October 14, 2024

Monday, October 14, 2024 Annette’s News Roundup.

Kamala is always busy.

The Vice President released her doctor’s evaluation of her health.

One more thing.

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Are male voters reluctant to vote for a woman?

Harris' backers are confronting the question head on

WASHINGTON (AP) — The concern has been there all along, but now it’s being talked about openly: Are some men reluctant to vote for Democrat Kamala Harris because she’s a woman?

The vice president rarely references her gender on the campaign trail, but her key supporters are starting to make more direct appeals to male voters, hoping to overcome ingrained sexism — or just plain apathy — as Election Day looms.

Former President Barack Obama said he was speaking to Black men in particular when he suggested some “aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president.” Actor Ed O’Neill implores in a new ad, “Be a man: Vote for a woman.” And Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, is helping lead “ Hombres con Harris ” — “Men with Harris” — to help energize Hispanic male voters.

“I think, in many ways, it’s other people who need to be the messenger,” said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women in Politics at Rutgers University. She added of appeals to men by the vice president, “I don’t think she can get up and say, ”Shame on you.”’

“It’s sad, but I think she needs these outside validators,” Walsh said.

The clearest example is Obama who, while campaigning in Pittsburgh on Thursday night, stopped by a Harris campaign field office to “speak some truths,” especially for some Black male voters who aren’t enthusiastic about supporting the vice president.

“Part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that,” he said, adding: “You’re thinking about sitting out, or supporting somebody who has a history of denigrating you, because you think that’s a sign of strength, because that’s what being a man is? Putting women down? That’s not acceptable.”

Keith Edmondson, a 63-year-old retiree from the Phoenix suburb of Gilbert who is Black and attended a Harris rally in Arizona on Thursday night, said he’s worried about whether young Black men will turn out for Harris. He said he’s trying to convince his three grandsons to vote for Harris even though their father, who is Edmondson’s son, is a supporter of the vice president’s opponent, Republican Donald Trump.

“There are more Black folks supporting Donald Trump than I thought,” he said, blaming what he called misinformation surrounding Harris’ background as a former prosecutor.

Trump has a long pattern of disparaging women. At a rally in Reading, Pennsylvania, this week, Trump reacted to Harris’ appearance on ABC’s “The View,” by saying, “People are realizing she’s a dumb person. And we can’t have another dumb president.” He also criticized on his social media site “the dumb women” who host the ABC program.

Next week, Trump is set to participate in a Fox News Channel town hall focusing on issues impacting women. But he has more often prioritized doing interviews with podcasts that are popular with younger men. The former president also entered the Republican convention this summer to the sounds of James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s World” and the proceedings were built around promoting masculine themes, including featuring personalities from the wrestling world.

The Lincoln Project, a Republican group that opposes Trump and often produces ads meant to irk him, produced an online spot voiced by O’Neill, of “Modern Family” fame, that urges men, when it comes to Harris to “let her lead,” before concluding: “Be a man, vote for a woman.”

His message was far more direct than Harris often is. Despite making history as the first woman of color to lead a major party’s presidential ticket, she hasn’t publicly embraced the trailblazing nature of her candidacy like Hillary Clinton did in 2016.

Instead, she used this summer’s Democratic convention to lean heavily into her experience as a prosecutor and promise that the U.S. has “the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.”

“She is speaking, in those moments, to the people that may well not be comfortable, or trusting, that a woman can lead at this highest level,” Walsh said.

In 2020, women made up a bigger share of the electorate than men. According to AP VoteCast, a sweeping survey of that cycle’s voters, 53% of voters were women and 47% were men. And in that election, men were more likely to support Trump, while women voters were more likely to support Biden.

Polling suggests that electing a woman president isn’t a top priority for men or women, but men in particular don’t see it as important.

A Pew Research Center poll released last year asked Americans how important it is that a woman be elected president in their lifetime, and found that only 18% of U.S. adults said this is extremely or very important to them. Some 64% said it is not too important or not at all so, or that the president’s gender doesn’t matter.

The same poll showed that 73% of men and 57% of women said the issue was not too important, not at all important or that the president’s gender doesn’t matter.

Among some key demographics, Harris’ support from men doesn’t keep up with levels among women. A majority of Hispanic women have a positive opinion of Harris and a negative view of Trump, but Hispanic men are more divided on both candidates, according to a poll released Friday by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

The Harris campaign rejects the notion that Harris herself can’t deliver a winning message to male voters. Instead, it argues, she is working to reach them personally and also complementing efforts by top male supporters and campaign advertising pushes aimed at things like top sporting events.

Rather than simply appealing to masculinity, the campaign says, it is presenting arguments that can appeal to men built around key issues, like the economy.

Harris is on the digital cover of the latest issue of “Vogue” and recently taped an interview with the “Call Her Daddy” podcast, which is most popular with younger women. But she’s also sitting next week for a town hall hosted by popular radio personality Charlamagne tha God.

Senior Harris campaign officials nonetheless admit to being worried about Trump’s support among men — including white, Hispanic and Black Americans. They note Trump’s brash appeals to “bro” culture have resonated with some, especially young voters — and made some would-be voters more likely to support Trump or sit out the election.

In response, aides have also urged the vice president to explicitly mention cryptocurrency in her speeches and interviews, knowing its salience among men. Trump has a crypto venture with his family, though he differs from Harris in believing that it should be more lightly regulated than she does. The Harris campaign is also expected to launch an aggressive effort to have the vice president and Walz appear in male-skewing media in the race’s closing weeks.

Walz has already done some of that, helping launch the “Hombres” group in Arizona and having one of his rallies there livestreamed via Twitch as a streamer on the site played “World of Warcraft” and offered commentary on the event — a forum popular with younger, largely male gamers.

Harris’ running mate is also attending a Friday football game in Mankato, Minnesota, where he once was an assistant coach, and plans a hunting outing this weekend.

During a “White Dudes for Harris” fundraising call this summer, Walz said this about the prospect of defeating Trump: “How often in the world do you make that bastard wake up afterward and know that a Black woman kicked his ass?” (Associated Press.).

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How the Midwest is won.

The Tim Walz we know and love.

The New York Times interview with J.D. Vance.

The J.D. Vance we know and don’t love.

Vance, Given 5 Chances to Say Trump Lost in 2020, Takes None.

In an interview with The New York Times, Senator JD Vance repeatedly refused to acknowledge Donald J. Trump’s defeat and said he would not have certified the 2020 results.

Heading into the final three weeks of the 2024 election, Senator JD Vance of Ohio will still not say whether his running mate won or lost the last race for the White House.

In an interview with The New York Times that will be published on Saturday, Mr. Vance repeatedly refused to acknowledge former President Donald J. Trump’s defeat and went to even greater lengths to avoid doing so than he did during the vice-presidential debate earlier this month.

When asked about the previous election during an hourlong interview with Lulu Garcia-Navarro, a host of “The Interview,” a Times podcast published each Saturday, the Republican vice-presidential nominee responded that he was “focused on the future.” It was the same phrase he used to evade the same question during his debate with his Democratic rival, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota.

“There’s an obsession here with focusing on 2020,” Mr. Vance said in the interview. “I’m much more worried about what happened after 2020, which is a wide-open border, groceries that are unaffordable.”

When pressed a second time, Mr. Vance pivoted to a complicated counterargument: He suggested Mr. Trump would have won more votes in 2020 had social media companies not limited posts about a New York Post story about the contents of a laptop that belonged to Hunter Biden, President Biden’s son. Trump allies had maintained that documents on the laptop linked President Biden to corrupt business dealings, but those claims were unfounded.

“Senator Vance, I’m going to ask you again,” Ms. Garcia-Navarro said. “Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election?”

“Did big technology companies censor a story that independent studies have suggested would have cost Trump millions of votes?” Mr. Vance replied.

“Senator Vance,” Ms. Garcia-Navarro continued. “I’m going to ask you again, did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election?”

“And I’ve answered your question with another question,” Mr. Vance said. “You answer my question and I’ll answer yours.”

On her fifth request for a yes-or-no answer, Ms. Garcia-Navarro pointed out that there was “no proof, legal or otherwise,” of election fraud.

Mr. Vance dismissed that as “a slogan.”

“I’m not worried about this slogan that people throw, ‘Well, every court case went this way,’” Mr. Vance said. “I’m talking about something very discrete — a problem of censorship in this country that I do think affected things in 2020.”

During his 90-minute debate with Mr. Walz, Mr. Vance twice refused to answer a direct question about whether Mr. Trump had lost the 2020 election. It was widely considered his weakest debate moment and may have turned off voters. In CNN’s focus group of seven undecided Michigan voters who watched the debate, the only person who settled on a pick after the event said he would support Vice President Kamala Harris specifically because of Mr. Vance’s refusal to acknowledge the 2020 election results.

Mr. Vance’s interview with The Times covered a range of subjects, including his conversion to Catholicism and the backlash over his attacks on “childless cat ladies.” But the exchange on the 2020 results showed he still had not found an answer to put the last election behind him. Acknowledging the truth that Mr. Biden won, of course, would discredit Mr. Trump’s claims and risk angering the former president.

Mr. Trump has anchored his party to this issue — and raised concerns about the reaction that could follow the results on Nov. 5 — by continuing to dispute the 2020 contest.

Mr. Trump seemed to acknowledge in a podcast interview last month that he had indeed “lost by a whisker,” but then insisted during his debate with Ms. Harris on Sept. 10 that “that was said sarcastically.”

“Look, there’s so much proof,” Mr. Trump said during the debate, after refusing to acknowledge his defeat. “All you have to do is look at it. And they should have sent it back to the legislatures for approval. I got almost 75 million votes.”

Mr. Trump received 74.2 million votes, but the presidency is decided by the Electoral College, not a nationwide popular vote. Still, Mr. Biden received 81.3 million votes.

Three weeks later, at the vice-presidential debate, Mr. Vance was asked directly by Mr. Walz whether Mr. Trump lost.

“Tim, I’m focused on the future,” Mr. Vance told him. “Did Kamala Harris censor Americans from speaking their mind in the wake of the 2020 Covid situation?”

“That is a damning non-answer,” Mr. Walz shot back.

In his Times interview, Mr. Vance said he would not have voted to certify the 2020 results, and added that “we commit to a peaceful transfer of power” in 2024.

“If there are problems, of course, in the same way that Democrats protested in 2004 and Donald Trump raised issues in 2020,” Mr. Vance said, “we’re going to make sure that this election counts.”

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On October 12th, 1998, Matthew Shepard died.

On the night of October 6, 1998, Matthew Shepard, small of stature and 21 years old, was beaten, tortured, and left to die on a split rail fence near Laramie, Wyoming. He died six days later from severe head injuries received during the attack.

Shepard's murder brought national and international attention to hate crime legislation at both the state and federal level. In October 2009, the Congress passed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act (commonly the "Matthew Shepard Act" or "Shepard/Byrd Act"). On October 28, 2009, President Barack Obama signed the legislation into law. Following their son's murder, Dennis and Judy Shepard became LGBT rights activists.

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Trump is always crazy.

Translation? Read it. Your Huh? will be even stronger?

FROM Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, October 13, 2024.

On Saturday, October 12, Trump held a rally in Coachella, California, where temperatures near 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius) sparked heat-related illnesses in his audience as he spoke for about 80 minutes in the apocalyptic vein he has adopted lately. After the rally, shuttle buses failed to arrive to take attendees back to their cars, leaving them stranded.

And on Sunday, October 13, Trump made the full leap to authoritarianism, calling for using the federal government not only against immigrants, but also against his political opponents. After weeks of complaining about the “enemy within,” Trump suggested that those who oppose him in the 2024 election are the nation’s most serious problem.

He told Fox News Channel host Maria Bartiromo that even more troubling for the forthcoming election than immigrants "is the enemy from within…we have some very bad people, we have some sick people, radical left lunatics…. And it should be easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military."

Trump’s campaign seems to be deliberately pushing the comparisons to historic American fascism by announcing that Trump will hold a rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden on October 27, an echo of a February 1939 rally held there by American Nazis in honor of President George Washington’s birthday. More than 20,000 people showed up for the “true Americanism” event, held on a stage that featured a huge portrait of Washington in his Continental Army uniform flanked by swastikas.

Trump’s full-throated embrace of Nazi “race science” and fascism is deadly dangerous, but there is something notable about Trump’s recent rallies that undermines his claims that he is winning the 2024 election. Trump is not holding these rallies in the swing states he needs to win but rather is holding them in states—Colorado, California, New York—that he is almost certain to lose by a lot.

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A true hero has died.

Lilly Ledbetter dead at 86: Alabama worker’s legal fight led Obama to sign Fair Pay Act of 2009.

US President Barack Obama applauds Lilly Ledbetter before signing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in the East US President Barack Obama applauds Lilly Ledbetter before signing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC, January 29, 2009. The wage discrimination bill, which allows employees more time to file a claim, is named after Lilly Ledbetter, a retired worker at a Goodyear factory in Alabama who discovered she was paid less than her male counterparts.

Lilly Ledbetter, whose discovery that she earned less than her male counterparts in a Gadsden Goodyear plant led to federal legislation, is dead at the age of 86.

According to her family, Ledbetter died of respiratory failure.

“Lilly Ledbetter passed away peacefully last night at the age of 86,” the family said in a statement. “She was surrounded by her family and loved ones. Our mother lived an extraordinary life. We truly appreciate your respect for our privacy during this time of grief. " (Birmingham News).

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Eve and I are going to Pennsylvania October 26-27 to knock on doors. And to Nyack, New York on November 2nd.

Anyone want join us? Email me.

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The Times marches to its own poll.

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Your Daily Reminder.

Trump is a convicted felon.

On May 30th, he was found guilty on 34 felony counts by the unanimous vote of 12 ordinary citizens.

The Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump was scheduled to be sentenced on July 11th and September 18th. He will now be sentenced on November 26.

@Jaime Harrison- This Detroit ad from MVP about that 34 count convicted felon is straight 🔥 !!!

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Happy Indigenous People’s Day to all.

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