The Runaround, Vol. 0.4
🍌 Bananas edition
Welcome!
Some of what you need to know; some of what you don’t. Send questions, push back, and consider sharing with a friend with whom you disagree about politics.
Headlines
Things to know. Whats missing?
It has been a 🍌 bananas 🍌 election summer. NPR’s Trump Trials podcast has a solid / exhausting rundown of what you’ve missed:
Liz Cheney, Republican former Congress Member and Duck Cheney’s daughter, is voting for Kamala Harris.
Why it might matter: the more high-profile party-switching endorsements happen, the more voters have a “permission structure” to switch, too. But I don't know of research suggesting that's true or false.
Kamala Harris is raising so much more money than Donald Trump that she’s giving some of it away to down-ballot candidates.
But we’ve got weeks to go, and money ≠ votes.
Conservative is going to war… with itself.
Stories about internal party panic and division get clicks, so keep one eyebrow up. But if the MAGA-Russia connections here prove out, that’s not a great look.
Through Lines
What’s on your mind? I’m compiling questions to tackle over time.
1. Are you (still) registered to vote? This is particularly important in Texas, which claims to have thrown 1 million voters off the rolls. Check here, and do it soon—voter registration deadline is coming up.
In Texas, follow The Texas Tribune.
Not from Texas? The government has a page, but I bet one of you has a better one.
2. Do non-citizens vote? Whether the government gets funded this year might depend on this question. And last month, Texas Gov. Abbott claimed to have thrown 6,500 non-citizens (later downgraded to “potential non-citizens”) off the voter rolls.
I’m open to being persuaded otherwise, but I think this is, as Mark Kelly puts it, a solution in search of a problem. Here are a few explainers on what this is about from NewsNation (centrist), Texas Tribune (centrist, accused of left), New York Times (inconsistently center-left), and NPR (center left). What am I missing here?
3. Where’s the (Policy) Beef? If you've noticed a lack of policy talk in this election, you’re not alone. We’ll hear more about what candidates would actually do in next week’s debate, and journalists will start pushing the candidates on it
But if you want to make policy, you have to get power first. So the election has been light on policy so far. That’s left Trump open to attacks based on the policy proposals of an outside think tank. The Trump campaign has attacked Harris as policy-free, too.
What are your policy priorities? Here is my favorite American politics quiz: If America Had Six Parties, Which Would You Belong To?. Pew Research Center has another.
4. Do People Change Their Minds? Political campaigns focus mostly on turnout, rather than persuasion, which matches the general vibe that people are mostly unpersuadable. Not true, argue David Broockman.
5. You can never step in the same river twice. Politico reports that some Republicans are secretly hoping for a Donald Trump loss, hoping it will let the old Republican coalition rebuild itself.
That old coalition includes social conservatives, pro-military defense hawks, and free market economy folks, all of which Trump has ticked off.
But these Republicans “have a top of the ticket problem and not a voter base problem,” says one interviewee.
And if Trump loses, why wouldn’t he run in 2028?
🍌 Punchlines
The whimsical, weird, and wicked.
Nerd-on-nerd violence. Political scientists fire (rhetorical) shots at election forecasters.
And there a historian who’s ready to call the race for Harris. The prediction itself is basically voodoo (not in a good way; sorry, voodoo) but it’s a good way to learn about the “fundamentals” of presidential races.
Christmas comes just twice a year. Nicholas Maduro, who probably stole Venezuela’s election, is moving Christmas to October.
Another bananas presidential election. I'm listening to a podcast about presidential elections, and 1796 was a barn burner. There are covered-up affairs and sexual assaults, dirty dealings in the swing state of Pennsylvania, and fears about the Future of the Republic: