A compendium of solid reporting and commentary surrounding the pivotal 2024 elections in the United States. You won't find horse race coverage here, or the standard "both sides" (even when one is lying) BS that passes so often for political journalism. What you will find are links – with brief quotes from the coverage and short commentary from me – to work that I believe advances the conversation we should be having about America's, and the world's, future. Remember: Everything is at stake this year. (Unfortunately, some of the work I point to is behind paywalls.)
Missouri will join at least a half-dozen states voting on abortion rights during the presidential election. Arizona’s secretary of state certified an abortion-rights measure for the ballot on Monday. Measures also will go before voters in Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Nevada and South Dakota. While not explicitly addressing abortion rights, a New York ballot measure would bar discrimination based on “pregnancy outcomes” and “reproductive healthcare,” among other things.
It's almost as if the Supreme Court's right-wing supermajority wanted to make life harder for right-wing Republicans when it opened the gates for states to enact abortion bans (or resume ones that had been in place before the Roe ruling). Of course, that wasn't their plan. But the Dobbs ruling created a massive backlash, showing in state after state that a resounding majority of voters didn't want the procedure banned at all. This won't make much presidential-election difference in the ballot-measure states listed in the AP article, with the exception of Arizona, where an extreme but tenuous right-wing legislative majority could tip Democratic along with the state's electoral votes. Even if all of these states vote to restore abortion rights, it'll leave a number of Republican controlled states that run roughshod over women's rights. Nonetheless, these ballot propositions are a measure of progress.
About four months after a notorious hacking group claimed to have stolen an extraordinary amount of sensitive personal information from a major data broker, a member of the group has reportedly released most of it for free on an online marketplace for stolen personal data. The breach, which includes Social Security numbers and other sensitive data, could power a raft of identity theft, fraud and other crimes, said Teresa Murray, consumer watchdog director for the U.S. Public Information Research Group.
This data theft, like so many others we've suffered in recent months and years, could be a powerful issue for a political party that gave a damn about Americans' privacy. Democrats are marginally better on this issue than Republicans. The Biden administration's Federal Trade Commission has done more than its predecessor, including an ongoing initiative to clamp down on promiscuous selling of our location data. In Sen. Ron Wyden, the Democrats also boast the most outspoken and knowledgable member of Congress on the topic. But the unfortunate reality is that Congress overall – the only place where we can get serious help – doesn't care. In face, it's safe to say that Congress is hostile to our privacy; otherwise it would do something.
That incredibly weird Trump-Musk Twitter "conversation"
Let’s deal only briefly with the eventual contents of Elon and Donald’s fireside chat, as long as we’re clear the fire they were sitting next to was a dumpster, sparks from which had long since set both their pants on fire. “I want to close the department of education,” Trump slurred at one point. According to Trump, Biden was ousted in a “coup”. Hey, at least the Democrats can organise a successful one.
Incompetence was the main feature of what Musk, owner of the site formerly called Twitter and major booster – including on the platform – of Trump's presidential campaign. To note that he didn't do Trump or himself (or (ex)Twitter) any favors is an understatement. The event was self-satire for both of them. The Guardian's commentator captured that nicely.
From Republican partisans these cries are expected. You hammer on what you think might be potential vulnerabilities. It’s the business of reporters to be pushing for more access and interviews. But more generally there’s a kind of impatience with a fairly dramatic shift in the trajectory of the election. It must not be real. It must be emotion and not reason. It must be cheap. We’re almost two and half months before Election Day. Given how much has happened in the previous six weeks, a universe of things can happen in ten. But there’s nothing cheap or vibesy or anything less than robust about the campaign Harris is now running. She’s putting out a vision and creating a choice and the public is responding to it. It’s working. Why on earth would she shift gears or respond to anyone trying to break her stride?
As usual, the top editor at Talking Points Memo offers context and wisdom about our political scene – a far cry from the horse-race and quarter-turn-of-the-screw mania you'll find in Big Journalism's political coverage. The press is particularly aggrieved at Harris' maybe-soon response to increasingly shrill demands for interviews and press conferences. Those, especially the latter, are almost always shallow TV events, by design. They could be used to illuminate issues. But reporters use them as ego platforms where they ask "tough" questions that are almost always about the most trivial topics. Political journalism is notorious, moreover, for not challenging the most outrageous lies by one of the two presidential candidates. (Guess which one...) But I guarantee that news orgs will jump all over anything Harris says that has even a tiny whiff of falsehood. Look, Harris will do what the Big Journalism demands at some point, because the press is only going to get more surly the longer it takes.
Put me firmly in the category of people who think it's great that a candidate for vice president has a clue about how most of us live. (Vance once had a clue, but he shed that part of him along with his name and integrity years ago.)
Voting is just part of democracy, but it's the essential place to start. Make sure you're registered. Doublecheck in the fall, well before Election Day, because in some states Republican officials are removing people, mostly those who tend to vote for Democrats, from voting rolls.
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DAVID A. LIEB
Jon Healey
Marina Hyde
