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.)
PA Stands Up decided on a “reverse coattails” strategy: not mentioning Biden or Harris on the doorstep or in their literature, but focusing on local races and local issues to organize voters—who might then also support the top of the ticket. A few days before our meeting, Harris introduced Tim Walz as her vice presidential pick to cheering crowds in Philadelphia. “Last week was very exciting,” Santoro tells me. “All of us were fucking shocked it wasn’t Shapiro!” Responses to the new ticket “ranged from relief…to elation.” Her group still hasn’t changed its game plan. But that sense of fresh energy and renewed possibility greeted me almost everywhere I traveled in Pennsylvania, from the banks of the Delaware to the shores of the Ohio.
Returning to the state where he spent his formative years, the author of this deep and nuanced piece (also the publication's editor) doesn't try to predict who'll win Pennsylvania's crucial 19 electoral votes. He spends a lot of time listening to people who live in a place that has prospered and suffered, where race is a longstanding undercurrent to how people live and vote, where the answers are easy only for demagogues and their supporters – and where Democrats have realized that pouring their time, money, and souls into presidential politics is ultimately not an enduring strategy.
Many interrelated factors should be carefully examined when considering the use of the military. The defense mission and core capabilities developed to carry it out often do not correspond to the skills needed to perform domestic tasks. Serious and likely harmful consequences flow from diverting the armed forces and the resources that support them to missions more appropriately tasked to domestic agencies. Those consequences include distracting the military from its main function—deterring and if necessary fighting America’s wars—and blurring the lines between what civilians are trained and resourced to do and what is expected from a professional military.
Lawfare, a publication that identifies its mission as examining “Hard National Security Choices," has teamed up with the Brookings Institution on a series of articles that takes seriously Trump's avowed plans to launch what amounts to a military invasion inside the United States. This inward invasion, as anyone paying attention understands, would be the start of rounding up, imprisoning, and then exporting millions of undocumented immigrants (and maybe documented ones, too). This article concludes, in think-tank style, that it's a really bad idea because it would divert the military from its primary mission(s) overseas and therefore jeopardize national security. The Trump people will have an answer to this, of course – a terrifying one for liberty in our own country. Since Trump claims he wants to reduce U.S. military presence around the world – a fine idea – the soldiers will be available for domestic action.
Even as the resources devoted to every other kind of journalism atrophied, poll-based political culture has overwhelmed us, crowding out all other ways of thinking about public life. Joshua Cohen tells the story of the time Silver, looking for a way to earn eyeballs between elections, considered making a model to predict congressional votes. But voters, he snidely remarked, “don’t care about bills being passed.” Pollsters might not be able to tell us what we think about politics. But increasingly, they tell us how to think about politics—like them. Following polls has become our vision of what political participation is.
The always thought-provoking Perlstein posted this semi-tirade about polling several days ago, and it made the rounds among people who love to hate polls. (Count me as one of them.) The anecdotes alone are worth the time you'll spend with it, but even if you love to follow polls you should be completely aware of how chagrined the pollsters – and the people who flog them so relentlessly during campaigns – should be about what they do. Who does the most to promote these flawed, clickbait surveys? Big Journalism, of course. Our top media organizations can't be bothered to do the serious work of covering politics, preferring horse races, false balance, and trivia. If they ever say they just don't have the resources to do things in depth, laugh in their faces. Their budget for polls is, seemingly, infinite.
In its coverage of any other power-establishment, the Times would be the first to note that institutions that are neither transparent, nor accountable, are asking for trouble. The news system is not transparent. (We have no idea who writes these headlines or decides on story-play.) It is not accountable. (See above.) This matters for Boeing and the banking system and pharmaceuticals and everywhere else. It matters for the news.
My friend Jim Fallows is the dean of press critics in America, one of the most thoughtful and passionate observers of (and participant) in the journalism of our era. In this newsletter entry, he recounts a former colleagues' (and his own) dumbfounded reaction to one of the New York Times' most bizarrely misguided political articles this year. Which is saying something, given that the Times has routinely botched its political coverage for several decades now. The Times has always been an arrogant institution, and now revels in its contempt for people – like me – who once revered the organization. I still do in some ways; at its best, the Times is the best. Sadly, that almost never includes political coverage, and in a year when so much is at stake, its staggering failures have consequences for the rest of us.
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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D.D. Guttenplan
Yumna Rizvi
Rick Perlstein
James Fallows
