A compendium of the best reporting and commentary surrounding the pivotal 2024 elections in the United States. You will rarely 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.)
Door-knocking is good. So is phone-banking, which you can do from anywhere. If you have the time and inclination and want to help the Harris-Walz campaign or any of the statewide coordinated campaigns, by all means go sign up for some shifts. You can find lots of them easily via Mobilize.us. That said, there’s one additional thing you should do that is arguably as valuable, if not more so: Take your personal contact list, compare it to the national voter file, and find out which of your actual friends, family, co-workers and past acquaintances live in swing states and districts where a call or text from you could be hugely influential.
From one of the smartest and wisest progressive writer-activists, Micah Sifry's latest newsletter post is the most important thing I can tell you about today. Please read it carefully, and please do what he suggests. Relational organizing, which he describes in detail, could make the difference – and you can be a vital part of it. You've never heard of relational organizing? Me, too, until Micah Sifry told me about it. Political journalists haven't heard about it, either. "Almost no one in the political media covers organizing, and if you do see a story about field organizing, it’s invariably just a color piece with mere whiffs of hard data," he explains. "It’s a lot easier and cheaper to report on the latest poll or campaign ad." After you finish rolling your eyes at media failings and nodding your head at Micah Sifry's great advice, please get going!
“Already been covered” is how journalists’ brains may work, but it isn’t how regular people’s brains are wired at all. This is arguably the most consequential action any presidential candidate has proposed in the recent history of the country. And lately, Trump has expanded it to include people who live here legally, like the Haitians of Springfield, Ohio. Far from simply booting those who have entered the country illegally, or deny hearings to migrants seeking asylum, Trump and his acolytes have recently been talking about “remigration”—a euphemism for picking and choosing legal and naturalized citizens to shove out of the country against their will.
Years ago, when I was a columnist at the San Jose Mercury News, I returned fairly often to topics I considered the most important in the arena I watched, namely technology. Once, an editor asked me why I was writing much the same thing in a column as I'd said a couple of months earlier. Haven't you already covered it? he asked. I doubted that my readers remembered everything I'd written, or written about, I replied – and this was a topic that needed frequent reminders. The New Republic's editor, in this piece, is trying to remind journalists that their audiences don't remember things the way we might prefer – that certain topics demand constant, vigorous attention. Political journalists occasionally do this, as when they went on a collective campaign to get Biden to quit the presidential race earlier this year. I wish journalists (real ones, anyway) would recognize that they'll be among the first to face Trump's punishment, and that helping to save democracy – a precondition to freedom of the press – should be a mission right now. But they keep demonstrating their resistance even to acknowledging, much less attempting to do anything about, incipient fascism. They will be remembered by honest historians for fecklessness, at best.
Trump said publicly, contrary to contemporaneous media reports, that the FBI was free to interview whomever they wished. ... [T]his was a lie. In reality, the "Trump White House strictly controlled which witnesses the FBI was authorized to interview and which leads the FBI could follow." The FBI did not interview two people with the most firsthand knowledge of the alleged incident, Ford and Kavanaugh, because the White House would not let them. The Trump White House "specified the name of each witness the FBI was permitted to contact as part of the supplemental background investigation" and, in some instances, "specified particular lines of questioning." The Trump White House never gave "the FBI discretion to decide whom to interview, or what follow-up investigative steps to take." Ultimately, the FBI conducted just 10 interviews.
Political corruption doesn't get a lot worse than this. And it took six years for the public to find out about it, and only then thanks to the tireless efforts of a U.S. senator and his staff. The cover-up continued because the FBI director took over the cover-up after Trump left office – and the Biden administration doesn't seem to have spent any political capital to help bring it to light. It's all a reminder of two things. First, Trump is infinitely corrupt. Second, don't ever expect law enforcement to blow the whistle on its own sleaze, even if the sleaze was ordered by the president.
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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Micah L. Sifry
Michael Tomasky
Judd Legum
