismisses the idea that Russian interference affected the outcome of the 2016 election, calling it a “made-up story,” “ridiculous,” and “a hoax.” He finds the subject so threatening to his legitimacy that—according to “The Perfect Weapon,” a recent book on cyber sabotage by David Sanger, of the Times—aides say he refuses even to discuss it. In public, Trump has characterized all efforts to investigate the foreign attacks on American democracy during the campaign as a “witch hunt”; in March, he insisted that “the Russians had no impact on our votes whatsoever.”

Few people, including Trump’s opponents, have publicly challenged the widespread belief that no obtainable evidence can prove that Russian interference changed any votes. Democrats, for the most part, have avoided attributing Hillary Clinton’s defeat directly to Russian machinations. They have more readily blamed James Comey, the former F.B.I. director, for reversing Clinton’s thin lead in the final days of the campaign by reopening a criminal investigation into her mishandling of classified e-mails. Many have also expressed frustration with Clinton’s weak performance as a candidate, and with her campaign’s tactical errors. Instead of investigating whether Russia tipped the electoral scales on its own, they’ve focussed on the possibility that Trump colluded with Russia, and that this, along with other crimes, might be exposed by the probe being conducted by the special counsel, Robert Mueller.

The U.S. intelligence community, for its part, is prohibited from investigating domestic political affairs. James Clapper, the former director of National Intelligence, told me, “We try not to spy on Americans. It’s not in our charter.” He emphasized that, although he and other intelligence officials produced—and shared with Trump—a postelection report confirming an extensive cyberattack by Russia, the assessment did not attempt to gauge how this foreign meddling had affected American voters. Speaking for himself, however, he told me that “it stretches credulity to think the Russians didn’t turn the election.”

Ordinarily, Congress would aggressively examine an electoral controversy of this magnitude, but the official investigations in the House and the Senate, led by Republicans, have been too stymied by partisanship to address the ultimate question of whether Trump’s victory was legitimate. Although the Senate hearings are still under way, the Intelligence Committee chairman, Richard Burr, a Republican, has already declared, “What we cannot do, however, is calculate the impact that foreign meddling and social media had on this election.”

Even the Clinton campaign has stopped short of attributing its loss to the Russians. Joel Benenson, the campaign’s pollster, told me that “a global power is fucking with our elections,” and that “every American should be outraged, whether it changed the outcome or not.” But did the meddling alter the outcome? “How will we ever know?” he said. “We probably won’t, until some Russians involved in it are actually prosecuted—or some Republican, in a moment of conscience, talks.”

Politicians may be too timid to explore the subject, but a new book from, of all places, Oxford University Press promises to be incendiary. “Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President—What We Don’t, Can’t, and Do Know,” by Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor of communications at the University of Pennsylvania, dares to ask—and even attempts to answer—whether Russian meddling had a decisive impact in 2016. Jamieson offers a forensic analysis of the available evidence and concludes that Russia very likely delivered Trump’s victory.

The book, which is coming out less than two months before the midterm elections, at a moment when polls suggest that some sixty per cent of voters disapprove of Trump, may well reignite the question of Trump’s electoral legitimacy. The President’s supporters will likely characterize the study as an act of partisan warfare. But in person Jamieson, who wears her gray hair in a pixie cut and favors silk scarves and matronly tweeds, looks more likely to suspend a troublemaker than to be one. She is seventy-one, and has spent forty years studying political speeches, ads, and debates. Since 1993, she has directed the Annenberg Public Policy Center, at Penn, and in 2003 she co-founded FactCheck.org, a nonpartisan watchdog group. She is widely respected by political experts in both parties, though her predominantly male peers have occasionally mocked her scholarly intensity, calling her the Drill Sergeant. As Steven Livingston, a professor of political communication at George Washington University, puts it, “She is the epitome of a humorless, no-nonsense social scientist driven by the numbers. She doesn’t bullshit. She calls it straight.”

Indeed, when I met recently with Jamieson, in a book-lined conference room at the Annenberg Center, in Philadelphia, and asked her point-blank if she thought that Trump would be President without the aid of Russians, she didn’t equivocate. “No,” she said, her face unsmiling. Clearly cognizant of the gravity of her statement, she clarified, “If everything else is a constant? No, I do not.”

Jamieson said that, as an academic, she hoped that the public would challenge her arguments. Yet she expressed confidence that unbiased readers would accept her conclusion that it is not just plausible that Russia changed the outcome of the 2016 election—it is “likely that it did.”

An airtight case, she acknowledges, may never be possible. In the introduction to her new book, she writes that any case for influence will likely be similar to that in a civil legal trial, “in which the verdict is rendered not with the certainty that e=mc² but rather based on the preponderance of evidence.” But, she points out, “we do make most of life’s decisions based on less-than-rock-solid, incontrovertible evidence.” In Philadelphia, she noted to me that “we convict people on probabilities rather than absolute certainty, and we’ve executed people based on inferences from available evidence.” She argued that “the standard of proof being demanded” by people claiming it’s impossible to know whether Russia delivered the White House to Trump is “substantially higher than the standard of proof we ordinarily use in our lives.”

Her case is based on a growing body of knowledge about the electronic warfare waged by Russian trolls and hackers—whom she terms “discourse saboteurs”—and on five decades’ worth of academic studies about what kinds of persuasion can influence voters, and under what circumstances. Democracies around the world, she told me, have begun to realize that subverting an election doesn’t require tampering with voting machines. Extensive studies of past campaigns, Jamieson said, have demonstrated that “you can affect people, who then change their decision, and that alters the outcome.” She continued, “I’m not arguing that Russians pulled the voting levers. I’m arguing that they persuaded enough people to either vote a certain way or not vote at all.”

The effect of such manipulations could be momentous in an election as close as the 2016 race, in which Clinton got nearly 2.9 million more votes than Trump, and Trump won the Electoral College only because some eighty thousand votes went his way in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. In two hundred and twenty-four pages of extremely dry prose, with four appendixes of charts and graphs and fifty-four pages of footnotes, Jamieson makes a strong case that, in 2016, “Russian masterminds” pulled off a technological and political coup. Moreover, she concludes, the American media “inadvertently helped them achieve their goals.”

When Jamieson set out to research the 2016 campaign—she has researched every Presidential election since 1976—she had no intention of lobbing a grenade. She was spending a peaceful sabbatical as a fellow at the Shorenstein Center, at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, exploring a rather narrow topic: the 2016 Presidential debates. She’d chosen this subject because, having devoted decades to examining the impact of advertising and other forms of persuasion on voters, she believed that most of the big questions in the field of political-campaign communications had been answered. Also, she admitted, “I have what you could call a debate fixation. Every year since 1996 I’ve done some kind of social-science look at the effects of debates.”

This expertise helped Jamieson notice something odd about the three debates between Trump and Clinton. As she told me, “The conventional wisdom was that Hillary Clinton had done pretty well.” According to CNN polls conducted immediately after the debates, she won all three, by a margin of thirteen per cent or greater. But, during the period of the debates, Jamieson and others at the Annenberg Center had overseen three telephone surveys, each sampling about a thousand adults. In an election that turned more than most on judgments of character, Americans who saw or heard the second and third debates, in particular, were more likely than those who hadn’t to agree that Clinton “says one thing in public and something else in private.” Jamieson found this statistic curious, because, by the time of the first debate, on September 26th, Clinton’s reputation for candor had already been tarnished by her failed attempt to hide the fact that she’d developed pneumonia, and by the revelation that, at a recent fund-raising event, she’d described some Trump supporters as “deplorables”—a slur that contradicted her slogan “Stronger Together.” Other Annenberg Center polling data indicated to Jamieson that concerns about Clinton being two-faced had been “baked in” voters’ minds since before the first debate. Clinton “had already been attacked for a very long time over that,” Jamieson recalls thinking. “Why would the debates have had an additional effect?”

After insuring that the surveys had been properly conducted, Jamieson analyzed whether this change in a voter’s perception of Clinton’s forthrightness predicted a change in his or her candidate preference. To her surprise, she found that it did: as she put it to me, there was a “small but significant drop in reported intention to vote for her.” This statistic, too, struck Jamieson as curious; she knew from years of scholarship that Presidential debates, barring major gaffes, typically “increase the likelihood that you’re casting a vote for, rather than against,” a candidate.
Last year, while Jamieson was trying to determine what could have caused viewers’ perception of Clinton’s character to fall so consequentially, the Washington Post asked her to write an op-ed addressing whether Russian operatives had helped to elect Trump. Jamieson agreed to do so, but, she admitted to me, “I frankly hadn’t thought about it one way or the other.”

amieson is scrupulously nonpartisan in her work. Beth Myers, who helped lead Mitt Romney’s Presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2012 and worked with Jamieson on a bipartisan project about Presidential debates, told me, “If Kathleen has a point of view, I don’t know what it is. She’s extraordinarily evenhanded. She is fair and fearless.” Anita Dunn, a Democratic adviser to Barack Obama, agrees. She, too, worked with Jamieson on the Presidential-debates project, and she studied with her as an undergraduate. Jamieson, she says, “is constantly pointing out what the data actually shows, as opposed to those of us who just assert stuff.”

Jamieson began her study of the 2016 election with an open mind. But, in the fall of 2017, as she watched the House and the Senate hold hearings on Russia’s social-media manipulations, and reviewed the sampling of dozens of Facebook ads released by the House Intelligence Committee—all paid for by Russians during the Presidential campaign—she developed suspicions about the reasons behind Trump’s victory. Before the hearings, Facebook’s chairman and C.E.O., Mark Zuckerberg, had maintained that the amount of Russian content that had been disseminated on social media was too small to matter. But evidence presented to the Senate committee revealed that material generated by the Kremlin had reached a hundred and twenty-six million American Facebook users, leading Senator Dianne Feinstein to call the cyberattack “cataclysmic.”

House Democrats later released not only the ads but also their “targeting data”—the demographics and the geographic locations of users receiving them—which indicated to Jamieson “whom the Russians were going for.” Among other things, she could discern that the Russians had tried “to minimize the vote of African-Americans.” Bogus Kremlin-sponsored ads that had circulated online—including one depicting a black woman in front of an “AFRICAN-AMERICANS FOR HILLARY” sign—had urged voters to tweet or text rather than vote, or to “avoid the line” and “vote from home.”

Jamieson’s Post article was grounded in years of scholarship on political persuasion. She noted that political messages are especially effective when they are sent by trusted sources, such as members of one’s own community. Russian operatives, it turned out, disguised themselves in precisely this way. As the Times first reported, on June 8, 2016, a Facebook user depicting himself as Melvin Redick, a genial family man from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, posted a link to DCLeaks.com, and wrote that users should check out “the hidden truth about Hillary Clinton, George Soros and other leaders of the US.” The profile photograph of “Redick” showed him in a backward baseball cap, alongside his young daughter—but Pennsylvania records showed no evidence of Redick’s existence, and the photograph matched an image of an unsuspecting man in Brazil. U.S. intelligence experts later announced, “with high confidence,” that DCLeaks was the creation of the G.R.U., Russia’s military-intelligence agency.

Academic research has also shown that political messages tend not to change the minds of voters who have already chosen a candidate; they are most likely to persuade undecided voters. And in 2016 an uncommonly high percentage of voters liked neither candidate and stayed undecided longer than usual. By some counts, about thirty-seven million Americans—fifteen per cent of the electorate—were still undecided in the final weeks before the election.

Jamieson argues that the impact of the Russian cyberwar was likely enhanced by its consistency with messaging from Trump’s campaign, and by its strategic alignment with the campaign’s geographic and demographic objectives. Had the Kremlin tried to push voters in a new direction, its effort might have failed. But, Jamieson concluded, the Russian saboteurs nimbly amplified Trump’s divisive rhetoric on immigrants, minorities, and Muslims, among other signature topics, and targeted constituencies that he needed to reach. She noted that Russian trolls had created social-media posts clearly aimed at winning support for Trump from churchgoers and military families—key Republican voters who seemed likely to lack enthusiasm for a thrice-married nominee who had boasted of groping women, obtained multiple military deferments, mocked Gold Star parents and a former prisoner of war, and described the threat of venereal disease as his personal equivalent of the Vietcong. Russian trolls pretended to have the same religious convictions as targeted users, and often promoted Biblical memes, including one that showed Clinton as Satan, with budding horns, arm-wrestling with Jesus, alongside the message “ ‘Like’ if you want Jesus to win!” One Instagram post, portraying Clinton as uncaring about the 2012 tragedy in Benghazi, depicted a young American widow resting her head on a flag-draped coffin.

Another post displayed contrasting images of a thin homeless veteran and a heavyset, swarthy man wearing an “UNDOCUMENTED UNAFRAID UNAPOLOGETIC” T-shirt, and asked why “this veteran gets nothing” and “this illegal gets everything.” It concluded, “Like and share if you think this is a disgrace.” On Election Day, according to CNN exit polls, Trump, despite his political baggage, outperformed Clinton by twenty-six points among veterans; he also did better among evangelicals than both of the previous Republican nominees, Mitt Romney and John McCain.

In her Post article, Jamieson wrote that it was “hard to know” if Russian propaganda and dirty tricks—including the steady release of hacked e-mails, starting with Democratic National Committee correspondence that was leaked just before the Party’s convention—had made a decisive difference in 2016. Nevertheless, she argued, the “wide distribution” of the trolls’ disinformation “increases the likelihood” that it “changed the outcome.”

After the article’s publication, she returned to her sabbatical project on the debates, with a newly keen eye for Russian trolls and hackers. After reviewing the debate transcripts, scrutinizing press coverage, and eliminating other possibilities, Jamieson concluded that there was only one credible explanation for the diminishing impression among debate viewers that Clinton was forthright: just before the second debate, WikiLeaks had released a cache of e-mails, obtained by Russian hackers, that, it said, were taken from the Gmail account of Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta. They included excerpts from speeches that Clinton had given to banks, for high fees, and had refused to release during the campaign. The speeches could be used by detractors to show that, despite her liberal rhetoric, she was aligned with Wall Street. The hacked content permeated the discourse of the debates, informing both the moderators’ questions and the candidates’ answers. All this, Jamieson writes, gave legitimacy to the idea that Clinton “said one thing in public and another in private.”

During the second debate, on October 9th, before 66.5 million viewers, one of the moderators, Martha Raddatz, relayed a question submitted by a voter: Did Clinton think that it was acceptable for a politician to be “two-faced”? The question referred to a leaked passage from one of Clinton’s previously unreleased paid speeches; Russian hackers had given the passage to WikiLeaks, which posted it two days before the debate. In the speech, Clinton had cited Steven Spielberg’s film “Lincoln” as an example of how politicians sometimes need to adopt different public and private negotiating stances. The point was scarcely novel, but the debate question—which took her words out of context, omitted her reference to the movie, and didn’t mention that Russian operatives had obtained the speech illegally—made Clinton sound like a sneaky hypocrite. When Clinton cited “Lincoln” in order to defend the statement, Trump pounced.

“She got caught in a total lie!” Trump said. “Her papers went out to all her friends at the banks—Goldman Sachs and everybody else. And she said things, WikiLeaks, that just came out. And she lied. Now she’s blaming the lie on the late, great Abraham Lincoln!”

The dynamic recurred in the third debate, on October 19th, which 71.6 million people watched. When Trump accused Clinton of favoring “open borders,” she denied it, but the moderator, Chris Wallace, challenged her by citing a snippet from a speech that she had given, in 2013, to a Brazilian bank: “My dream is a hemispheric common market with open trade and open borders.” Again, there was no mention of the fact that the speech had been stolen by a hostile foreign power; Wallace said that the quotation had come from WikiLeaks. The clear implication of Wallace’s question was that Clinton had been hiding her true beliefs, and Trump said to him, “Thank you!” His supporters in the audience laughed. Clinton said that the phrase had been taken out of context: she’d been referring not to immigrants but to an open-bordered electric grid with Latin America. She tried to draw attention to Russia’s role in hacking the speech, but Trump mocked her for accusing Putin, and joked, “That was a great pivot off the fact that she wants open borders.” He then warned the audience that, if Clinton were elected, Syrians and other immigrants would “pour into our country.”

The fact-checking organization PolitiFact later concluded that Trump had incorrectly characterized Clinton’s speech, but the damage had been done. Jamieson’s research indicated that viewers who watched the second and third debates subsequently saw Clinton as less forthright, and Trump as more forthright. Among people who did not watch the debates, Clinton’s reputation was not damaged in this way. During the weeks that the debates took place, the moderators and the media became consumed by an anti-Clinton narrative driven by Russian hackers. In “Cyberwar,” Jamieson writes, “The stolen goods lent credibility” to “those moderator queries.”

As Jamieson reviewed the record further, she concluded that the Russian hackers had also been alarmingly successful in reframing the American political narrative in the crucial period leading up to the second debate. On Friday, October 7th, two days before it took place, three major stories landed in rapid succession. At 12:40 P.M., the Obama Administration released a stunning statement, by the Department of Homeland Security and the director of National Intelligence, accusing the Russian government of interfering in the election through hacking. This seemed certain to dominate the weekend news, but at 4:03 P.M. the Washington Post published a report, by David Fahrenthold, on an “Access Hollywood” tape that captured Trump, on a hot mike, boasting about grabbing women “by the pussy.” Then, less than half an hour later, WikiLeaks released its first tranche of e-mails that Russian hackers had stolen from Podesta’s account. The tranche contained some two thousand messages, along with excerpts from the paid speeches that Clinton had tried to conceal, including those that would be mentioned in the subsequent debates. (Julian Assange, the head of WikiLeaks, has denied working with the Russian government, but he manifestly despises Clinton, and, in a leaked Twitter direct message, he said that in the 2016 election “it would be much better for GOP to win.”)

If the WikiLeaks release was a Russian-backed effort to rescue Trump’s candidacy by generating a scandal to counterbalance the “Access Hollywood” tape and the intelligence report on Russian interference, Jamieson writes, it worked splendidly. The intelligence community’s report faded from the headlines; that Sunday morning, none of its authors were invited on any major talk show. Instead, the programs breathlessly discussed the “pussy” tape and the Clinton campaign’s e-mails, which were portrayed as more or less exposing both candidates as liars. Jamieson notes, “Instead of asking how we could know that the Russians were behind the hacking, the October 9 Sunday show moderators asked what effect the disclosures would have on the candidates’ respective campaigns and what the tape and speech segments revealed about the private versus public selves of the contenders.” If not for WikiLeaks, she writes, the media discourse in those crucial days likely would have remained locked on two topics advantageous to Clinton: Russian election subversion and Trump’s treatment of women.

Time to End the Electoral College

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

By overwhelming majorities, Americans would prefer to elect the president by direct popular vote, not filtered through the antiquated mechanism of the Electoral College. They understand, on a gut level, the basic fairness of awarding the nation’s highest office on the same basis as every other elected office — to the person who gets the most votes.

But for now, the presidency is still decided by 538 electors. And on Monday, despite much talk in recent weeks about urging those electors to block Donald Trump from the White House, a majority did as expected and cast their ballots for him — a result Congress will ratify next month.

And so for the second time in 16 years, the candidate who lost the popular vote has won the presidency. Unlike 2000, it wasn’t even close. Hillary Clinton beat Mr. Trump by more than 2.8 million votes, or 2.1 percent of the electorate. That’s a wider margin than 10 winning candidates enjoyed and the biggest deficit for an incoming president since the 19th century.

Yes, Mr. Trump won under the rules, but the rules should change so that a presidential election reflects the will of Americans and promotes a more participatory democracy.

The Electoral College, which is written into the Constitution, is more than just a vestige of the founding era; it is a living symbol of America’s original sin. When slavery was the law of the land, a direct popular vote would have disadvantaged the Southern states, with their large disenfranchised populations. Counting those men and women as three-fifths of a white person, as the Constitution originally did, gave the slave states more electoral votes.

Today the college, which allocates electors based on each state’s representation in Congress, tips the scales in favor of smaller states; a Wyoming resident’s vote counts 3.6 times as much as a Californian’s. And because almost all states use a winner-take-all system, the election ends up being fought in just a dozen or so “battleground” states, leaving tens of millions of Americans on the sidelines.

There is an elegant solution: The Constitution establishes the existence of electors, but leaves it up to states to tell them how to vote. Eleven states and the District of Columbia, representing 165 electoral votes, have already passed legislation to have their electors vote for the winner of the national popular vote. The agreement, known as the National Popular Vote interstate compact, would take effect once states representing a majority of electoral votes, currently 270, signed on. This would ensure that the national popular-vote winner would become president.

Conservative opponents of a direct vote say it would give an unfair edge to large, heavily Democratic cities and states. But why should the votes of Americans in California or New York count for less than those in Idaho or Texas? A direct popular vote would treat all Americans equally, no matter where they live — including, by the way, Republicans in San Francisco and Democrats in Corpus Christi, whose votes are currently worthless. The system as it now operates does a terrible job of representing the nation’s demographic and geographic diversity. Almost 138 million Americans went to the polls this year, but Mr. Trump secured his Electoral College victory thanks to fewer than 80,000 votes across three states: Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

This page has opposed the Electoral College for at least 80 years, and it has regardless of the outcome of any given election. (In 2004, President George W. Bush won the popular vote by more than three million, but he could have lost the Electoral College with a switch of fewer than 60,000 votes in Ohio.)

Many Republicans have endorsed doing away with the Electoral College, including Mr. Trump himself, in 2012. Maybe that’s why he keeps claiming falsely that he won the popular vote, or why more than half of Republicans now seem to believe he did. For most reasonable people, it’s hard to understand why the loser of the popular vote should wind up running the country.

FBI in agreement with CIA that Russia aimed to help Trump win White House

By Adam Entous and Ellen Nakashima

FBI Director James B. Comey and Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. are in agreement with a CIA assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election in part to help Donald Trump win the White House, officials disclosed Friday, as President Obama issued a public warning to Moscow that it could face retaliation.

New revelations about Comey’s position could put to rest suggestions by some lawmakers that the CIA and the FBI weren’t on the same page on Russian President Vladi­mir Putin’s intentions.
Russia has denied being behind the cyber-intrusions, which targeted the Democratic National Committee and the private emails of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta. Trump, in turn, has repeatedly said he doubts the veracity of U.S. intelligence blaming Moscow for the hacks.

“I think it’s ridiculous,” Trump said in an interview with “Fox News Sunday,” his first Sunday news-show appearance since the Nov. 8 election. “I think it’s just another excuse. I don’t believe it. . . . No, I don’t believe it at all.”

At a “thank you” event Thursday night with some of her top campaign donors and fundraisers, Clinton said she believed Russian-backed hackers went after her campaign because of a personal grudge that Putin had against her. Putin had blamed Clinton for fomenting mass protests in Russia after disputed 2011 parliamentary elections that challenged his rule. Putin said Clinton, then secretary of state, had “sent a signal” to protesters by labeling the elections “neither free nor fair.”

The positions of Comey and Clapper were revealed in a message that CIA Director John Brennan sent to the agency’s workforce Friday.

“Earlier this week, I met separately with FBI [Director] James Comey and DNI Jim Clapper, and there is strong consensus among us on the scope, nature, and intent of Russian interference in our presidential election,” Brennan said, according to U.S. officials who have seen the message.

The CIA and the FBI declined to comment on Brennan’s message or on the classified intelligence assessment that CIA officials shared with members of the Senate Intelligence Committee earlier this month, setting off a political firestorm.

In the closed-door Senate briefing, CIA officials said it was now “quite clear” that electing Trump was one of Russia’s goals, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.

CIA and FBI officials do not think Russia had a “single purpose” by intervening during the presidential campaign, officials said. In addition to the goal of helping elect Trump, Putin aimed to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, intelligence officials have told lawmakers.

A few days after the Senate briefing, a senior FBI counter­intelligence official briefed the House Intelligence Committee but was not as categorical as the CIA briefer about Russia’s intention to help Trump, according to officials who were present. The FBI official’s more cautious presentation of the intelligence to the House panel left some Republican and Democratic lawmakers in the room with the impression that the FBI disagreed with the CIA.


Officials close to the FBI and the CIA now say that lawmakers had misunderstood Comey’s position. “The truth is they were never all that different in the first place,” an official said. Similarly, officials said, Clapper and Brennan saw the intelligence the same way.

Earlier this week, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and a Trump supporter, wrote to spy chiefs to demand briefings on the Russian meddling.

But Clapper responded that he wanted to first complete a review of all available U.S. intelligence, as directed by Obama.

Brennan tried to talk to Nunes several times about the dispute. But officials said the congressman didn’t take his calls until after he issued a statement Wednesday asking intelligence leaders to “clarify press reports that the CIA has a new assessment that it has not shared with us.”

Officials disputed the statement, saying Nunes had been fully briefed on the intelligence.

“In recent days, I have had several conversations with members of Congress, providing an update on the status of the review as well as the considerations that need to be taken into account as we proceed,” Brennan wrote in his message to CIA staffers. “Many — but unfortunately not all — members understand and appreciate the importance and the gravity of the issue, and they are very supportive of the process that is underway.”

Brennan wrote to the CIA workforce, officials said, to reassure them in the face of accusations from Trump supporters that intelligence was being politicized.

Nunes did not respond to requests for comment, but in a statement, he said, “We have not received any information from Intelligence Community (IC) agencies indicating that they have developed new assessments on this issue. I am alarmed that supposedly new information continues to leak to the media but has not been provided to Congress.”

In one of the last news conferences of his presidency, Obama defended his administration’s response to the Russian hacking and vowed to “send a clear message to Russia” that its meddling was unacceptable.

“I think we handled it the way it should have been handled,” he said of the hacking investigation and the lack of a formal accusation of blame until a month before the election. “We allowed law enforcement and the intelligence community to do its job without political influence.”

Obama was referring to an Oct. 7 statement by Clapper and Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson publicly blaming Russia for hacking political organizations, a clear reference to the Democratic National Committee and other Democratic officials.

U.S. officials said an earlier draft of the Clapper-Johnson statement singled out Putin by name for authorizing the influence operation. But before the final statement was made public, Putin’s name was removed “so it wouldn’t be provocative,” one official said. Instead, the statement blamed “Russia’s senior-most officials.”

At that time, Obama said, the U.S. intelligence community “did not attribute motives” to Russia’s decision to intervene in the election.

“Imagine if we had done the opposite,” he said Friday. “It would have become immediately just one more political scrum. And part of the goal here was to make sure that we did not do the work of the leakers for them by raising more and more questions about the integrity of the election right before the election was taking place — at a time, by the way, when the president-elect himself was raising questions about the integrity of the election.”

At Friday’s news conference, Obama did not directly point the finger at the Russian president. But he came close to doing so by saying: “Not much happens in Russia without Vladimir Putin.”

Some members of Clinton’s campaign, Democrats in Congress and others have taken the Obama administration to task for not calling out Russian efforts to influence the election sooner, as well as for not taking retaliatory action against those responsible for the cyber-intrusions and leaks to WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy group.

Obama said some possible retaliatory measures might not be seen by the public, although they would be seen or felt by Moscow. Obama, who has only a few weeks left in office, made clear any response to the hacks must be carefully thought through.

“The relationship between us and Russia has deteriorated, sadly, significantly over the last several years,” Obama said. “And so how we approach an appropriate response that increases costs for them for behavior like this in the future but does not create problems for us is something that’s worth taking the time to think through and figure out.”

What Is Trump Trying to Hide in His Tax Returns?

Presidential candidates have released IRS forms for years, but the GOP candidate wants to break that pattern—even though it’s more important for him than anyone else.
by David A. Graham

“This is the ultimate reality show—it’s the presidency of the United States,” Paul Manafort, a top adviser to Donald Trump, said on MSNBC Tuesday. Manafort’s comment was intended as both a defensive measure—a reply to those who mock Trump as a lightweight who thinks he’s still on The Apprentice—and a rebuke to President Obama, one of those who voiced the critique, sniping last week, “We are in serious times; this is a really serious job. This is not entertainment. This is not a reality show.”

But Manafort’s statement is also a useful key to explaining how Trump is approaching the general election. One of the rules of reality shows—right after not being there to make friends—is to break the rules. In an interview with the Associated Press released Wednesday morning, Trump said he will not release his tax returns before the general election in November. Here’s the AP report:

"There's nothing to learn from them," Trump told The Associated Press in an interview Tuesday. He also has said he doesn't believe voters are interested.

This being Trump, it’s unwise to wager much on him sticking to that if the heat gets too intense—like every other politician, Trump launches trial balloons, though his are often less subtle. But if he didn’t release the documents, it would represent a serious change in norms about what Americans can expect to know about their leader.

The habit of candidates universally releasing tax returns runs back to the 1970s. Even before then, there’d been some releases. George Romney famously released 12 years of returns ahead of the 1968 election. During the 2012 election, George’s son Mitt dragged his feet on releasing returns, earning some unflattering comparisons. At the time, Politifact investigated and found that since 1972, only seven presidential nominees had refused to release their returns: Democrat Jerry Brown (1992); Republicans Pat Buchanan and Dick Lugar (1996), Mike Huckabee, Rudy Giuliani, and Romney (2008), and Green Party candidate Ralph Nader (2000).

One thing sticks out about those candidates: None of them won a major-party nomination, or for that matter really came especially close. Trump, as the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party, is a different situation.

But Trump is a different situation for other reasons, too. He’s far wealthier than any other candidate to run for president, and he has a long history of questionable finances, and faces other allegations.

His companies have declared bankruptcy four times. He’s been fined by the Federal Trade Commission for improper behavior. He incorrectly received a tax break for people making less than $500,000 per year. All of this means that people might have legitimate questions about what Trump is doing with his supposed vast sums: what he does with it, whether those things are legal, and further whether the techniques he likely uses to reduce his tax obligations (like many wealthy people) are appropriate, even when they are legal. Given Trump’s repeated attacks on companies that move their profits offshore, or hedge-fund managers who use the carried-interest loopholes, voters have a right to know whether he practices what he preaches.

It is true that candidates are all required to file a personal financial disclosure as part of post-Watergate reforms from the 1970s, but tax experts say returns offer a more complete view. Trump released a disclosure in 2015, claiming that he was worth $10 billion. But many finance experts greeted that estimate with feelings ranging from skepticism to derision. The disclosure form allows for ranges of values, so that Trump could simply say certain holdings were worth more than $50 million—and then claim the top-line value. The Wall Street Journal offered a more sober estimate of “at least $1.5 billion.”

The journalist Tim O’Brien was especially savage in mocking Trump’s rather inflated claims of value for his brand. If it seems a little personal for O’Brien, that’s understandable—and the backstory explains why it’s wise to be skeptical of Trump’s claims and push for more disclosure. In a 2005 book, O’Brien sought to determine just what Trump was really worth. He concluded that the Donald was really only worth $150 to $250 million. Trump, outraged, sued O’Brien for $5 billion for libel. (Perhaps he doth protest too much!) It didn’t work: The suit was thrown out. That doesn’t prove that O’Brien was right—it only proves that there weren’t grounds for a libel case—but the proceedings offered more reasons to doubt the face value of Trump’s claims, as O’Brien writes.

Moreover, Trump appears to already be lying about his taxes. He claims that he can’t release them now because he is being audited. Yet that claim is false: The IRS says there’s no reason a citizen can’t release returns that are under audit. If Trump stands behind the returns he signed, why not just put them out there?

As Matt Gertz says, Trump’s statement that he won’t is a provocation to the media—in saying that citizens don’t care, he’s laying down a challenge to the press to make them care, and force him to release the returns. In the past, at least, that has worked. Romney ultimately opted to release his returns, despite misgivings, after extensive pressure from the media and other politicians. Stuart Stevens, a former top Romney aide, suggested that the Commission on Presidential Debates could make release a prerequisite for participation.

Whatever the mechanism, voters deserve a chance to assess Trump’s returns before they make their choice in November. The entertainer may be running a different sort of campaign, inspired by reality TV, but that doesn’t mean give him any leeway to cut them off from the normal information about a candidate’s private life. Besides, isn’t voyeurism the real allure of reality shows anyway?

 

Nine Ways the U.S. Voting System Is Rigged But Not Against Donald Trump

by Jon Schwarz

Donald Trump is right — the U.S. voting system is totally rigged!
It’s not rigged against him, though. It’s rigged against people without much money, and people who are members of any number of minority groups.

Some of the rigging is by design, and dates all the way back to the Founding Fathers. Some of it is simply a byproduct of an economic system where the top 0.1 percent have almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent. Some falls somewhere in between.

Add it all up, and it constitutes a gigantic obstacle to regular people using their purported power to run our purported democracy.

Here are some of the ways in which the voting system is rigged, few of which are ever discussed in American elections — which some might say constitutes its own kind of rigging.

1. You have to register to vote.

Between one-quarter and one-third of American adults, up to 50 million people, are eligible to vote but aren’t registered to vote.

That’s ridiculous. Why do American adults have to take a special, extra step to govern themselves?
Many other countries, including France, Italy, Chile, Israel, Sweden, Denmark and Finland, all register everyone to vote automatically. Not coincidentally, they have much higher voter turnout than we do.

The unregistered are younger, poorer and less white than registered voters. They’re also more likely to support progressive political policies, such as a higher minimum wage and a financial transactions tax.

The good news is that five states — Oregon, California, West Virginia, Vermont and Connecticut — now have near-automatic voter registration, and many other states are considering it. Hillary Clinton has called for the federal government to push all states to make it happen.

2. Election Day is a work day

The less money and power you have, the harder it is to take time off from work to vote.
Many states now have early voting, but some do not. Even if you can vote early, the rules are different everywhere and often change. We should expand and standardize early voting but also, as Sen. Bernie Sanders has proposed, make election day a national holiday.

3. Gerrymandering and geography

In 2012, a slight majority of Americans voted for a Democrat for their congressional representative. Nevertheless, 54 percent of the elected representatives were Republicans.

This was thanks to both gerrymandering and the tendency of Democratic voters to live in dense cities. Currently Republican state legislatures use computer software to pack Democratic voters into as few districts as possible, creating the characteristically bizarre gerrymandered shape. But computers can also be used to create districts that look “fair” — i.e., compact and contiguous — and these would still put Democrats at a disadvantage because Democrats have by choice packed themselves into a few small places.

This is a problem that may not have an easy answer. Gerrymandering is to some degree in the eye of the beholder. Cities are probably going to remain highly Democratic. Some people believe it would be best to turn states into “multimember districts,” so that if the state sends seven representatives to the House, everyone in the state would get seven votes and would choose their top seven candidates.

4. Many felons can’t vote.

6.1 million Americans can’t vote this year because they’ve been convicted of a felony. 2.2 million of them are African American; in Florida, Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia more than 1 in 5 black adults can’t vote.

No other country works like this. The solution here is simple: As in France, Germany, Israel, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Peru, Poland and Romania, everyone should be eligible to vote, including those convicted of felonies and even those currently in prison.

5. Voter suppression.

Paul Weyrich, one of the founders of today’s conservative movement, cheerfully explained in 1980 that “I don’t want everybody to vote. … Our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

Republicans have taken this perspective to heart for decades, and are doing their best again in 2016 to reduce the number of people voting. Popular methods include purging voter rolls of eligible voters, reducing polling times and places, requiring photo ID to vote and voter intimidation.

6. No Instant Runoff

Instant runoff voting, which was recently used in the London mayoral election, lets third-party supporters vote for their first choice without fear they’ll act as spoilers and help elect their least favorite candidate.

Here’s how it works: Voters rank as many candidates as they like in the order of their preference, from first to last. If a candidate gets a majority of first choice ballots, he or she wins. If not, the last place candidate is eliminated – and his or her votes are distributed to the candidates who were the second choice of the eliminated candidate’s supporters. And so on. (If this sounds confusing, a Minnesota Public Radio video explains it in a clever way using post-its.)

In terms of this election, a Jill Stein voter who loathes Trump and lives in a swing state can’t vote for Stein without helping Trump. With instant runoff voting, such a Stein supporter could rank Stein as his or her first choice, Clinton as his or her second, and Trump last or not at all.

There is a built-in bipartisan consensus against any such move, however, since it would weaken the two-party duopoly that runs U.S. politics.

7. The Senate

The Senate hugely magnifies the power of small states. Deep red Wyoming, population 582,000, has two senators. So does deep blue California, with a population of 38.8 million, 66 times greater than Wyoming’s.

That is so rigged!

The Senate’s ability to slow or stop change is why it was created in the first place. As James Madison, the main author of the Constitution, put it in 1787: “Our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation” and “protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.” The Senate, Madison said, should be the part of the government designed to do this.

8. You can’t vote for the Federal Reserve

The U.S. economy is like a car with two gas pedals and two brakes. Congress controls one of each, but the Federal Reserve controls the others.

Its seven governors are appointed by presidents to 14-year terms. Even worse, the Federal Open Market Committee, which controls interest rates, is made up of the seven governors plus five members who are presidents of the regional Federal Reserve Banks. The regional presidents are chosen in a process that’s largely controlled by banks.

9. Corporate America is more powerful than politicians

As John Dewey, one of America’s most important pro-democracy philosophers, wrote in 1931, “politics is the shadow cast on society by big business.”

This could be seen most clearly in the 2008 Wall Street bailout. Not only did the biggest banks have the power to destroy the U.S. economy in a way no politicians ever could, they easily forced the entire political system to stop everything and give them what turned out to be trillions of dollars.
On a smaller scale, both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump hope to slash the tax rate on multinational corporations even though I’m guessing this is not one of your top priorities.

Whew, that’s a long and depressing list. But don’t give up: That list used to be much, much longer, yet regular people have been successfully fighting to shrink it for 240 years. There’s no reason to believe we can’t make it shorter still or eventually eliminate it altogether.

So go vote! There’s a reason this list exists, which is that democracy is powerful and dangerous and lots of people want to limit it. Don’t let them.

Donald Trump viewed from Russia: A potential friend

Russian state media make no secret of who Moscow wants to win the US presidential election.

 by Rory Challands

Source: Al Jazeera News

"Trump Soars Over Clinton Week Before US Election Amid FBI Scandal" ran a headline on Sputnik's website on Tuesday.

I'd followed a tweeted link to the article, which also included a GIF of Trump pulling one of his most self-satisfied facial tics. It's a face I imagine many in Moscow are wearing at the moment.

The article encapsulated the surge of hope within Russia's largely state-controlled media that maybe, perhaps, possibly the US election might work out after all.

The reopening of the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton's private email server could easily damage her support. At least one US poll quickly put Clinton trailing Trump for the first time in months.

Ironically, Russia didn't even have to do much. This saga had its origins in Washington DC, not Moscow.

The 2016 US election has been a wild ride. And much US establishment thinking - particularly in intelligence circles - has detected Russia's destabilising hand in everything from the hacking of the Clinton campaign's emails to the potential Kremlin recruitment of Trump himself as some kind of inside agent.

'No banana republic'

Sorting the signal from the noise in all this is no easy task. The Russian president has dismissed it as far-fetched hysteria.

"Correct me if I'm wrong," Vladimir Putin said at the Valdai Discussion Club in Sochi last week, "but America is a great nation - not some banana republic."

If the US is as mighty as it thinks it is, the president was saying, then there's nothing that Russia could do to mess around with its democracy.

It was a classic Putin line. An insult wrapped in a compliment, tied up with a bow that could easily be interpreted as a geopolitical challenge. He was also partly dissembling, as he often does.

The hacking allegations seem credible enough. Cyber security investigators Crowdstrike say of the hackers (COZY BEAR and FANCY BEAR):

"Both adversaries engage in extensive political and economic espionage for the benefit of the government of the Russian Federation and are believed to be closely linked to the Russian government's powerful and highly capable intelligence services."

Watch Russian TV for any length of time, and it's pretty obvious who Moscow wants to win.
"Trump’s leading in the race. His ability to state things as they are, and his intention to end the recent extreme Russian-American tensions - all this puts him in a very risky situation,” said TV host Dmitry Kiselyov on his prime-time news show mid-September.

"Now they may just kill him," he concluded, ominously.

Coverage of Clinton in the state-controlled Russian media is largely negative. She's viewed as ideologically anti-Russian, and Trump as a pragmatist and potential friend.
And even cosmopolitan, middle-class Russians you'd expect to think differently are wary of the Democrat, and find Trump's candour and novelty refreshing.

One friend of mine here told me recently that under Clinton, the US-Russia relationship would stay the same - ie, bad. A Trump presidency, by its very unpredictability, would at least offer options for change. Essentially, she was saying, better the devil you DON'T know.

An opinion poll done in Russia recently found the following: 57 percent of Russians asked said the US election results would be important to Russia; 38 percent thought not. One in three said Trump’s victory would better match Russia’s national interests; 6 percent said they'd prefer Clinton; 22 percent replied that both were as bad as each other.

For most Russians, politics in their own country seem remote enough. US politics are remoter still.
What they want is largely what the president and the Kremlin-controlled TV channels want - a leader in the White House who will smooth balm on the gangrenous wound that is the current US-Russia relationship.

They don't think Clinton will do that.