By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, Bluesky @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content) June 8, 2025; because of YOU, Real Context News is approaching two million all-time content views, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

(Traduce en español/translate to Spanish; Russian/Русский перевод)

A PERSONAL NOTE

SILVER SPRING—My dear readers, I owe you an explanation as it has been some time since I have engaged in publishing articles as a journalist, and the reasons are simple.

Last fall, I took on a job in the U.S. Federal Government, and out of an abundance of caution beyond the Hatch Act’s requirements and especially with the de facto war insurrectionist Trump’s presidential administration has declared on federal workers, critics, and many of the world’s most desperate poor alike, I decided that continuing my journalistic work at the time would put my ability to continue my work—work helping those suffering from disasters here in the U.S.—in serious jeopardy.

Over the next few months, I was proud to serve this nation and its people in time of need.  I didn’t care that most people where I was deployed had voted for Trump when it came to my work: they were my countrymen and deserved our support, and that was why I was there.

But then my personal life got in the way, and I had to take some time off.  Soon after, it was constant dread as it looked more and more likely that drug-addict and all-around bad person Elon Musk’s farcical, gaslighting DOGE would cost me my job.

While all this was going on, my Dear ol’ Dad passed away late in March and monstrous, deceitful relatives of mine made that experience exponentially worse.

Right around that time, I was formally DOGEd along with so many others, my federal position not continuing.  Since then, I have had to focus on things other than the news.

Finally, though, I am trying to get back into the swing of things and am working on a number of new pieces I hope to be publishing quite soon.  I might very much still be a mess in some ways on the inside, but this is life and it is time to move forward.

However, I think that it is important and that I owe it to you, my readers, to address a few issues before going forward.

A Note on My Ukraine Coverage

As far as my previous Ukraine/Russia coverage, I maintain most of that still stands up quite well, it’s just been delayed: between Ukraine not achieving the massive land gains hoped for during the big 2023 offensive, Trump’s MAGA Republicans holding up Ukraine aide well into 2024, between the aid that did come being diminished because of all the increased costs resulting from the aid delay, with the distraction of the 2024  U.S. elections, and with the Trump Administration favoring Russia diplomatically now and treating Ukraine and Zelensky horribly, the dynamics I have espoused upon consistently were diminished yet still intact and are what they are even if diminished or somewhat dormant.

Well, I do believe a lot of those dynamics could amplify in a decisive way for Ukraine and will be explaining that in a future piece that (indeed, recent spectacular events might signal a promising shift…).  The last two years had slowed down and delayed a lot of the core dynamics but not rewritten them.  So, while I would have loved for 2023 up until now to be different, like Ukraine is, I am looking to the future to vindicate myself even if the situations have looked less promising (so far) than my analysis would suggest.  And I don’t think time favors Russia now just as I felt the same before.  Still, while what I predicted is not happening and may yet come to pass and I would argue it will, I will understand if readers intelligently and reasonably question my work, and such questions are welcome.

And I will certainly be covering that recent historic, daring special operations strike against Russian air bases that somehow turned trucks into aircraft carriers and humiliated Russia spectacularly, evolving warfare as we know it before our very eyes, as Ukraine has done before.

A Note on My 2024 U.S. Election Coverage

In some of my coverage and depending on the prevailing trends of polling in any particular race, I have at times challenged pollster’s methodology.  I saw a closer race than most in 2016, for example.  In the 2022 midterms, I was more than vindicated by my analysis that polls were underestimating Democratic turnout.  But in 2024, building on some of the logic from 2020, I ended up putting out my least accurate predictive analysis of my journalism career.  To be fair, I still gave Trump a realistic chance of winning—about one in five—but my reading of the tea leaves, uncharacteristically, was seriously flawed.

Why?  I may elaborate in the future on each of these reasons below, but for now:

First, I looked at polls showing Americans caring about the state of democracy and the high portions placing democracy as their top or a major voting priority and I assumed—admittedly for very good reasons—that the vast majority of most of those voters were supporting Harris against Trump.  I was wrong: it was far closer in various exit polls and surveys released the day of and after the election, with Trump voters absurdly also quite concerned about Harris’s and Democrats’ perceived threats to democracy.  I simply did not think that so many millions of Americans would have been hoodwinked and gaslighted enough to think that Trump was in any way a better candidate to protect democracy than Harris, let alone someone who practices or respects democracy. 

I also did not believe the polling showing minority and younger voters shifting—in some categories, significantly—towards Trump and MAGA and away from Harris and Democrats.  I looked at how some of these polls were constructed and conducted and thought I had understood correctly their flaws.  But instead, after the election, I realized that this country had changed, even over the past four years, in ways I didn’t see or expect or recognize fully, and explained away the evidence that did point to this.

I was wrong, and, to their credit, the pollsters overall were pretty accurate.

And, very much related, I underestimated the degree to which social media and random generally unqualified people often dubbed “influencers” (both of which I have long-noted are more and more so spreading dangerous misinformation, propaganda, and disinformation, often backed or carried out by powerful hostile foreign government intelligence agencies) have for years increasingly displaced traditional media (the term “legacy” media is such an arrogant misnomer) and are now seeming to eclipse it.  In turn, I overestimated the degree to which people were actually seeing the implosion in terms of coherence, message, and performance at the main events of Trump campaign in the closing weeks.  I thought things like the MSG rally from fascist past just before the election would have cost Trump a lot of votes.  But it seems a lot of people were not checking into reality.  Often, people are so misinformed or worse that they vote for a candidate who will actually do the opposite of what they expect (and no, the recent Elon-Donald catfight will not save the left, but more on that another time..).

Now, I am not sure how many people, or even if a majority of voters, were aware of the quality of campaigns overall or heard the candidates unedited in their own words at any length (relatively few people watched the conventions compared to past election years, for example).  Instead of watching what could pass for a white version of a ranting aging Col. Qaddafi with a disturbing cast of minions leaving a bad aftertaste, they seem to have made their minds up on selective or doctored clips or even loved the awfulness, if they even paid attention to it.

I thought the awfulness would cost him the election, but instead it seems to have helped him win it or not hurt him, at the very least.  The information sphere is now so jumbled by these new forces that large sections of the electorate are not making well-informed decisions, even more than before.

As others have said, the cruelty is the point.  And this time, he won on it.

Conclusion: Stay Tuned and All Hands on Deck

Every path is a learning experience, and even the best still learn on the job.  I will be incorporating these lessons and others in my future work, so look soon for more stories Ukraine and Russia, the situation in the U.S., a major piece on Gaza, and even possibly some thoughts on the singular current cultural phenomenon that is the Star Wars show Andor (a must watch for all antifascists, the most politically relevant fictional show on television now, in my opinion and that of others, and the show with the highest-rated-string of episodes of all time on IMDB!).

I will have content soon on Orwell vs. Trump, for my podcast, and on this glorious human achievement known as the Andor Star Wars television show (so damn relevant to our times it’s literally terrifying [spoilers in link]). I humbly ask for your patience and forgiveness and am confident my future content will rectify my recent past underperformance.

Oh, and, given this tough time we’re all in, I’m very much asking for your support.  If we don’t support each other, as the senior senator from Chandrila and fellow ginger redhead exclaimed in this season of Andor, “If we do not stand together, we will be crushed.”

First, donate to help Ukraine and civil liberties organizations, but then please consider donating to support my efforts here.  Many thanks!

© 2025 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here. Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

(Traduce en español/translate to Spanish) By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, Threads @bfchugginalong, LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content) October 31, 2024; UPDATED November 5: I noted below that my Electoral College predictions are rough, but am restating today on Election Day that I believe the most likely outcome will be my “strong” for Harris prediction (3rd map); Updated November 4 to cover Florida Senate race; *UPDATED November 3rd: added discussion of Iowa’s move into the swing state category, courtesy of the peerless Ann Selzer, and Electoral College maps have been updates in turn; also slight update to voter registration modeled partisanship; Update November 1st: fixed section on Florida and Virginia with missing text and fixed NC registration graphic that was GA; see related article on this election from September 6, 2024, and one on the 2022 midterms from November 7, 2022; because of YOU, Real Context News is approaching two million all-time content views, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

SILVER SPRING—We’re at the point in this election where we should able to start making predictions, because it is hard to believe anything dramatically different will emerge in polling in the next week, and I am here making mine (which I may or may not update).  But first, some housekeeping.

Methodology

In general, a good rule of thumb is to go by weighted polling averages.  One of the weaknesses of Real Clear Politics’s averages are that they basically put any poll in there without weighting for quality in an election cycle in which there have been a lot of low-quality polls using less-accurate sampling methods as well as a high number of biased partisan polls, a fair amount of both driving the discussion and most of the latter by far are from Republican-favoring sponsors (I have not been able to find an explanation of its methodology on the RCP site).  But FiveThirtyEight the past several presidential election cycles has had more accurate polling averages than especially RCP but other sites like The New York Times, whose polls this cycle, conducted with Sienna College, seem to be oversampling Republican-leaning voters significantly (meaning disproportionately including Republican representation in their estimation of who will turn out and vote).  Thus, my main source of information for polling is always FiveThirtyEight’s polling averages.  I will be using their national and state polling averages here.

In addition, I will be also combining polling data with modeled partisan voter registration modeled partisanship from Tom Bonier’s excellent outfit TargetSmart, the data presented from which I used during the 2022 midterms to predict, accurately, when very few others would, that there would be no “red wave” and that polls were undercounting Democratic support in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s infamous Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, women especially coming out strongly to support Democrats for a historic overperformance for a party in power of the same party as a sitting president in his first term.  And newly registered voters are not only more likely to vote than previously registered voters in a soon-to-happen election, but they are indicative also that others in the groups they represent are also more likely to vote.  While in many cases, the absolute numbers of voters registering are less than in 2020, the portions overall of all new registrants shifting significantly net towards Democrats is a very telling dataset considering 1-how insanely close the results of the key swing states were in 2020 and 2-how close in polling it is today it is in key states where there is a disproportionate portion of new voters modeled as likely to vote for Democrats.

In a moment of statistical ties in swing state polling, that that is as good a sign as any that Democrats will win in states statically tied—that is, within the margin-of-error range of what usually 95% of outcomes would be expected to fall under—or very close.  For this reason, in these close races in which the polls are a statistical tie, I am going to let modeled partisanship based on voter registration data be one of the decisive factors in how I make my predictions.  So for me, the more of a net shift towards Democrats in modeled partisanship share of new registrations, the more likely Democrats are likely to outperform their polls, i.e., the less polling will capture this shift.  My “net shift” is calculated by the getting difference between the point shifts for each side, so if GOP went down 3 points and Democrats up 2, that’s a 5-point shift in favor of Democrats in my scoring system.

I will also very much be relying on my own analysis from my last article—based on voter registration and early voting data as presented by Bonier’s outfit and its (and my) excellent track record from 2022—that very confidently concluded state and national polls across the board are generally off, missing those hugely disproportionate swings compared to 2020 in the share of new voter registrations towards Democratic leaning populations and the effect of new abortion and reproductive rights restrictions in many states across the country since the fall of Roe.  As I noted in my last piece and will reinforce here, when races are extremely close, polling with its inherent errors is not a sufficient tool in trying to analyze who will win and who will lose and analysis will have to take into account other factors, as I have before and will here.

Finally, based mainly on my discussions of the individual states and national polling data along with early voting data, I will make a range of Electoral College map predictions as well as a win probability prediction for both Kamala Harris-Tim Walz and Donald Trump-JD Vance (rough on the odds part).

Caveats, source, and presentation notes:

• The TargetSmart Voter Registration Dashboard shows you when each state last reported its registrants and they are not uniform.  The dashboard lets you adjust to match the time when voter registration data was last reported to data from the same time in the previous presidential election in 2020 and the 2022 midterms as a frame of reference.  Obviously, when not looking at individual states, there is no way to get a fully accurate national or all-swing-state picture with combined states with different dates, but most are within a few weeks of each other so the combined outputs can give a quite rough but still quite useful general sense of what’s going on.  You can play around yourself with different data and different variables—race, age, gender, rural, urban, etc.—and I recommend that you do, but I found modeled partisanship to be most useful.
• All polling averages are what FiveThirtyEight has posted as of 8:15 PM on October 30; if numbers don’t quite add up (0.1 off or tied) in terms of the FiveThirtyEight numbers given, it might be because they rounded using more precise data from crosstabs.
• In my presentation here and in general, polling data/shifts are generally rounded to nearest tenth of a percent/point.
• Herein, polling figure is given as a percent.  I will use “points” to describe a number-level shift, and a percent increase would be the increase by a factor, as in a 2.5-point increase from 5% to 7.5% would be a 50% increase, by a factor of 1.5 times the original.
• FiveThirtyEight uses likely voter iterations of a poll in its weighted averages whenever possible.
• Numbers given for Puerto Ricans in each state are from 2023 from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, except Alaska’s are from 2022.
• All polling chart images from FiveThirtyEight and all registration chart images from TargetSmart
• Coming up with overall predictions is more an art, not a science, but one using scientific tools that are inherently flawed and yet still pretty-damn good in the aggregate.

On Polling

In my previous article, I really went into the weeds on some polling issues and why I was so confident in 2022 and why I am even more confident now in the polls undercounting Democratic support in 2024 (and remember, I was one of the only people in 2022 making such a prediction, so take that for what it’s worth).  But on average, according to FiveThirtyEight, overall from 2000 to 2020, presidential general election polls three weeks out from Election Day—both state and national—have been off by 4.3% since 2000.  Harry Enten noted in a FiveThirtyEight 2016 classic that the a 2-point error was the average presidential national polling error a week before the election from 1968-2012, which would fall in most cases within the margin of error of each poll, or a  “standard polling error,” noting that Trump was just such a standard polling error away from winning.  Even with 2022 being far more accurate a year for polling that usual, the polls in close House races in the midterm year incorrectly favored Republicans (also known as GOP, for Grand Old Party) in most of those races, with Democrats winning in most of them in part because of women being fired up about their rights being taken away by the Supreme Court and their state legislatures.  Things have only gotten worse for women since then, with new restrictive laws literally killing women across the country.  So do not make the mistake in thinking that this issue has faded for women.

And with amazing new registration proportions for Democratic-leaners compared to Republican-leaners, it is key to note that pollsters often do not incorporate newly registered voters into their models and sampling or find it hard to do so accurately.  So I am very confident that polls are undercounting the level of Democratic vote share for the 2024 election and you can explore my detailed discussion here.  As a result of this gap, I am putting significant weight behind new voter registration share by likely-party vote.  Therefore, you can add a few points to most polls in favor of Harris in most cases, both in state polls and nationally, and you will likely get a better sense of where things stand.

THE NUMBERS AND PREDICTIONS

The Seven States that Most Mainstream Press Agrees Are the “Swing States” (UPDATED: November 3) *AND Iowa

Ratings system: Arrange by worst for Harris to Best for Harris and reflecting likelihood/probability of winning, not necessarily margin of victory: Edge Trump, Edge Harris, Advantage Harris, Strong Harris

All of these states are currently within the aforementioned margin of error and are considered statistically tied, essentially jump balls. *UDPATE November 3: Voter registration modeled partisanship has slightly increased for Democrats and slightly decreased for Republicans in Pennsylvania, North Caroline, and Georgia with new batches of voter registration data released by those states since October 31 and new modeling on that data being released by TargetSmart; therefore, the gaps highlighted below for those three states are now slightly higher in favor of Democrats than the figures given here, having just increased in the final days of the campaign, another data point in favor of a momentum swing for Harris.

*UPDATE: NOVEMBER 3: IOWA!!!—6 Electoral Votes

Polling: Average not given. I am surprised to be including Iowa here, but I have no choice. I know that I always caution not to put too much stock in any one poll, but I must make somewhat of an exception here (and to be fair, it’s not just one poll). To get to the point, Iowa pollster Ann Selzer is one of the best pollsters in politics, perhaps the best. He long track record speaks for itself and her approach is meticulous. She released polls in partnership with The Des Moines Register back in February and June that had Biden losing by 15 and 18 points to Trump, respectively. Then in September, that lead in a another Selzer poll had shrunken to just 4 points against Harris. And now, just before the election, Selzer has Harris overtaking Trump by 3 points, 47%-44%! Yes, it is within her margin of error, but Selzer’s poll if the only poll to show anything like this—all others have Trump up (nearly all significantly) and another poll just released has him up 9 points—but no other pollster conducting these polls is like Ann or has her record. The profound thing about this poll is, that if it is accurate, it surely captures something beyond Iowa, something regional, maybe even national, that the vast majority of polls have simply missed. It is at the heart of what I have gotten into in this article before this update, that the modeled partisanship from voter registration data tells a story that is incompatible with that narrative and narratives we have from the polls, and suggests movements and shifts in the electorate among significant parts of the population, especially with new voters likely to be missed or underrepresented especially if they are registering in historic and abnormal ways. And Nate Silver and The New York Times‘ Nate Cohn both just pointed out how bad pollsters this cycle have been with “herding,” or modifying their results to not stand out too much and not take heat for being “wrong” or an outlier. Now, none of this means that Selzer must be right, and the others wrong. And I am not going to move Iowa into Harris’s column based on just Selzer’s latest poll and the shifts from her previous poll. But Ann is credible in and of herself, I have enough respect for and deference to her, and her previous three polls were well within the realm of being favorable or very favorable to Trump, that I am going to move Iowa into battleground swing-state status, but as all the other polls have Trump winning, even though I think they are not up to the standards of Selzer, I am rating Iowa as slightly favoring Trump. Without Selzer, I wouldn’t even be discussing Iowa, but now we all should be: Harris has a real chance if Selzer’s poll is accurate, and her polls usually are. If I am right, Selzer is capturing what I am onto, what the modeled voter registration partisanship is pointing towards, and what will explain a large Harris win if that is what unfolds over the next few days. If Selzer’s poll is accurate, it might just be the most important poll in the history of American politics. As of now, it is certainly one of the most discussed and highlighted of in American history, I have certainly never before seen a reaction to a single poll as massive as the political world’s reaction to this poll.

Also, there are also over 9.000 Puerto Ricans in Iowa (see the Pennsylvania discussion below) while the Uncommitted movement received over 600 votes, or 4.5% of the vote (see the Michigan discussion below); Trump won Iowa in 2020 by over 138,000 votes, or 8.2%.

IOWA RATING: Edge Trump (but don’t be surprised if Harris wins!)

New registration modeled party share: Last updated October 20

Vs. same weeks before election in 2020: Democrats +3.1 points, GOP +0.3 points, net shift +2.8 points for Democrats

While a slight shift, given Selzer’s poll and Iowa’s small population, this could end up making a big difference…

Pennsylvania—19 Electoral Votes

Polling average: Trump 47.9%, Harris 47.5%, Trump +0.4 points

Polling is razor close, and in most scenarios I have whoever wins Pennsylvania winning it all, finding it hard to imagine a scenario in which that is not the case (though not impossible).  While the polling is within the margin of error, I think in nearly all these states, the polls are undercounting democratic support.  Having said that, even if it is, say, 3% off (putting her at +2.7), that is still a very close race polling-wise and within the margin of error.  So, as stated, I am going to look at new registrants.

New registration modeled party share: Last updated October 20

Vs. same weeks before election in 2020: Democrats +7.6 points, GOP -3.1 points, net shift 10.7 points for Democrats

As far as Pennsylvania’s voter registration data, of the three Rust Belt battleground states, the data is most promising here for Harris and by far.  Also factor in that popular Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro is a rockstar in the state and is campaigning heavily for Harris there.  Additionally, factor in that at Trump’s final rally at Madison Square Garden, a speaker prominently trashed Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean” (all Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens, in case you did not know that) and that there are over 472,000 Puerto Ricans in Pennsylvania, the most of any swing state (in each swing state we will now be discussing the Puerto Rican x-factor!  Thanks, Tony Hinchcliffe), which stands up well against the over 61,000 write-ins for 5.6% of the vote in the Democratic primary, most representing Uncommitted protesting Israel’s war in Gaza (see the discussion on Michigan below).  Remember that Trump lost in Pennsylvania by less than 82,000 votes in 2020, and I think the net picture of these factors in Pennsylvania means the state is a pretty good bet for Harris. 

PENNSYLVANIA RATING: Strong Harris

Also, Democratic incumbent Senator Bob Casey is polling better than Harris against Republican challenger Dave McCormick, so I see a strong chance for Casey’s victory.

Michigan—15 Electoral Votes

Polling average: Harris 48%, Trump 47%, Harris +1 point

Even though Harris is polling better here than anywhere else not only in the Rust Belt but also better than any other swing state, this is deceptive.  And yes, while Michigan has the third-highest African-American population proportionately of any swing state and fifteenth-highest in the nation, there are other factors that are not good for Harris here in Michigan…

New registration modeled party share: Last updated October 20

Vs. same weeks before election in 2020: Republicans +8.4 points, Democrats -2.1 points: net shift 10.5 points for GOP

Of the seven states dubbed by most as swing states, this is one of only two that saw a shift in favor of Republicans (and by far the larger shift) and this bodes quite ill for Democrats in Michigan as it is a significant shift that could very well overcome the fact that Harris’s polling average here is her best in the Rust Belt, given that that it is not her best by much. One x-factor?  In such a close state, there are almost 54,000 Puerto Ricans in Michigan.  And all this in a state a state Trump lost by less than 155,000 votes in 2020.  Also, it should be noted Michigan has a something of a screwy recent history of throwing pollsters curve balls, for what that’s worth.

But the real elephant in the room for Democrats and Michigan are the deaths of many Arabs in the fighting with Israel: the horrific mass violence, mass displacement, and mass destruction in Palestine’s Gaza in the escalation of the conflict between Hamas and Israel that erupted with Hama’s massive terrorist attack against Israel on October 7, 2023, as well as increasing violence in Lebanon and Palestine’s illegally-occupied-by-Israel-since-1967 West Bank, are all deeply affecting Michigan’s substantial Arab-American community, which consists of over 208,000 people and in Michigan represents the highest share for an Arab population of the total population in any state.  As a result these events and the Biden-Harris Administration’s support for Israel, many of them are holding Biden and Harris responsible for, in their view, not stopping and even enabling all of this and are now reluctant or refusing to support her.  In fact, out of all the swing states, Michigan had the most proportionately and absolutely Uncommitted National Movement votes protesting the war in Gaza in the Democratic Primary this year: over 101,000 voters for some 13.2% of the presidential primary vote.  The movement includes many non-Arabs and non-Muslims and many young people.

But to be clear, not all these people—maybe even not most—would necessarily not support Harris over Trump, as the movement was meant to send a signal and was not officially a firm anti-Biden or anti-Harris vote, hence the term “uncommitted” (and I am sure plenty of Arabs in Michigan will still vote for her, just less so than if what was happening in the Middle East was not happening), while some of the Puerto Rican population are minors and all the Uncommitteds were able to vote.  Thus, do no look at the Puerto Ricans and Uncommitted one-to-one as easily canceling each other out, but I am just giving all this data an context for.. context (remember the name of my site, cherished readers).

One other thing: despite endorsing Trump, former candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is still on Michigan’s ballot as a separate candidate, having lost multiple legal challenges to remove his name, including just recently at the U.S. Supreme Court.  Along with Wisconsin, Michigan is one of only two swing states in which he remains on the ballot.

This state really is up for grabs, but with the polls so close and statistically tied, and such a meaningful shift towards Republicans in the share of overall new registration vs 2020 and problems Democrats are having with Arab-Americans, I would have to say I see Trump as slightly more likely to win, but it could be extremely close either way.

MICHIGAN RATING: Edge Trump

On a positive note for Democrats, their Senate candidate Elissa Slotkin is polling significantly better than Harris and I give her and an advantage against her Republican opponent Mike Rodgers.

Wisconsin—10 Electoral Votes

Polling average: Harris 48.0%, Trump 47.6%, Harris +0.4 points

Wisconsin had been where Harris was polling the best in the Rust Belt for some time, but things have narrowed for whatever reasons in recent weeks.  Even though the polling now is slightly better in Michigan, there are not the complications in that state has that I just discussed here in Wisconsin.

New registration modeled party share: Last updated October 21

Vs. same weeks before election: Democrats -4.1 points, GOP -6 points, net shift 2.1 points for Democrats

Still, with a statistical tie in effect with such a slight lead, modeled voter registration partisanship does not give her a huge boost: of the five swing states where there has been a shift towards Democrats, Wisconsin has the weakest such shift by far.  The potential Puerto Rican factor involves nearly 65,000 Puerto Ricans.  Conversely, for what it’s worth, the Uncommitted vote in the Democratic primary was over 48,000 votes for 8.3% of the vote (Trump lost by less than 21,000 votes).  Also, like Michigan and as mentioned, Wisconsin is one of only two swing states where RFK Jr. is still on the ballot, most recently being denied removal from both by the U.S. Supreme Court.  Based on this available data and my conclusion that polls are undercounting Democratic support, I’d say Harris is more likely than not to win here in Wisconsin and not just barely, though it will still likely be close.

WISCONSIN RATING: Advantage Harris

Incumbent Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin is in a tight race against Republican Eric Hovde, but has consistently polled ahead of him.  Along with Harris, I see her as having an advantage.

Georgia—16 Electoral Votes

Polling average: Trump 48.7%, Harris 47.0%, Trump +1.8 points

Georgia is Trump’s second-best poll-showing among swing states, but I would argue this is deceptive.  It is still well within the margin of error and there are certainly some other factors that are very much not in his favor when it comes to this state…

New registration modeled party share: Last updated October 8

Vs. same weeks before election in 2020: Democrats +7.1 points, Republicans -12.2 points, net shift +19.3 points for Democrats

Folks, this is a massive shift towards Democrats and I do not think polling has captured this.  And part of that is black women being incredibly enthused for Kamala Harris in a state that has the highest African-American share of the overall population of any swing state and the third-highest of any state.  And let’s not forget Trump’s longstanding feuds with Republican Georgia Governor Brian Kemp and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (listen to my interview with him six days before Trump’s Capitol Insurrection) acting against Trump’s longstanding election overturning/denial efforts.  There are also over 120,000 Puerto Ricans in Georgia (Trump infamously lost by less than 12,000 votes) and Uncommitted was not on the ballot here in the Democratic primary.  Finally, do not underestimate the political machine that former Democratic gubernatorial candidate and Georgia House of Representatives Minority leader Stacey Abrams has helped put in place.  Especially with the voter registration data, I am very confident Harris wins Georgia.

GEORGIA RATING: Strong Harris

North Carolina—16 Electoral Votes

Polling average: Trump 48.3,% Harris 47.3%, Trump +1.1 point

Once again, there is a statistical tie here.  But with a Republican Governor candidate who is possibly the worst gubernatorial candidate in modern American history—an African-American extremist who called himself a “black NAZI!” on a porn website’s forum, among other disgracefully pathetic and offensive things in his history—likely dragging Trump down among undecideds, independents, and some Republicans, the closeness in the poll might be deceptive.  But then there is the voter registration stuff…

New registration modeled party share: Last updated October 11

Vs. same weeks before election in 2020: Democrats +5.4 points, GOP -5.5 points, net shift +10.9 points for Democrats

North Carolina also has the second-highest portion of African-American voters of any swing state and the eight-most in America, something that is definitely quite favorable for Harris.  Also, there are over 130,000 Puerto Ricans in North Carolina; on the other side, North Carolina had second-highest absolute and proportionate turnout for Uncommitted during the Democratic primary among swing states: almost 89,000 voters for 12.7% of the vote (Trump won the state in 2020 by less than 75,000 votes).  On balance with all of this, and given especially the big shift in modeled partisanship and the state’s large black population, I think Harris has a clear advantage in this state, though not a strong one as Trump won by close to 75,000 votes in 2020, so that margin won’t be easy to overcome.

NORTH CAROLINA RATING: Advantage Harris* (I am putting an asterisk here because an x-factor is the intersection of the damage from Hurricane Helene that may yet lead to many people having difficulties in voting, the rampant and wildly dangerous disinformation spewed by Trump and Russia and many others about FEMA and overall government relief efforts in the state leading to actual armed threats against FEMA staff, and the actual major efforts going on there by the Biden-Harris Administration to help people there; I do not know how and/or if these dynamics will play out and affect the election here so leave some room for North Carolina to surprise).

Nevada—6 Electoral Votes

Polling average: Harris 47.5%, Trump +47.4%, Harris +0.1 points

Polls here in Nevada are really tight, though they have generally been better for Harris here than its southwestern counterpart, Arizona.  As in most other cases, though, I still think polls are undercounting Democratic support.  So what does voter registration data tell us?

New registration modeled party share: Last updated October 25

Vs. same weeks before election in 2020: Democrats -7.1 points, GOP -6.2 points, net shift +1.1 points for GOP

This is the only other swing state besides Michigan that shifted towards the GOP, though only slightly so, and in a state with a smaller population like Nevada, that could amount to a big deal.  There are also approaching 35,000 Puerto Ricans in Nevada, while a “None of these candidates” inspired by Uncommitted received less than 7,500 votes at 5.5% of the Democratic primary vote (Trump only lost this state by in 2020 by less than 24,000 votes).  This has the potential to be the closest state, but with Harris actually leading in the polls if only by the most minute amount, and with only the barest shift so far towards the GOP in registration, this comes down to a gut feeling if I am not going to award a tie, and my gut is going with Harris given how things are breaking overall late in the game and with the wisdom of Jon Ralston, who really knows Nevada politics, also giving me confidence.

NEVADA RATING: (barely) Edge Harris

Incumbent Democratic Senator Jackie Rosen is polling significantly ahead of her Republican opponent Sam Brown as well as Harris, so I would argue she has a strong chance to win.

Arizona—11 Electoral Votes

Polling average: Trump 48.7%, Harris 46.6%, Trump +2.2 points

Arizona is currently by far Trump’s best-polling state, but is still within the margin of error in a climate in which, again, I think most polls are undercounting Democratic support.  So what does the modeled partisanship of new registrations based on registration data tell us?    

New registration modeled party share: Last updated October 21

Vs. same weeks before election in 2020: Democrats +13.3 points, GOP -19.1 points, net shift +32.4 points net shift for Democrats

This is the most significant shift vs. 2020 for any swing state, and that almost speaks for itself, casting serious doubt as to the accuracy of the neck-and-neck polling.  On top of this, the Puerto Rican factor here: almost 54,000 people and Uncommitted was not on the ballot in a state Trump lost by less than 11,000 votes.  While Trump is up a few points in the poll, this massive shift in voter registration makes me think the polls in Arizona are significantly underestimating Democratic votes.  Trump has a real shot to win Arizona, sure, but Harris should be favored and not just barely.

ARIZONA RATING: Advantage Harris

Also, in the race to fill the vacancy left by departing Arizona Senator and former Democrat Kyrsten Sinema, Democratic Candidate Ruben Gallego has been polling very well against his opponent, the failed Republican 2020 gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, who refused to concede defeat and supports Trump’s election denialism.  Gallego has a very strong chance of winning.

My Dark Horses

Yes, there can be some shocks!

Alaska—3 Electoral Votes

Polling: Average not given, but all polls since September have been conducted by the same pollster and all were at least +8 Trump except for one poll in mid-September that had Trump only up 5 points.  Based on this, it would seem safe to rule Harris out for winning Alaska, except…

New registration modeled party share: Last updated October 21

Vs. same weeks before election in: Democrats +8.5 points, GOP -17.8 points: net shift +26.3 points for Democrats

That’s a huge deal, dear readers: Trump only won Alaska by some 36,000 votes (10% of the vote in such a low-population state), meaning a shift of a little over 18,000 votes (5%) would have given Biden the state.

And in 2022, Alaskans voted to send to the House as their one representative the amazing Mary Peltola, the state’s first Democrat to fill that seat and first Alaska Native to do so.  I really expect her to help drive a big Alaska Native turnout, and the registration data is also showing this, with Alaska Natives as a share of voter registrations nearly 43% higher than in 2022, meaning they are 43% more of the share of new registrants (Native American/Alaska Native coded as NAAN in TargetSmart in the above).  There was also no Uncommitted on the ballot in the Democratic primary, but there are over 10,000 Puerto Ricans in Alaska.  And finally, in a state with such a small population, the fact that RFK Jr. is still on the ballot here could also make a difference.  So if a state not at all on the radar is a surprise flip, I’m saying that state will be Alaska.

ALASKA RATING: Advantage Trump but Harris could really do this

Ohio—17 Electoral Votes

Polling average: Trump 51.7%, Harris 43.7%, Trump +7.9 points

Yes, Trump has a sizable lead over Harris.  While it is unlikely Harris will win Ohio, incumbent Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown has been generally far ahead of her and generally also ahead of his Republican opponent, Bernie Moreno, but it’s still a close race.  With my analysis telling me polls are undercounting Democrats in general, I find the best way to feel confident in specific races is corroborating those Races to increases in the share of modeled voter registration partisanship for Democrats where the races are taking place.  So, without further ado…

New registration modeled party share: Last updated October 10

Vs. same weeks before election in 2020: Democrats +18.8 points, GOP -17 points; net shift +35.8 points for Democrats

These are remarkable numbers for Ohio and a larger shift than any of the swing states and seem quite dissonant with the polling.  So remarkable, in fact, that they actually give Harris a real shot at an upset even if Trump is favored.  You would think with sitting Ohio Senator JD Vance as Trump’s running mate that these numbers would be different, but they are not.  The numbers also give Brown a strong chance to win.  Maybe the debunked racist smears about legal Haitians migrants eating neighbors’ pets as well as ducks and geese touted by both Trump and Vance and many other Republicans backfired, as Democrats gained almost 0.4 points in the modeled share 9 weeks out from the election—when these vile rumors began to rise—to four weeks out (when the latest Ohio data is available) while in the same period, Republicans lost about 2.3 points…  Back to the racism theme, here there are nearly 134,000 Puerto Ricans in a state where six years ago, Brown won reelection by less than 300,000 votes.

Sure, Trump is favored, but there is something in these numbers telling me you can’t rule out a Harris upset and it’s would not be a miracle to happen.

OHIO RATING: Advantage Trump

Texas—40 Electoral Votes

Polling average: Trump 51.2%, Harris 44.0%, Trump +7.2 points

It sure doesn’t look good for Harris here, but like in Ohio, the Senate is a different story, and also like in Ohio, the registration information is shocking.

New registration modeled party share: Last updated October 11

Vs. same weeks before election in 2020: Democrats +11.1 points, GOP -18.5 points: net shift +29.6 points for Democrats

Yet another massive shift for Democrats in a supposedly safe state for Republicans.  And there are over 269,000 Puerto Ricans here who might make a difference here in a state in which incumbent Republican Senator Ted Cruz only won his 2018 Senate reelection against Democrat Beto O’Rourke by less than 215,000 votes.  These Puerto Ricans may help the state say “adios” to Cruz, as his Democratic challenger, former NFL player Colin Allred, currently serving in the U.S. House for Texas, is polling much better than Harris, Cruz polling much worse than Trump.  But given these blowout numbers on modeled registration partisanship, Harris has a real if relatively small chance, too.  As for Trump, he won by over 631,000 votes (yes, Texas is a big state).  When it comes to Uncommitted, it was not on the ballot in Texas.

TEXAS RATING: Advantage Trump

And I’d give Allred an edge over Cruz since I already think the polls are undercounting Democratic support and because there is such a huge shift in favor of Democrats.

All Swing States

New registration modeled party share 5 weeks out vs. same in 2020 (rough since not all states reporting on same dates, so October data not included):

Democrats +3.7 points, GOP -5.4 points, net shift +9.1 points for Democrats

Other Notes from Outside the Battleground States

Florida seemed it might be competitive in polling for a bit, but polling has now given Trump an even larger lead and modeled voter registration partisanship based on favorable voter registration partisanship data for Republicans from there as of September 30 seems to rule out a major upset there, though if somehow this changes dramatically with data in October months, maybe there’s a miracle waiting for Harris. Update November 4: Incumbent Republican Senator Rick Scott is underperforming compared to Trump, and while he is in a strong position to be expected win, Democrat Debbie Mucarsel-Powell would have a small chance if there was a shift in new registrations for October and/or polls are way off and Harris is competitive or winning in a place like Iowa, for, while a decent number of polls gave Scott a large lead, a decent number down the stretch did show a closer race, though none had Mucarsel-Powell ahead or closer than 3 points behind.  Virginia had hinted at being competitive in a few polls—though I never bought that this would be the case closer to the election and when the final votes were tallied—but no longer, and with the same type of registration data and modeling current as of October 18 overwhelmingly favoring Democrats, it seems impossible for Trump to win now.  And quirky New Hampshire flirted with Trump in a few polls, but Harris seems to have pulled away there, too (New Hampshire has not provided registration data, as it is wont to quirk).

There is no reason to think Harris can win Montana, but that state’s embattled incumbent Senator Jon Tester is a different story.  Until recently, he was trailing significantly, every poll from August 12 through October 8 having his opponent, Republican Tim Sheehy, ahead 6-8 points (save one that had Tester up 5 points from August 14 and several were GOP partisan polls).  But the last two polls in October have Tester tied or only down three, a decent sign the race may very well be tightening significantly, suggesting Tester has at least a decent chance to hang on.  Yet the voter registration shifts up to October 21 there were massively favoring Republicans, making it less likely than in other states that the polls are significantly underestimating Democratic support.  Thus, without any significant data favoring Democrats here, Tester is easily the most vulnerable incumbent Democrat.  Yet don’t count him out yet—momentum does seem to be in his favor now and recent polling is likely a reflection of multiple serious scandals that have embroiled Sheehy—a relative newcomer to the state—in the final weeks of this race, calling into question his credibility and character.  If future polling before the election comes out showing a tighter race or even tester up again, I would favor Tester in a state where even slight shifts can make a huge difference in state with such a small population.  Still, with the available data, Sheehy has an edge for now, but one he is in danger of losing in these final days.

And finally, polling in congressional districts and voter registration data in the two states, Maine (registration data as of October 15) and Nebraska, that award electoral votes the winners of the districts, do not seem competitive: Maine’s 2nd Congressional District (1 electoral vote) seems to be safely going to Trump and Harris seems a safe bet to win Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District (also 1 electoral vote).  A big shift towards Democrats in the share of new registrants in Nebraska statewide (with data as of September 30) doesn’t just help Harris in the split district favoring her: it bodes ill for incumbent Republican Senator Deb Fischer against the surprisingly very-competitive-in-polling independent candidate, Dan Osborn (+12 points for Democrats, -11.2 for Republicans, a net shift of +32.2 points for Democrats as of September 30!).  My money would definitely be on a strong chance for Osborn here.

NATIONALLY

Popular vote: Harris 48.1%, Trump 46.7%, Harris +1.4 points

I don’t think for a second that Harris only wins the popular vote by 1.4% unless maybe she loses the Electoral College and even then she might beat that polling.  As I have stated throughout, I think polls are generally undercounting Democratic support, whose coalition runs from Republican President George W. Bush’s Vice President, Dick Cheney, and his daughter and former third-highest Republican leader in the House, Liz Cheney, and former Republican Congressmen Joe Walsh and Adam Kinzinger on one side, to Nancy Pelosi and AOC and Bernie Sanders on the other, to include never-Trumper Republicans and pro-lifers who do not want to impose their views on others and still others keeping their vote a secret for various reasons (including many married people from their partners).  But as we have seen in 2016 and 2000, the popular vote winner does not always win.  Yet as far as the popular vote, feel free to add a few points to her total here.

New registration modeled party share vs 2020, 3 weeks out (rough, because of different reporting times and because New Hampshire and North Dakota are not reporting information):

Democrats +3.2 points, Republicans -4 points, net shift +7.2 points for Democrats nationally

It seems almost impossible for Trump to win the popular vote with a shift like that from 2020 to 2024.  So expect Harris to win the popular vote no matter what and to win by more than 1.4% and more than just a little more.

ELECTORAL COLLEGE

The way I see this, and this is a rough probability breakdown, there’s a 20% chance of Trump edging out Harris, a 30% of Harris edging out Trump, and 30% chance of a strong defeat of Trump, and a 20% chance of a huge win for Harris (all maps from 270toWin) *UPDATE NOVEMBER 3: Iowa!

Edge Trump Map: 277-293* Trump, 245-261* Harris (roughly 20% chance)

*I am really bullish on Georgia and Pennsylvania for Harris and think she would win both even if Trump wins, but could see Trump picking off one or the other in theory, though I think this is less likely than what I chose to show in the map.

Edge Harris Map: Harris 272-288*, Trump 250-266* (roughly 30% chance)

*I can see Nevada and Wisconsin going either way, hence the range, but the map is my best guess within these possibilities.

Strong Harris Map: Harris 319-328*, Trump 210-219* (roughly 30% chance^ and this is what my head believes will really happen; UPDATE November 5: ^I am sticking with this as my most likely scenario out of the four maps I have presented herein)

*Even in this scenario, am giving her a shot at Alaska. The range is for Alaska and Hawaii going either way.

Huge Harris Map: Harris 385, Trump 153 (roughly 20% chance but capturing my heart)

Sure, you laugh, but remember that there were net shifts in Texas of +29.6, Ohio of +35.8, and Alaska of +26.3 points in favor of Democrats as a share of voter registrations for this election since 2020!  The polls don’t tell the whole story, and, anyway, I have 80% of outcomes being more favorable for Trump than this.

So basically, a 1 in 5 chance Trump wins, a 1 in 5 chance she blows him out, and a 2 in 3 chance she wins by between a little (1 in 3) and solidly (1 in 3).  This is not meant to be precise, but a rough proclamation.  I thought about tinkering a bit, maybe changing the solid Harris win to 35% at the expense of a Harris blowout, moving that down to 15%, but I want to keep it relatively simple and I was almost blown away by the modeled partisanship registration shares of Texas, Ohio, and Alaska, which I think tell us something big is going on the ground in these places that the polls are just missing.  So I am sticking, officially, with 20-30-30-20 on the odds unless decisive new data pops out in the next few days, which is highly unlikely.

And if I had to pick one and a professional, as noted, it would be the third strong map.

CONCLUSION

There are other factors, such as voters who would normally not vote for Democrats but are increasingly disgusted by Trump’s election denialism and insurrectionism and recent economic developments., that may also prove to be hard-to-measure factors boosting Harris’s final vote tallies and/or margins that I did not discuss in any detail.  What is clear is that the voter registration data shows a lot of drops in GOP-modeled voters’ share of registrations and increases in both Democrats and independents throughout the country, something clearly not being captured by the estimate of likely voter models that are being used to craft the poll samples.

Will Puerto Ricans be a fired-up factor in the swing states and beyond?  I would at least bet on at least somewhat higher turnout from Puerto Ricans for Democrats after the aforementioned disgusting insult was recently blasted live from Madison Square Garden to the nation at a Trump rally which came off like a stylistic homage to a 1939 American Nazi rally that also took place at Madison Square Garden.

One way I could be wrong is if somehow massive amounts of voters who voted for Biden in 2020 will be voting for Trump in 2024, but color me skeptical—highly skeptical—of that being a thing.  As I discussed in my last article one thing is clear: certain groups of voters are registering in highly disproportionate level compared to past elections, and these groups significantly lean Democratic.  And none have surpassed their previous proportional levels of registration as have African-American women and Latinas/Hispanic women.  These historic proportions and the shifts in voter registration during this cycle—the Harris Effect—they have helped lead to fruition tell a story different from the polling, one not captured by polling, and that means we should expect some surprises in the coming days as a nation and the world hold their collective breaths.

In short, the likelihood of Harris winning is definitely significantly higher than the polls would indicate, though of course this does not mean Trump does not have a still real—if significantly less likely—chance, not minuscule one but perhaps a higher chance than of losing Russian Roulette with a six-shooter.

And if she wins, from the information presented here there, it should be clear there is a good chance Democrats can hold the Senate, especially if Tester is able to continue closing the gap in Montana and the independent Osborn defeats incumbent Republican Fischer in Nebraska, helping offset the near-certain loss of the current seat of retiring West Virginia’s Senator Joe Manchin, now formerly a Democrat, to West Virginia Republican Governor Jim Justice in a race against Democrat Glenn Elliot (the Senate is currently a coalition of Democrats and independents that form 51 majority against 49 Republicans (50-50 would be a tenuous majority if Harris wins because Walz as vice president would be the tie breaking vote).

As for the House, there are a number of good polls for Democrats against incumbent Republicans, but House polls are a lot more challenging to conduct and less accurate.  In the end, there is good reason to think there is a good chance that if Harris can ride a rising wave of momentum to victory, so can many House Democratic candidates in competitive races, and Democrats only need a net gain of five seats to take back control.  Especially if Harris wins more than narrowly, expect Democrats to retake the House and hold the Senate, but a more narrow win for her would leave such an outcome in doubt without ruling it out.  Conversely, if Trump wins, with a number of Republican Senate candidates polling well below him, there is more of a chance of divided government.

As with every election, so much is at stake, but so much more is at stake in this particular election: almost everything is up for grabs, including the very nature of our government and the survival of democracy itself.

One favor: when the dust settles, if I turn out to be as accurate as I have been in the past, please do share this profusely so we can improve the level of analysis in our fraught media landscape.

In data, we trust, so trust in a Harris victory as by far the most likely outcome.

© 2024 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

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(Traduce en español/translate to Spanish) By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, Threads @bfchugginalong, LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content) September 6, 2024; UPDATE October 8-9: see my Twitter thread with updated voter registration numbers and analysis; see my related July 5 article, Biden at His Worst Is Better than Insurrectionist Trump at His “Best”: 13 Reasons to Keep Calm & Carry On (Biden’s Already Gaining Ground!) ; because of YOU, Real Context News is approaching two million all-time content views, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion. Note: when decimal percentages are given, averages are rounded to the tenth; when not given, they to rounded to the nearest full number; *correction appended to fix a date.

SILVER SPRING—Just before the 2022 midterm elections in the wake of Roe v. Wade’s half-century precedent protecting reproductive abortion rigths being overturned by Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, I had been following the excellent analysis of Democratic political expert Tom Bonier.  He was then busy was pointing out both that women were registering in far high numbers than usual for midterms and, later, that the early vote—which had been favoring Democrats in recent election cycles—was also significantly higher than the previous midterms.  Because of the hard voter data Bonier so skillfully presented, I drew the conclusion in detail before the election that Democrats would outperform their polls and had a real chance to hold both the Senate and the House.  Democrats ended up not holding the House (barely, in large part thanks to 4 Republican flips of Democratic seats in New York, including by the now famous George Santos) but my analysis was correct: with turnout high and many more women voting than usual in a midterm, the pollsters were off in many races and underestimated the vote for Democratic candidates.  Back in 2022*, in the run-up to the midterms and commenting on the new registration surges, Tom was making it clear that he’s “never seen anything like it.”

That midterm, Joe Biden tied for the fifth-best midterm performance for his own party for his first midterm among all modern presidents, with the four doing better than him in the House having significant historical advantages when Biden was at disadvantage, and Biden is tied for tenth out of all presidents in the House and seventh in the Senate (excluding the aberrations that were the Reconstruction midterms and John Tyler, who was partyless).

Wonderful New Data for Democrats

Now, Bonier is at it again with even far more encouraging and unprecedented data for Vice President Kamala Harris, her running mate—Governor Tim Walz—and down-ballot Democrats.  In what he is calling the Harris “Effect,” for the week beginning July 21^st—the Sunday of which saw President Joe Biden formally withdraw as the Democratic Party’s nominee for the presidency—many constituencies that heavily lean Democratic in 15 states have seen massive surges in voter registration surges compared to the same time-period in the las presidential election in 2020, which Joe Biden won.

• Young black women are up in voter registration by over 175%
• Young Latinas are up almost 160%
• Black women are up over 98%
• Black voters overall are up nearly 85%
• Young women overall are up over 84%
• Latinas overall are up over 78%
• Young voters overall are up nearly 75%
• Hispanic voters overall are up over 68%
• Democrats are up nearly 50%

But male voters—who strongly favor Trump—are just up over 18% and Republicans are just up 8% (not all states released party affiliation, so the Democratic/Republican registration was modeled by Bonier’s firm when that information was not available).  These were the included states: Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada, Maryland, Delaware, Vermont, Rhode Island, Ohio, Kentucky, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Wyoming.  Since then, North Carolina, New York, and Pennsylvania (including 262% increase for young black women!) have been added and new data from Georgia analyzed by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, with all confirming and continuing the trend (and even as I am proofing this, new data is in the process of being added from 19 other states that are confirming these overall trends again and again, but have not yet been presented as added to the overall demographic averages across all states analyzed).

Furthermore, Bonier noted that his political data outfit TargetSmart’s research “found that surges in voter registration are predictive of increases in overall turnout from those groups of voters (not just the new registrants in those groups).”  That’s huge, because this means these surges in registration are indicators of much more than just the individuals registering in record rates, individuals representing groups that are heavily pro-Democratic.

This is a dramatic imbalance that, if it holds, means that polling in these 39 states (38 looked at my TargetSmart and Georgia looked at by The Atlanta Journal Constitution)—including most of the swing states—will undercount support for Democratic candidates, perhaps significantly and perhaps more than in 2022.  This would mean if we look at these close averages, the election might end up being not as close as the polls are indicating they are: Kamala Harris might not just win most swing states, but could even do so convincingly, limiting the ability of bad-faith actors to disrupt the transition to a would-be Harris-Walz Administration or challenge election results and vote certifications.

2022 Midterms: Polling Past as Prologue for 2024?

Getting into the Weeds

I am not sure what changes pollsters have made and may yet make to their methodology from the midterms and previous presidential election for this election cycle.  Are they looking at these numbers and making adjustments?

I am inclined to think perhaps not much just by my gut, but beyond that, let’s look at what happened with the polls in 2022.

In 2022, Senate polls in the last three weeks before the midterms were 0.3% biased in favor of Republicans (also known as the GOP, or Grand Old Party), but 0.2% biased in favor of Democrats in the House.  However, this is actually quite misleading: as Nathaniel Rakich notes writing for FiveThirtyEight (a mecca for many things polling weighted whose averages are higher quality than those of Real Clear Politics), two main types of polls were included in the House calculations: polls for specific House district races and generic ballot polls, the latter being polls asking voters which party was preferred to control Congress, not about a specific House race.  Those generic ballot polls are generally far more accurate than the polls for specific House races (from 1998 and on, 3.9% average error vs. the 6.7% error for the district-specific polls).  In 2022, House polls were off overall by 4.0%, but the specific House race district polls were off by an average of 5.0% compared with 3.1% error margin for the generic polls.  And the polls for the House were overall relatively more accurate in part because a far larger portion of House polls in 2022 were the more accurate generic polls: 46% of all House polls when the average from 1998 and on has been only 21%.

As far as degree of error historically overall, since 1998, polls have been relatively close in the last three weeks before voting, averaging 6% error margins overall (9.2% for presidential primaries, 4.3% for presidential general elections, 5.4% for Senate polls, 6.1% for the House, and 5.4% for governors).  In the 2022 election cycle, the polls were even more accurate than usual and the best of all those examined starting in 1998, only being off 4.8% overall (off 4.8% in the Senate, 4.0% in the House, and 5.1% in governors’ races).  In spite of this relative accuracy, the polls were off in congressional House and Senate races, undercounting Democrats’ support as I suspected they would.

Women were 4% to 5% more of the electorate in 2022 than men, according to exit polls and the U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, respectively (the two main sources of such information).  I tried looking under the hood of some of those final polls, but when I tried to find the details, some did not indicate their breakdown in gender as far as the sample and/or adjustments to the sample were concerned, though some did and seemed to have gotten it very close or right while others definitely underrepresented women (at least in the raw numbers of people interviewed, but even then, because pollsters don’t always get the exact portions they want for a likely voter model in terms of who responds, they adjust and weight their samples—including demographically including by gender—and it is not clear from the main press releases or crosstabs/methodology sections—if available—how these adjustments were made and if their projection for likely voters was the same or different from their raw sample, how accurate they were in modeling and predicting the portion of the electorate that would be female and how they would vote).

Some, perhaps most pollsters, would reveal their methodology upon request through individual channels but I confess I am pressed for time and resources in trying to track down methodology for two-year-old polls where the information is not as easy to track down online at this point in time, if it even is online, which can be difficult and time-consuming.  Under different circumstances in the future, perhaps I can and will.  Yet even the most wonky websites I have seen, including FiveThirtyEight, have not attempted compiling such a database…

Yet all things considered, given then-historic data on female voter registration in 2022 and because the polls were consistently off there, my hypothesis and one I feel good about given the situation with Roe being overturned is that women were either undercounted and/or the women that were counted were underestimated as far as their favoring Democrats (and I am thinking both, especially as new women registering after Dobbs were very likely motivated overwhelmingly by their loss of reproductive rights and would have been a much more Democratic-leaning group than women overall and who had registered prior to Dobbs).

Before getting into this next section, it should be pointed out, as Rakich does, that even some of the most accurate polls might get the race wrong in terms of predicting the actual winner, that the closer a race is the less “right” a often poll is in picking a winner: if a result is super-close, say, 0.5,% 1%, 2%, 3%, or even 4% or so, these results are often within the margin of error: the range above or below the level of estimated voter support for a particular candidate that the final result should fall under (in most cases) 95% of the time.  So, if a race is 47%-45% between two candidates and the margin of error is 3.2%, since the 2% difference is less than 3.2%, the race would be considered statistically tied.  But if the race was 50%-45% with the same margin of error, that lead would be considered more solid and safe.  And a poll can predict a winner who won by 5% but only have predicted a 1% win, while another poll could have been more accurate and have been off by less than 1% but predicted the wrong candidate.  In other words, polling is… complicated, and is really is about understanding about what the aggregate polling data means, not just screaming about one single poll.

And of course, one poll is just one data point, so it is the averages of polls over time and the polls closest to actual voting happening that matter the most, not one or a few polls.  But anyway, the point is, in very close races, pollsters should not be thought of as “off” if they predicted one candidate in their final polls as down 2 points who won by 0.5%, a 2.5-point-swing, if the margin of error was, say, 4%, meaning a 2.5%-swing either way would fall within margin of error, the way polling methodology is supposed to work.  So many polls could be super-accurate in close races and still get the winner wrong.  But what was interesting about 2022 is how many of the close races had polling biased against Democratic levels of support and were “wrong” even while often being relatively accurate.

Looking at predictions in 2022, FiveThirtyEight’s polls-only model had its average predictive outcome as 229 seats for Republicans to 206 for Democrats in the House, with the middle 80% of results landing from 250 to 208 seats for Republicans, and there were substantially more outcomes with Republicans doing much better than their average than Democrats doing better than their average.  For the Senate, the polls-only model predicted an average predictive outcome as a 50-50 Senate, with 80% of outcomes falling from 54 to 46 seats for Republicans.  For the overall popular House vote, the polls-only model had a 2.4% margin win for Republicans as the most likely outcome.  But keep in mind, these House models in a lot of cases included a lot of generic polls that were not a specific measure of the specific House race in question (this is in part because many House district races have little-to-no polling specific to them) and that, as mentioned before, the generic ballots favored Democrats relative to the specific district polls.

So, what actually happened?

What the Results Tell Us

In the end, the election results gave Democrats 213 and Republicans 222 seats in the House, a loss of 9 seats for Democrats compared with the results from the 2022 midterms, yet which, as I have noted, was a performance for the history books for Democrats, who kept 7 seats more than the polls-only model’s average prediction.  And in the Senate, Democrats won 1 more seat than the average of the polls-only model prediction.

The final popular vote outcome for the House was 50.6% Republicans, 47.8% for Democrats, a 2.8% margin for Republicans, the actual final margin being 0.4% higher than the 2.4% the model predicted. 

Yet, that year, the generic Congressional control preference polling—an important factor in the polls-only model—ended with 1.2% advantage for Republicans (smaller than the 2.8% actual margin, but as Rakich notes in footnote 6 here, Republicans had many more seats in House races where their candidates ran with no Democrat even running to oppose them than the reverse, depressing what the final popular vote would end up for being for Democrats by about 1% and suggesting that some of surge of Democratic women was strategically felt more in competitive races give the number of upsets we will get into in the next few paragraphs).  As of September 5 of this year, Democrats have a 2.6% advantage, a notable swing and another indicator Democrats could have an even better year than 2022 (although to be fair, on September 2, 2022, with the same number of days until Election Day that year—three days later than this year—Democrats were up 0.9%, so the generic ballot would be a serious indicator only if Democrats still end up with an edge towards the end and through early voting, beginning over the coming days and weeks in many states, and there is no reason to think generic ballot polls will naturally mirror patterns from 2022 and necessarily have Republicans favored over Democrats).  If this paragraph was a bit confusing, the big takeaways are that the model and especially the generic ballot average estimates underestimated the national House vote margin for the GOP, but the GOP had a lot more races with no Democrats running in them, meaning this is to be expected, and at least now the generic ballot polls are much better for Democrats than they ended up being in the end for Democrats in 2022, something that if it holds could be another good sign for Democrats.

As far as those upsets, specifically, the polls-only model favored Republicans in 13 House races in which Democrats pulled off upset wins compared with only 7 situations where the model predicted Democrats to win in the House and Republicans won instead (including the 4 surprises from New York state).  In the Senate, the model favored Republicans in two races that Democrats won.

If we break down these races by how close they were in polling, including governor races along with congressional ones, in the toss-ups (leader with a 50%-60% chance of winning in the model), those “tilting” Democratic—7 races in which Democrats were favored on average 55% of the time to win—only 3 of those 7 Democrats won (43%).  But in those “tilting” Republican—11 races in which Republicans were favored on average 53% of the time to win—only 3 of those 11 Republicans won (27%).

In the “lean” races (leader with a 60%-75% chance of winning in the model), those “leaning” Democratic—26 races in which Democrats were favored on average 68% of the time to win—23 out of 26 Democrats won (88%).  But in those “tilting” Republican—13 races in which Republicans were favored on average 67% of the time to win—only 8 of those 13 Republicans won (61%).

In the “likely” races (leader with a 75%-95% chance of winning in the model), those “likely” Democratic races—36 races in which Democrats were favored on average 88% of the time to win—all 36 Democrats won (100%).  But in those “likely” for Republicans—44 races in which Republicans were favored on average 86% of the time to win—40 of those 44 Republicans won (91%).

Thus, in key races, polling relatively favored Republicans much more in key races where Republicans were upset than the reverse, showing a significant undercounting of Democratic support.  In the competitive races (combining “toss-ups”” and “leans,” Democrats won 26 of 33 (79%) while Republicans won only 11 out of 24 (46%) and were upset in 4 races they really should not have lost(“likely”) while Democrats held all those seats.  Again, a historic performance for Democrats against very strong headwinds.

Thus, despite the narrative that the polls were historically accurate in 2022 and they certainly were in a relative sense, they were still consistently off in favor of Republicans in 2022 in many key races by underestimating Democratic support.  To get back to my question about whether pollsters will have adjusted much for this, this accuracy narrative might actually be leading pollsters this cycle to adjust less and question what they did in 2022 less, which might very well be setting up a repeat of pollsters undercounting Democratic support among voters, within the composition of the electorate, and level of Democratic support among women and other key groups, especially since the registration surges for strongly-Democratic demographics are even more dramatic and historic now after Harris’s rise than in 2022.  And as these are new registrants, a very high percent of the new registrants voted in the 2020 presidential election (81.3% in Pennsylvania, for example).

Conclusion: Expect Democrats to Overperform this Election

Given what happened in 2022 and the tendency of that cycles’ polls to miss a surge in Democratic turnout in dozens of close races and even a few that were not close in polling that led to key upsets, as well as the fact that polling now is better and that registration numbers are significantly better across a wide variety of states, feel free to add a few points to the numbers you are getting from polls for Democrats in most key races and attribute that the historic rise in voting registration of young voters, women, black voters, and especially Latinas and even more especially African-American women, then look at the relatively paltry numbers among groups that could favor Republicans.  Additionally, there are a number of other dynamics I felt would favor President Biden as a candidate over time before he dropped out, and most of those still apply to Harris now.  Because of all these factors and the hard voter registration data so wonderfully presented by Tom Bonier, now Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, and down-ballot Democrats can be quite confident in victory, especially now because people are responding disproportionately well when it counts most and that will count in the close races that will decide the fate of our republic in the face of insurrectionist Trump’s fascist, violent assault on American democracy.

In data we trust, but also in Latinas and African-American women.

© 2024 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here. Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

(Traduce en español/translate to Spanish) By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, Threads @bfchugginalong, LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content) July 26, 2024, Updated July 27 with more analysis on Kelly; see my related July 5 article, Biden at His Worst Is Better than Insurrectionist Trump at His “Best”: 13 Reasons to Keep Calm & Carry On (Biden’s Already Gaining Ground!) ; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

#1: The Case for Gov. Shapiro

Josh Shapiro is the governor of the swing state that has the most electoral votes (19—tied with Illinois for the 5^th most) going to the Electoral College and is quite popular, beating his opponent in 2022 by 56.5% to 41.7%, a margin of 14.8%, overperforming his FiveThirtyEight weighted polling average by 4.4%.  A selection of polls this year have had him with a 49% approval in late July, 57% approval in May, and 4% approval in March, higher than his predecessors at those stages in their tenure and including significant support from a minority of Republicans.  He was Attorney General of the state since early 2017 before taking office as governor, and before that was a Member, then the Chair, of the Montgomery County Board of Commissioners since 2012, before that a member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives since 2005, marking over 19 years as a public servant for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.  This makes him well-qualified to understand local and state issues as well as both legislative and executive power and politics.  He is Jewish and a strong supporter of Israel, which can shield Harris from false attacks against her and Democrats as being “anti-Israel,” and has been repeatedly described as an incredibly gifted politician.

Per FiveThirtyEight’s weighted polling averages, when President Joe Biden exited the race, between Michigan (15 electoral votes), Wisconsin (10 electoral votes), and Pennsylvania (19), Biden was polling worse in Pennsylvania (behind 4.4%)—where fascist insurrectionist Trump was nearly assassinated recently—than the two Midwest swing states (behind 2.4% in Michigan and 2.3% in Wisconsin), but was polling better in those three states than the other three main battleground states (5.5% behind in Arizona [11 electoral votes]), 5.9% in Georgia [16 electoral votes], and 5.8% in Nevada [6 electoral votes]) as well as North Carolina (6.9%) (16 electoral votes), Biden winning all those states in 2020 except North Carolina (the latter regarded as less competitive, less swingy than the other six states).

Because Pennsylvania is worth the most electoral votes among the swing states, and because the gap in polling there for Democrats is larger there than Michigan but not as large as North Carolina, which may be out of reach, Shapiro is a better pick than other noted contenders, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina.  Additionally, Whitmer is a woman, and two women on the ticket lacks a balance that appeals to broader demographics, while Shapiro is a white man and would be running with a black and South Asian woman, offering broader cross-appeal nationally than Whitmer and likely very likely delivering his state of Pennsylvania for Harris.  That cross-demographic appeal is an important factor when considering Shapiro: the appeal he has to numerous demographics in Pennsylvania as a charismatic white Jewish male is transferrable to both Michigan and Wisconsin as well as the rest of the Midwest because of relatively strong demographic similarities Pennsylvania has with those places.  Thus, what works well in Pennsylvania can be transferrable to the Midwest to some degree, especially Michigan and Wisconsin, crucially.

#2: The Case for Senator Mark Kelly

Mark Kelly brings an impressive resume and is a current U.S. senator serving the swing state of Arizona since 2020, when he won a special election unseating Republican Martha McSally—who had replaced John McCain upon his death through the appointment of the state’s then-Republican governor—51.2% to 48.8% (by a 2.4% margin), then won a full term in 2022, defeating his opponent 51.4% to 46.5% (by a more robust margin of 4.9%).  Before that, he was a NASA astronaut, before that a U.S. Navy aviator, flying many combat missions during the Gulf War.  He is also the husband of former U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords, who became famous after surviving a shot to the head in an assassination attempt in 2011, has become a leading advocate for gun control, and will help to emphasize the issue of gun violence with voters, who overwhelmingly prefer the Democrats’ position that stricter gun laws are needed.  Like Shapiro, Kelly is a white male and helps balance the ticket demographically.  As a veteran, Kelly brings valuable national security experience that Shapiro does not and his wife might partially neutralize some of the sympathy working in fascist insurrectionist Trump’s favor resulting from the recent assassination attempt on him. Update July 27: Additionally, as Kelly is an former combat pilot and astronaut, there are the role-model, positive masculinity and hero factors that will provide an exceptional contrast with fascist insurrectionist Trump’s toxic masculinity and false machismo covering for persistent, pervasive, and extreme insecurity masquerading as strength, his running mate JD Vance and the MAGA cult also displaying these traits constantly and brazenly, so Kelly’s qualities in this regard will form a better contrast in this sphere than Shapiro, who is not a former combat pilot nor a former astronaut (though he is still an amazing male role model and still offers excellent contrast as well).

Why Shapiro Is a Better Choice than Kelly

To start, Arizona has significantly fewer electoral votes than Pennsylvania.  Furthermore, since Kelly is a sitting senator, the current Democratic governor would get to appoint his temporary successor but then a special election would ensue in 2026, forcing Democrats to defend a seat in a highly competitive state when the balance of power in the Senate is crucial: Kelley would not be up for reelection, and Biden’s term as president shows how crucial a single vote in the U.S. Senate can be (as I have noted before).  While there are relatively very strong similarities with demographics in Arizona to the other nearby swing state of Nevada, Nevada is just 6 electoral votes.  Given this risk of losing a Senate seat in 2026 that would otherwise be safe until 2028 if Kelly is not Harris’s choice, given that Pennsylvania has 19 electoral votes to Arizona’s 11, and given Pennsylvania’s similarities to the two other swing states of Michigan and Wisconsin each with more electoral votes than Nevada (25 combining the two), the advantages of Shapiro from a Pennsylvania that is far more important clearly make Shapiro the stronger candidate over Kelly, especially give how close the race is in multiple swing states crucial to victory. 

X-Factors Leave Other Options Open, but Shapiro Still the Favorite

An x-factor in any vice presidential selection is personal synergy with the presidential candidate: JD Vance, for example, was selected because he is now willing to defend anything and everything fascist insurrectionist Trump does, even though years ago he referred privately to fascist insurrectionist Trump as a potential American Hitler (I’m proud to noted that’s me applauding the Mitt Romney comment being read as a way of heckling Vance in this video below, and Vance calls me out about three minutes later).  Harris may, then, pick one of these two candidate or perhaps even a different candidate based on personal rapport.  There could also possibly be issues with either of the two above candidates’ backgrounds unbeknownst to the public—think of the skeletons in both John Edwards’s and Andrew Gillum’s closets—that the vetting process could reveal to Harris, altering the calculus and perhaps even pushing her to a third alternative.  Yet both Shapiro and Kelly are longtime public servants that have been well vetted over many years and are charismatic and cooperative team players, so these factors will very likely not count against them, leaving them to very likely be the top two picks, with Shapiro very likely in the lead.  Indeed, the closeness of this race means that electoral considerations will almost certainly play a larger-than-usual role in Harris’s vice presidential selection process and should have played more of a role in fascist insurrectionist Trump’s selection.

I am all in for Shapiro-Harris 2024 to defeat fascist insurrectionist Trump-Vance and their MAGA movement!  And Harris is looking damn strong right now, I really do think we will win and possibly win big! In fact, I think at least ten of the factors I listed in my last article that I wrote would favor Biden over time also work for Harris!

© 2024 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023. Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

(Traduce en español/translate to Spanish) By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, Threads @bfchugginalong, LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content) July 4, 2024 UPDATED July 12 2:10 PM EST with new polling in section 7 showing Biden is closing his gaps significantly nationally and in the main swing states; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

SILVER SPRING—On a day in which we just learned President Joe Biden’s economy added a preliminary total of over 200,000 jobs in June—more than expected—and just hours before a crucial, possibly-make-or-break interview with ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos tonight (I think Biden will do really well in it), let me say: dear fellow Democrats and independents, Republicans, and anyone else who has been supporting or are considering supporting Biden: TURN OFF THE NEWS (except for Biden’s interview tonight).  Go do something not related to politics.  Wait until Biden’s public events, watch them live if you can, and see how our man does.  If he does well or even just ok consistently with a few hiccups here and there, we’re fine for now and the frequency and volume of panic will recede.  If he continues to do well after for the bulk of the remaining campaign, we will be competitive until the end.  Give him a few chances and we really should be ok and stop the internal hemorrhaging inside the Democratic Party caused by Biden’s terrible performance at the debate last week and amplified greatly by the absolutely hysterical media coverage of Biden’s performance.

Here are the main reasons why I am not giving up.

1.) Time

It would be one thing if this debate had happened in October or even September, but, people, we have four freakin’ months left in this campaign.  That is A LOT of time for Biden to change the narrative and to get a steady stream of new footage of himself being far more confident, capable, vigorous, and articulate than the disaster that was this first debate.  If there is far more footage that is more recent of Biden out there in the final weeks and days of the election that is much better, it is possible that the concerns spurred by this debate performance will be largely overcome, that performance seen by enough voters as an aberration.  And that is a lot more time for insurrectionist Trump to keep producing daily outrages that will only turn more and more voters off over time and add to his long list of negatives more and more.  Insurrectionist Trump will be insurrectionist Trump and as people pay more and more attention as the race gets closer and closer to ending, he will continue to give plenty of new reasons for voters to turn against him and pick Biden.

2.) Voters Themselves

There are characteristics of voters which can work very much in Biden’s favor.  The first is that many people are like Dory from Finding Nemo: they don’t remember or consider much that isn’t recent and forget a lot of things.  So, playing into the first element, this can really work well for Biden as long as avoids any repeat performances à la this debate or only has a few more such incidents, especially the closer we get to Election Day.

Additionally, voters, even many of the most stupid ones, have levels of complexity: they generally aren’t going to cast their vote based on one thing, the main exceptions being those voters who are single-issue voters (especially on guns and abortion).  For most voters, an array of multiple issues matter; character and truth-telling matter; the candidate not being a convicted-felon matters; the candidate not being an insurrectionist matters; the team the candidate will surround himself with and govern with matters; and preserving democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law matters.  And for many people—including, I am anticipating by the end, most independents by a good margin—insurrectionist Trump is far inferior to Biden on most or all of these.  One debate weighed against all this should not and will l not be what defines this election, nor be what decides people’s votes.

3.) Democracy

Unapologetic insurrectionist and fascist Donald Trump is, simply put, very likely an extinction-level event for our democratic republic and plenty of independent voters know this.  More and more people are learning about the terrifying and far-reaching Project 2025, the Republican Party’s blueprint for a fascist America, and, simply put, many voters will say having an old president who isn’t 100% all of the time and has occasional senior moments is a small price to pay to preserve our democracy, period.

4.) Character and the Truth

While Biden was confused and jumbled his facts during the debate, insurrectionist Trump gaslit the whole time he was on stage, deliberately lying in incredible ways and even taking credit for Obama and Biden programs. Americans know Biden is way more honest than insurrectionist Trump and most voters actually care about character, integrity and telling the truth.  Even though Biden performed worse than his opponent in the debate, he still contrasted well with him on telling the truth and on character (Biden did not cheat on his wife with an adult film actress/producer and—when his wife was pregnant—a Playboy Playmate…).  And throughout his political career, insurrectionist Trump has been known as a serial liar while Biden has always contrasted well with him in this way.  Many voters will prefer an old man who occasionally has serious senior moments to a man who has lied more than any other president in U.S. history by far.

5.) Issues and Substance

Again, while Biden performed more poorly than insurrectionist Trump, most of the time he gave coherent answers that actually addressed the questions he was asked and showed he understood the issues at hand, though the exceptions to that were certainly glaring.  His opponent, in contrast, was still terrible and answered almost nothing he was asked and demonstrated no understanding of policy, presented no substance.  The debate may have gone worse for Biden, but he still scored points on insurrectionist Trump on issues and character even in the worst moment in his political career.  The presidency is far more than public speaking, far more about picking and managing personnel, about behind-the-scenes engagement and policymaking, about forging and utilizing relationship, about crisis management, and about having knowledge and expertise on topics, not primarily performing well in a debate.

6.) People Don’t Just Vote for One Person, but a Team

It’s the Biden-Harris ticket with his solid cabinet with other great officials and the Democratic Party and their all-stars in Congress who are linked together in a common effort, led by Chuck Schumer and first Nancy Pelosi and now Hakeem Jeffries.  As I noted before, empirically they are the most unified political party in Congress in American history and with one of the best-performances of a party for the first midterm for a presidential administration of the same party.  If Joe stumbles or needs some help occasionally, he will never be alone in a quizshow/gameshow format, the country falling apart if Biden doesn’t have a quick quippy answer.  Many voters will know that Biden has plenty of solid people on his team who will be there to support him, who have helped him deliver the most substantive legislative results by far of any president since Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s, and will contrast them with the extremist wackos, weirdos, liars, felons, and dangerous fascists surrounding insurrectionist Trump now, who in his first term had some respectable people around him to restrain him and now seems to have mostly just sycophantic full MAGA cultists around him: there will be no adults in the room during a second Trump term.  While Team Biden Democrats governs and governs well, Team MAGA sows chaos and division.

7.) Polling

In the week since the debate, you might have thought there would be a big drop in Biden’s support and a big increase in insurrectionist Trump’s, but there has been no large drop for Biden and no large bump up for insurrectionist Trump.  If things were as bad as the media was claiming, you would think there would be a big change in the polling situation, but so far—as of the publishing of this article—there has only been a 2.2% shift towards insurrectionist Trump and away from Biden in the average aggregate of recent polling, per FiveThirtyEight’s weighted measure weighted measuring.  Of course, this could change, but the current leads are leaks that can be plugged and the ship is not doomed to sink.  If it does get worse, it may in part be because of a negative feedback loop created by the repetitive hysteria from the media.  And even if it does get worse, it can also still get better: historically, the polls tend to shift significantly from this point in a general election to the end and are far, far more accurate in the final few months of the race after both conventions.  We are nowhere near that yet and even after that disaster of a debate Biden is only averaging 2.4% behind insurrectionist Trump nationally (he was 0.2% behind him the day of the debate), with post-debate bumps in polls for a candidate perceived to have won a debate often disappearing not long after. UPDATE 7/12: Biden is now only 1.9% behind nationally, only a 1.7% shift in insurrectionist Trump’s favor post-debate, which was at its height on July 5 at 2.5%, meaning at most insurrectionist Trump gained 2.3% at Biden’s nadir and has lost 0.6% in his edge since then. And in all the key swing states, Biden is also gaining, recovering from post-debate nadirs:

• Arizona: 7/5 5.9%-7/12 4.1% +1.8%
• Georgia: 7/5 7.5%-7/12 4.8%, +2.7%
• Michigan: 7/5 2.7%-7/12 0.2%, +2.5%
• Nevada: 7/5 5.7%-7/12 4.4%, +1.3%
• North Carolina: 7/5 8.3%-7/12 5.8%, +3.5%
• Pennsylvania: 7/8 3.4%-7/12 2.9%, +0.5%
• Wisconsin: 7/5 1.9%-7/12 1.0%, +0.9%
• National: 7/5 2.5%-7/12 1.9%, 0.6%

Voters thus far are rejecting the media’s hysteria, telling them how to vote, distortion, and misframing of this election!

Also, crackpot conspiracy theorist and vaccine denialist Kennedy—unsupported by most in his own family, who mostly support Biden—only saw 1.1% in growth since the debate, but I fully expect his support to shrink a lot as people get more and more exposed to his sheer ignorance, insane ideas, and strange way of communicating and get beyond RFK, Jr.’s name recognition.  Additionally, I expect him to take more votes from insurrectionist Trump than Biden as voters get more exposure to him since they align on some key issues and since I suspect more liberals than those open to Trump are liking him from name recognition while those open to Trump are more likely drawn to him because of his stances (the Kennedys as a political dynasty are not exactly popular with MAGA Republicans); indeed, there is some solid polling showing RFK, Jr. does take more from insurrectionist Trump even if not all the polling shows this.

8.) Debate Was One of Least-Watched in History

This was the least viewed presidential debate since 2004, twenty years ago, and while over 51 million Americans watched the debate, and that may seem like a lot, in 2020, 73 million watched the first Trump-Biden debate and 84 million watched the first Clinton-Trump debate in 2016.   In fact, the only debates with fewer viewers were when Reagan debated an independent candidate—John Anderson, who only would end up receiving 6.6% of the vote—in 1980 before his debate with Jimmy Carter—both Clinton-Dole debates in 1996, all three Gore-Bush debates in 2000, and the second and third Bush-Kerry debates in 2004 (the third just barely so), but that’s it.   This means that it was the ninth-least-viewed presidential debate since all the other general election presidential debates since 1960 had more viewers, all in Americas with fewer, often far fewer people, ninth out of thirty-six total presidential debates.

This is also the earliest debate in U.S. presidential general election debate history, the farthest from the general election, so for this reason and the low viewership, it may be one of the least impactful debates: people simply tuned the debate out and will have four more months of inputs affecting their vote before casting their ballots.  Yet it is possible if the worries about Biden’s fitness grow dramatically, the effect of the debate might seem to grow in hindsight, but a week after, there has not been much movement in the polls, as noted.

9.) Not Many People Watch the News or Subscribe to Newspapers

The fact is that not that many people watch or read the major news outlets for a country of over 335 million people.  Earlier this month pre-debate, ABC’s main primetime news show got over 7.1 million viewers, NBC’s 5.7 million, and CBS’s only about 4.3 million.  As for cable news, earlier this month before the debate, only about 2 million people watch Fox News in primetime, less than 960,000 MSNBC, less than 465,000 CNN.  In all these cases, the vast majority of viewers are 55 or older.  Maybe older people will have more sympathy for Biden being… old?

As for newspapers, more than ten million subscribe to The New York Times, and less than four million to The Wall Street Journal, and about 3.6 million to The Washington Post.  Overall, newspapers around the country have been rapidly declining in readership.

The media may be trying to push Biden out, but how many people are listening?

10.) The Media Overhypes Its Own Debates

While it could be subconscious (but may not be), as presidential debates are televised by corporate media companies and moderated and covered by their journalists, these journalists and media are executives benefit from hyping presidential debates so it is in their interests to make the debates seem like crucial, decisive moments in campaigns.  And while they can be, that is hardly always the case and seems less so in recent years, so the media can very likely be overselling both how important the debate is overall and especially how important it is to voters, which consider them an input but often not the determinative one.  For the news media, selling the debate’s importance is selling their own importance, getting subscriptions from consumers and money from advertisers (this debate had several commercial breaks).  And debates are not something that are anything close to what a president does when he actually carries out his duties, only during election campaigns.  Media executives also likely would wager that that fueling speculation about Biden being unfit or needing to step aside will also draw viewers even if it is a fake, premature crisis fueled largely by the pundit class and its own debate.  Despite the media’s intense coverage of its debates, more often than not they are not game-changers.

11.)  An Unintentional Assist from the Rogue Radical Activist Supreme Court

Between the historically disastrous two Supreme Court decisions—Chevron v. NRDC gutting regulatory agencies and the even somehow-even-worse presidential immunity one—and the debate, this has been a historically bad week for the country, not just Democrats.  With the immunity ruling coming right on the heels of the debate, I think a lot of liberals are snapping, a lot of independents and even some principled Republicans are snapping, and I think, much like when Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned Roe v. Wade and energized larger turnouts for Democrats and other pro-choice voters across multiple elections and referenda, a backlash and a reckoning Republicans are totally not expecting are on their way and it can only help Democrats and Biden.

12.) More than Inspiration from the UK’s Labour Party

All the way back in 2016, just after Brexit, I warned that that own-goal of Britain might very well portend bad things for we former colonials back here across the ocean in America, that a similar rise in the extreme right here could mean trends that might lead to a Trump victory.  Unfortunately, I was right. 

Now, the historic, roaring, total victory for Labour giving it a supermajority and obliterating the power of the Conservative Tories who blundered into one crisis after another from Brexit until the present can have the opposite effect of Brexit and portend good things for Democrats and Biden.  After all, the UK is more like the U.S. politically than any other European country.  It is the only European country (other than oddball Malta) with essentially a two-party system, both are majority-white countries with very high levels of immigration and immigrants, and both hail from a predominantly Ango/English culture and political tradition.  So it’s not crazy to suggest that the UK election results might be a preview of a strong showings for Democrats in November just as the disaster of Brexit was a preview of the horror show that was the Trump Administration.

Furthermore, voters richly rewarded a Labour Party led by a Sir Keir Starmer (now Prime Minister Starmer), who is largely regarded as boring and uninspiring and was not well-known, reminding voters that elections can be about parties and issues, not just one man.

13.) Joe Biden Has a Strong Record of Overcoming Being Underestimated

Will this be the time that Biden is not able to get back up after being knocked down?  Time will tell.  I was one of the only people who was bullish on Biden from the beginning of the primary back in 2019 and the only to predict basically exactly how the primary would unfold.  People were surprised Obama elevated him to the vice presidency.  People were saying it was naïve for Biden to try for bipartisan legislation as president only for him to get major, historic bipartisan legislation passed.  He has a long career of overcoming adversity, and, in the past, those underestimating him have been proven wrong repeatedly.  Don’t count joe out, not just yet.

Conclusion: Maybe 13 Lucky Reasons to Keep the Faith, Democrats?

Look, I am not going to sugar-coat it: I’m worried.  That debate performance has really set Joe Biden back and given him less room for error.  But we have to give Biden time to see if, as our captain, he can right the ship and get us through these troubled waters.  Things very much can get better and may very well—I believe they will—so, again, stop the hysteria and ignore the hysterical.

But things could get worse, and I can see scenarios after some time passes where it might be the best move for Biden to step aside in favor of his vice president, Kamala Harris (who has better approval ratings that are improving and is polling better than you might have been hearing from the “experts”; she and Biden poll better than the rest against Trump so far, other than Michelle Obama who has repeatedly made it clear she does not want to run).

But we simply are not there yet, the current calls are irresponsible panic and premature, and we have all these solid reasons to be hopeful that Biden can bounce back.  Only time will tell, but people need to give it time, as the Democratic National Convention is in late August and it’s only early July at the moment.  If Biden avoids having multiple major meltdowns like the one he had on debate night, I like the odds for this resilient candidate who hasn’t let us down yet when it comes to beating Donald Trump and overall leadership.  Ultimately, Biden will have to make his own decision and I trust him to make the right call as he has done so many times before.  The media “experts” who have done a terrible job of covering Biden and Democrats for years are certainly not the ones who will make that call, nor should they be.  This process has to play out and until it does, no one know what the outcome will be.

So, take a deep breath, give the old man some time to recover and show us the old Joe, and take heart for the reasons I outlined above.

© 2024 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

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By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) September 3, 2020 (conclusion slightly expand September 4)

SILVER SPRING—To be frank, part of me is ashamed that I am even writing about this.  But neither I nor sane people made Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip to a hair salon the top story on rightist media the past few days or absolutely dominate Facebook’s top link shares.  And if there is one thing that 2020 should have taught us journalists, it is that nonsense that picks up steam must be confronted forcefully, in detail, and repeatedly.  Yet, as I have noted before, the media has not learned from its 2016-cycle mistakes and is currently repeating them.  Over the last few days, Trump himself tweeted no less than four times about this, and retweeted an additional two tweets about it and one of his own tweets regarding the same.

Today, White House Press Secretary, Kayleigh McEnany literally played a loop of video of Pelosi at the hair salon to begin today’s press briefing, because the Trump Administration feels this is the most important thing in America and the world today—not, say, the more than 1,000 American dead added to the coronavirus death toll yesterday or the more than 880,000 Americans applying for unemployment benefits last week—and, somehow, that makes complete sense in the dystopian America Trump and his enablers have inaugurated.

Hairgate: Another Fake Scandal Pushed by the Right

Today’s case in point: two months before the election, we are talking about Nancy’s trip to a hair salon.  And by we, I mean pretty much every media outlet, not just right-wing news, but CNN, The New York Times, the BBC, you name it.

My suspicion, after seeing Pelosi’s response, was that, whatever what the local salon operator did, Kious as the owner would have been one of the only people with access to the security footage who could have passed it on to Fox News and that this was, indeed, a setup, because no footage of me at a private business has ever made it to a news station; no, this was not some sort of official investigation, but video from a private business of a famous politician does not just land at the desk of a news organization hostile to that politician. 

And I was right: Kious did provide the footage to the media, specifically to Fox News, which has run wild with it since, as has the rest of the right-wing media.

In her interview from last night on Fox News, Tucker Carlson said her story of her fighting COVID restrictions and fallout from her sharing this video with Fox News “one of the most heartbreaking stories I’ve heard in a long time, a long time”  (a comment made, mind you, in the era of the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Jacob Blake, among others).  She has plenty of footage of Pelosi presumably, and yet we only see a few seconds of Pelosi walking just after her hair-washing, with a face-mask on but pulled down.  Pelosi (who has constantly taken serious precautions to wear a mask and practice social distancing when Trump the vast majority of the time—even at his own Republican National Convention—has not) claims she wore the mask when she was not having her hair washed and for a moment immediately after, but other footage has not been released.  It has been stated that she was the only customer in the salon, and the staff were wearing masks, so this was hardly an incident that endangered people in any serious way, unlike Trump’s speech in front of the White House on the final night of his convention with over 1,500 people present, most of whom were not practicing social distancing or wearing masks, and unlike, say, Trump’s summer rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, at which it seems former Republican presidential candidate and Trump supporter Herman Cain may very well have contracted coronavirus, which killed him after quite a battle with the virus.

Pelosi has claimed this was a setup against her, stating she was not familiar with the specific regulations and that, when the salon, which she has frequented for years, accepted her appointment request, she assumed her visit would be in line with any regulations.  Kious makes the absurd claim in her interview with Carlson that it cannot be a setup, because she had a camera system for five years and because Pelosi’s assistant made the appointment, that it could not be a setup.  And yet, it was Kious who chose to share the video and to share it with Fox News and to speak, specifically, with Tucker Carlson in a live interview.

Guess who else thinks it was a setup by Kious?

In a statement released by his lawyer, Kious’s own contractor, Jonathan DeNardo, who ran the salon that day and did Pelosi’s hair, claims he had spoken with Kious the night of August 29^th about the request for an appointment from Pelosi’s office and said he would not take her appointment for the 31^st without Kious’s permission.  In the statement, it DeNardo claims that the fact that Pelosi was the one who wanted to come in drew “special interest” from Kious, who

made several vitriolic and incendiary comments about Speaker Pelosi and her purported responsibility for temporarily suspending operations of Ms. Kious’ business, despite such orders actually being put into place not by Speaker Pelosi, but by Governor Gavin Newsome and San Francisco Mayor London Breed.  Ultimately, Ms. Kious authorized Mr. DeNardo to proceed with Speaker Pelosi’s appointment.

If this is true, Kious and her story are both farces and she bears even more responsibility as the business owner for responsibility for allowing the appointment to proceed without even trying to have Pelosi informed that it would be in violation of the regulations, for Speaker Pelosi was still a paying, regular customer.  So, yes, this reeks of being a setup, despite claims by Kious that this is not about politics and a right-wing media eager to echo her framing.

Pelosi having the mask down for few second on video after her hair-washing surely helped Kious’s setup, but from Kious’s statement it was just the act of Pelosi coming in and making the appointment that really set Kious off, so even without Pelosi’s mask being pulled down for a few seconds on video, it seem quite likely that Kious would still have gone to Fox with news of the appointment to air the same grievances.

The legal statement on behalf of DeNardo continues to note that, contrary to Kious’s statements to Tucker Carlson, she has been frequently operating her business since April in violation of the restrictions, up to an including just a few days before Pelosi’s own visit, that Kious herself (unlike DeNardo in the video) was in multiple instances not wearing a masks or practicing social distancing and even encouraged her contractors to violate regulations “for her own financial benefit,” and that there is photographic, video, and witness evidence to substantiate these claims (as she declared she has been shut down, perhaps some enterprising sleuths will keep tabs on if she bothers to declare income from this period as legally required and if she will be held accountable frequent violations of state and local authority).

The statement’s last paragraph begins: “The fact that Ms. Kious is now objecting to Speaker Pelosi’s presence at eSalon, and from a simple surface-level review of Ms. Kious’ political leanings, it appears Ms. Kious is furthering a set-up of Speaker Pelosi for her own vain aspirations.  Mr. DeNardo’s name has now been dragged through the mud for simply following Ms. Kious’ recommendations.”

DeNardos’s attorney is right that “a simple surface-level review of Ms. Kious’ political leanings” reveals much: after even just a little research, there is an overwhelming chance she is in the MAGA/Trump crowd for different reasons, lending further credence to the idea that she would have set up Pelosi and sew the whole situation as an opportunity to create a scandal for U.S. House Speaker, whom Kious obviously does not like and, form her statements and actions, holds responsible for her frustrations even though, as the statement points out, Pelosi is neither the mayor of San Francisco nor the governor of California responsible for the restrictions in California.  Not least of the reasons is almost certainly among the Trump faithful is that she chose to go on Tucker Carlson’s show—one of the least subtly racist television shows on any major network, of all shows—to highlight this Pelosi incident and air her grievances, a decision that speaks volumes.

But there are other indicators that she is firmly part of the MAGA crowd.

Exposing the Political Motivations of a Salon Owner Who Entrapped a Paying Customer Over Politics

For one thing (and I know that this is wading into dangerous territory as some would say no one—especially men—should criticize a woman’s appearance), I will make an observation that I am certain I am not the only one to notice: that Erica Kious has that classic Fox News-fake-blonde, heavily-made-up-and-glammed look, could easily fill in for a number of the anchors reading scripts, and, certain to be a star now with the MAGA crowd, may very well have a future on Fox: she has already appeared on the problematic Tucker Carlson’s show just hours before I began writing this, and I am wholeheartedly convinced that if this had happened a few weeks ago that Erica Kious would have been a featured prime-time speaker at the Trump’s Republican National Convention cult performance art spectacle and already in the process of beatification by the MAGA faithful, with serious effort to groom her for a House seat gestating.

Additionally, while her social media presence is hardly ubiquitous and her business-sense as an owner was deep enough to keep her from posting publicly about Trump, what is out there in terms of her social media posts is pretty telling.

While truly working-class people have been devastated by COVID-19, Kious posted beaming pictures of what appears to be a vacation in Tennessee (including posting photos of firing guns at a shooting range, in which she included the hashtag “guns;” probably not [though possibly] the only-time she has been to a range given her other characteristics, with gun-loving being one of the more solid political-affiliation predictors) in August and another trip to Montana in July, writing “Montana was amazing-so fortunate to be there during the CA lockdown!!”  Keep in mind that Kious was fortunate enough to be spending long periods of time away from home on vacation during an economically devastating lockdown and yet, somehow, she was able to secure a federal Small Business Administration (SBA) Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan, which she tweeted about in late June in an angry responseto the Mayor of San Francisco, who tweeted about a delay in reopening based on “science and data.”  There was also another Tweet from Kious in July responding to the governor’s office in which Kious complained that San Francisco had not reopened yet. 

She also complained in a post against a proposed California tax increase extension, Proposition 55, that a $250,000 household income “is not rich here in the Bay Area with two kid [sic] in school and daycare cost-that’s low! This is bullshit!!!”  That’s right, this woman is complaining and stating that her family with two kids presumably making $250,000 a year should not be considered “rich.”  A quarter-of-a-million a year is “middle class” or “working class?”  I know the San Francisco area is not cheap, but over $250,000 in household income places you just above the 95^th percentile (the average is less than $90,000 and median is about $63,000) in household income.  Thus, her household is making more than at least 95% of other American households.  Even in the San Francisco-Oakland-Haywood conglomerate, $250,000 for household income is in the 83^rd percentile.  Again, typical of wealthy conservatives to downplay their wealth but even in a very wealthy area like the San Francisco Bay area, her household is making at least more than 83 percent of other households.  But the Trump Administration felt this woman was deserving of an emergency loan when so many truly small businesses were not granted them, with friends and family of the president and larger corporations taking money that could have gone to those who truly needed it. 

In two other recent Facebook posts, Kious also came out strongly against California Assembly Bill 5 (AB-5), which, controversially and in a complicated way, seeks to limit abusive corporate practices in which companies treat de facto employees as freelancers, denying them benefit and forcing double the payroll taxes on then because they incorrectly classify them as freelancers (as a freelancer myself, I will disclose that I am very much for forcing such companies, like Uber and Upwork, to treat their employees better, pay them higher wages, and cover far more payroll taxes rather than try to milk the advantages of using freelancers without allowing such freelancers to truly have the freedom  and lack of constriction that is supposed to come with being a freelancer).

Prior to the pandemic, she also put up one Facebook post mocking positive coverage of Jay-Z and Beyoncé expecting twins (seriously, who does not like Beyoncé [besides right-wingers]?), another post that was a typical right-wing shallow complaint about a DMV being understaffed in spite of “all the tax we pay and smog checks and all the money the state & DMV take from people,” and another mocking protesters taking to the streets in opposition to Trump just after his elec

Erica Kious does not by any means need to be canceled or boycotted, and there should be zero tolerance of any serious efforts at harassment, threats, intimidation or having her life ruined.  Neither should her family, friends, or business.  She has already established herself as another inane prop in our inane political-stage Kabuki-theater-drama, but after refuting and exposing her nonsense, let us not give her any more oxygen or attention other an occasional fleeting look or update here or there, without the formatting of big-type fonts or front/top-landing-page position.  As far as politics, she should be ignored as much as humanly possible, other than firmly and emphatically exposing the farce that is her disingenuous setup of Pelosi, period, full stop.

Stupid Is As Stupid Does

As noted, Pelosi has been consistent in her use and advocacy of masks and social distancing and certainly more than the MAGA cult and the Dear Leader Donald (I am not trying to be cute: they and he truly act like a cult and a cult leader, respectively).  In the words of CNN media critic Oliver Darcy

It’s a perfect example of a story, pushed heavily by partisans, getting outsized attention in our current information ecosystem. In normal times, that would not be a great reflection on our media environment, but also unworthy of this screed. But with so many grave issues facing the country, it’s outrageous that this—of all the dire problems we face as Americans—is dominating the public conversation.

Beyond outrageous, it is incredibly pathetic, a true testament to how the right arranges its priorities, and a true indicator of how utterly and contemptibly stupid the whole Trump MAGA cult is.  Even now, I still wait to come across a single declared supporter of Donald Trump who expresses that—amidst a combination of national and international health, economic, and other crises not seen in any of our lifetimes except for those who are literally a century old or older—such a degree of focus on a trip to a hair salon is decidedly undeserving of so much attention or weight.  Kious is right in a sense that this is not about politics, but hardly in the duplicitous way she stated. These cultists must be driven from power as much as possible and serious, rational, sane adults who care about saving lives, jobs, democracy, and the global democratic order must prevail, with Biden–Harris as the only hope for those global forces to prevail.  And in this struggle, Hairgate exists not as a real scandal for Speaker Nancy Pelosi but only as evidence of the sheer bankruptcy of the Trump MAGA cult and the sheer mockery it has made even of the now long-hollow Republican Party that started on this sad, sorry path years ago, the shell of which has been coopted by the parasitic MAGA cult run by a the most unfit president ever to hold the office, installed by Russia’s Vladimir Putin weaponizing our own stupidity against us even as we may be allowing it to happen again. As I have pointed out before, a majority of the top “stories” on Facebook and varyingly large portions of stories on other platforms and networks in the final months, weeks, and days of the 2016 election were either fake news or garbage, with hairgate and other “scandals” like the Bidens-Ukraine-Burisma “story” (which I have discussed in detail) giving an awful sense of déjà vu in this election cycle.

Also, even though now Ted Cruz and pregnancy are trending together, I am too emotionally drained by the above to even take on that mountain of stupidity.  Apologies, but that baton can be handled by someone else.

© 2020 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

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By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) August 20, 2020

SILVER SPRING—This piece is going to be less about research and facts and more just personal reflection, but quite analytical still.  So let us dive in.

Harris the Senator and Candidate: Not Her Best Self

As I noted before in one recent piece, I thought Kamala Harris had an impressive resume but that Susan Rice’s resume was far more impressive vice presidentially and that it was not even close.

I stand by that analysis.

After I wrote that piece, I began writing another looking at personality and other intangible aspects to rate both Rice and Harris as candidates.  I had gotten through half of what I had originally planned, finishing the part on first impressions, when it was announced that Harris was the pick.  I was slightly surprised, and then began thinking more and more about(now-) Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden picking her, and what that meant.  I had laid out earlier serious concerns about who Harris was as a person and how she chose to present and conduct herself in key moments in her career public career as a senator.  Biden’s picking her did not mean that my concerns were invalid, but it did mean that he has thought of them, spoken with and vetted her, and left confident that her positives outweighed, by far, those concerns.

So, as I wrote my conclusion to that last piece, I decided to look at her in a new light.  And I had realized, in that white-and-male dominated rat-race of politics, Kamala understandably felt a tremendous amount of pressure as a woman of color.  New to a gridlocked Senate and not able to pass any of her legislation, she focused, instead, on trying to create viral moments much like Warren’s “Nevertheless, she persisted” moment, as I detailed in my last piece and for which SNL satirized her.

Since I mentioned the NBA basketball documentary The Last Dance in my previous pieces, I will compare some of these moves to Reggie Miller initiating contact, expertly, and getting an offensive foul called on a defender: a cheap but very effective ploy.  I admit, without such moments, it would have been hard for her to get attention and distinguish herself in a gridlocked senate.  But as someone who was an athlete in high school and a huge Kicks fan, I hate Reggie Miller and cheap, fake play like that.  I just do not like those kinds of cheap, media-driven moves, but hey, my purist style is probably not opportunistic enough for a freshman junior senator trying to run for president; I understand the politics behind such plays and can appreciate it as an effective tactic (just look at Reggie), but I do not have to like it, as I mentioned in my last piece.

Well, Harris and her campaign doubled down on this kind of conduct in 2019 in the presidential campaign and debates, most notably in cheap shots against Biden and Warren (the latter really backfiring but both probably souring her with Democrats who do not like seeing their beloved figures suffer from friendly fire that is unfair; it did not work for Sec. Julían Castro, either, for the record) and even Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who ripped her apart on her criminal justice record.  Now, I cannot stand fringe-y, wacky Tulsi Gabbard (though I respect her military service), but the way in which Harris did not really defend her record but, instead, punched down at Gabbard in response—as if Gabbard was simply beneath her—was also not impressive to me and rubbed me very much the wrong way.

But I am a policy wonk who likes fair, accurate, collegial (when within the Party, at least) campaigning and avoiding the cheap shots, taking the high road.  And, in the end, my guy with that style won and got the nomination.  Still, at the time, Biden saw what I did not: a tough, aggressive rival whose fire could be turned effectively against the GOP in a general election, who could competently deflect away from things she did not want to answer, and would be a good complement for a guy who is too open and says too much about his vulnerabilities, is too candid.  In other words, she could be different and was in ways that would enhance the ticket as a number two far beyond just being younger, a woman, and a person of color.

I also knew she had a friendship with Beau Biden, the heroic, accomplished son of Joe’s who succumbed to cancer in 2015.  What I did not know was how close Kamala was with Beau, and that this closeness helped create an authentic relationship between Joe and Kamala.  But that relationship between Joe and Kamala just did not come out on the campaign trail in 2019, not on TV and certainly not at the debates.  Harris was going to put her friendship with Biden aside and play aggressively to win by going after Joe and letting Joe defend himself rather than take chances to defend him, too, even with the Hunter Biden, Ukraine,  and Burisma smears.  This was at a time when it was very possible (especially if Harris had run a very different campaign) for Harris to put herself in a position to overtake Biden in ways that were never realistic other candidates.  Again, I do not have to like it, but, at the same time, Harris had a real shot, she felt that would work, and negative cheap-shot campaigning is far from the most insane tactic from a rationalist perspective; sometimes, politics really is House of Cards.  I can respect that as a candidate choice even if I do not like it.  It just did not work, thanks to Democratic primary voters and in spite of biased mainstream media coverage and because.  And, thankfully for me as a Biden supporter, this was in part because Harris ran an overall terrible campaign.  The opportunity to build enough support passed for Harris, she saw the writing on the wall, and, like Joe Biden in his 1988 election cycle presidential campaign dropping out in late 1987, dropped out even before 2020 began.

Biden Picks Harris for the Real Kamala

But Biden was clearly impressed with Harris’s grit, and, from the personal relationship few knew they had, he knew things most Americans did not know about her: her warm, thoughtful, unrehearsed, tender, compassionate, funny, fun, likable (dare I say humble?) side.  While a large portion of Harris’s major public displays since becoming a senator were calculated, shallow, and not highlighting in deep, substantive ways her impressive, substantive record, Joe knew the real Kamala when she was not trying too hard, not so desperate to distinguish herself in an ineffective Senate and a crowded debate stage.

So it was that I began to think that he must know her in ways I did not, and gave Biden the benefit of the doubt in picking her and, thus, gave her the benefit of the doubt.  If Biden could be big in putting aside Harris’s cheap attacks, trusting that what he saw in her was greater than my less-familiar impressions, even if they were consistent, I could put those attacks aside too (“All’s fair in love and war and politics too??” [meh]).  I began to get excited about the speech she would give the next day as I was writing my conclusion to my second Harris piece, and the moment that was put out on social media, when she was delighted, surprised, and humbled when Biden offered her the VP slot, was a different side of her, what I felt must be the real Kamala, what it seems she had in some ways been hiding from me and many others who did not know her better.  The person she thought would work politically may not have, but I could not wait to see her the next day give her first speech as Joe’s VP selection.

But even before then, I began to realize where I had been wrong in other ways.  Rice easily had the best resume, and I care little for flash, for theatrical performance, for how “cool” or smooth someone was when weighed against policy chops, expertise, and experience.  But guess what: there are very few voters like me, and most voters will pick the “cool” telegenic candidate over Albert Einstein himself.  And I realized, that, politically, sacrificing some substance and experience for a person who has exceptional poise, stage presence, and charisma (even when Harris is falling flat, you see glimpses of that, and I had seen a few far better moments here and there) but who still has a relatively impressive resume is the best fit politically, especially for such a crisis moment that amounts either the survival or death of our democracy, as former President President Barack Obama himself made terrifyingly clear last night.

Basically, I put too much stock on experience and expertise (Rice) and not enough on optics and performance.  If we had three grades for each candidate—substance, style, and baggage—Harris would be score higher than rice; even if her substance score was not nearly as high as Rice’s, her style score—when Harris is at her best—was incredibly high and she has far less baggage that can hurt.  And it is not that Rice is not also a great personality, it is simply that Harris is one of those rare top-tier-with-very-few peers-level-of-charisma people.  I think Rice could have won Americans over, but she also has the whole Benghazi and unmasking “baggage,” which, though totally nonsense and made-up smears obviously concocted by Republicans, still would have admittedly stuck and dogged a Biden-Rice campaign throughout the election (just ask Hillary Clinton how damaging false smears can be!).  So Rice, though more substantive, had more risks whereas Harris was relatively lower-risk, higher political reward, still strong substantively, and did not have any of that Benghazi-Clinton-Obama Administration baggage; Rice was an old Washington Hand (which I loved) but Harris was fresh, new, and exiting (which pretty much everyone else loved).  I did not consider politics enough (though a VP is mainly needed as a governing partner) and, especially for campaigning in the coronavirus era, did not consider enough the ability to produce energetic, viral clips nearly enough.  As a policy wonk, I needed to remember that wonks are a political constituency that amounts to the negligible and recognize the importance of mass appeal to a public that generally will not care as much about someone being an Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs or a peacekeeping specialist on the National Security Council as they will about sheer star power.

In short, I was wrong to favor Rice over Harris if you take politics, not just resumes, into account.

Kamala’s Real Self Is Her Best self

And yet, that was Harris’s fault, because of the way she campaigned and presented herself since becoming a senator in key moments when she had the most exposure.

So when Harris was formally introduced to speak as Joe’s VP pick by Joe himself, when I saw the real Kamala Harris, a.k.a. Mamala, when I saw the emotion and tenderness with which she spoke about her relationship with Beau and how Beau was the one who really made her understand what made Joe Biden so special, when I saw how deeply she respected Joe and appreciated Joe, when I saw her warmth and grace in a setting where she did not have to fight to be remembered on a stage with about ten other people, when I saw the grace, dignity, and humility with which she accepted this honor, and when I saw the measured but more natural version of the fierce prosecutor, indicting Trump not in a soundbite but in but methodical, righteous detail, with measured yet genuine anger and scorn that felt organic and not staged, I was fully on board with Team Kamala.

Biden’s pick of her brough me over to her in my head, but Kamala herself won over my heart when I got to see the real her in this first real speech by her as Joe’s running mate.  Joe had picked the most magnetic and charismatic person available from the entire pool of presidential candidates and other VP hopefuls, and, apart from Rice, the person with the best resume among all of the mentioned VP contenders: in other words, the best VP candidate possible for this moment, especially at a time of great reckoning and awakening and tragedy, when someone not a woman of color would have affected enthusiasm among some key voting blocks, especially younger voters of all colors, whose level of cynicism and disaffection may be what determines the outcome of this election (if it is voting that will determine it and not voter suppression or Russian interference).

Harris and Biden: A New Hope Bringing Out the Best in Each Other

To be clear, I am (cautiously) optimistic Biden can and will win by a lot (though I am also filled with dread, but more on that another time), and I think no matter his VP selection, this would be the case as long as it was not someone too far-left for most Americans, like Sens. Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren (sorry Bernie and Liz fans, that’s political reality, but thanks to both senators for such solid support for Biden!), so I do not buy what some of the punditry—especially, understandably, those so strongly identifying with and seeing themselves in Harris—are saying along the lines of Biden “needing” Harris,” or that the man perhaps most steeped in policy of any major-party nominee in American history “needed” her on any particular issue or with any particular demographic.

But I strongly believe Harris is a major win-win even allowing for stupid racists and misogynists, that Harris adds a lot to Biden’s team, that her different perspective as the last second-opinion in the room will be good and valuable to Biden much like one way Obama found Biden so valuable, and am thrilled—even ecstatic—that she will be by his side during the campaign and, we should all hope, in the White House.

To be clear, I though her speech when Biden introduced her was perfect.  Literally perfect.  As was her speech accepting the Vice-Presidential nomination, and with that first speech, I was an enthusiastically on board with Team Kamala.  Harris, freed of the inane pressure of having just a few minutes to shine, showed her real self, the one Joe loves and Beau Biden loved, the one I had only seen glimpses of, in its full glory.  This side of Harris reminded me, too, why I love Biden, for he chose so wisely and so well: Harris is no black-Indian Palin, so, she is a singularity in this election cycle when freed to be herself by herself and the format.  She will demolish Vice President Mike Pence one-on-one and electrify the campaign trail like Palin did for (the now late) Sen. John McCain, though not with crass appeal to racists and xenophobes, but with grace and substance, hope and accountability.

I had serious issues with Harris.  I was offended by how she conducted herself, and though I respected her talent and accomplishments, I just was not feeling her.  I also had issues with her record.  But Joe’s faith in Harris as demonstrated by his picking her and Kamala’s own since her selection—her conduct in rising decidedly to the occasion—made me realize who the real Kamala Harris was I was sold.  Even on policy, as Peter Beinart persuasively argues in The Atlantic, as a trailblazing black-Indian-American woman trying to win statewide office California, she more or less did what she had to do.

So now?  Call me a Kamala Convert.

Kamala—Senator Harris—thank you for showing me and so many others your real-self.  Joe is so smart to have picked you and so lucky to have you by his side.  The Democratic Party may very well have found its next Obama, and America may have found the perfect teammate for Biden to both beat Trump and Pence like a drum out of the White house and save America, democracy, and the world from Donald Trump’s insanity, tribalism, and a rising fascism, as a Democratic Party Batman and Robin: Joe as Batman and Kamala as a much cooler-than-normal, way-more-stylish Robin.  They are the superhero duo we need now, and let me be an example of how one of Harris’s superpowers is winning over serious doubters to become fervent supporters.

See related previous articles: Substance vs. Style as Biden Picks Harris over Rice and Based on Experience, Susan Rice Is Easily—by Far—the Best Choice for VP for Biden (Sorry Harris Fans, that Includes Kamala)

© 2020 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s latest eBook,Coronavirus the Revealer: How the Coronavirus Pandemic Exposes America As Unprepared for Biowarfare & Bioterrorism, Highlighting Traditional U.S. Weakness in Unconventional, Asymmetric Warfare, available in Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, and EPUB editions.

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here and, of course, please share the hell out of this article!!

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) August 11, 2020 (see related articles: August 20, 2020: I Was Wrong about Harris. Why I Changed My Mind and How She Won Me Over and August 8, 2020: Based on Experience, Susan Rice Is Easily—by Far—the Best Choice for VP for Biden (Sorry Harris Fans, that Includes Kamala))

WASHINGTON and SILVER SPRING—In my earlier recent piece comparing the careers of California Senator Kamala Harris and former Obama Administration National Security Advisor and United States Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, I noted that I have been watching and really enjoying ESPN’s The Last Dance (the documentary series about Michael Jordan and his Chicago Bulls’s championship teams, especially their final championship run).  I noted that there are two main facets as to how a player gets selected for a team and how they perform: the first facet is the stats: the numbers that would be a on a player’s trading card; that is what I looked at in that last piece as far as Harris and Rice.  In this piece, I want to look at some of the intangibles, the second facet: the stuff that you would not get by looking at a trading card, but which speak more to personality and traits that are more about how you operate or fit on a team in ways that numbers cannot display.  And a lot of these intangibles can come across in informed first impressions voters get from seeing each for the first time.

First Impressions

I will begin first by just explaining how I remember being introduced and familiar with both Rice and Harris.

Rice

With Rice, I do not really remember anything specific.  I did not watch or read a lot of news in the 1990s in middle school or high school.  I was super busy in both: lots of activities (music, sports) and taking advanced classes throughout.  I also went to a fairly strict boarding school for high school (shout out to Canterbury), where TV-watching was quite limited (and when we had freedom to watch TV in the common room, it was usually sports and MTV that the other kids had on; I never, ever recall seeing the news on in the dorms.  If I had put the news on, I probably would have been physically driven out of the dorms) and where I was busy enough that I did not get to read the news too often, either.

I still followed politics a bit somehow in high school, but I can say that I have no recollection that I ever heard of or even saw Susan Rice when she was with the Clinton Administration or in the time that followed before she was with the Obama campaign.  I do not have any recollection of becoming aware of her existence during the 2008 election either, though perhaps I saw her on TV or read an article or few that mentioned her.  I do know that I became aware of her as our Ambassador to the United Nations.  I recall nothing specific between the first term and the Benghazi “scandal,” other than a few times she would have been speaking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the UN and I am sure I saw her other times in clips of other UN deliberations as well as press conferences, interviews, and in articles.  Each time, I remember seeing her calm, composed, knowledgeable, competent, sharp, and articulate, a solid representation of America to the world and a competent National Security Advisor, one of the only black women in American history to reach such heights in government and on the world stage representing America.  Until recently, I only had a vague—I had never digested her in depth or at length—but strongly positive impression of her, with no complaints that I can recollect; this was, in part, because I researched the Benghazi situation deeply in advance of Clinton’s marathon Congressional testimony of October, 2015, and realized that entire case against Hillary Clinton (and, by default, Susan Rice) in terms of the Benghazi fiasco, was, as I noted at the time, a cynical, disgusting, disingenuous, dishonest, witch hunt-like, purely political attempt to damage Hillary Clinton and the Obama Administration before the 2016 election (check out my in-depth article examining this hearing for a dismantling of all the specious, misleading, and/or untruthful arguments put out by Republicans).  The first experience I ever had that really focused on Rice was watching while working out in the fall of 2019 an interview of her by Walter Isaacson for Amanpour and Company on the event of the release of her memoir.  I was incredibly impressed with her, and have since paid more attention to her and her interviews and tweets since her book tour started, and her public interactions have consistently been at a level that keeps impressing me at a very high level.

Harris

When it came to Harris, my introduction to her was very much at a time when I was glued into politics as a freelance reporter who was then focusing much more on American politics than I had previously, and, she was also being built up as a star; for these reasons, I ended up paying way more attention to her when I first came across her than I did with Rice.  I was still living in the Middle East, but had found, most disappointingly and quite sadly, that Trump and the U.S. election cycle giving me much more opportunity and paid way better than covering Syrian refugees, ISIS, Iraq, or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  I had been closely following the whole Trump-Russia saga, in particular, since July, 2016.  Thus, when there was a highly-anticipated hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee with key figures from the intelligence and law enforcement community, including Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who had only weeks earlier appointed former FBI Director Robert Mueller as Special Counsel to investigate Trump’s ties to Russia, Russian election interference, and any possible collusion between people around Trump with the Russian government or its intermediaries, I was highly interested. 

One of the Democratic senators taking part in the hearing was the newly-elected Kamala Harris from California.  Her win in 2016 was certainly met with some excitement, the second black woman to be elected to the U.S. Senate and the first South-Asian (her father was black and her mother was Indian).

Full disclosure: I grew up near New York, and we East Coasters pay little attention to California politics.  So, I barely paid attention to her in the 2016 campaign, which was an extremely busy time for me when I was trying to cover the primaries and Clinton vs. Trump.  Thus, I was pretty excited about this hearing: in many ways, it would be Harris’s biggest stage yet, her introduction to the national scene, and it was certainly her introduction to me.  I remember hearing a lot of hype about how she could be the next Obama, presidential material, and the future of the party, so I was expecting to be mightily impressed and looking forward to seeing one of our brightest new stars of my left on the national stage in action.

Now, full disclosure: before you read my take on what transpired, you should know I watched the entire hearing live and closely (full video and transcript).  I was deeply interested in all the proceedings and was at least somewhat, sometimes very, familiar with the issues being discussed.  And I have to say that from the very beginning of her allotted time (video beginning with that here) during the hearing, I was shocked at how obnoxious, grating, and disappointing I found her performance to be.  From the very beginning, she was rude and grandstandy, first very briefly to Admiral Mike Rogers, cutting him off after asking him a question so that he asked, respectfully, “Senator, if you could, could I get to respond, please, ma’am?” He then tried to continue but she interrupted him again.  “No, sir. No, no.”

It looked like Harris was going to act like a Big Name prosecutor taking on a Hostile Witness, and almost immediately, she switched to question Rosenstein with the bulk of her time, confirming this impression with him, too.  She constantly interrupted him and cut him off, was rude and hostile, not yelling and haranguing like maniac and staunch Trump apparatchik Jim Jordan might in the House, not even raising her voice to the less-annoying-than-Jim Jordan-level of Republican Ted Cruz in the saucer-cooling Senate, but still clearly determined to stand out, show that she was being “tough,” demonstrate her stern courtroom prosecutorial demeanor, and make a name for herself with a figure like Rosenstein very much in the headlines.  And her whole premise was to act like she was leading an effort to protect Mueller from Trump Administration interference or from even being sacked to protect the president, citing a precedent where a previous Attorney General (AG) overseeing an independent, specially-appointed inquiry had pledged in writing to respect the independence of the investigation.  But in that case, the appointed head of the inquiry was a sitting U.S. Attorney that could be fired by the president, so there was a potential conflict in that he normally reported as a Department of Justice employee to the AG and served at the pleasure of the president.  In this case, Mueller was a retired and private citizen who was not part of the Department of Justice and did not have that conflict or reporting issues and could not be fired by the president and under law could only be fired under special, non-political, non-arbitrary circumstances by the top Department of Justice official overseeing the investigation (Rosenstein, because AG Jeff Sessions had recused himself).   Between that and the regulations of the particular law governing Mueller’s appointment—regulations that that did not apply to the precedent Harris was citing—Harris’s point was moot and so were her attempts to get Rosenstein, in a quite a badgering (do not worry, I apply that term often for male congressman) and hostile manner, to commit to a statement in writing like the one she cited earlier but that did not apply under circumstances that were quite different in relation to Harris’s line of questioning.

Rosenstein was very respectfully trying to explain this to Harris, but Harris repeatedly cut him off and continued to demand a simple answer to a complex question.  Sen. John McCain, who stood up more to Trump and Republican malfeasance and better than any other Republican senator during the Trump Administration, came to the rescue of Rosenstein, asking for Harris to stop interrupting the witness and to let him answer the question.  The Republican Chairman of the Committee, Senator Richard Burr, would join in, stopping Harris after she challenged even Burr him from repeating the same question in a hostile manner and permitting Rosenstein to make the above explanation about why a simple “yes” or “no” did not as answer given the different circumstances.

And by hostile, I mean hostile; again, I watched the entire over two-and-a-half-hours-long hearing, and nobody else acted in any way near the manner of Harris.  Only her’; everyone else—Democrat and Republican alike—was polite to the witnesses, did not repeatedly cut them off, used a respectful, non-badgering tone, and did not feel the need to be adversarial even though they found a great many things to be frustrating and concerning, but Harris adopted this adversarial tone from her very first question to the admiral and continued using it until her time was up.

There are two other reasons why this is incredibly obnoxious: despite pressure from the president to stop Mueller, Rosenstein had defended Mueller’s probe (it was Rosenstein who became alarmed enough at Trump’s behavior that he was the one who decided to appoint a special counsel to investigate Trump, and it was also Rosenstein he who chose Mueller) and had given Mueller a lot of freedom, independence, and support.  Rosenstein is far from perfect and has had some problematic aspects of his time as Deputy AG ands since, but at this point he has been very much on the right side by deciding to appoint a special counsel, Mueller, and working to keep the integrity of Mueller’s investigation secure amidst considerable pressure to compromise it by Trump, Republicans, and right-wing media.  The other reason this is incredibly obnoxious is that I am certain Kamala Harris knew the law (she is an accomplished prosecutor and served as California’s Attorney General) and knew that her point was largely moot, not appropriate, and not fair to Rosenstein.  But she was determined to establish herself as a tough newcomer, to get attention, to rise above all her peers during her first major public hearing.  She was trying to trap both the admiral and especially Rosenstein into “gotchya” questions, embarrassing them and pushing them into a seemingly hypocritical trap to make the witness look like he hiding something unnecessarily in the case of the admiral and that he was not willing to stand up for the independence and integrity of the Mueller probe in the case of Rosenstein (which by all accounts up to that point and many beyond, he had).  So Harris knew she did not need to be overly concerned over Rosenstein at that point; she knew her clever attempt to prosecutorally box Rosenstein in like he was a defendant on the witness stand back in California was not getting at the heart of any major issues with the Mueller probe, knew that her actions were designed to generate a soundbite that would hopefully go viral, and knew she was engaging in self-promotion that was a subtle attack on the integrity of both Rosenstein and Admiral Rogers over a moot point, designed to make her look like she was a tough prosecutor who was taking a version of Law and Order to Washington.  In an otherwise cordial hearing, her contentious exchanges would stand out and get her attention in a situation where most junior senators would not behave this way.  You could smell presidential aspirations on her from a mile away.  And if you think I am making this up, this is exactly how Maya Rudolph satirized Harris on Saturday Night Live: always looking to create a media moment that would go viral on the internet, designed to get her attention and often show her as a tough ready-for-primetime prosecutor, regardless of the level of substance behind what she was saying.

Yep, that was my introduction to Harris: a woman clearly of great intellect, substance, and capability that chose to engage in grandstanding devoid of substance, misleading but guaranteed to get headlines.

I was deeply saddened; is this what the internet was doing to us, hollowing out our politics to be mostly hot air?  Was Harris going to use her office to be an effective legislator or focus on promoting herself in the media and on using her office to prepare a presidential run?  Would we be elevating the likes of Bernie Sanders whose “plans” were never in the realm of reality and whose central narratives and premises justifying his campaign were crafted on fantasy, thus pretty much dooming his campaign?  Were capable women of substance going to choose to play for meme and viral moments, hoping to base their campaigns on social media likes and shares?  Were these folks really going to be the future of the Party?

But the next day, it would get even worse, as Harris tried to capitalize on her events from the day before in an even more blatantly cynical attempt to create a viral, slogan-ready moment.  Because she had been interrupted by McCain and Burr—two men, two white men—there was an opportunity to frame their actions as sexist or even racist.  One thing is for certain: Warren’s viral “Nevertheless, she persisted” moment form just a few months earlier—when Republican male Senate colleagues had silenced Warren with a rarely used technicality regarding actions that “impute” fellow senators directly—was very much on Harris’s mind, and she clearly wanted to recreate that, especially the vibe of a woman standing up to powerful men.  It was almost like she could see Warren (whom I have been fairly critical of for various reasons) getting an edge over here for 2020 and she wanted to respond, and while Warren’s moment seemed relatively authentic, this would have a feel of being manufactured.  Harris’s plan was already implemented within two days of the hearing, with Harris was advertising stickers on Facebook with the words “courage not courtesy” you could get on her website—not on her Senate site, but kamalaharris.org (translation: she’s running.  Already.  In June, 2017).

Now, first off, there is a tremendous amount of sexism in the world, in America, in politics, in the Senate.  Of that, there is no doubt among rational, informed people.  And to be fair to Harris, it was smart politics.  Gimmicky as hell?  Cringingly forced and inauthentic?  Sure.  But definitely effective: most voters would not have watched the hearing.  Some—many—will have seen the clips of Harris and taken the image of her she wanted them to; most certainly would not have known much about Rosenstein or the special counsel regulations, and she was betting on that.  She had created her viral moment, though it would pale in impact and reach to Warren’s, and, I suspect, fell far short of what she was hoping, but it certainly got the attention of the media, some outlets of which tried to make it a sequel to Warren’s big moment.

I have watched Harris plenty of times since then, and, at least until the 2020 campaign—another story possibly for another time—most of her performances were much better that what I saw at the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing.  I would be wrong if I did not admit that this first major impression she made was strong, and that it made me more likely to read calculated political gamesmanship into some of her actions—I would say fairly—but that did not stop me from seeing her as capable, formidable, one of the top rising stars on the left, and a top-tier contender for the 2020 nomination, one of the few I thought that could compete with Biden if he was to run.

Yet still, once of the reasons I love Biden is his authenticity and positioning of substance front and center throughout his career.  As for “courage not courtesy,” just ugh.  I have written about the devolution of our politics for years and it has been happening for years, but once thing that was fairly consistent for some time was that, unlike the more unruly House, the Senate was supposed to be an elevated form of politics less prone to theatrics, more prone to comity, civility, cooperation, and compromise, with less heated rhetoric and more substantive deliberations, more removed from the passions and the whims of the masses.  There is an old, unsubstantiated tradition that Washington told Jefferson that the Senate was like a “saucer” that could allow “our legislation to cool.”  In the words of James Madison in Federalist “No. 62,” the Senate would be less “subject to the infection of violent passions, or to the danger of combining in pursuit of unjust measures” than the House.  But these days, this distinction is decidedly weakened and weakening, and I am not for that.  Today is all about “populists” on both sides smashing tradition and norms and going around institutions and political colleagues “directly to the people,” whatever that means.  Think Bernie Sanders’s mobilizing millions of people to take to the streets as a governing philosophy.  Far worse, think about Trump’s calls on his supporters to take to the streets if things do not go well for him.  Harris’s theatrics were by far nowhere near the worst I have seen in the Senate, not even close to second worst (Hello, Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton!), but they were another step in a decline that seriously worried me.  And Harris, clearly, cared little for such tradition if she felt she could blaze a trail for her advancement.

A reasonable case can be made that this is what is needed at this time, that Harris’s calculation is what is needed against the Republican and Trumpian threat.  I thought to myself, Harris might have what it takes to win in the Internet/Twitter age, perhaps even what is needed to take on Trump, and she would have my support against him, but I do not have to like it.  I do not have to like how she treated DAG Rosenstein and Admiral Rogers.  I not have to like the premeditation to stand out tonally in a setting when it just was not at all necessary.  I do not have to like the calculated attempt to prepare sloganeering stickers within days.

But that does not mean I can not like or support Harris.

Rooting for (vice presidential nominee) Harris’s Best Self

As I write this conclusion, news is breaking that Biden has picked Harris.  My preference would definitely have been for Susan Rice.  But I point out these issues I have with Harris (before or after her being picked) not to denigrate her, not to turn people against her.  Harris if anything responds to the atmosphere in the moment.  She could very likely be our next vice president.  She would have my support as VP and should have all our support, has mine as a candidate for VP, and deserves our respect for earning this pick on the part of Biden.

To an extent, some of the concerns I have about Harris are mollified by Biden’s confidence in her in selecting her.  At the same time, I am still publishing this not just because I had written most of it before the pick was announced, but because I hope these concerns I have will be shared by others in a way where we push Harris to be her best self, not the disappointing campaigner we saw in 2019 and much better than the performance I saw in the hearing from 2017 I discussed above.

I have 100% confidence that Harris is more than capable of taking the higher road.  Even though I argued recently that Rice had better experience to be a VP, Harris’s experience is still impressive and contains much substance, much to be proud of, and she is both a safer and probably a better bet politically.  It is a sad testament to our current politics that a woman of color so accomplished and so talented would feel the need to play to internet/meme culture so strongly, though Peter Beinart makes a good case defending her in The Atlantic that, like Obama, as a black trailblazer in politics she has had to play it safer, in that article’s case, with her actions on criminal justice in California, actions which have been heavily criticized.  I hope, now that she has bested all but one man to be the second survivor of the Democratic primaries, that she will feel less pressure, feel more freedom, and feel confident enough in her selection by Biden to run more on substance and less on style and seeking viral moments (not that those do not help, but that is my preference as one of her supporters and one who wants to see our politics reelevated).  I hope that, if Biden wins, she can learn from someone like Susan Rice on foreign and security policy, follow Biden’s lead, be a great governing partner, and set herself up to be an amazing president of her own years down the road. 

And that is in part up to us:  it is no longer the Democratic primaries, and a much more moderate, national crowd is her audience; as her supporters or on-the-fence-voters, it is, in part, up to us to telegraph what we want from her, so lets us demand her very best, not clamor for internet gimmicks and viral videos.  I know that my complaints here were mostly about her style and how she operated, but these “little” things, the way you pursue your goals, the norms you respect and those you break, the tenor and tone you set, set all matter… just look at Trump!

Even as I am writing this conclusion, my emotions changed a bit.  Even as someone who was rooting for Susan Rice, I am happy and pleased with Harris (whom I saw as a much better-qualified candidate than Warren, both for president and vice president), and I am genuinely proud of Harris and of her selection by my candidate Joe Biden and my Democratic Party, the historic first woman of color on a major party ticket.  It is sad because of our insane coronavirus pandemic response that we cannot have a live event with a huge crowd welcoming Kamala Harris on stage with Joe Biden: both deserved that, especially Harris.  But that lost moment is the least of the slights and challenges Harris will face going forward.  I am now rooting for Harris, and confident she can help Biden win and govern.  She is immeasurably better than Vice President Pence and even more so (obviously) than President Donald Trump.

The pressure is on, but I hope and am confident that Senator Kamala Harris will rise to the occasion.  We, the people behind her, can help by pushing to keep substance front and center in a campaign that will contain a historic amount of nonsense from Trump, Republicans, the right-wing media, and the Russians.  But together and, yes, with Kamala Harris’s help, we can ensure that President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are sworn in on January 20^th, 2021.

See related previous article: Based on Experience, Susan Rice Is Easily—by Far—the Best Choice for VP for Biden (Sorry Harris Fans, that Includes Kamala)

© 2020 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s latest eBook,Coronavirus the Revealer: How the Coronavirus Pandemic Exposes America As Unprepared for Biowarfare & Bioterrorism, Highlighting Traditional U.S. Weakness in Unconventional, Asymmetric Warfare, available in Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, and EPUB editions.

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here and, of course, please share the hell out of this article!!

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) August 8, 2020 (See Brian’s follow-up articles: August 20, 2020, I Was Wrong about Harris. Why I Changed My Mind and How She Won Me Over and August 11, 2020: Substance vs. Style as Biden Picks Harris over Rice)

WASHINGTON—There is no question the punditry’s Conventional Wisdom has California Senator Kamala Harris as “the favorite”, or front-runner, for Joe Biden’s vice-presidential sweepstakes. 

Besides Elizabeth Warren, it is hard to find any current sitting senator with more star power or who inspires more passion from supporters than she, the only other exception being Elizabeth Warren or, at the very least, out of any Democratic senator; Cory Booker sort of comes to mind, yet Harris polled so much higher than him in the primaries that that surely dampens that argument, as has the number of times she has been highlighted by the mainstream news media compared to him.  While few can compare to the likes of freshman House Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Speaker Nancy Pelosi for Congressional publicity in the House (though Reps. Ilhan Omar, Ted Lieu, and Adam Schiff would get honorable mentions), the Senate just has a lot of older folks who simply come off as more boring.  On the right, Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton are stars and good at getting lots of coverage and publicity, and while younger and engaging Cory Booker is helped a bit by his celebrity girlfriend Rosario Dawson, there just aren’t many senators that generate much excitement, quotable videos, or positive press coverage regularly aside from Warren.

However, there is a special climate in this time of a serious racial awakening in America in light of the mass groundswell behind the black lives matter movement in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd as well as other African-Americans and the massive protests and some rioting  that came in the wake of Floyd’s killing, events which unfolded of in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic and worst economic crisis in America since the Great Depression.  And in this climate, we can pretty much count Warren out (and could even before indications are that Biden has narrowed his list down to two women of color, Sen. Harris and Susan Rice, former United States Ambassador to the United Nations and former National Security Advisor, both in the Obama Administration), as the spirit and mood of both the media elites and Party activists—along with at least the most vocal part of the Democratic electorate—seem to strongly prefer a non-white running mate.  Also, I won’t even get into these in detail here, but there are other clear reasons for Biden not to pick Warren that range from her narrow ideological appeal (the absurdity that somehow she would bring in lots of Bernie voters, who generally seem to hate her, does not hold much water) to her frequent inability to work well with the leaders of her own Party, including Obama himself when she had a real chance to be chosen lead her brainchild, the Consumer Protection Financial Bureau, but blew it.  Most important is that her style and politics are quite different from Biden, even as they agree on the larger issues more or less, and, when it comes to being picked as a vice president, the ability to work with with—and, especially, defer to—your running mate is paramount.

Counting Warren as essentially out, it is useful to briefly compare the lives of Harris and Rice, who were born in the same year within a month of each other, making the comparisons especially apt.  Most available biographies of them are short, the exceptions being their own memoirs, though Wikipedia provides quite a few details and citations.

As I write this, I will note that I have been watching and really enjoying ESPN’s The Last Dance (an amazing documentary series about Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls’s championship teams, especially their final championship run) recently, and there are two main facets to how a player gets selected for a team and how they perform: the numbers and the intangibles, the latter being traits that do not show up on paper but are still vital, including personality.  We will leave that second category for a sequel piece, as the first category, the resume, what a player’s trading card would look like for Harris and Rice, is going to be our subject for today.

A Tale of Two Women

Harris was the child of a black Jamaican father and an Indian mother, both immigrants who achieved elite status as a distinguished professor and a cancer scientist, respectively, who divorced when Harris was seven.  The eventual senator was born and raised in California, but attended an elite public high school in a suburb of Montreal, Canada, participating in the pep club and a dance group, and her grades, according to one classmate, were among the best in her class.

Susan Rice’s parents were also elites and both black Americans, her mother a prominent education policy scholar and her father a prominent economic policy scholar, each heavily involved in the U.S. government in fairly high-tier, prestigious capacities.  Rice was born and raised in Washington, DC, and her parents divorced when she was ten.  Her mother would remarry, a prominent lawyer in a major government position.  Rice’s family was friends with Madeleine Albright, then already experienced in government and a prominent scholar, and, when Rice was becoming a young woman, a top foreign policy advisor to major Democratic Party figures.  She acted as mentor to the young Rice, who was already exposed to lots of government policy discussions at her dinner table.  In high school, Rice lettered in three varsity sports, was student government president, and graduated as the top student in her class, the valedictorian of a top-tier elite private school in Washington.

Harris certainly had an impressive record as a student before college, but it is still one that pales in comparison to Rice, who dominated as a valedictorian, a leader on and off the field, and, in terms of government, was exposed to top policymakers and experts and their policy debates in her family and its circle of friends at a young age in ways Harris was decidedly not.

If we move on to college, both women graduated in 1986 with Bachelor of Arts degrees in the short-term, in Harris’s case, from Howard University, where she double-majored in political science and economics.  While attending school, she interned as a mailroom clerk for one of her California senators, led both a campus economics society and the debate team, and joined a sorority (the nation’s oldest African-American one).  In 1989, she had earned her law degree from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco and passed her bar exam shortly after, being admitted to the California Bar in 1990. 

Rice attended Stanford as an undergraduate, where she was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, the nation’s oldest and most exclusive academic honor society, also generally thought to be the most prestigious, and also won a Truman Scholarship, the nation’s most prestigious graduate fellowship for public service leadership.  Her B.A. in History was awarded with honors.  She also earned a Rhodes Scholarship, studying at the UK’s world-renown Oxford University, where earned a Masters and a Doctorate in Philosophy in 1988 (while also serving as a foreign policy advisor to Michael Dukakis’s campaign) and 1990, respectively, each in International Relations.  Her doctoral dissertation was named the best in the UK in her field by the Royal Institute of International Affairs (also known as Chatham House) and it also won a Royal Commonwealth Society award for outstanding research in the field of Commonwealth history.

Again, while Harris’s achievements and activities in school were impressive by any standard, Rice’s were absolute standouts among standouts and far exceeded even Harris’s high bar, especially in graduate school, where Rice gained entry into far more elite and exclusive programs and then literally bested all her peers in the UK, winning two Royal awards.

The 1990s would be years of solid achievement for both women.

Harris was hired in 1990 as a deputy district attorney in Alameda County, California, an incredibly impressive achievement for someone who passed the bar the same year; in this role, her performance was noted positively.  By 1994, she was dating the Speaker of the California Assembly, Willie Brown, (the lower house of the California State Legislature), who placed her in 1994 in a board spot on California’s Unemployment Insurance Appeals body and, subsequently, a spot on the California Medical Assistance Commission, for which she temporarily left her prosecutor position.  By 1998, she was picked by the San Francisco District Attorney (DA) as Assistant District Attorney (ADA), where she ran the Career Criminal Division, taking on many of the most serious violent cases and where she quickly stood out for her leadership and passion, challenging her more established male superiors and connecting in significant ways with the public and the media to raise her profile and fight for her agenda.  This caused controversy, friction, a true battle of egos, and, eventually, resulted in Harris quitting her post in 2000 (more on that another time).

Rice would work for two years for famed consulting firm McKinsey, but with the election of Bill Clinton to the presidency, she joined the Clinton Administration in 1993 as a National Security Council (NSC) staffer, until 1995 as director for international organizations and peacekeeping and then, rising quickly, as special assistant to the president and senior director for African affairs until 1997.  With lobbying from Madeleine Albright, then Secretary of State, Bill Clinton appointed Rice Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs in 1997.  Rice’s relative youth and meteoric rise made some of the “old guard” uncomfortable, but Rice’s direct yet persuasive approach won over some of her doubters.  Her time in the Clinton Administration was during an era of major upheaval throughout Africa and major peacekeeping and international aid and development initiatives, and she managed to have significant impact on a number of pressing crises.

After Harris quit her ADA role, moving to a role in San Francisco City Hall under the City Attorney and running the Family and Children’s Services Division, fighting against neglect and abuse, it was soon fairly clear Harris was planning a comeback to challenge and overthrow her former colleagues at the DA’s office, beginning to seriously organize in 2002, even persuading top Democrats to not endorse her incumbent former boss who was in the middle of a significant scandal.  She also out-fundraised her opponent significantly, running to his right and beating him in 2003 by a significant margin to become the state’s first black DA in 2004.  As San Francisco DA, she was aggressive on pursuing violent crime and made significant improvements in multiple areas, including conviction rates, recidivism, and truancy.  As DA for San Francisco, she was named a “Woman of Power” by the National Urban League Conference, won the National Black Prosecutors Association’s Thurgood Marshall Award, and was voted onto the National District Attorneys Association’s Board of Directors as vice president and appointed as co-chair of its Corrections and Re-Entry Committee.  At the end of the decade, she began preparing a campaign to become the California Attorney General. 

After the election of George W. Bush to the presidency, Rice was a managing director and principal at political risk consulting group Intellibridge from 2001-2002 (it was eventually bought by Ian Bremmer’s Eurasia Group), then moved onto the influential Brookings Institute, where, as a senior fellow, she worked on a number of major international issues from 2002-2009, including global poverty, transnational security threats, weak and failing states, and U.S. foreign policy.  While at Brookings, she also served as a top foreign policy advisor to John Kerry’s presidential campaign and played a similar role for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, taking on that role relatively early, also playing a top tole on his incoming Administration’s transition team, during which Obama announced he would appoint Rice as America’s Ambassador to the United Nations, elevating it back to a cabinet-level position; thus, it was clear Rice would play a major role in in the incoming Obama-Biden Administration.

While Harris the 2000s would have a clear edge in governmental experiences to Rice’s more academic decade, both would position themselves for meteoric rises in the 2010s.

In Harris California Attorney General campaign, she won early the backing of major California Democrats.  While easily winning the Democratic Primary, she barely won the 2010 general election by 0.5% but still did so, becoming both the state’s first black person and first woman elected to that office, assuming it in early 2011.  She won reelection by a wide margin in 2014, and her time as attorney general was often characterized by boldness and impressive results, including in corporate accountability, truancy, recidivism, the environment, and aspects of police reform.  Though not without controversy, hers was a historic tenure in the office, and as attorney general she was co-awarded the Bipartisan Justice Award (shared with Republican Senator Tim Scott) by the 20/20 Bipartisan Justice Center.  She left her second term early after winning the 2016 election for a California U.S. Senate seat.  While none of her sponsored legislation has been enacted into law in a Republican-controlled Senate, she did receive as senator the ECOS Environmental Award for her efforts towards environmental protection throughout her career and she has been adept at making hers a voice that is heard and covered by the media (and shared on social media) on a variety of issues.

During the time Rice was with the Obama-Biden Administration, she served all of its first term as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, a cabinet-level position restored to that status by Obama in a sign of his confidence in her and value to him as an advisor.  She conducted high-level diplomacy through many crises, including involving Israelis and Palestinians as well as the Arab Spring.  She championed anti-poverty efforts, human rights (including women’s rights), non-proliferation, and was effective in implementing tough sanctions on North Korea and Iran, the latter of which helped set the stage for the eventual Iran nuclear deal.  She was a major force in ending the full-scale Libyan Civil War, and though she became controversially embroiled in the Benghazi attacks’ fallout, ten investigations failed to find any wrongdoing on her part, including six led by Republicans, though this controversy would lead her to withdraw herself from the path to becoming the next U.S. Secretary of State.  Instead, she would be named by Obama early in his second term in 2013 as U.S. National Security Advisor, where she continued to work on many of the same issues as she had as UN Ambassador.  One issues she had a measurable impact on was her helping to mitigate the aggressiveness of the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen.  She even presciently saw the national security threat that a pandemic could post.  Throughout Obama’s presidency, she was present and participated in key meetings on key issues making key policy, working closely with both Obama and Biden.  Shortly after the Obama-Biden Administration was out of power, France awarded Rice with its prestigious Commander, Legion of Honor rank, one of the highest awards France can bestow on anyone, instituted by Napoleon himself.

Based on Experience, Rice is the Clear Choice for Biden

To return to our NBA trading card comparison, both Rice and Harris would be All Stars, but Rice’s stats would make her one of the top players (the top in this year’s draft), and while Harris would be a very talented player any team would be lucky to have, still among the best of the picks available, any team would draft Rice over Harris based on their stats unless, somehow, a team was overstacked on foreign policy and desperately needed criminal justice system experience. 

And that is no to say Rice has no relevant domestic experience or insight: she still had to lobby congress in her various roles, still worked three presidential campaigns where her foreign police expertise would have been engaged through the prism of domestic politics, and grew up in a family where her parents, step-father, and other close family friends were deeply involved in domestic policy, having that be part of young Susan’s regular dinner conversations with prominent from active practitioners.  And the same can be said for foreign policy.

On top of that, Rice’s academic credentials are quite exceptional and add further dimensions to her policy expertise in ways that I would say career practitioners who do not take some academic time generally fail to match.  While in office, public officials are pulled in so many directions that a Rhodes Scholarship and years at the Brookings Institute can offset by allowing more focused, in-depth research.  But the last academic experience Harris had was law school, which admittedly is broad and pulls students into many directions.  Harris of course deserves praise for earning two degrees, but Rice exceeded this achievement with three.  Rice also went to better institutions and distinguished herself more, winning prestigious top-tier honors and awards Harris did not and standing out to a far higher degree.

In addition, Rice has some experience in the private sector, and therefore a deeper understanding of it and economic issues, whereas Harris has only been in government since passing her bar exam.

To briefly review:

In the 1990s, Harris was putting in time in with various district attorneys offices, and, to be sure, she impressively got selected for these positions at a young age.  But Rice at the same time rose to leadership roles in the National Security Council and State Department, and working in state DA offices pales in comparison.

In the 2000s, Harris had a leg up in earning relevant experience, staying in government while Harris took a more academic turn, though she still managed to work for two presidential campaigns.

Yet in the 2000s and through 2016, Harris’s work would remain narrowly focused on one aspect of domestic policy—law enforcement—while Rice during the Obama-Biden Administration was one of the senior officials in the entire U.S. government on both national security and the entirety of U.S. foreign policy.  She worked closely with President Obama and Vice President Biden throughout the Obama-Biden Administration, including in a cabinet-level position, and would thus have a far deeper understanding of how the White House works and works with the rest of government and Congress than Harris would.

To be clear, this is not an anti-Harris argument, but between two exceptional, amazing, inspiring women of color who overcame much adversity in their careers, one stands out far more in terms of her government experience and accomplishments than the other, and that person is easily Susan Rice.

See Brian’s follow-up article: Substance vs. Style as Biden Picks Harris over Rice and related article: Benghazi Hearing: GOP’s Embarrassing Shame, Clinton’s Triumphant Vindication

© 2020 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

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