The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly

 

The good:

President Biden’s withdrawal and Vice President Harris’s selection as the presumptive Democratic nominee have reset the 50-state race for the White House.

Former president Donald Trump had gained in national and state-level polls after a June debate in which Biden appeared confused and was at times unable to answer questions.

But in the two weeks since Biden dropped out and Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee, Democrats’ poll numbers — and their chances of holding the White House — have rebounded. The path to victory for Harris once again runs through seven key swing states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

“The Democratic base is coming home,” said Amy Walter, publisher and editor in chief of the Cook Political Report with Amy Walter. “In states that we know that are evenly divided and have been very, very close for these last few elections, they kind of snap back to being very, very competitive and will be the focus of the 2024 campaign.”

Although Trump’s paths to victory were expanding in late June and early July, the race “is now contracting back to the original six or seven battleground states,” Walter added...

With the impending choice of her running mate, who'll join her on a seven- State campaign blitz, and the spotlight on the Democratic National Convention starting on August 19, Vice President Harris will continue to take over the spotlight from the increasingly desperate Malignant Loser.  Watch the ticket's poll numbers go up heading into the last two months of the campaign.  Bet.

The bad:

For the first time in as long as anyone can remember, Arizona’s largest public school district isn’t opening its schools to voters as polling sites.

The reasons have been building for years, but the final straw for Mesa Public Schools officials came last November with a small, low-turnout election that became mired in misinformation and menace. [snip]

In the eight years since Donald Trump was first on the ballot, hundreds of schools throughout this fiercely contested battleground county are no longer willing to assume the risks associated with holding elections. In 2016, 37 percent of county polling locations were schools, according to a Washington Post analysis of data obtained through a public records request. So far this year, it’s 14 percent.

Heightened school safety protocols and sustained attacks on voting systems and the people who run them — largely by Trump and his supporters — have prompted school leaders across America in both red and blue states to close their doors to the democratic process, according to interviews with nearly 20 school district leaders, county officials, school safety officials and election experts. In at least 33 states, the law says public buildings, including schools, can or should be made available as polling locations. In many districts, administrators now cancel classes on Election Day.

The challenge has been especially acute in Arizona, where Trump’s narrow loss in 2020 inspired ceaseless conspiracies, false assertions that his and other GOP losses were illegitimate and death threats against county leaders who oversee voting and the workers on the front lines of running elections. Trump allies like Kari Lake, a Republican who lost her 2022 race for Arizona governor and is now running for the Senate, have empowered self-styled election-fraud detectors who are critical of both elections and the public school system...  (our emphasis)

The violent morons of MAGA world are succeeding in their intimidation tactics in this critical battleground state, and elsewhere.  Much more pushback is needed by State and local officials, and if that fails, by the Federal Government to safeguard our elections, both the ballot and the voter.

The ugly:

Former President Donald Trump praised Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday, just days after the massive prisoner exchange between the U.S., Russia and other nations.

“By the way, I would like to congratulate Vladimir Putin for having made yet another great deal. Did you see the deal we made?” the Republican presidential nominee said at a campaign rally in Atlanta.

The historic prisoner swap, the largest such exchange involving the U.S. and Russia since the Cold War, saw 16 people, including Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, be released from Russian custody.

It’s been described as a massive win for President Joe Biden’s administration in the days since.

Trump, who has shown love to Putin before and once claimed the Russian leader wouldn’t release Gershkovich “for anyone else” but him, didn’t mention any Americans who returned home as part of the deal at his Atlanta rally.

“Now look, we want to get people in. You know we got 59 hostages, I never paid anything,” said Trump, who has falsely claimed that he gave “nothing” to secure the return of American prisoners in exchanges with other countries under his administration... (our emphasis)

Who possibly could have predicted that the racist convicted felon Malignant Loser would give credit for the hostage release to his fellow autocrat and puppetmaster Putin?!   It almost makes you think he could be a self- serving, sociopathic traitor to his country.

From Voter Suppression to Voter Intimidation

For years, Rethuglicans have been doing their best to shape the electorate to their liking, whether it's Rethug-controlled state legislatures gerrymandering districts to minimize Democratic representation, passing voter suppression laws targeting minorities and other unfavorable demographic groups, or limiting ballot access by reducing voting sites or restricting hours for voting. Now, the Rethugs have their ideal candidate at the top of the ballot: a narcissistic demagogue who won't say whether he'll accept the will of the people in November.

Sociopath Donald "Rump" Trump has been claiming that the upcoming elections will be rigged, now that he's behind and falling in the polls. It's bad enough that he's undermining public confidence in the elections (which are administered by the individual states). He's also telling his gullible (and often violent) supporters to travel to urban / minority polling sites to "monitor" the elections and prevent nonexistent "voter fraud." Clearly, it's not about "election protection"; it's about intimidation, a violation of Federal law. Fortunately, voting rights groups, civic organizations and state and local elections officials are pushing back on Rump's own rigging efforts:

"But Trump’s threat to voting has galvanized state and local election officials and voting advocates across the political spectrum in a pushback against the most serious voter intimidation effort that the country has faced since the 1965 Voting Rights Act ended the routine denial of the franchise to Southern blacks. Republican secretaries of state from coast to coast have lambasted his remarks and pledged to maintain the integrity of the election process. At least one Republican secretary of state, Paul Pate of Iowa, took Trump’s comments as a personal insult. As Salon noted, it’s Republican secretaries of state who control the election process in most of the battleground states, so Trump did the party no favors—no surprise there."

Rump's threat to our democracy is real and imminent. His pathological narcissism causes him to dismiss any possibility of defeat, aside from a "rigged" election, and there are enough of his delusional followers to make election day a potential nightmare for voters if they're not stopped.