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.)
There’s an odd dynamic in this debate. Vance is doing well. He’s smooth. He’s hitting his points. Walz is kind of jangly. Not nearly as smooth. He stumbles over sentences. If you look at this and say, who’s smoother? Who’s clearer? I think that’s Vance. But what Walz is doing is hitting the key lines the campaign wants him to say. Often he gets to them in response to questions about other things. But he hits them. The stories of these women who died or almost died from Trump abortion bans. So I think he’s hitting his marks too.
That sounds right, as far as it goes. For me the central element of this event was the mostly unchallenged deceit from one side. (As Vance said, with evident surprise when one of the moderators corrected the record on his latest BS about Springfield, Ohio, "The rules were you guys weren't going to fact check.") Unlike Trump, who's brazen and clumsy in his lies, Vance is glib and acrobatic in his. In neither case does it seem to matter anymore. It's all normalized, thanks in large part to our media. I predict Vance will be declared the "winner" of the debate, a reminder that in a society where TV and memes tell us what to think about what we just saw, a smooth liar gets higher scores – in a theatrical sense, since reality means so little – than an occasionally clumsy truth teller.
Tseffos is one of dozens of people across the country mounting grassroots challenges to the far-right extremists in local elections in their communities. Some are running for office for the first time. Others are mounting long-shot campaigns in deep red districts. Regardless of their experience or likeliness to win, what unites them is a shared sense of obligation to protect democracy.
For decades, centrists and liberals have snoozed while an increasingly extremist right wing organized – very effectively – from the grassroots upward. Democrats at the national level have cared mostly about Congress and the presidency. In state after state, district after district, they've stopped trying to compete. That, as this article notes, is changing, and it's way overdue. It takes guts to do this in many places, given the right wing's propensity for threats and, on occasion, violence.
Yet as Senator JD Vance (R-OH) continued to insist that his lie about eating pets was true and to falsely call the Haitians “illegal aliens,” DeWine grew “just more infuriated,” as he put it to me over dinner. “Yeah, after a while, because it got cumulative, and then you keep thinking, ‘Well, they’re going to stop this,’” he said. “Well, they didn’t stop this, they just keep going.”
This long piece is a fascinating and look into the dilemma Ohio Governor DeWine has faced in the wake of the torrent of lies from Trump and Vance about Springfield and its Haitian immigrants. You'll find yourself cheering DeWine on for his refusal to bow down to the thoroughly dishonest leaders of his party – on this one subject. And that's the rub. You would imagine that there is a line beyond which it becomes impossible to keep supporting a demagogue who wants to destroy democracy and is promoting hatred as a means of getting the opportunity. But there is no such line. DeWine's political stances in almost every other way are identical to Trump's, and he's actively supporting the Republican ticket. This is valuable pushback, and it's not nearly enough.
Understandably, this means that pro-democracy efforts are focused on a relative handful of people in a handful of states, but nothing—absolutely nothing—is going to shake loose the faithful MAGA voters who have stayed with Trump for the past eight years. Trump’s mad gibbering at rallies hasn’t done it; the Trump-Harris debate didn’t do it; Trump’s endorsement of people like Robinson didn’t do it. Trump once said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose a vote. Close enough: He’s now rhapsodized about a night of cops brutalizing people on Fifth Avenue and everywhere else.For years, I’ve advocated asking fellow citizens who support Trump whether he, and what he says, really represents who they are. After this weekend, there are no more questions to ask.
Tom Nichols' Atlantic commentary is a warning. After all we know about Trump, the fact that this election is effectively tied is due to two things. First, the Electoral College gives Republicans an absurd advantage. Second, Trump's supporters will crawl naked over broken glass to get to the polls. Harris has millions of eager supporters, but the depth of their commitment is unclear. Whether the people who realize what Trump would do to our country are all willing to vote will decide this election. Nichols is obviously not confident, and I'm not, either.
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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Matt Cohen
