A compendium of the best 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" BS that passes so often for political journalism. What you will find are links, with brief commentary, 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.)
The Harris/Walz camp knows — and is letting everyone else know — that the other choice in this election is “or fascism,” and is thus freed from having to defend its entirely non-controversial, blandly-old-school-centrist platform of vague promises to the middle class, promoting voting and bodily autonomy, and not gutting Social Security and health care, from accusations of somehow being a “radical, socialist” agenda. Sure, the right is still calling it radical and socialist, but when the right’s plan is to keep pregnant folks under surveillance and restrict their travel, as just one example, its ability to call anyone else’s plans “radical” is, shall we say, diluted.
Some of the best political commentary comes from non-journalists, and here's a great example. This blog post by science-fiction author John Scalzi does a fine job of summing up the state of play in the presidential election. There's a little too much horse-racy stuff for my taste, but Scalzi's observations strike me otherwise as smart and wise. The paragraph I quoted above could also be read as something of a takedown of the Harris-Walz ticket, however. We need stronger progressive policies, not centrism. Maybe a middle-of-the-road approach won't make things worse but but it definitely won't get us out of the politics-as-usual morass we so desperately need to jettison. But I otherwise liked this piece a lot, and it's a master wordsmith at work. (I'm a huge fan of Scalzi's novels and commentary on his blog, in case that wasn't already obvious.)
If Trump and his toadies are now complaining that Harris is treating him like the incumbent it is because in ways vast and small he has acted like one and demanded to be treated like one for almost four years. She’s taken his most perverse and vainglorious conceit and turned it into a massive liability.
Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall spotted a key facet of the new campaign: the way the Democrats flipped the script on Trump and his party, but especially on him. They had his inadvertent help in every way, of course. If this holds up – remember, there is still plenty of time for events to overtake this framing and turn it back to where it was before Biden dropped out – it will be seen as one of the key moments of this election year. (The Bulwark also took useful note of the phenomenon, but with more focus on the horse race.)
The carried-interest loophole allows private equity, venture capital, and hedge fund managers to categorize their share of investment earnings as capital gains, which is taxed at only 20 percent. In comparison, regular income is taxed at 37 percent. Consequently, Wall Street billionaires are paying far less in taxes than typical employees. In fact, since 2000, the world’s largest private equity firms have avoided paying income taxes on more than $1 trillion in carried-interest pay, according to a study from Oxford University.
The Democratic platform calls for the repeal of the carried-interest tax break, which is one of the most egregious favors-for-people-with-big-money loopholes, rewarding the rich while putting the burden on the rest of us. Harris' campaign has said it supports similar Biden administration calls. But political "donations" from big financial institutions – especially the looting operations known as private equity and hedge funds – are absolutely flooding into the Democratic coffers. Harris can't do any of this without strong support from her own party (she'll likely get none from congressional Republicans). But if she starts wobbling on this one, it will send a dismal message about her – and her party's – progressive claims.
Editor to audience: This isn't what you want to hear
Trump isn’t losing because Kamala Harris is being hyped by the press and fluffed up to kingdom come. He isn’t losing because the press is being unfair to him. He’s losing because he’s a weak, unpopular, undisciplined candidate running at the head of a weak, minority electoral coalition. That’s the truth, whether anyone wants to hear it or not.
The editor of National Review, a right-wing magazine of long standing, is telling his audience what it most definitely doesn't want to hear. I don't agree with his assessment of press coverage overall, though it's certainly fair to say Big Journalism has been embarrassingly gaga over Harris for the past week or two – after beating up the Biden administration for most of its term. This is a rare example (at this point, anyway) of right-wing media not being absurdly in the tank for Trump.
“It was a call to action, but also calling out our local elected officials that are the ones who have the authority to make these changes and are in the trenches in their local communities,” said Washington Democratic state Rep. Jessica Bateman, who has authored new housing reform laws in Olympia and is running for state Senate on a pro-housing platform. “The reason why it’s being discussed by our national leaders in prime time television is because it’s impacting our communities in every area across the country.”
Our wildly distorted housing markets (the word is plural because there is nothing resembling a single national market) have become that way due to decades of bipartisan policies that had, essentially, a single goal: to encourage lots of people to buy homes. In recent years, the goal has evolved: to beef up current owners' wealth – if they happen to live in desirable neighborhoods. That's an oversimplification, obviously; housing policy is massively complicated, but as this article recognizes, it's also immensely political. The piece implies that mostly Democrats are conflicted, because they control major cities. But Republican-controlled suburbs are at least as conflicted, if not more so. It's a risk for Harris to make a major pitch of this kind, but an important one.
Voting is just part of democracy, but it's the essential place to start. Make sure you're registered. Double-check in the fall, well before Election Day, because in some states Republican officials are actively removing people, mostly those who tend to vote for Democrats, from voting rolls.
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I spend a lot of time looking for essential coverage, and hope you'll help me by letting me know about the good stuff you find. Let me know.
John Scalzi
Helen Santoro
