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 sprint begins
Before American presidential campaigns became essentially endless, Labor Day was the traditional start of the heavy-duty campaign season. Now it's considered the beginning of a near-sprint to the finish line, an exhausting stretch for all, including candidates, staffs, and voters. Below is Harris' speech in Detroit yesterday, and it emphasizes the degree to which the Democratic Party has resumed its strong pro-labor stance, marked by strong policies. It's worth a listen. (Trump didn't speak publicly on Labor Day. )
Ever since Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, he’s been constantly ranting about voter fraud and that election being stolen from him. (It wasn’t.) Over the past four years, this has galvanized Republicans across the country to pass a slew of restrictive voting laws, right in time for Trump’s third attempt at the White House. Since these changes happen bit by bit over time at the local level, you could easily have missed them—but the big picture of how much things have changed since 2020, especially in some key swing states, is pretty troubling.
Troubling? It's a complete scandal. The big picture is an epic voter suppression/rigging campaign the Republicans have been waging for much longer than four years. The reason "you could easily have missed" is, in large part, that our major journalism organizations – and most local ones – have paid too little attention. Except at a small number of small outlets (Talking Points Memo in particular), the coverage has been sporadic and lacking context. We're talking here about a war on (Democratic) voting – combined with Supreme Court-endorsed, extreme gerrymandering and visible efforts to challenge the outcome if Democrats win. That is an attack on democracy, by one of our two major parties. This should have been front and center all along. Having said all that, the article above is a solid roundup of the bad stuff that's happening now.
But there is also some good news: The country is now in far better shape to avoid the kind of protracted mess we saw in 2020. The fact that we are no longer facing the emergency demands of a pandemic is a big help, but no less important are the electoral guardrails that have been put in place since then.
Hasen is a UCLA law professor and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project. Here, he offers some optimism on the post-Election Day period, saying that recent safeguards will make it more difficult for Trump and his allies to gum up the works. Can we rest easy? The answer for everyone who doesn't want to see Trump take back the White House by cheating, is no. This is the time to redouble our efforts to get out the vote – as early as possible in states that offer mail-in ballots and early voting – and persuade our friends, neighbors, and colleagues that they need to vote, too. (Note: This has been changed from the original, which (as was pointed out to me) could have been understood to say that Biden stole the White House. Apologies for that.)
[T]he campaign raised $540 million in six weeks, leaving the Harris operation with more than 2,000 staff and 312 offices in the battleground states in partnership with the Democratic National Committee, a far bigger footprint than the Trump campaign, which has put less emphasis on field organizing.
There isn't much precedent for presidential campaigns to carve out this level of funds from their own coffers and hand it over to other candidates. The Harris campaign believes it can and should do so, as it's flush with cash at the moment. It's a reflection of the momentum that has flowed to the Democrats since Biden stepped down as a candidate, and there's no indication that the momentum has slowed. The importance of what's happening here is in the larger context – a Congress that is almost evenly divided (thanks largely to the overweighting in the Senate of Republican-dominated states with small populations, plus the Republicans' relentless rigging of Congressional districts in the states they control. The down-ballot faces are always important. We can't overstate how much rides on their outcome this year.
Trump is approaching the election of 2024 the way southern white supremacists approached elections from 1876 to 1964. He has made it very clear he is not trying to win the votes of a majority of Americans. He and his loyalists are trying to intimidate his opponents to keep them from voting while egging on his supporters to commit violence. They are bringing the tactics of the reactionary southern Democrats after the Civil War forward to the present day in an attempt to impose the same sort of minority rule on the nation as a whole.
Richardson's newsletter is often a must-read. Regular readers here will be familiar with a fair amount of what she says in her Labor Day post. But I'm recommending her piece because the historical context she brings to her writing is usually missing from other, more immediately focused coverage.
When a woman starts bleeding out after labor, every second matters. But soon, under a new state law, Louisiana doctors might not be able to quickly access one of the most widely used life-saving medications for postpartum hemorrhage. The Louisiana Illuminator spoke with several doctors across the state that voiced extreme concern about how the rescheduling of misoprostol as a controlled dangerous substance will impact inpatient care at hospitals. Misoprostol is prescribed in a number of medical scenarios — it’s an essential part of reproductive health care that can be used during emergencies, as well as for miscarriage treatment, labor induction, or intrauterine device (IUD) insertion.
The entries above are about politics in a direct way. This piece – an example of the work we're seeing from a host of local news startups – reminds us that there are dire human costs to what politicians do. Louisiana is in a race with other states run by right-wing extremists to have the most reactionary, cruel anti-abortion laws, no matter how much they harm women. This is a reminder that elections matter, a lot.
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.
Please send your suggestions
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.
Shirin Ali
Heather Cox Richardson
Lorena O’Neil
