A couple-day-old report by Nate Cohn
, “A Florida Poll That Should Change the Way You Look at the Election,” is yet another data point in how strange our method of electing Presidents is. The first several paragraphs highlight that the latest NYT/Sienna poll shows Donald Trump with a staggering 13-point lead in his now-home state of Florida and argues that, despite this being wildly different from what other polls are showing, we should believe it.
That, really, is neither here nor there. We’ll know in a month, after all. But here’s the thing that matters:
In a key respect, a big lead for Mr. Trump in Florida doesn’t affect the presidential election much. The state had already drifted off most analysts’ lists of core battleground states; Florida voted for Mr. Trump by more than three percentage points in 2020. And in the winner-take-all Electoral College, it doesn’t matter if you win Florida by four points or 13 points — either way, you get all the state’s 30 electoral votes.
Intellectually, of course, we all know this. With the minimal exceptions of Maine and Nebraska, all the states and the District of Columbia award their entire Electoral slate to the popular vote winner in that state, regardless of margin. That Trump is doing considerably better in Florida (which, those of us of a certain age will recall was the crucial state in determining the 2000 election and thus the swingiest of the swing states) than the last two cycles is completely irrelevant to the outcome of the election. And that makes no sense whatsoever in a rational system.
Interestingly, this is not the point Cohn came to make. Rather, he’s seeing further signs of a re-alignment or at least yet more sorting on cultural lines.
If Florida becomes more solidly Republican in 2024, it suggests that the upheaval during and after the pandemic has had a lasting effect on American politics.
This poll, after all, is far from the first indication of Republican strength in the Sunshine State. Republicans won a landslide victory
here in the 2022 midterms, as the state was ground zero for the conservative reaction against lockdowns, vaccine mandates and “woke
.”
These same issues didn’t do nearly as much to help Republicans elsewhere in the country. In fact, there were other states — like Michigan, Kansas and Pennsylvania — where the backlash against Mr. Trump’s stop-the-steal campaign and the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade seemed to outweigh them
and propelled decisive Democratic victories.
Which makes sense on one level—Ron Desantis is Florida’s governor after all—but shows the impermanence of the blueness or redness of a given state. Both the ideological tenor of the parties and the demographics of the states change over time. And what appeals to “undecided” voters in the South is going to be different than what appeals to their counterparts in the Rust Belt.
In the short term, though, this means our weirdly undemocratic system is becoming more democratic in practice.
Importantly, the pattern is consistent with the idea that Mr. Trump’s edge in the Electoral College relative to the popular vote has shrunk somewhat
since 2020.
A 10-point gain for Mr. Trump in Florida and New York — where Siena College also shows
enduring Republican strength, though the state remains safely Democratic — would be enough to shave about one (inefficient) point off Vice President Harris’s lead in the popular vote.
While true in the aggregate, it’s ass-backward in the particular. If it turns out to be true that Trump has gained 10 percentage points in popularity in New York over the last four years, the takeaway isn’t that this will lessen the distortion caused by the Electoral College but rather the opposite. In 2020, 61% of New Yorkers voted for Biden while 38% voted for Trump, so the distortion was that 38%. If, in 2024, it’s 51% Harris, 48% Trump, it would be a distortion of 48%.
We’re talking here about the third (Florida) and fourth (New York) most populous states in the union, combining for 12.5% of the entire US population. That the votes that don’t count in the two largely cancel out is a matter of happenstance, not design.
Harvard Law professors Nikolas Bowie and Daphna Renan
take to the op-ed pages of the NYT to proclaim, “The Supreme Court Has Grown Too Powerful. Congress Must Intervene.“
The Supreme Court’s stunning decision this summer interpreting the Constitution to give presidents broad immunity from federal criminal laws is only the latest of its many opinions undermining Congress’s efforts to protect constitutional democracy, from its 19th-century invalidation of federal civil rights laws to its more recent curbing of the Voting Rights Act.
This is a curious framing. The premise of Constitutional democracy is that there are limits to what elected policymakers may do. Going back to at least the 1803 case Marbury vs. Madison (and arguably long before that), it has been the province of the courts to judge whether legislation and executive actions passed Constitutional muster.
Today even Americans who decry these opinions largely accept the idea that the court should have the final say on what the Constitution means. But this idea of judicial supremacy has long been challenged. And the court’s immunity decision has set in motion an important effort in Congress to reassert the power of the legislative branch to reject the court’s interpretations of the Constitution and enact its own.
Congress has always had the power to overturn the Supreme Court on matters of statutory interpretation. But if it can overturn decisions on what the Constitution permits by mere legislation, then judicial review is all but meaningless.
“Make no mistake about it: We have a very strong argument that Congress by statute can undo what the Supreme Court does,” Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, said
recently as he announced the introduction of the No Kings Act. The measure
declares that it is Congress’s constitutional judgment that no president is immune from the criminal laws of the United States. It would strip the Supreme Court of jurisdiction to declare the No Kings Act unconstitutional. Any criminal actions against a president would be left in the hands of the lower federal courts. And these courts would be required to adopt a presumption that the No Kings Act is constitutional.
While I’m more sympathetic to the idea of presidential immunity than most of our commentariat, I agree that SCOTUS has overreached on a good number of decisions of late—including on the scope of that ruling. Then again, I’ve thought that at various points of time over the roughly four decades that I’ve been paying attention.
Indeed, I’ve come to agree that the courts simply have too much power. Given that, practically speaking, the Constitution means whatever at least five Justices think it does at any given moment, they’re effectively a sitting Constitutional Convention. That was never the intent of the Framers nor even of John Marshall. But, two hundred twenty years in, it seems obvious that we’d need a Constitutional amendment to restructure the system.
It might seem unusual for Congress to instruct federal courts how to interpret the Constitution. But the No Kings Act follows an admirable tradition, dating back to the earliest years of the United States, in which Congress has invoked its constitutional authority to ensure that the fundamental law of our democracy is determined by the people’s elected representatives rather than a handful of lifetime appointees accountable to no one.
Should the No Kings Act pass, it would take its place among a constellation of occasions when Congress protected its more democratic interpretation of the Constitution.
Again, “democratic” and “Constitution” are in tension. By definition, the Constitution limits what majorities are allowed to impose on society through the force of state power.
As Congress considers the No Kings Act, it should not just embrace the presumption that its laws are constitutional but also institutionalize it.
The presumption that laws passed by Congress are constitutional is an old idea, one the court itself once avowed
. Even after 1803, when the court took the position in Marbury v. Madisonthat it had the power to disagree with Congress about the constitutionality of federal legislation, the court spent the next five decades deferring to Congress about the meaning of the Constitution. It was not until 1857 that the court attempted to override Congress’s constitutional judgment in a case, Dred Scott v. Sandford
, that rejected Congress’s power to limit the spread of slavery. The court’s claim of supremacy inspired Abraham Lincoln to object
that “if the policy of the government, upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court,” then “the people will have ceased to be their own rulers.”
I have often cited the half-century gap between Marbury and Scott as evidence that the court was shrewd in accumulating power. Indeed, Marbury was perfect in that regard: It invalidated a portion of an Act of Congress, ruled against the sitting President, and compelled neither to do anything. Thus, it asserted great power to itself in a way that would not be met with immediate challenge.
At the same time, the basic principles of Marbury — “Congress does not have the power to pass laws that override the Constitution” and “It is emphatically the province and duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is” — have been largely unchallenged to this day. Indeed, the very question Bowie and Renan raise was at stake in that case: “The Constitution is either a superior, paramount law, unchangeable by ordinary means, or it is on a level with ordinary legislative acts, and, like other acts, is alterable when the legislature shall please to alter it.” The unanimous opinion was that it was decidedly the former.
As the abolitionist Frederick Douglass explained, the presumption that federal laws are constitutional reflects the fact that a bill becomes law only after it has been debated and passed by Congress and considered and signed by the president — all of whom, like judges, take an oath to support the Constitution. As the national legislature makes national policy, it necessarily determines what kinds of laws are constitutionally appropriate. Some might disagree about the constitutionality of a law, but regular elections give voters a say among competing interpretations. Like many of his contemporaries, Douglass argued that any judge who attempts to defy such a statute should have “strong, irresistible and absolutely conclusive
” reasons for doing so.
Here, I emphatically agree. Judges should presume the good faith of the elected branches and, given the significant hurdles that passing laws requires, they ought to be presumed Constitutional. (We apply this principle in the Executive branch routinely: orders from the President and his agents are presumed legal unless it’s glaringly obvious that they’re not.) The courts should be, well, judicious in overturning Acts of Congress.
This is, however, a very different thing than saying that, if the Court deems a law in violation of the Constitution, it must nonetheless be enforced if it can pass a second time. That may well be a perfectly valid system—it is essentially* the one used in the UK—but it’s not the one the Framers designed. If we wish to change to a new one, we should amend the Constitution.
In recent years, however, the court has seemed particularly uninterested in forbearance, as five or six justices routinely upend Congress’s longstanding interpretations of the Constitution. For example, nearly 50 years after Congress and the president first decided that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was appropriate legislation and after several more Congresses, presidents and Supreme Court majorities agreed that the law was constitutional, five justices in 2013 invalidated
a crucial provision of the law.
This is really a bad example. The VRA is both a means of enforcing the provisions of the 15th Amendment and very much in tension with the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment as well as the Doctrine of Equality of States. For decades, SCOTUS warned that the provision in question had an expiration date. While it’s debatable whether the time had come to strike it down, it’s certainly true that Jim Crow had been dead for a very long time when it happened.
Over 100 years after Congress and the president first determined that the integrity of federal elections required limiting the power of corporations to overwhelm voters by spending from their coffers, five justices in 2010 struck down Congress’s bipartisan campaign finance reform, ruling that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in candidate elections.
Which was very much in line with judicial rulings going back to at least 1976 (Buckley vs. Valeo). And, frankly, even without judicial interference, we’ve seen that attempt after attempt to regulate campaign finance going back to 1974 have been overwhelmed by the desire to put money into the system.
Though the court has declared itself supreme in constitutional interpretation, the only thing the Constitution explicitly allows the Supreme Court to do is exercise “the judicial power.” The Constitution does not define this phrase. Nor does anything about the phrase inherently give judges the power to review acts of Congress. In Britain, the same phrase has long referred to judges’ power to enforce, not second-guess, the laws passed by Parliament.
This argument was made by conservatives unhappy by liberal rulings for decades. I’ve made variations of it myself. But the legal scholarship into the origins of judicial review makes it clear that, while not explicitly mentioned in the text of the Constitution, it was simply presumed to be a fact by the Framers. It’s simply how the law as they knew it had always functioned.
While the Constitution leaves the Supreme Court’s power ambiguous, it empowers Congress to pass and the president to sign whatever laws they think are “necessary and proper for carrying into execution” all the powers vested by the Constitution in arms of government like the Supreme Court. The Constitution’s text envisioned that Congress might decide to create federal trial courts, empowering them to decide certain cases and controversies. It also envisioned that Congress might make “regulations” and “exceptions” to the Supreme Court’s appellate jurisdiction.
Congress has done all of that. It has always determined — and at times changed — the power of the Supreme Court and the lower federal courts to decide constitutional questions.
Indeed, doing so was among the very first acts of the very first Congress: the Judiciary Act of 1789. But that Act’s granting of original jurisdiction to the Supreme Court a matter that was not granted in the text of the Constitution was a deciding point in Marbury.
The very first Congress set up detailed rules for federal courts, telling them which cases they were allowed to decide, when and how they could reach those decisions and what kinds of orders they were allowed to issue. When Thomas Jefferson was worried that federal courts were too partisan, he signed laws passed by Congress that abolished circuit courts and effectively canceled the Supreme Court’s next term.
“Effectively” is doing a lot of work here. Congress rather clearly doesn’t have the authority to order the Supreme Court not to meet. But, yes, it has the power to create and thus abolish lower courts**, and doing so would certainly impact the Supreme Court’s caseload.
When the Dred Scott court said that Congress could not ban the spread of slavery in federal territories, Lincoln signed a law
in 1862 that did just that. When it looked as though the post-Civil War court would try to nullify Congress’s Reconstruction-era attempt to create multiracial democracy in the South, Congress enacted a law that stripped the court of the power to review its statute. And when the court later refused to enforce federal laws that promoted a more just political economy and banned child labor, Congress and the president ultimately compelled the court to change its mind by threatening to rein in the court or increase the number of justices.
These are all different things. The 1862 law was clearly unconstitutional insofar as Dred Scot hadn’t been overturned by subsequent SCOTUS ruling or the 13th Amendment. Who would have sued to overturn it in the midst of the Civil War was unclear. Congress clearly doesn’t have the power to strip SCOTUS of the authority to hear cases and, indeed, the court subsequently overturned scads of Congressional Acts pursuant to Congress’ express power under the 14th Amendment to enforce equal protection. And threatening to pack the courts is a political act, not a matter of constitutional power of the courts.
The purpose of such legislation was not to evade the Constitution. To the contrary, it was to allow the people and their representatives to enforce their interpretation of the Constitution against a small group of judges who would defy it.
Here, we agree. To the extent the Court is broadly seen as acting in contravention of the Constitution, it loses legitimacy. And deference to its orders is purely a matter of reputation: it has essentially no power to enforce its rulings absent the belief that it is a legitimate interpreter of the Constitution and not a partisan actor. It’s what prevented Richard Nixon from simply telling a unanimous Supreme Court to go to hell when it ordered him to turn over the tapes. Instead, he complied and tendered his resignation.
Previous justices understood that their power comes from Congress and the public’s acceptance of how they exercise it. Shortly before Robert H. Jackson joined the Supreme Court in 1941, he testified before Congress to caution against judicial overreach. He observed that it is “a responsibility of Congress to see that the court is an instrumentality in the maintenance of a just and constitutional government and that it does not become an instrumentality for the defeat of constitutional government.”
Jackson was uneasy about the power the court had arrogated to itself after the Civil War to declare an act of Congress unconstitutional. Echoing Douglass, he wrote that if the court were to exercise such a power, it should do so exclusively in a clear case — what Jackson described as “a case in which the incompatibility of the statute with the provisions of the Constitution was beyond honest dispute.”
Again, this has been my longstanding position. But it’s ironic that it’s now being taken by liberals who had spent decades cheering on a Supreme Court that routinely overturned laws they didn’t like on absurdly thin Constitutional pretext.
The No Kings Act gestures at this standard with the requirement that courts adopt it when they interpret Congress’s command to treat the president as any other public official.
Aside from the fact that the President simply isn’t “any other public official” but the embodiment of what has become the most powerful of our three branches of government, it’s just not clear where Congress would derive the power to tell the Supreme Court how to do its job.
But as Congress debates the bill — and as future Congresses debate other laws to promote the general welfare — Congress should go further to institutionalize the idea that the court “not become an instrumentality for the defeat of constitutional government.”
This is, effectively, a shorthand for “make rulings we don’t like.” Almost any major Supreme Court decision will evoke outrage from some significant segment of society. If the idea is simply that the majority should be able to legislate as it pleases—provided it can overcome the already-extant antimajoritarian features of our system—then we should just do away with judicial review altogether rather than doing so on a piecemeal basis. We’re moving down that road with the filibuster, for example, but that’s something the Senate can do on its own. It’s pretty clear this one would require amending the Constitution.
To do so, Congress could pass a statute declaring that when asked to apply a federal law, a judge must do so unless the judge believes the law is unconstitutional beyond honest dispute.
Just as Congress will always think laws it passes are “necessary and proper” (see: Federalist 78
), a Supreme Court Justice declaring a law unconstitutional will always think he’s doing so honestly.
To ensure there is no honest dispute, Congress could require the judge to enforce the law unless the Supreme Court certifies by a supermajority or unanimous vote that there are no reasonable grounds to defend it. In this way, Congress would require the justices to show, by their votes, that the incompatibility of the law with the Constitution is beyond honest dispute.
While I would love to go back to the days of unanimous rulings—and thus modestly written opinions—on the most contentious issues, I don’t see where Congress would get this authority.
There are other approaches to reconciling the role of the court with representative democracy — from allowing Congress to override specific constitutional rulings to eliminating constitutional review of congressional legislation more generally. Many of these have been proposed across American history and imposed by other Western democracies like Canada and Britain. The No Kings Act would be no panacea. But it would be a start.
Liberals would be happy with these provisions given a conservative—arguably radical–majority on the Court. But there are currently three Justices (Thomas, Alito, and Sotomayor) over 70 and one (Chief Justice Roberts) just shy of it. It’s conceivable that a President Harris with a Democratic Senate could replace three of them in her first term and have a young, Democratic-majority Court by the end of her second. And liberals would love to have that bulwark against an eventual Republican government.
Judicial review is so deeply engrained in our system of governance that, while I’ve spent considerable timing thinking about the norms that ought to apply to it and ways to reform it to achieve those norms, it has never really occurred to me to do away with it altogether. Doing so would be incredibly difficult, given the barriers to amending the Constitution. But I’m certainly open to the idea.
Interestingly—if perhaps not surprisingly—Bowie and Renan want to retain judicial review of state legislators.
Importantly, statutes protecting federal law would preserve the court’s ability to check state laws that defy federal constitutional commitments, as the court did in Brown v. Board of Education when it enforced a federal statute to find racial segregation by states unconstitutional. While the court’s defiance of laws enacted by Congress and the president puts an unelected tribunal at the top of our democracy, its enforcement of federal law secures national authority against state nullification.
For this reason, members of the civil rights bar, the labor movement, Congress, the judiciary and the academy who have historically opposed the court’s supremacy over Congress have often supported federal laws that invite courts to review state actions.
While, on the surface, this seems to be about the probability of outcomes they like rather than about Constitutional principles, it is certainly true that the states have a history of flouting Federal law and the US Constitution. But it’s interesting to prefer democracy over judicial supremacy in the one instance and vice versa in another.
*It’s complicated, in that there’s essentially no judicial review for Acts of Parliament but the House of Lords performs an analogous function. But, ultimately, the House of Commons will prevail if they wish to override the objections of the upper house.
**Presumably, the impacted Article III judges would still hold their positions for life. What that would entail absent courts is unclear.
They may want to believe, but why do they want to believe this?
There are a couple of levels to the answer. The tier is why people believe in conspiracy theories
in general; the second is about why the MAGA conspiracy theories resonate with that particular audience.
There are lots of reasons why people fall into the conspiracy theory rabbit hole:
Conspiracy theories explain why people feel dispossessed and disenfranchised. These cabals aren’t just interested in manipulating markets and controlling global conflicts. They’re also out to get you, for whatever you represent to them that they find offensive (for example, because you’re white, male, Christian, and can’t get a date).
Conspiracy theories are esoteric knowledge. Even if you feel powerless and downtrodden, you can at least claim one advantage: you know something that the sheeple don’t.
There’s lots of interesting social science research into conspiracy theories, posing hypotheses about how there may be a conspiracy theory mindset
, how that worldview makes one open to seemingly disconnected conspiracy theories (If clearly there are lizard people running the world, why not Bigfoot?), and even how there might be neurobiological origins of conspiracy thinking
. And it’s nothing new for scholars to point out how often conspiracy theories (or, as Umberto Eco called it, “obsession with a plot”
) are an integral part of fascist content.
But none of these possible explanations tell us why someone would be willing to believe in specific MAGA fever dreams, such as voting machine companies are rigging elections, Venezuelan gangs have seized power in a Colorado suburb, Haitian immigrants are eating innocent pets, gay teachers are “grooming” students, or Bill Gates wants to inject microchips into your veins. The content of these conspiracy theories has a simpler explanation: these are the people who already make the believers in conspiracy theories uncomfortable, and they are looking for stronger justifications for their discomfort. Or, to put it more succinctly, they want to believe because they want to hate.
You might simply invoke the word “Othering” and leave it at that. However, I believe it’s more important to understand the mechanism that replaces the humanity of people you don’t like with a demonic caricature.
There are many basic human impulses at work which polite, vague terms like “disenfranchisement” don’t capture. They’re as simple and direct as discomfort (with the day workers hanging around the Home Depot parking lot), disgust (with the concept of gay sex), fear (about one’s own sexual leanings, of changes to the community in which one lives, etc.), envy (of people who are more successful than yourself), and bafflement (at how complex systems, such as government agencies and supply chains, operate).
Conspiracy theories take these very raw human feelings and turn them into a narrative of good and evil, in which the most extreme countermeasures are justified
. It’s not just that transvestites makes me feel icky, but drag queen story hours are an active plot to corrupt the nation’s youth. Those day workers aren’t merely people unlike myself, but still recognizably human; they’re rapists and murderers who have infiltrated our country. That talking head on TV isn’t merely someone with whom I don’t agree, but a secret communist trying to undermine the pillars of American society.
MAGA conspiracies are so ridiculous because they are trying to justify things that are inherently hateful. The more innocuous the truth (most immigrants are just people looking for a better life, or escape from a horrible fate; LGBTQ+ people don’t want special privileges, they just want to be treated as humanely and fairly as everyone else; etc.), the more outlandish the narrative has to be.
Of course, no one is immune from taking this dark path, including people of more left-wing political persuasions. One simply has to look at the equally absurd conspiracy theories in the history of Communism that justified horrors like the liquidation of Ukrainian “kulaks,” the killing fields in Cambodia, or the Cultural Revolution. However, we’re talking about this particular movement, in this country, at this time, and the eager embrace of fantasies that are as ridiculous as they are hateful.
There are other mitigating factors, obviously. Fifty or a hundred years ago, the person who rants about how the Earth is hollow and aliens have secret bases within it would have been the neighborhood kook, with few ways to reinforce their beliefs beyond a few fringe publications, newsletters, AM radio shows broadcast in the middle of the night, and the occasional TV “documentary” show. Now, they are plugged into vast networks of fellow believers who provide encouragement and tortured explanations needed to sustain their beliefs in the face of facts. They also, of course, now have a Conspiracist In Chief who fans the flames of their paranoia, and a legion of other full-time conspiracy thought leaders doing podcasts and posting on social media. You can call this a “permission structure,” but again, I fear this language may as denatured as “disenfranchisement.” What we’re talking about is a license to hate.
To re-make my point from Tuesday’s post, none of this goes away if Kamala Harris is elected president, and the inauguration happens without interruption in January. Once you crawl your way to the top of a pile of tortured logic, unbridled hatred, and outright lies, it’s terrifying to climb down again — particularly when there are legions of people cheering you on, telling you that you’re exactly where you should to be, sneering at the people you think should stay below you.
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As Hurricane Milton
approaches Florida
, meteorologists are staying awake for days at a time trying to get vital, life-saving information out to the folks who will be affected. That’s their job. But this year, several of them tell Rolling Stone, they’re increasingly having to take time out to quell the nonstop flow of misinformation
during a particularly traumatic hurricane season. And some of them are doing it while being personally threatened.
“People are just so far gone, it’s honestly making me lose all faith in humanity,” says Washington D.C.-based meteorologist Matthew Cappucci, in a phone interview conducted while he was traveling down to Florida for the storm. “There’s so much bad information floating around out there that the good information has become obscured.”
Cappucci says that he’s noticed an enormous change on social media in the last three months: “Seemingly overnight, ideas that once would have been ridiculed as very fringe, outlandish viewpoints are suddenly becoming mainstream and it’s making my job much more difficult.”
[…]
This hurricane season, Cappucci and the other meteorologists I spoke with say, conspiracy theories have been flooding their inboxes. The main one that people have seemed to latch onto is the accusation that the government can control the weather. This theory seems to be amplified with climate change creating worsening storms combined with a tense election year, and the vitriol is being directed at meteorologists. “I’ve been doing this for 46 years and it’s never been like this,” says Alabama meteorologist James Spann. He says he’s been “inundated” with misinformation and threatening messages like “Stop lying about the government controlling the weather or else.”
[…]
“Something has clearly changed within the last year,” says Spann. “We know some of it is bots but I do believe that some of it is coming from people that honestly believe the moon disappeared because the government nuked it to control the hurricanes, or that the government used chemtrails to spray our skies with chemicals to steer Helene into the mountains of North Carolina.”
This is, well, insane. Although, as Kingdaddy notes, people often believe in these nutty theories because they are desperate to understand the world in a way that makes them feel secure. On one level I get it: it is easier to accept that these terrible outcomes are the result of human actions rather than to accept how helpless we are all in the face of the truly terrifying forces of nature. And also better to assume evil politicians are are work than accept that we all helped warm the planet and are living with the consequences.
Leaders of quality should seek to quell conspiracy theories and, moreover, should want to promote truth. However, too many politicians see advantage in stoking fears and spreading lies. It is why Trump is lying about hurricane relief. Worse, Congress, Marjorie Taylor Greene is propagating actual conspiracy theories about weather control. This is not a kook in their mom’s basement, but rather an elected kook with a really important position.
Marjorie Taylor Greene has doubled down on claims Democrats control the weather
, prompting fellow GOP congressperson Carlos Gimenez to tweet
she should “have her head examined.” Meanwhile, the White House is launching
a Reddit account to keep the public informed on Helene/Milton response and recovery.
“Science is one of the few things that doesn’t care about politics,” says Cappucci. “If a tornado is coming down the road at you, it doesn’t check your voter registration.”
Again, leaders who care about people shouldn’t behave this way.
Some experts I spoke with think that misinformation is exceptionally bad this year because we are leading up to a presidential election. Some of the conspiracy theories accuse Democrats of intentionally steering hurricanes to red-leaning swing states, in order to hurt Donald Trump’s chances of winning.
“The 2024 misinformation is being fueled to a certain extent by political polarization,” says Sarah DeYoung, a professor at the Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware. “I think that’s corresponding with there being a presidential election this year.”
DeYoung says there are certain myths that pop up for every disaster. Some of them are well-intentioned, like telling people that hotels have to accept pets in an emergency event, which is not true. Others are misconceptions, like saying looting goes up after natural disasters when in fact, the crime rate often goes down and people are just trying to locate basic essentials
like food and water to survive. But in 2024, they are often politically motivated.
“It becomes particularly dangerous because it starts to rile up additional feelings of division and then the false information about FEMA funneling money towards immigrants, that makes people who are immigrants more vulnerable to potential acts of violence and backlash from those kinds of rumors.”
DeYoung says this harms both the people that need help and the people trying to help, by adding confusion, slowing down the recovery process and fomenting mistrust.
All persons of good conscience should demand better of our leaders and roundly reject anyone who is clearly lying to us for their own political gain without any concern for the consequences of their actions as long as they get power to sate their own self-important appetites.
Rep. Chuck Edwards, a North Carolina Republican, sent a letter to his constituents debunking the misinformation and conspiracy theories that have spread in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene
, telling them, “Nobody can control the weather.”
[…]
“Hurricane Helene was NOT geoengineered by the government to seize and access lithium deposits in Chimney Rock,” Edwards said, adding that there is no technology that can geoengineer a hurricane and local officials confirmed the government is not taking control of the town.
Edwards also reassured his constituents that FEMA would not run out of funds to assist the area with its recovery efforts. He said residents may be eligible for more than the $750 of immediate assistance that FEMA provides to survivors to help cover essential items while the agency determines their eligibility for additional funds.
Former President Donald Trump is among those who have made misleading claims
about federal disaster relief, falsely alleging that the Biden administration distributed most of FEMA’s funds to undocumented migrants. He also falsely claimed that storm victims were only being offered $750 in aid.
I suspect, however, that Edwards is not telling folks who it is spreading the lies about FEMA.
The Atlantic’s Rogé Karma
posts to “The Most Dramatic Shift in U.S. Public Opinion.”
America’s immigration debate has taken a restrictionist turn. Eight years ago, Donald Trump declared that “when Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” and promised to build a “big, beautiful wall” on the southern border. That rhetoric, extreme at the time, seems mild now. Today, he depicts immigrants as psychopathic murderers responsible for “poisoning the blood of our country” and claims that he will carry out the “largest deportation operation in the history of our country.”
Democrats have shifted too. In 2020, Joe Biden ran
on the promise to reverse Trump’s border policies and expand legal immigration. “If I’m elected president, we’re going to immediately end Trump’s assault on the dignity of immigrant communities,” he said during his speech accepting the Democratic nomination. “We’re going to restore our moral standing in the world and our historic role as a safe haven for refugees and asylum seekers.” That kind of humanitarian language is gone from Democrats’ 2024 messaging. So is any defense of immigration on the merits. When asked about immigration, Vice President Kamala Harris touts her background prosecuting transnational criminal organizations and promises to pass legislation that would “fortify” the southern border.
So how to explain this?
The change in rhetoric did not come out of nowhere. Politicians are responding to one of the most dramatic swings
in the history of U.S. public opinion. In 2020, 28 percent of Americans told Gallup that immigration should decrease. Just four years later, that number had risen to 55 percent—the highest level since 2001. (Other surveys findsimilarresults
.) Republican attitudes have shifted the most, but Democrats and independents have also soured on immigration.
On it’s face, this seems like a chicken-egg problem: are politicians shifting to a shift in public opinion or is public opinion shifting because politicians are hyping the issue? (They’re eating our dogs!) Maybe a little of both.
Although public opinion is known to ebb and flow, a reversal this big, and this fast, is nearly unheard-of. It is the result of a confluence of two powerful factors: a partisan backlash to a Democratic president and a bipartisan reaction to the genuine chaos generated by a historic surge at the border.
Political scientists have long observed that public opinion tends to move in the opposite direction of a sitting president’s rhetoric, priorities, and policies, especially when that president is an especially polarizing figure—a phenomenon known as “thermostatic public opinion.” No president has kicked the thermostat into action quite like Trump. In response to his incendiary anti-immigrant rhetoric and harsh policies, including the Muslim ban and family separation, being pro-immigrant became central to Democratic identity. In 2016, only 30 percent of Democrats told Gallup they wanted to increase immigration; by 2020, that number had grown to 50 percent. In just four years under Trump, Democratic attitudes toward immigration levels warmed more than they had in the previous 15.
But the thermostat works the other way too. When Biden took office, he immediately rescinded many of Trump’s border policies and proposed legislation to “restore humanity and American values to our immigration system.” This triggered a backlash. Right-wing media and Republican politicians sought to turn Biden’s policies into a liability. By mid-2022, the percentage of Republican voters who said immigration should decrease had risen by 21 points. And with Trump no longer in the White House to mobilize the opposition, Democratic immigration attitudes began by some measures to creep closer to their pre-2016 levels as well. “The paradox of Trump was that he inspired an unprecedented positive shift in immigration attitudes,” Alexander Kustov, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, told me. “But because it was a reaction to Trump himself, that positivity was always extremely fragile.”
Sure. But that doesn’t explain why Democrats have shifted so much on the issue. Biden hasn’t exactly made radical policy changes, after all.
Trump is not the entire story, however. Public opinion continued to drift rightward long after Biden took office. From June 2023 to June 2024 alone, the percentage of Democrats who favored decreased immigration jumped by 10 points, and the percentage of Republicans by 15 points. That’s the single largest year-over-year shift in overall immigration attitudes since Gallup began asking the question back in 1965.
I’m not surprised by Republicans being more radicalized on the issue under a Democratic administration. But Democrats changing their stated opinion to that degree in a single year is surprising absent shifts in real-world circumstances.
Voters may have been responding to the sharp rise in so-called border encounters—a euphemism for the apprehension of undocumented immigrants entering the country from Mexico. These reached
a record 300,000 in December 2023, up from 160,000 in January of that year and from just 74,000 in December 2020. The surge overwhelmed Customs and Border Patrol, and scenes of overcrowded immigrant-processing centers and sprawling tent encampments became fixtures on conservative media outlets. Texas Governor Greg Abbott began sending busloads of asylum seekers (about
120,000 at this point) to cities such as New York, Chicago, and Denver, which were caught off guard by the influx. Suddenly blue-state cities across the country got a taste of border chaos in the form of stressed social services, migrants sleeping on streets, frantic city officials, and community backlash. “I don’t think the shift in attitudes is surprising, given what’s been happening at the border,” Jeffrey Jones, a senior editor at Gallup, told me. “People are sensitive to what’s going on, and they respond to it.”
Which makes sense. If immigrants are coming to the border faster than they can be processed, it’s natural to want the numbers to come down regardless of one’s broader attitudes toward immigrants or immigration. Which, it turns out, haven’t actually changed that much.
Some experts call this the “locus of control theory,” or, more colloquially, the “chaos theory” of immigration sentiment. The basic idea, grounded in both survey data and political-science research
, is that when the immigration process is perceived as fair and orderly, voters are more likely to tolerate it. When it is perceived as out of control and unfair—perhaps due to an uncommonly large surge of migrants—then the public quickly turns against it. Perhaps the best evidence for this theory is that even as Americans have embraced much tighter immigration restrictions, their answers to survey questions such as “Do you believe undocumented immigrants make a contribution to society?” and “Do you support a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants?” and even “Should it be easier to immigrate to the U.S?” haven’t changed nearly as much, and remain
more pro-immigrant than they were as recently as 2016. “I don’t think these views are contradictory,” Natalia Banulescu-Bogdan, a deputy director at the Migration Policy Institute, told me. “People can simultaneously have compassion for immigrants while also feeling anxious and upset about the process for coming into the country.”
Indeed, that’s pretty much where I am. The flood coming from the south is beyond our ability to handle in the near term. The fact that they are exploiting loopholes in the asylum system rather than following our rules exacerbates that problem.
One implication of chaos theory is that leaders can mitigate opposition to immigration by introducing reforms that make the process less chaotic. That’s what the Biden administration tried to do in June of this year, when it issued
a series of executive orders that would, among other things, bar migrants who cross illegally from claiming asylum and give the Department of Homeland Security the ability to halt the processing of asylum claims altogether if the volume of requests gets too high. Border encounters have fallen steadily throughout 2024, reaching about 100,000 in July and August—still a high number, but the lowest level since February 2021. Perhaps not coincidentally, the salience of immigration for voters has also been falling. This past February, 28 percent of Americans told Gallup that immigration was the most important problem facing the country; by August, that number had dropped to 19 percent. (It crept back up to 22 percent in September, for reasons that likely have more to do with the wave of disinformation about Haitian migrants than with crossings at the border, which continued to fall.)
I’m skeptical that Americans are following the nuances of the flow that closely. Or that being ranked as the number one issue is that useful a metric, given that the salience of other issues is a variable rather than a constant.
The very fact that Biden had to rely on unilateral executive orders, which are being challenged in court, illustrates a deeper issue. Even though most Americans want a more orderly and fair immigration system, the nature of thermostatic public opinion gives the opposition party strong incentives to thwart any action that might deliver it. Earlier this year, congressional Republicans killed a border-security bill—which had previously had bipartisan support—after Trump came out against it, lest the Biden administration be given credit for solving the issue that Trump has staked his campaign on. And if Trump is reelected, the pendulum of public opinion could very well swing back the other way, putting pressure on Democrats to oppose his entire immigration agenda.
What’s clear is that the current hawkish national mood is not the fixed end point of American popular sentiment. Attitudes toward immigration will continue to fluctuate in the years to come. Whether public policy changes meaningfully in response is anyone’s guess.
The irony is that a Trump border policy would likely exacerbate the problem thus increasing support for his policy.
This piece from 60 Minutes is worth your time, Arizona election officials subjected to violent threats undaunted in defense elections
. It is an interview with a number of persons, all Republicans. Primarily it is focused on Stephen Richer, who was elected as Maricopa County’s recored in 2020 as well as Shelby Busch, an election denier and Maricopa County’s Republican Party vice-chair. In addition, Clint Hickman, the Republican chair of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, and Ben Ginsberg, a prominent Republican attorney are interviewed. Ginsberg was once general council to the RNC, he represented the Bush campaign in the 2000 Florida recount, and worked for the Romney campaign.
Let me stress: four Republicans (two of whom are currently in office). But one is quite unlike the other. There is also the Republican who wasn’t interviewed who is also discussed below.
I would note that Richer and Hickman have both faced intense public opprobrium because they followed the law and the data and, worse, have faced numerous death-threats. At least one of the men who threatened Richer in serving a prison sentence as a result (two others have been convicted and are awaiting sentencing). One of the men who threatened Hickman is also in prison.
First, Richer.
Richer took office after the 2020 election, when his own party was up in arms over allegations of fraud. It was Richer’s first elected office and he knew what to do.
“They just need answers,” Richer said he thought. “It’s not that complicated of an issue. It’s just people are uncertain. They expected Donald Trump to win. I expected Donald Trump to win in Maricopa County. He didn’t win. They have questions. As soon as we give them logical, factual answers, all will be well.”But that’s not what happened. There were multiple investigations. The Republican-led State Senate commissioned a hand recount of Maricopa County’s 2.1 million paper ballots, which reconfirmed Mr. Biden won. Statewide, prosecutions for illegal voting involved a total of 19 ballots.
Note a couple of things.
First, the fact that evidence and reason did not work (indeed, the piece makes it quite clear that no amount of evidence matters to those denying the veracity of the results). It didn’t matter than reality could be demonstrated, nor that the officials conducting the process were Republicans who almost certainly voted for Trump. To reiterate Richer above: “I expected Donald Trump to win in Maricopa County.”
Second, there were 19 ballots that led to prosecutions for illegal voting statewide. There were 3,420,565 ballots cast in the state in 2020 according to official numbers from the Secretary of State’s office. That means 0.00005554637903% of the vote was found to be illegal in AZ. This is a number so small as to be meaningless to the outcome. Moreover, given how hard perfection is to achieve in any endeavor, it is almost a miracle that that is the number. But, it is also why honest people cannot say, “There was zero fraud in the election” and why other can claims that fraud exists without any sense of proportion if not the implication that something very sinister is going on. But scope matters. Nonetheless, those 19 ballots are the kind of thing that will go into the Heritage Foundation’s Electoral Fraud Database, likely as 19 separate entries and then be used as examples of massive fraud. (I have written extensively on that database here
and here
).
Second, Hickman.
He has been a supervisor on the board for 11 years and was among Trump’s most loyal supporters in 2020. Then-President Trump publicly thanked him in 2020 at a campaign rally days before the election. But after all the votes were tallied, Hickman found no evidence of fraud and said so when he and the Republican majority Board of Supervisors voted to certify the county’s election. Since then, he says he has been accused of treason and received death threats.
“I’ve lost count. I have lost count,” Hickman said. “And so have my colleagues. And so have election workers.”
In one instance, Hickman got a call from Mark A. Rissi
, who threatened to “lynch your stupid lying Commie a—.”
Rissi, who in the voicemail went on to threaten to hang him, received a two-and-a-half year prison sentence after he pleaded guilty to sending threatening communications. Hickman recalled another message he received he called “chilling”.
The caller stated, “‘We know the restaurants that you are in. And we know where your kids go to school,’” Hickman said.
Again, Hickman was a Trump supporter. And, again, these threats are serious enough to put people behind bars. Moreover, the notion that an elected official, properly doing their job, should face threats to their children is sickening.
Third, Busch.
“What I am doing is, I am shining a big bright light on the disdain and the arrogance of some of the elected officials,” she said. “They are elected to represent the interests of the people. And until they are ready to step up and do that, then there will be unrest.”
Busch believes state statutes and regulations were violated. She still questions whether signature verification was proper and whether some ballots were collected illegally. In a recent case, a judge disqualified Busch — an administrator in a medical practice — from testifying as an expert because he said she was “obviously unqualified…not even in the ballpark.”
“That’s one judge’s opinion who is a radical leftist who is legislating from the bench and I don’t believe that it had any merit in my credibility whatsoever,” she said.
The write-up leave out, I think, the most telling interchange wherein Pelley tries to get Busch to explain what evidence she has. Eventually Pelley says something to the effect that she is right because she says she is and Busch agreed. Additionally, she claimed divine inspiration.
In a speech, recorded on video earlier this year, Busch said she would “lynch” Richer.
“If Stephen Richer walked in this room, I would lynch him,” she said in March. “I don’t unify with people who don’t believe in the principles we believe in and the American cause that founded this country.”
Busch later said she was referring to a “political lynching.”
“It’s referred to as destroying someone’s career. It was not ever meant physically in any way, shape, or form,” Busch said. “Probably a poor choice of words.”
A “poor choice of words,” indeed. But a very telling choice.
I would note that the word “lynch” showed up in one of the threats to Hickman. Not only does lynching have a troubled history in the United States, it is a word directly associated with mob justice.
By the way, Busch was rewarded for her behavior by being a delegate to the RNC and being the delegate who announced Arizona’s delegation for Trump during the roll call of the states. The GOP is now the party of people like Busch, rather than Richer or Hickman. If you are reading this and you consider yourself a Republican, ask yourself which Republican Party you would prefer. Then consider that as ironic or counterintuitive as it may seem, voting for Harris (or, at a bare minimum, not voting for Trump) is the best pathway you have is avoiding the party being controlled by people like Busch who reject evidence and threaten violence on those who present it.
Fourth, Ginsberg.
“The evidence to back up the allegations of fraud and elections being unreliable simply does not exist,” Ginsberg said.
[…]
“Donald Trump and his supporters brought 64 cases. They lost 63 of them outright,” Ginsberg explained. The case they won related to a small number of ballots “far from outcome determinative,” he says.
Election deniers have said that they lost in court because the judges weren’t fair.
“Under the rule of law, you have every right to submit your litigation,” Ginsberg said. “But under the rule of law, a conservative principle, a Republican principle for as long as I’ve been practicing election law, you have to accept the rulings of the court.”
Again: this is a man who has spent his career working for Republicans at the highest levels.
The Missing Fifth Republican.
Let me conclude with a fifth Republican–the one who decided not to be interviewed: Donald Trump. He is the source of all of this discontent, anger, and threatened violence. This kind of behavior does not spontaneously emerge. The Trump campaign, and Trump himself, seeded doubt before the election and stoked the flames of denial and discontent for months. It is why we had an attack on the US Capitol on January 6th. The same anger that lead to death threats against Richer and Hickman and for people like Busch to toss around words like “lynching” and motivated an insurrection.
The source is Trump.
Part of the reason, for example, that Richer received threats is because Trump lied on social media about what Maricopa County officials were doing with the data. Likewise, Trump lied about basic processes, such as the notion that all the voting should be counted by election night. That is, and always has been, impossible.
Good evening. I’d like to provide the American people with an update on our efforts to protect the integrity of our very important 2020 election. If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us. If you count the votes that came in late — we’re looking at them very strongly. But a lot of votes came in late.
[…]
As everybody saw, we won by historic numbers. And the pollsters got it knowingly wrong. They got it knowingly wrong. We had polls that were so ridiculous, and everybody knew that at the time. There was no blue wave that they predicted. They thought there was going to be a big blue wave; that was false. That was done for suppression reasons. But instead, there was a big red wave.
These are all lies. But people like Busch believe.
(A book could be filled with Trump’s conscious, public lies on this subject–I will stick just to the ones above because this post has already gotten very long).
None of this will get better if he wins. He will put people with Busch’s mentality (i.e., facts are irrelevant, only what I believe matters) into positions of power. Significant, serious power.
But let me stress: Trump is the source of the denialism. He is the source of the anger. He is doing nothing to squelch it. And, as I have noted, he himself frequently uses violent rhetoric. Leadership and character matter and Trump is leading many of his followers down a dark path and is demonstrating an utter lack of character.
Look, for example, just in the last week at the lies he is telling
about hurricane relief. He is actively cultivating anger and resentment against FEMA and other officials because he thinks it helps him politically.
I would note that the write-up provided above of the interview is adequate, but that the piece for TV has more information and is also more impactful. The video can be found here
.
As a bit of a postscript, I also wrote on piece on in 2021, The Arizona Audit
that is relevant and the follow-up: BREAKING: Biden Wins AZ
. The first piece details a lot of the legal outcomes in the state in advance of what was, to me, a stunt audit aimed at proving all the formal governmental types were wrong. The spoiler for the follow-up is that even the audit proved Biden won. To quote from a NYT piece noted in my post: “In fact, the draft report from the company Cyber Ninjas found just the opposite: It tallied 99 additional votes for President Biden and 261 fewer votes for Mr. Trump in Maricopa County, the fast-growing region that includes Phoenix.”
The evidence that Trump lost is overwhelming, and yet he still insists he won and inflames the passions of many of his supporters in so-doing.
Note that JD Vance would not say who won during the VP debate. And then, later that week, claimed the Trump won
.
I know that people will say that all politicians lie, and this is true, if anything, because all humans lie. But there is a profound difference between claiming you will get a certain policy passed if you are elected, knowing that you probably can’t, exaggerating about past accomplishments, or not owning up to a change of policy position and blatantly claiming that reality isn’t real while knowing it is leading to your followers making death threats against innocent local officials.
Trump does not care what effects his words have. Should such a person be President?
And you wish to claim that he just doesn’t know or understand what effects his words are having, then I ask you: should such a person be President?
Via The Atlantic: Donald Trump Flirts With Race Science
. I take the rhetorical point that is being made, but I have to confess it seems like more than just a flirtation.
JUST NOW: @realDonaldTrump
leans heavily into race science by telling @hughhewitt
that you can tell whether migrants are predisposed to committing murder by “their genes.”
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