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 Georgia State Election Board has gained a lot of attention recently for passing controversial rules that could delay the certification of results. However, the GOP board members aren’t the only state officials threatening Georgia’s democracy. Gov. Brian Kemp (R) has signed multiple voter suppression bills into law over the last few years. Also, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) has pushed his own anti-democratic agenda through a noncitizen voting audit and voter purges.
Kemp and Raffensperger deserve credit for what they didn't do after the 2020 election. They didn't bow to Trump and throw the state's electoral votes to him. They had that much integrity, anyway. In 2020, Georgia – a linchpin state in American politics at this juncture – voted for Biden, and two years later voted in two Democratic senators. Since then, Kemp and Raffensperger – who somewhat implausibly claim to dislike what the state Election Board is doing – have worked with the Republicans who control the legislature and most county offices to deny voting rights to as many likely Democratic voters as possible. Commitment to democracy, you see only goes so far.
The Freedom to Vote Act would guarantee early voting and vote by mail, establish automatic registration, ban gerrymandering, bring disclosure to dark money in elections, and strengthen public campaign financing and safeguards against election subversion. The John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would restore the strength of the Voting Rights Act after it was gutted by the Supreme Court.
If Harris is elected, and if the Democrats maintain a majority in the Senate, 2025 could see the most important boost for voting rights in decades. A key element of this is ending the filibuster on this matter. The Democratic majority leader has said he would push to do that. Harris said she would sign the legislation. Again, none of this can happen if she loses, or if the Democrats lose the Senate.
Previous polls released by industry groups, like the DCG-funded and Blockchain Association-published poll from May 2024 and a Coinbase survey from 2023, often feature dubious methodology, and the summaries of these polls are often written to suggest conclusions that are not well-supported by the data even if the data were trustworthy. So, when Paradigm released this poll, which makes bold claims that “Democratic voters are increasingly gravitating towards crypto” and “there are 1-2% of Democrats who may be leaning towards Trump due the Biden Administration’s hostility to crypto”, I wanted to dig in.
No one does a better job of covering the endlessly sleazy cryptocurrency "marketplace" than Molly White. Crypto wasn't much of a political issue until recently, when its main backers started pouring money into politics. After that happened, by amazing coincidence, Donald Trump canceled his former skepticism and became a big fan. But enough Democrats have fallen under the spell – and received handsome campaign contributions – to make this at least somewhat bipartisan. In this case, White brilliantly analyzes a new poll – by going through it line by line to explain what it says, what it doesn't say, and where it (at best) misleads. The industry wants us to believe the election could turn on candidates' stance on an industry that has completely discredited itself while ripping off countless speculators who should have known better.
The question of what antitrust means for tech start-ups might seem obscure during the home stretch of an election in which nitty-gritty policy appears to hardly matter. But the outcome of the fight over the FTC, should Harris become president, could say a great deal about how she will govern. The commitment to strong antitrust enforcement has been a pillar of the Biden administration’s populist economic agenda. Hoffman and company are now challenging that agenda on its own terms.
First, a disclosure. I've known Reid Hoffman a long time, and consider him a friend. He was an investor in a startup I co-founded about 15 years ago. I'm sure he believes what he's saying. But he is wrong on this issue. And if he and others corporate magnates succeed in convincing Harris to get rid of FTC chair Lina Kahn, that would be a terrible achievement – good only for shareholders and executives of monopolies and cartels. The Biden-Harris administration has been progressive on some key economic policies, and the Democratic convention rightly featured speaker after speaker calling for even more progressive policies – which, perhaps surprisingly, have support from some very right-wing Republicans. More competition won't fix the grotesque inequality of opportunity and wealth in America, or instantly give us better prices and more respectful treatment from huge corporations, but it'll help. (Note: You may have to register at the Atlantic to read this commentary.)
[T]hese are powerful pieces of evidence that fill in precisely the picture that Harris attempted to lay out in her economic speech in Raleigh. Heightened concentration, opportunistic displays of market power, and high-tech forms of collusion are preying on the American people. Harris saw it coming and pointed to it as a top priority.
Dayen does some of the best reporting on economic issues and how policy affects us in key ways. In this piece he smartly connects the dots in three situations that show clearly why progressive Biden administration policies – aimed at improving the lot of average people and bringing accountability to corporate control freakery – are so important.
“Late at night, Trump was leading in a lot of states,” he said, referring to Election Night. “Mathematicians said that what Biden did was almost mathematically impossible. Almost totally impossible. So that got my attention.” I asked him which mathematicians had said this. “Well, I got it from Fox,” Faulk said.
When Trump said he liked uneducated people, this is why.
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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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.
Courtney Cohn
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Molly White
Christopher Beam
David Dayen
