Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have both framed the 2024 election as a race to maximize voter turnout. For much of the campaign, that effort to energize voters has favored Republicans, but new research from polling and data firm TargetSmart shows that Harris and newly energized Democrats have finally flipped the script on the MAGA movement.
In a thread posted on X (formerly Twitter), TargetSmart Senior Advisor Tom Bonier shared the group’s stunning findings: In the more than a dozen states that have updated their voter files since late last month, Democrats have made record gains among every major voter group, blowing Republicans out of the water in the process.
Black women ages 18 to 29 led the way, with a 175.8% increase in voter registrations compared with the same time period in 2020. Hispanic voters have also rushed to register since Harris became the Democratic nominee, with young Hispanic women posting a stunning 149.7% increase in registrations, and Hispanic voter registrations overall jumping over 60%.
Women weren’t the only ones flocking to register. Registrations among Black voters leapt 85.8% over their 2020 numbers, while Asian Americans saw a 31.7% gain. Democrats as a whole saw a 51.2% increase in total registrations, compared with just 7% for Republicans. Those are game-changing numbers not just for Harris but also for Democrats up and down the ballot, and according to Bonier, those voters are also displaying higher enthusiasm than they did when Biden beat Trump four years ago.
“You just don’t see that sort of thing happen in elections normally,” Bonier told CBS News on Wednesday, adding that the data indicated voters are “fired up and want to participate in this election.” ...
Offered without further comment.
The bad :
A far-right party won a state election for the first time in post-World War II Germany in the country’s east on Sunday, and looked set to finish a very close second to mainstream conservatives in a second vote.
A new party founded by a prominent leftist also made a strong impact, while the parties in Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s unpopular national government obtained extremely weak results.
The far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, won 32.8% of the vote in Thuringia — well ahead of the center-right Christian Democratic Union, the main national opposition party, with 23.6%.
In neighboring Saxony, projections for ARD and ZDF public television with the count well advanced put support for the CDU, which has led the state since German reunification in 1990, at 31.9% and AfD on 30.6-30.7%. AfD made substantial gains in Thuringia and smaller ones in Saxony compared with the last state elections in 2019.
“An openly right-wing extremist party has become the strongest force in a state parliament for the first time since 1949, and that causes many people very deep concern and fear,” said Omid Nouripour, a leader of the Greens, one of the national governing parties.
Other parties say they won’t put AfD in power by joining it in a coalition. Even so, its strength is likely to make it extremely difficult to form new state governments, forcing other parties into exotic new coalitions. The new Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, or BSW, took 15.8% of the vote in Thuringia and nearly 12% in Saxony, adding another level of complication...
It's a sickness based in fear and scapegoating of "others," encouraged by charlatans like AfD (and some leftist) politicians -- and mirrored in movements across Europe and, of course, by our own orange charlatan. Of course, there are other factors involved, especially Germany's poor economic recovery from the Covid epidemic, and that the eastern part of Germany has been fertile ground for far- right politics for years. And it's no surprise it follows that these AfD neo-Nazis also are admirers of Russia and oppose aid to Ukraine (Putin's rubles at work). That it's happening again in the cradle of Nazism is especially repugnant and dangerous.
When Donald Trump launched his first presidential campaign nearly a decade ago, there was a deluge of concerns about his foreign financial entanglements. And rightfully so. Given the financial overlap between Trump, his family, his company, and a constellation of kleptocratic regimes, especially Russia, Trump presented an unprecedented opportunity for foreign regimes to directly access the White House and tilt American policy in the process.Now, with Trump running for the presidency once more, those concerns have hardly disappeared. If anything, foreign governments — including brand-new regimes that weren’t involved in Trump’s first whirlwind in the White House — have only spied new opportunities to burrow into his pockets and into a second administration.
Many of these networks are already known, if forgotten. Trump’s financial links with regimes in places like China, Kazakhstan, or Indonesia were already reported in detail during his presidency. Even after Trump left the Oval Office, the revelations about his subterranean financial links as president with foreign regimes continued spilling out; it was only this year, for instance, that congressional investigators revealed that the first two years of Trump’s presidency included countries as far afield as Qatar, Kuwait, Turkey, and many more patronizing Trump businesses. Any of these details on their own would be exceptional — can you imagine how much any other presidential candidate’s secret Chinese bank account would dominate a news cycle? — but they’ve been subsumed in the broader morass of Trump’s scandals. They’ve become, to an almost shocking degree, normalized...
Russia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, China, etc., etc. The Malignant Loser is an easy target for foreign influence because he's a narcissist with no principles or motivation except his own self- enrichment and aggrandizement. He's a mortal threat to our national security, part infinity.
