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) 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).

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By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, Threads @bfchugginalong, LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content) April 22, 2024; *UPDATED April 30 discussing Trone’s misrepresentation of polling; see related Twitter thread and all of Brian’s Maryland U.S. Senate race coverage here; 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. Note: all poll numbers and poll margins are rounded to nearest whole numbers unless otherwise indicated.

SILVER SPRING—The state of the Maryland Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate seat about to be vacated by Ben Cardin is dismal (as I have warned before), with Larry Hogan beating (sometimes crushing) either frontrunner in all credible independent recent polls.  While both U.S. Representative David Trone and Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks are both good people and fine Democratic politicians with solid records, their campaigns are failing Democrats and others who want to ensure that the U.S. Senate seat held by the retiring Ben Cardin for over seventeen years and by Barbara Mikulski before him for thirty—two Democratic Party legends—stays occupied by a Democrat.  With its candidate consistently polling far behind her primary rival, the campaign of Country Executive Alsobrooks has become desperately dishonest (sadly, more on this just below), and while Trone’s campaign should feel good about his lead over his primary rival, that he is still not beating Hogan in a blue state after spending nearly $42 million of his own money is downright humiliatingly embarrassing and bodes ill for Democratic efforts to keep Cardin’s seat blue as he is the candidate the keeps performing better against Hogan in polling between himself and Alsobrooks.

A dismal state for the Democratic primary, indeed.

Desperation and Dishonesty from the Alsobrooks Campaign (and Internal Polls 101)

(*Update April 30: to be fair, the Trone campaign has also been blatantly dishonest about Trone’s polling. In Trone’s latest ad, he says: “The polls say I’m the only candidate who can beat Larry Hogan.” This is false, as I will explain below, because that is nowhere near what “the polls” suggest. To be fair to him, the only poll that had him tied—the one from back in February discussed below—has him technically at 42.3% to Hogan’s 41.7% in the crosstabs, but the unofficial rules of how polling is reported and disseminated to the public involve the common practice of reporting the rounded numbers with no decimal digits, so in this case, tied at 42% and well within the margin of error; there have been only three major credible independent polls since then and all three have had Trone behind, the latest by 13 points. Yes, all these polls had him doing better than Alsobrooks against Hogan, but Trone clearly said “the polls” as in more than one, and even citing the one where he was reported as tied, would be misleading, and doing better than Alsobrooks is not the same as beating Hogan, so this was blatantly misleading (if he had said “the most competitive candidate,” that would have been honest). And Trone’s campaign has not released any internal polls for the general election matchup in all of 2024. Neither has Alsobrooks, suggesting both their internal polling against Hogan is brutal (more on how/why/when internal polls are released below). There was one internal partisan poll that is funded by a Democratic group from mid-November all the way back in 2023 giving Trone a 49%-34% lead over Hogan months before Hogan entered the race, but none of Trone’s numbers against Hogan have looked anywhere near that since then and that is ancient history as far as polling goes. So, again, there are not even any recent internal polls to suggest he “can beat Hogan,” let alone independent polls, which are much more credible and accurate than internal polls, as the discussion below will explain.)

I want to preface this section by noting I don’t believe County Executive Alsobrooks was personally involved in any of what I am about to describe: she has always been cordial and respectful in person to me and she only gives the impression that she is an honest, sincere, kind person working hard for the people.  But it must be noted that the campaign of Angela Alsobrooks yesterday sent out a deceitful, dishonest e-mail to its supporters, misrepresenting one of the campaign’s own internal polls—that is, a poll that is paid for by the campaign itself and often (as in this case) not released with the usually full data or crosstabs—as a poll from national news outlet Axios.  The e-mail innocuously opens by noting “A new poll just dropped,” and the graphic of the poll has the Axios logo on it.  No further description or link as to the source of the poll is provided, so most readers would simply assume the poll was an Axios poll, given the logo (full screenshot of the email below):

Except if you go to the Axios article that discussed the poll, within the article itself, its bylined author Stephen Neukam writes “Alsobrooks is within the margin of error against Trone, according to internal Alsobrooks campaign polling obtained by Axios.”  Thus, compounding the misleading logo, the use of a ”a new poll” when the people writing this email were well aware that it was their own campaign’s commissioned poll is absolutely also a deliberate obfuscation, and, to make matters worse, the use of Axios’s logo on the graphic to mislead readers to clearly make them think the poll is by Axios when the campaign itself was the party responsible for providing its own poll directly to Axios even further compounds the sinning.

This trifecta of dishonesty is simply disgraceful and goes beyond anything near relatively acceptable so-called “spin;” rather, we have two examples if information being deliberately withheld from readers—that the poll was an internal Alsobrooks campaign poll and that the Alsobrooks campaign gave the results to Axios—and a full-on misrepresentation by putting the Axios logo on the poll graphic, giving the clear impression this misleading labeled “a new poll” is an Axios poll, all in order to confer fake legitimacy on the poll by making it appear it is not an internal poll and allowing the impression to be clearly conveyed to the reader that the poll is from the independent news outlet Axios.

The partisan internal poll as described by Axios highlights that Alsobrooks is at 40%, just 3 points behind Trone at 43% (with 17% undecided) and within the margin of error.  There is also a third omission falling within the realm of normal spin: another poll—this one a far more credible, independent poll put together by The Baltimore Sun, Fox 45 Baltimore, and the University of Baltimore at just about the same time as the Alsobrooks campaign’s internal poll—had Alsbrooks 19 points behind Trone, 29% to 48%.  Now, it’s normal for a campaign to highlight a more favorable poll even if also perhaps misleading in that that the poll the campaign chooses to highlight may be unrepresentative, but it is downright dishonest to tout your own internal campaign poll as “a new poll,” suggest visually that it is a poll from a major news outlet, and then omit that your own campaign fed the poll data to that news outlet: this is far from normal and should be called out as simply wrong.

Why is it important do sharply distinguish between internal polls and other polls?  Let me explain if you’re not familiar with internal polls.  Internal polls released by a campaign are self-selected datapoints and usually not the full or transparent set of data: the parts that are shared are deemed by the campaign to be favorable and are chosen to be shared with the public because the campaign thinks it will benefit in some way from the information being released.  Most internal polls are not released and what is released tends to be the best possible tidbits among other tidbits and other internal polls that are not to selected to be released.

Furthermore, partisan internal polls average out to be significantly more favorable in their results towards their preferred candidate than independent polls not paid for by such a campaign and should, therefore, be taken with a full salt-shaker, not just a grain of salt even if they are not useless.  Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight for some time banned the listing of internal polls on its site and later would actually show that it had adjusted internal polls by changing the results to account for that bias in favor of the candidate by reversing the bias away from the campaign’s preferred candidate.  Simply put, internal partisan polls are generally less accurate and far less transparently disseminated to the public and generally should, as a result, be trusted far, far less than non-partisan independent polls.  Thus, it is truly a sign of the desperation of the Alsobrooks campaign at this stage, about a month before the primary and about two weeks before early voting, that it released an internal poll still showing her down three points to Trone (accounting for the bias, this poll actually does not suggest she is close to Trone or really closing in, but those who don’t know about the bias of internal polls can be fooled by this presentation). 

Considering all this, this play by the Alsobrooks campaign breaks major principles of honesty and attribution in attempting to pass off one of its own polls to readers as a “normal” “from” Axios poll in order to give the false impression that polling data has Alsobrooks in a close race with Trone.  For the data absolutely does not show this: in four credible independent non-partisan polls beginning in February, Alsobrooks was down 15 (17% to 32%), then 7 (27% to 34%), then 9 (33% to 42%), and, most recently, 19 points (29% to 48%) to Trone.  In this context, passing off an internal poll as having Alsobrooks down just 3 points (40% to 43%) as indicative is the overall state of the race is highly misleading.

As noted, it falls within the normal realm of political spin and campaign advocacy to cherry-pick the best polling for your candidate and present that to voters while not stressing other less favorable polls.  But this is not what the Alsobrooks campaign did with this e-mail to all of its followers: it presented its own internal poll as “a new poll”—not as its own internal poll—and presented it as an Axios poll and, on top of that, did that when the campaign itself had provided that data to Axios.  This is a form of lying to voters and is disinformation: deliberate misrepresentation, misattribution, and omission to dupe voters into thinking its candidate is far more competitive than any of the credible data indicates.

But now we must also talk about journalistic integrity: the reporter, Stephen Neukam (I tried to contact him directly but received no response), and/or his editors at Axios were either engaging in blatant advocacy designed to unfairly boost (from a journalistic perspective) the Alsobrooks campaign or were not discerning or careful enough with their work to realize they were being coopted by the Alsobrooks campaign to push a misleading agenda about the state of the race, with Neukam’s article’s title being “Hot Dem primary in Maryland tightens a month before election;” to be fair, as a journalist myself I know that often we reporters are not the ones who craft the title and that editors often do that in ways me might not choose to for our own work, but the point is, Neukam or his editors or both did present a clearly misleading picture with that headline but also some of the text within the article by putting out an Alsobrooks campaign internal poll as evidence of a tightening Democratic U.S. Senate primary race between Trone and Alsobrooks when only that less credible internal poll deliberately provided to Axios by the Alsobrooks campaign presented such a picture and the other more credible independent, non-internal, non-partisan polls had shown Trone with a much larger lead: the latest poll with Trone leading Alsobrooks by 19 was just days away from coming out on April 16 when the Axios article was published on April 12, but the latest independent poll before that had come out on April 2 and gave Trone a 9-point lead, and, as noted, the other two previous polls had also given Trone a far larger lead than the 3-point lead of the Alsobrooks campaign internal poll.

Are we getting into the weeds here?  Sure.  But we reporters are like mechanics who are responsible for fine-tuning and checking out what’s under the hood for the customer.  And what has happened here is that a used car salesman has lied about what he sold his customer or was not professional enough to know what he as a salesman picked up was not in good working order before selling it, either knowing the car was messed up or getting hoodwinked by the seller he got it from before selling to the customer.  In this case, I am the mechanic, pointing out what is not working under the hood to the voters, raising questions about Axios and Neukam and clearly finding wrongdoing by the Alsobrooks campaign.

There have to be consequences and learning here.  Both Neukam and Axios should review what happened and be careful in the future not to present any internal polls as game-changers or indicative or the real state of any race, especially one provided directly by that poll’s campaign to them; at best, such an internal poll should be an aside detail in a larger article, it should not drive a headline claiming to portray the state of a major high-stakes primary race: this is just good journalist practice to avoid overstating internal polls (and a single poll in general) and Axios needs to do better.  And the Alsobrooks campaign should reprimand or perhaps even fire the staff responsible for framing that e-mail’s contents the way it was framed.

In the end, any political campaign must establish and preserve trust with its supporters (current or prospective), and a breach of that trust by deliberately feeding them disinformation about polling, the nature of the polling, and who produced the polling to paint an unrepresentative picture of the level its candidate’s competitiveness in order to paint a far more favorable picture for the candidate than the reality in order to, in turn, raise money from people reading that disinformation is a serious affair that is a test for the campaign and its integrity, its very ability to be honest even when the going gets tough.

As I stated in the beginning, I very much do not believe County Executive Alsobrooks herself was personally involved in generating the disinformation in this e-mail, but the campaign does bear her name and she is responsible for the staff she and her senior staff select as well as all of the content put out by their campaign.  So while I do not believe she would do anything like this, if nothing is done to correct this serious breach of trust exhibited by that email, if steps are not taken to prevent any reoccurrence of anything similar, it would call into question her ability to lead, to run a major political office, and to put people in place who will properly react to such breaches of trust when discovered.  While I can understand the pressure in a race to raise money against a very wealthy opponent who has heavily outspent you when the real polling has you down significantly and the primary is just weeks away, there is no excuse for this behavior exhibited in this e-mail, nor for ignoring such behavior or letting it slide.  Still, this is an opportunity for her and her campaign to show leadership by doing the right things, by issuing an apology and a correction and disciplining those responsible for the disinformation email discussed herein.

Alsobrooks Also Has Other Issues

Apart from the disinformation email, the Alsobrooks campaign can fairly be accused of being less than stellar in its approach.  The e-mails you get from her campaign nearly all come off as if they are written by AI, lacking substance and pizazz, and nearly all asking for money and centering on asking for money, many of those complaining about how much money Trone has spent (and boy, we will get to that!).

Yes, Trone has spent a lot of money, but Alsobrooks has raised a lot, too: not that far from $7.2 million through the end of March, including $2.1 million for 2024’s first quarter.  But you’d be hard-pressed to understand how that money has been spent.  Is it on quality e-mail communications?  Certainly not.  It is on television ads?  Nope: Alsobrooks has only just started putting out TV ads in mid-February (and not that many since then until the past few weeks).  Which begs the question: why?  Because she has significant amounts of money she is not spending.  History tells us that striking first helps: you frame the race that way and put your opponent on the defensive, forcing him to react, while also raising your own profile earlier and generating more attention and thus drawing more money earlier: spending more early means you can raise even more later in a reinforcing feedback loop.  And the March Washington Post/UMD poll had 58% of respondents saying they had “no opinion” when it came to Alsobrooks to 46% saying the same for Trone while Hogan had a 64% favorable rating.

But even with her massive challenge with a clear majority of voters not knowing who she is or much about her, for Alsobrooks, of the more than $4.9 million she had raised by the end of 2023, over $3.1 million had remained unspent at that time (“cash on hand”).  After the end of first quarter of 2024 just a few weeks ago, Alsobrooks had nearly $3.2 million cash on hand unspent and for the entire campaign, had spent less than $4 million; in contrast, Trone had spent nearly everything he had, with just under $1 million left unspent at the end of March and spending over $41.6 million by then.

Folks, this represents two very different strategies.  Trone’s is to leave it all on the field and to be the one who shapes the race and garners notice and recognition (much) sooner rather than later, but it is not clear what Alsobrooks’s own strategy is: people are already voting by mail and early voting starts May 2, in ten days.  What is she waiting for??

If Alsobrooks loses, her people will claim it is because she was so heavily outspent.  But that will not necessarily be the reason why as more money doesn’t always mean victory.  In U.S. Senate general election races, the bigger spender has lost in about one-fifth of the races in the past two decades.  And at the presidential level, Bernie Sanders outspent Hillary Clinton in 2016 and lost while she outspent future insurrectionist Donald Trump in the general election and lost; Biden was outspent in 2020 by Bernie and some other rival Democrats, too, all who lost; and Trump was outspent by some of his rivals in the 2016 primaries (remember Jeb! and his $100 million?) who lost and has been outspent by some of his 2024 primary opponents.

Again, I don’t know what Alsobrooks is spending her campaign’s money on, but her TV ads starting so late in the primary may have doomed her campaign, especially seeing how many ads with which Trone was flooding the market.  She should have been advertising on TV towards the end of 2023 and she had the money then to have done so, which would almost certainly have garnered her more name recognition and then more money and more support.  We will never know if it would have been enough, but the Alsobrooks campaign has hardly been running an A-game campaign that looks capable of upsetting a higher-spending rival: a much-better-run campaign can beat and has beaten a less-well-run campaign even if that less-well-run campaign outspends it, but if you aren’t even running a particularly good campaign, money is hardly the beginning or the end of your woes or the clear reason for a loss, for which it looks as if Alsobrooks is heading.

Alsobrooks has also had a harder time explaining how her experience as a county executive and state’s attorney translates well into the work of the Senate, while Trone’s efforts in the House translate perfectly to Senate work as they are both concerning federal legislative positions.  As I have discussed before, this is in part because voters have long-deemed county executive work to be less relevant and less transferable when it comes to the U.S. Senate, only exceedingly rarely sending someone in that position directly to the U.S. Senate.  Additionally, while Alsobrooks has touted specific accomplishments as a county executive, it is unclear what distinguishes her from other country executives in terms of her record: sharing a debate stage with her four times, I have not heard rank her accomplishments relative to other county executives in the state or make an evidence-based case that sets her apart from other county executives in general, whereas Trone is quick to tout that he is one of the most objectively bipartisan members of Congress and the most effective of the entire Maryland delegation.  Thus, Trone sounds more like a senator that she does talking about what he does as a leader and has been more effective in explaining what makes him unique and stand out among his peers.

Additionally, Trone has also garnered an impressive number of endorsements from prominent Democrats in Alsobrooks’s own Prince George’s County as well as U.S. House Minority Leader (and hopefully soon-to-be-Speaker) Hakeem Jeffries, an African-American and one of the country’s most prominent and powerful black politicians in a race where Alsobrooks is definitely highlighting the historic nature of her candidacy as an African-American woman.

Furthermore, while I have seen Trone generate a more dynamic response from audiences with a somewhat more energetic and dynamic style, Alsobrooks is more reserved and careful with her approach.  I experienced this most keenly observing the two at a NAACP forum last month in front of a mostly-African-American church audience in Fort Washington.  I was a bit surprised that Trone seemed to connect more viscerally with that audience than Alsobrooks, who by no means did poorly but was not having the same dynamic effect as Trone was.  So cautious and reserved can be a good strategy if you have a large lead, but reserved and careful is not a good strategy when you are down significantly and consistently in the polls.  In particular, the Alsobrooks campaign keeps projecting an “everything is fine” vibe even as she has consistently polled significantly behind Trone and has always polled worse against Hogan than Trone (her best number against Hogan—40% to Hogan’s 44%–came from the March Goucher College poll, which had a significantly smaller sample size than the other independent polls and is likely less accurate as a result), continuing as they have without making any major adjustments since he entered the race.  Echoing my sentiment, the main Baltimore Sun reporter covering this race, Jeff Barker, yesterday came out with an article titled “Alsobrooks isn’t running as if she’s behind in Maryland’s US Senate primary.”  So others are also perplexed by this approach besides me…

And while I am certainly aware of gender and race dynamics—it is easier for a white man than a black women to speak more openly and worry less about consequences—the difference is still there and everything can matter and come under scrutiny for any candidate in a high-profile contest like this one.  Also, in general, her staff members at these events have seem more protective and hovering than those of Trone.  I admit these are anecdotal observations, but Alsobrooks seems great as a person and shouldn’t be seen as needing protection in a race like this by her staff but even more exposure.

To conclude, I am not sure who is helping Alsobrooks make these calls, but it sure does not seem as if her senior staff have served her well.  As a significant underdog to Trone as far as polling and money, waiting to spend millions and adopting a more reserved and careful approach is not a path to victory.  Getting the twin powerhouse endorsements of rockstar Maryland U.S. House Representative Jamie Raskin and The Washington Post—Trone would certainly have liked to have received either or both and they should persuade some undecideds—perhaps they think those endorsements will be enough to close the gap along with increased spending on ads late in the game, but that may very well be overly optimistic and is likely downright risky, given the size of the gap between her and Trone indicated in credible polling (that latest Sun/Fox/UB disastrous-for-Alsobrooks poll with her down 19 came weeks after Raskin’s endorsement but before the Post’s), and Trone is sure to surge more of his own money into advertising these last few weeks, too.

Trone’s Mortifying Polling vs. Hogan in the Context of Record Spending

In case you thought I was going to let Trone off easy or was even endorsing him here, this section will make it clear I am not.  Trone has put a staggering amount of his own family fortune into this race: some $41.7 million.  If this sounds like a lot, it is: it’s the largest amount a self-funder has ever poured into a U.S. Senate primary in American history, with the next highest person and amount not even reaching $30 million.  And while he seems to have a comfortable lead over Alsobrooks and would be the favorite to win the primary at this point, his numbers for a possible matchup against Hogan, while better than Alsobrooks’s, have ranged from troublesome to dismal: the first independent credible poll in February had him tied (42%-42% vs. an 8-point deficit for Alsobrooks), then he was down 12 (49%-37% vs. a 14-point deficit for Alsobrooks), then down one in that likely-less-accurate Goucher poll with the smaller sample size (42%-43% vs. a 4-poit deficit for Alsobrooks), then down 13 points (40%-53% vs. an 18-point deficit for Alsobrooks).  For both candidates, these are terrible numbers in a very blue state against a Republican in the era of Trump, and while Alsobrooks has spent far less and is a county executive as opposed to a member of Congress, meaning lower name recognition is more of an excuse for her, for Trone and the nearly $42 million spent through up through the first quarter, this is a terrible result: even flooding the airwaves in the most recent polls has him either trailing in heavily-Democratic Maryland or losing by double digits, the latest poll having him down 13 points.  With all the money spent, I worry this suggests Trone has more of a ceiling relative to Alsobrooks, but that may not be the case.  But I do worry that after so many commercials (if you watch non-streaming-service TV, you must have seen his ads and likely a lot), there could be a sizable chunk of voters that are more than a little hesitant to back him in the general election.

And while Alsobrooks has incessantly criticized his level of self-funding in a rather classist manner I have criticized before (in contrast to his hollow attacks on her as a “career politician”), strategically-minded Democrats like myself and some party leaders welcome the idea that during a general election, national Democratic Party efforts and the efforts of liberal allies and big leftist donors can count on Trone self-funding and turn their money and attention to other competitive races across the country.  But many other voters will not be thinking about that, and while I have mentioned that Alsobrooks is not the most dynamic or energetic speaker, I do worry that Trone being easily stereotyped as an old rich white guy will not help generate enough enthusiasm, especially compared to the idea of the much younger African-American female candidate in Alsobrooks.  Then again, enthusiasm isn’t everything, lots of less-enthusiastic people still vote and Trone so far has consistently been ahead of Alsobrook while also doing better against Hogan, even if he still loses to him.  In this case, time will tell and I am honestly torn at this point as to who is the better candidate against Hogan, as is much of the rest of the Maryland electorate.

Speaking of Trone having a more dynamic, freewheeling, colorful style than Alsobrooks, while often an asset, this also can lead to him making gaffes that Alsobrooks would not make.  One example of this was at the aforementioned NAACP forum, when he said he we need to “beat Larry Hogan like a rented mule” (this drew laughs but also groans and a mild, playful rebuke from the moderator; if there were PETA or vegetarian/vegan folks in the audience, that sure did not help Trone with them).  Another gaffe was at a House hearing last month in which Trone quite seemingly inadvertently substituted an old racial slur for the word “bugaboo,” a mishap that generated negative coverage nationwide and outrage on Twitter but might not have done too much damage.

Interestingly, of the six Maryland U.S. House Democrats who are not David Trone, five have endorsed Alsobrooks to just one of Trone’s Maryland Democratic U.S. House colleagues endorsing him, while Maryland’s Governor Wes Moore and Maryland’s  other U.S. Senator besides Cardin, Chris Van Hollen, have also endorsed Alsobrooks.

Conclusion: It’s Late in the Game but We Need These Candidates Need to Do Better or We Need Someone Else (ME!)

Even after my first debate with Trone and Alsobrooks (and the only one on which I shared the stage with Trone as he did not attend the next three while Alsobrooks did), it was clear that the performances I saw from both, while ok, were not stellar and not anything that would make me feel particularly confident in either debating Hogan (not that that they were bad, but when you are down a lot to an opponent, you have to be able to clearly beat them in several areas and debates are one of those key areas).  I am just worried that neither are particularly strong against Hogan and the polling we have thus far with neither beating him in a very Democratic state suggests my worries and those of others are justified.

Sure, polls can change over time.  It’s possible for Alsobrooks to overcome her deficit with Trone, and it’s possible for either to overcome their deficits against Hogan.  But that is not guaranteed, they do not seem to be on the path to a general election victory now, and it’s going to be too close for comfort in a state where a Democrat should easily win.  And that is, simply put, because we do not have better candidates.  The frontrunners’ current approach—that they are projecting confidence against Hogan without making any serious adjustments since he entered the race even after polling consistently shows them not beating him—is not reassuring.

Because of these campaigns’ complacency and the lack of journalists trying to push them on why they are polling so badly against Hogan in a blue state, I think it is necessary for someone else to be a third person in the weeks we have left in this race to draw attention to these issues and their shortcomings and to perhaps present a third alternative voters can rally behind.  I think I am the only Democratic candidate who can do this: the other candidates I shared space with on four debate stages so far totally avoided these issues, could not provide answers of any depth on a number of pressing topics (in contrast see me answering in the debates here and I even outshone the only frontrunner who attended in one of the debates!), and did not garner anywhere near the media coverage I have: I am the only candidate besides Trone or Alsobrooks still in the race to be quoted by any major news outlets, including The Washington Post and The Baltimore Sun (see details of my coverage here).  I am likely third in the sense that I have a far greater presence on social media than any of the candidates (close to more than the Trone and Alsobrooks campaigns combined on Twitter) and more news media mentions than any other second-tier candidate, so I will come up far more easily and quickly for voters searching for information about other candidates, and once they get to my site, they will see I have by far the most detailed policy proposals of any candidate.  So for all those reasons, I believe I am likely to come in third but I need your help to really make a statement and make sure the frontrunners get the message that they need to do better!!

Look, I am not going to mislead any of you by inflating my chances of outright winning this race: I have not polled above 1% yet (technically 1.2% *but see April 30 update above that discusses rounding in polling), and it is far more likely that I can be that voice that helps hone the candidates and their campaigns and push them to adjust to be in a better position against Hogan than it is likely that I would actually win the nomination (though stranger things and political miracles have happened).  Maybe if I finish third on an upcoming poll, I can leverage that to be on stage with Trone and Alsobrooks in an upcoming debate (there’s only been one televised debate so far and just this past Friday—which only has about 4,200 views on YouTube—pretty ridiculous!) but I need you help for any of this to happen.

If I finish a strong third set firmly apart from all the other candidates after Trone and Alsobrooks, I think I can make that case publicly more effectively and perhaps even garner more influence on the party nominee and his or her campaign during the general election.  If you are concerned about what I have discussed here or are hesitant at all about the frontrunners, vote for me to let them know they need to step up their game and change course to earn your general election vote.

In the Democratic presidential primary, voters voting “uncommitted” to protest the Biden Administrations policies on Israel and Palestine amidst the Gaza war have been heard and acknowledged by Biden and his people in tense and difficult circumstances, and I have long-argued that Biden is already shifting policy in major ways behind the scenes to stand up more for Palestinians that are not yet apparent to most under a horrific geopolitical setting, but the point is that movements aiming to have a symbolic affect in political primaries can affect the conversation and garner attention at the highest levels.

We need better from Trone and Alsobrooks if one will be our standard bearer to keep Cardin’s seat blue for Democrats to better fight Trumpist MAGA insurrectionist fascism and I can play role in making that happen and, though it’s a longshot, maybe a political miracle can happen and I will be your nominee.  Whatever the outcome, whether the nominee is Trone, Alsobrooks or myself—and I will support whomever the nominee is enthusiastically—supporting me will help Democrats’ odds of winning in November because a bubble mentality and complacency is the path to losing in November.  Hogan may not be Trumpist, insurrectionist, or fascist, but he will vote far too much with MAGA so we have to win in November!

Bubbles in politics are nothing new and are quite common, but are not only dangerous in people governing but also with more extremist segments among the population.  They are also dangerous in campaigns, and the lack of self-awareness emanating from the two main frontrunners’ campaigns in the Maryland U.S. Senate Democratic primary should give all Marylanders and Americans united against insurrectionist Trump’s MAGA fascist extremism great cause for concern.  We need these candidates and their senior staff who think everything is going just fine and no major adjustments are needed to get out of their bubbles and I am the only candidate who seems willing to push them in this direction.  Spread the word and donate so we can put Democrats in the best possible chance to keep Cardin’s seat blue and defeat Hogan this fall to fight MAGA in the Senate!

See related articles Frydenborg Holds His Own Against Alsobrooks in Baltimore Maryland U.S. Senate Democratic Primary Debate, but Will It Matter & Why Won’t Local Media Cover this Race Properly?, Maryland U.S. Democratic Primary Debate Raises Questions on Frontrunners’ & Party’s Readiness to Take on Hogan. Can Frydenborg Emerge As Third Option? and Petty Feuding Between Trone and Alsobrooks Does Not Honor Ben Cardin’s Legacy. Vote for Me Instead! And see all of Brian’s Maryland U.S. Senate race coverage here as well as Brian’s official campaign website.

© 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!

Yes, I am using my own news website to promote my candidacy and ideas I am putting forth as a candidate for U.S. Senate for Maryland and I won’t apologize for it!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, Threads @bfchugginalong, LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content) March 26, 2024; *UPDATE April 8: Afro News finally posted coverage of the March 21 eleven days later on April 1; Brian was quoted more than Alsobrooks; see related articles: March 19 Frydenborg Holds His Own Against Alsobrooks in Baltimore Maryland U.S. Senate Democratic Primary Debate, but Will It Matter & Why Won’t Local Media Cover this Race Properly?, March 6 Maryland U.S. Democratic Primary Debate Raises Questions on Frontrunners’ & Party’s Readiness to Take on Hogan. Can Frydenborg Emerge As Third Option?, and March 2 Petty Feuding Between Trone and Alsobrooks Does Not Honor Ben Cardin’s Legacy. Vote for Me Instead! and see all of Brian’s Maryland U.S. Senate race coverage here; 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. Correction appended: this article earlier misstated the length of Sen. Mikulski’s Senate term.

SILVER SPRING—To paraphrase what I wrote recently after my second Maryland U.S. Senate Democratic primary debate, if a debate happens but is not covered by the media, did it really happen as far as voters are concerned?

I am afraid the answer is no.

A Candidate Failed by this Maryland Primary Process

I write now as a candidate perhaps cheated by history in gross fashion, but in a way we may never know fully or be able to quantify to what degree.  To start, I would like reiterate the facts of the only credible independent poll to come out in 2024 at the time it was released, the mid-February Emerson College/The Hill/DC News Now poll:

For the Maryland Democratic U.S. Senate primary:

• Undecided 37%
• U.S. Representative David Trone 32%
• Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks 17%
• and all other candidates combined (including me) totaling 14%.

For the general election:

• Trone tied with Hogan at 42% with 16% undecided
• Alsobrooks down 37% to Hogan’s 44% and 19% undecided

Those general election numbers are clearly a horrific result for Democrats in a blue state race for a seat held for 17 years by Democrat Ben Cardin and held for by Democrat Barbara Mikulski for the thirty years prior to that.

But since that poll, in the first two debates of 2024 (see my writeups of both and also video here; there was only one exclusionary debate beforehand in early December in which I was not allowed to participate), one other candidate besides the two frontrunners—Trone and Alsobrooks—and only one other candidate was quoted by major press outlets after those debates, by The Washington Post and The Baltimore Sun after the first and by The Baltimore Sun after the second (quoted twice, as much as the only other person quoted, Alsobrooks; Trone did not attend): me, Brian Frydenborg.  Quickly setting myself apart from the rest of the second-tier candidates in terms of substance and quotability, and with an online presence with more social media followers for my Twitter account than the campaign accounts of Trone and Alsobrooks combined while I was ramping up my campaign, it would seem I could be considered the third candidate in the Democratic primary.

Now, of course, that is open to debate, but think of it this way: media coverage for unknown candidates and for undecided voters is often the decisive factor, as most voters don’t go to rallies or events but read the news to learn about candidates or go to the candidates’ websites after seeing them covered in the news.

I will herein now present an alternative history as food for thought, and then look at what actually has just happened.

What Could Have Been…

Just a few days after that second debate on March 16 and riding a surge of being the only other candidate given serious attention by the mainstream press after Trone and Alsobrooks, The Washington Post/University of Maryland released a poll on March 20 that showed both Democratic frontrunners losing by 12 points or higher to Hogan.  But it also showed Brian Frydenborg in clear third place in the Democratic primary, significantly ahead of all the other second-tier candidates even as he was not that close to either Alsobrooks or Trone and with still many undecided voters.  Separating himself from that pack, Brian was contacted by several major outlets, including The Washington Post, quoting Brian not just on the state of the race and his concerns with both Democratic frontrunners but also on some of his own positions and experience.

The very next day, the third debate—a bipartisan one—in which Brian participated was held in Baltimore and covered by all the local Baltimore television stations as well as multiple newspapers.  Neither Trone nor Hogan attended, but Brian’s performance not only stood out for his energy and passion, but his specific command of details and history, in contrast to Alsobrooks, whose performance was fine and with good responses, but was far less energetic and detailed.  Brian often got more audibly engaged positive responses from the audience than Angela did, and while some of the rest of the Democratic candidates might have drawn some laughter with humor and antics, none compared to either Frydenborg or Alsobrooks in terms of giving substantive, direct, and knowledgeable answers to the questions asked.  It was the two of them and everyone else far behind, but the relatively unknown candidate Frydenborg not only held his own against the county executive frontrunner, but exceeded her performance.  His passionate framing of the failings of the two-frontrunners’ campaigns, the Democratic Party organizations and allies in Maryland, and the media with its general lack of coverage in producing a situation where Democrats are losing badly Republican opponent in the race to succeed Ben Cardin in the U.S. Senate.  In contrast, Alsobrooks gave relatively normal answers and projected unreassuring confidence for a potential matchup against Hogan for someone who was down 14 points to him in a blue state.

The media writeups and television coverage of the event—all the local Baltimore stations and papers with some of that coverage spreading—all of sudden introduced a new candidate more forcefully to primary voters besides just a few quotes in a few articles, a candidate who was articulate, passionate, and able to discuss the issues in detail while also giving voice to their anxieties about the state of the race and of potentially losing Cardin’s Senate seat to Republicans.  Thus, profiles in papers and television interviews followed, and while the next poll out still showed Brian significantly behind Trone and Alsobrooks, he had still risen even further and was clearly the only other candidate making waves, clearly establishing himself as the third candidate in the Democratic primary, with a snowball effect of more donations and more media coverage reinforcing each other that ensured his voice was heard and having an effect and keeping his trajectory in the polls an upward one in the weeks to follow.

The Sad Reality Failing Democrats, All Maryland Voters, and the Nation

I said that this was an alternate history.  Now for what really happened.

To reiterate—because this is so important—The Emerson/Hill poll had shown that the collective support of all the second-tier candidates (14%) was just 3 points behind Alsobrooks in second place (17%), with more voters than even those supporting first-place Trone (32%) saying they were undecided (37%).

In the fictional history, the next poll included the second-tier candidates: this was the only responsible choice given how much collective support the second-tier candidates had that was so close to the level of support of the number-two candidate in Alsobrooks—the 3-point gap within the 3-point margin of error—and given how the largest bloc of voters in the poll was not supporting any candidate but was undecided.  In such a context, any respectable pollster not including the second-tier candidates would be ridiculously irresponsible, but in the real world, that is what was done: the Post/UMD poll was actually released on March 20, as happened in the alternate history, but it excluded all of us second-tier candidates, including myself—the only candidate from that second tier and besides Alsobrooks or Trone tier to be quoted by the Washington Post or Baltimore Sun from the past two debates, as I have pointed out before.  And given all that, relative to all the other second-tier candidates, for me there was an excellent chance that I would have risen more than any of them and surpassed all of them to legitimately claim third place then and there in this Democratic primary race.  But with not being included at all, it is not possible to know this and not possible for voters to have an accurate, full picture of a potentially volatile contest.  So no bounce recorded and no media exposure as a result of such a poll just before my third debate, which could have even partly framed the debate itself.

To make matters even worse, while in my alternate history there was still ample media coverage of the third debate to allow my forceful and stand-out performance to reach the voting public even if I was inexcusably excluded in that latest poll, there was no media coverage in real life: no local sites, no local TV stations, no newspapers, period, (*April 8 update) until, that is, Afro News finally published coverage on April 1, eleven days after the debate; still, better late then never and I was quoted more than Alsobrooks!

“We’ve got to be real about what is coming at us,” said U.S. Senate Candidate Brian Frydenborg (D), during the forum at New Psalmist Baptist Church. “Hogan 50–Alsobrooks 36,  Hogan 49–Trone 37, that is not where we need to be as Democrats. What that means is that despite the best of intentions and two quality frontrunners, we are failing.”

For a debate less than two months before the primary and less than six weeks before early voting, this is just an absolute collective disgrace on the part of the local media (*April 8 update) apart from Afro News, and it still should have published its account much earlier.

If you’re disappointed by now, here’s another harsh dose of reality: while the event was organized by the League of Women Voters of Baltimore City (LWVBC), the host for the event was Baltimore’s New Psalmist Baptist Church and they were in charge of the recording and streaming of the event.  Before the debate, I asked about the status and quality of the recordings.  I was directed to a Pete French, who assured me that the Church recorded all their services and that they were professional quality (I mentioned that previous “official” recordings had sorely missed the mark in quality).  He made it clear that an audio, not a video, recording would be made (strange, why not record video, what are we hiding from voters here?) and that no decision had yet been made on whether that recording would be released.  I pressed him on this, noting how it would really be a disservice to the public to not share the recording.  He declined to explain why they were going about this in such a secretive way and clearly did not feel he had any obligation to offer any further explanation, making it clear he would not say anything further of substance at this point on this issue.  I must admit I had a bad feeling about whether or not this recording would be released given his polite yet clearly dismissive attitude; also, days earlier, I had asked if the organizers might offer any rides from the main Baltimore-Penn Station connecting to DC since the Church was on the outskirts of the city and I was coming from DC—about an hour away by public transit from Baltimore-Penn Station, and was told no; when I introduced myself to Farmer, he asked me with an amused and perhaps condescending tone if I was the candidate who has asked for a ride (an Uber had been suggested, which would have been prohibitively expensive, but I eventually learned that Baltimore had a subway and was able to take that out).  After this exchange before the debate during the introductions while we were on stage, it was announced that the debate would be live-streamed.  I asked one of the staffers for that link to be provided so I could share with all my followers online, and she said she would get that for me.  It never came.  After repeated inquiries after Thursday’s debate, I learned on Sunday from the Facebook account of LWVBC that the New Psalmist Baptist Church—specifically Pete Farmer—had decided not to release the audio to the public.

Even with the oddness of our exchange I had in-person with Farmer, I was still flabbergasted and deeply offended by this decision, sure for myself, but even more so for the people of Maryland.

They may be a church, but who in the hell did they think they were keeping this debate from the larger voting public?  This furthermore went against what the LVWBC website had stated, that “The event will be recorded and made available online”:

To be honest, though, this triple whammy—a major polling firm making an exclusionary and totally inexcusable decision to not include second-tier candidates despite the results of the previous poll as characterized earlier, literally zero media coverage of the debate (until this piece you are reading now by yours truly *April 8 update: and until Afro News‘s artile eleven days later)), and then the New Psalmist Baptist Church recording the event but then the person in charge of the decision on whether to release the recoding deciding against its release despite my personal entreaties to have them released made directly to him in person—is par for the course for this Maryland Democratic U.S. Senate primary this election cycle.

Fortunately, there is one available unofficial partial video taken by one candidate’s staffer by mobile phone of the debate that is missing most of the opening statements but has the rest (you can hear me speak at 12:36, 28.24, 43:43, 1:01:07, 1:18:11, 1:33:30).  You can clearly see that my alternative history description from above is accurate: the only difference from above is that there was no news media coverage (April 8 update: until Afro News eleven days after the event).  And the debate was well attended, so there is still a chance for it to have some impact, though because of what I outlined above, that impact will surely be minimal unless somehow my coverage here makes a difference and that video gets a lot of views.

Time for Democrats to Panic and Adjust and Why I am the Solution (Even if You Support David or Angela)

The Problems with Candidates Trone and Alsobrooks

It is mistakes and attitudes like the above that, if nothing changes, make Republican Larry Hogan the favorite to win in November.  Yes, here we have two candidate frontrunners and their campaigns running their campaigns in such a problematic way that Hogan is beating them badly and either most or close to most voters don’t even have an opinion on them: 46% when it came to Trone and 58% compared to Alsobrooks, while Hogan had a 64% favorable rating.  And when he left office in Maryland in January 2023 not that long ago as one of the nation’s most popular governors for years, a final poll had him with a 77% approval rating, including 81% with Democrats (even matching their approval of Biden), higher than with Republicans (68%).  And this was a Republican governor in a heavily-Democratic state!  Additionally, his approval was 81% with African-American voters to 76% for white voters.

So here we are heading into a general election with two far-lesser-known frontrunners running far behind the far-more-well-known Larry Hogan: David Trone 12 points behind—49%-37%–and Angela Alsobrooks down 14 points—50%-36%.  “Don’t worry, once voters get to know them in the general election, they’ll be fine, plus, we have the abortion issue!” is not just an extremely naïve, hubristic, non-sequitur response, it is incredibly risky and a losing mentality.  We have no idea if any of that ground will be made up (I would suspect some would be but hardly think it’s a given that enough of it will be, and though I think Alsobrooks just picking up the endorsement of rockstar Rep. Jamie Raskin—our modern Daniel Webster in the House—will big a serious boost in her fight with Trone it may not be enough to get her past Trone, only time will tell), let alone whether the gap will get worse for either candidate.  And abortion rights are not really particularly at stake in Maryland with a 102-39 Maryland House of Delegates Democratic majority, a 34-13 Democratic majority in the Maryland Senate, and with Democratic Governor Wes Moore running the state, not in the way they are at risk in purple swing and Republican-controlled red states with local leaders or extremist right-wing courts trying to impose sweeping restrictions on women’s bodily and reproductive autonomy.  But that or some other version of “Don’t worry, it’ll be fine” is the dangerous mentality I am hearing from the frontrunners and their supporters.

This should be even more worrying when one consider that certain key parts of the base will be less than enthusiastic about supporting an old white guy who was a billionaire retail alcohol mogul for decades before entering Congress just five years ago or a former county prosecutor with what especially some on the left would view as a controversial record in that role.  And neither have the stature or big-time political experience Ben Cardin had in 2006 or Larry Hogan has today.  These and other weaknesses are being ignored or denied, and not testing the candidates on these grounds before Larry Hogan would challenge them on in a contest that would involve many Republicans and independents, not just Democrats, is a plan for failure and losing.  As I noted in my concluding speech, Obama was a much better candidate having faced off against Clinton in 2008 before he went up against McCain.  We need a third person in this race to toughen or hone these Trone and Alsobrooks into being much more competitive against Hogan or consider an alternative.  I can play both roles better than anyone else among the second-tier Democratic candidates in this race.

Trone may have way more money than Alsobrooks, but she had raised just under $5 million before last quarter’s reporting date at the end of 2023, no small amount.  I can promise you that if I had $5 million, this would be a very different race with a very different feel.

The Problems with the Maryland Democratic Party and its Affiliates

As I have noted before, the Maryland Democrats’ plan has failed thus far and needs to change dramatically.  If I was involved in the Maryland State Democratic Party, my plan would have been and for the rest of the primary is now simple:

1. Encourage every organization sponsoring any primary debate or candidate forum to reach out to all other Democratic Party organizations in the state to cross-promote and cross-post about all these event on their pages and social media.
2. I would also ensure all local papers, local news sites, and local television stations would be listing all these events well-ahead of time and prominently as a matter of public interest.
3. I would engage national- level outlets, especially The Washington Post, in addition to C-SPAN to engage in much more coverage.
4. I would have the state party interview each and every Democratic candidate and post video on our site, YouTube, and social media, as well as transcripts.
5. I would have the state party during these final weeks organize two to three more debates in the final less-than-two months of the primary.  The questions would not just be about issues but also the candidates’ possible weaknesses and their strategies to win against Hogan.  I would include all candidates for at least the first one or two debates, pay to commission an independent and respectable non-partisan poll or two from a major pollster, and have some sort of polling cutoff based on non-partisan polling available (right now, just two polls) for the final debate or two.  I would find a way to get these televised live on public access television, perhaps C-SPAN, and definitely streamed online live and posted online after.  They would not be amateur, cell-phone quality, or inaudible or unintelligible as has been the case thus far.
6. I would have the state party provide assistance to any involved or sponsoring organization to further all these ends.

The insanity here is that all six of these are no-brainers and should have been happening on some level partly since late in 2023.  There is no excuse for the lack of coordination, cross-promotion, and not properly recording all these debates/forums and not properly making them publicly available on the internet, period.

The Problems with the Media

And as a journalist, I for damn sure wouldn’t depend on outreach to know about these events and cover them.  I would prioritize coverage of these events, make sure they are listed in an “upcoming events” section within the politics section with links to the event pages, and sure as hell not let a situation occur like what happened with the last debate when it was not covered at all.  Lost pets, fraternity hazing, and traffic accidents are not more important.  If outlets are short-staffed, bring on some interns if necessary to cover, but have someone there covering no matter what for every single primary debate (plenty of college kids can at least sit and take notes).  There should be alerts in the days before on the news organizations’ homepage, and this should be especially prominently featured on the homepage up top on the day of the event.

All this is so absolutely basic that it shouldn’t need to be said, anything less is gross negligence.  But this is not happening and so it very much needs to be said, and this is just damn pathetic.  This needs to go for all the main local papers and The Washington Post, all the local-interest sites, and all the local television stations.  There is no excuse for anything less.  And, as I noted before, if you’re a newspaper associated with a poll, you sure don’t exclude second tier-candidates under current conditions for the reasons outlined earlier.

Conclusion: Candidates, the Party, and Media: Help Me Help You Do Your Jobs

In the end, the top candidates’ jobs are to put themselves in a position that make it the most likely they will defeat their opponents.  In the end, the Democratic Party and its allied organizations’ jobs are to promote events as much as possible so as to generate real public and media interest and ensure voters can make informed decisions over months of a competitive primary process that for much of its duration is open and gives all comers a real chance to connect and get their message out to voters and the press, along with making sure the process forges candidates into stronger versions of themselves better equipped to take on a formidable general election candidate if there is such a candidate and, boy, there sure is this time around, clearly much more than was anticipated.  Andin the end, the press’s job is to cover all this in substantive ways and to also raise awareness and so that voters can stay informed and not just take candidates’ and the Party’s words without scrutiny and context.

With the polling where it is and factoring all of the above into the equation, it is obvious none of this is happening now.  And I don’t see signs of any adjustments or self-awareness that adjustments need to be made.   And either they change what they are doing and how they are doing it or Larry Hogan’s odds of winning Ben Cardin’s seat for Republicans will be high, far too high for my liking at a time when having more Democrats to stand up to Trump’s MAGA insurrectionist fascism is essential because the survival of democracy in America itself and the whole post-World War II U.S.-led international order are at stake, under assault from an unholy alliance between Trump and Putin.  So no, we cannot afford to have even one of the best possible Republicans in Larry Hogan—in votes, the GOP equivalent of Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), breaking often with his party on key issues—to replace Ben Cardin, we need a Democrat.

At the last three debates, I was the only candidate who talked about the frontrunners’ (increasingly) poor polling against Hogan and the major crisis for Democrats in both Maryland and the U.S. Senate this represents.  None of the moderators so much as asked anything even remotely related to clear and present dangers this reality presents for Democrats’ prospects in a deep blue state.  So I see only one solution to correct course: make me the third person in this Maryland Democratic U.S. Senate primary race so I can light a fire under the ass of all the major actors involved to either forge the frontrunners into being more Hogan-ready than their current 12-14 point disastrous deficits or to present a third alternative if they are unable or unwilling to adjust.

Whichever role I end up playing, me being that clear third person in this Democratic U.S. Senate race in Maryland seems to be the only way to maximize our changes to keep Ben Cardin’s seat blue.  The current course and status quo of the press coverage along with the Democratic candidates and Democratic establishment here in Maryland are failing and making it far too likely that Hogan and Republicans will win.  I am the only Democratic candidate willing to admit this, let alone call for action to address it and be a leader by acting accordingly.  I therefore deserve to at least be the third candidate in this race and be part of the discussion from now until May 14, not for my sake, but for all our sakes and for the sake of a Democratic victory in November.

But I need your help to make this happen.  Even if you support Rep. David Trone or County Executive Alsobrooks, they are not currently on a path to beating Hogan or even close, they need help and need someone to push them to be better.  And like it or not, there is no other candidate that can do that in this race at this time besides me.  So please support me, spread the word, and donate to my campaign for the sake of the party and keeping Ben Cardin’s seat blue to better fight against Trumpist MAGA insurrectionist fascism in Washington, the most important fight that must take precedence before all others.  Hogan is a nice guy, not a fascist nor an insurrectionist, but he will still vote too many times with those who are, and that is why we must defeat him, and that is why I’ve got to be the third person in this race.

See related articles Frydenborg Holds His Own Against Alsobrooks in Baltimore Maryland U.S. Senate Democratic Primary Debate, but Will It Matter & Why Won’t Local Media Cover this Race Properly?, Maryland U.S. Democratic Primary Debate Raises Questions on Frontrunners’ & Party’s Readiness to Take on Hogan. Can Frydenborg Emerge As Third Option? and Petty Feuding Between Trone and Alsobrooks Does Not Honor Ben Cardin’s Legacy. Vote for Me Instead! And see all of Brian’s Maryland U.S. Senate race coverage here as well as Brian’s official campaign website.

© 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!

Yes, I am using my own news website to promote my candidacy and ideas I am putting forth as a candidate for U.S. Senate for Maryland and I won’t apologize for it!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, Threads @bfchugginalong, LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content) March 19, 2024; see related March 6 article Maryland U.S. Democratic Primary Debate Raises Questions on Frontrunners’ & Party’s Readiness to Take on Hogan. Can Frydenborg Emerge As Third Option? and March 2 article Petty Feuding Between Trone and Alsobrooks Does Not Honor Ben Cardin’s Legacy. Vote for Me Instead! and see all of Brian’s Maryland U.S. Senate race coverage here; 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—At a debate with a small audience—more people came to see Julia Ioffe interview CNN’s Jim Sciutto about his new book at Politics and Prose in Washington—at which Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks and another second-tier candidate came in each with a small crowd of supporters and/or staff hard in the tank for their candidate and determined to show vocal support, candidate Brian Frydenborg—myself—made a surprising showing, offering some of the most detailed answers and generated significant applause after many of his statements and answers despite not having a single supporter or staffer present (but by the end of the debate, I seem to have won at least a few of former).

A Frontrunner Who Could Not Easily Outshine Second-Tier Competition and a Second-Tier Candidate (Me!) Who Held His Own Against a Frontrunner

Don’t just take my word for it, you can see/hear for yourself when I speak in this video of the full debate (at 16:20, 23:37, 30:16, 45.:11, 51.:55, 58.44, 1:05:32, 1:23:34—things get a little crazy during my conclusion because of a Gaza protester, who I wished I could have engaged and probably could have won at least partly over with what I had to say).

In some ways, I feel I “won.”  This is like one of the lowest seeds nearly beating a top seed in an away arena in the NCAA March Madness basketball tournament or a very low-ranked national squad tying against a home powerhouse in the soccer World Cup group stage play.  When such things happen, the story focus is on the upstart underdog overperforming, and I feel that is a fair take here, too.  The other candidates with staff and/or supporters they organized to bring to the event—people who were literally there to show support for specific people not named Brian Frydenborg—had to contend with a person in myself who pretty much no one there knew yet who still held his own and earned applause and support not from anyone who was literally there to cheer for him but who showed respect for him solely based on his ideas and delivery and articulation of them.  So if anything, this could be seen as a victory for me and a defeat and an embarrassment for Alsobrooks, who has raised millions of dollars, been active in Maryland politics for decades, and had a clear following present at the debate.  The other candidate I mentioned had the loudest support of all—the loudest person there was recording the debate for this candidate and gets credit for the video linked to earlier—his core showing of staff and supporters often outshining support for Alsobrooks—again—one of the two frontrunners in this race (the second, Rep. David Trone, backed out at the last minute, perhaps judging that he was far enough ahead of Alsobrooks in polling that there was more for him to lose than gain by attending).

That Alsobrooks could not generate more people to show up or more vocal support at a Baltimore event in which two virtually unknowns—including me, with no predisposed crowd support—can demonstrate anywhere near-comparable crowd response is troubling for Alsobrooks, perhaps giving some explanation as to why in the best polling she runs behind not just her Democratic main rival Trone but former Maryland Governor Republican Larry Hogan as well.

To be clear, I am not saying Alsobrooks performed poorly in the debate: her answers were consistently good even if sometimes coming off as listy, general, meandering, and less-detailed than my own (again, listen for yourselves and don’t take my word alone).  So her performance was not bad or anywhere near bad.  But as one of the top-two candidates (and by far so) in the primary, Alsobrooks should have displayed a crowd support and performance that blew everyone else there—all three second-tier candidates—out of the water.  That this did not happen is reason to feel less confident in her candidacy and how her campaign is being run, and while I would also caution not to read too much into any one event, with less than two months to the primary this situation was still shocking.  I essentially have no campaign organization and have no staff, but if I had raised the millions in funding she has, the setting for this debate would have been much different, that much I can say.

As it is, Alsobrooks and myself were the only two candidates who actually answered the questions in a way that demonstrated a range and depth of understanding on the issues and experience dealing with them.  As was the case in the last debate in which I participated, I was also the only candidate quoted outside of the two top-tier candidates by a media outlet: this time, with Trone absent, only myself and Alsobrooks were quoted directly by The Baltimore Sun in its writeup, each twice.  This is how I was quoted in the article:

Alsobrooks didn’t mention Trone during the roughly 90-minute forum. One of the four candidates who did attend — Brian E. Frydenborg of Montgomery County — said Trone “should be here tonight.”

and

The Emerson College polling showing Hogan even with Trone [and seven points ahead of Alsobrooks] “should make us all terrified because it’s worrisome,” Frydenborg said during the forum. “We cannot afford to have a Republican voting with Republicans in the Senate.” Democrats currently hold a 51-49 Senate majority.

I even had a small crowd of voters come up to talk to me after the debate and the discussions went for some time.  So, again, for this reason and all the above reasons, I feel you could argue I at the very least came in second, but could also say I tied with Alsobrooks or even won considering what was very much stacked against me and relative expectations (high for her, none for me).

Yet sadly, my performance may not even matter…

Where Is the Media??

If a Democratic U.S. Senate Primary happens in the woods and there is no media there to cover it, is it actually happening for most voters in Maryland?  I sort of jest, but not really: local media coverage has been nonexistent or wanting greatly far too often depending on the outlets involved.  For my own two debates, I can only give The Baltimore Sun high grades as it is the only outlet to have covered both.

As noted above, that debate discussed herein was just one event.  So it would also be a mistake to oversell the effect or importance of this event.  I am certain Alsobrooks and Trone are both far, far more ahead of me, that one of them will very likely be the nominee and not me, but part of the reason this effect will be so limited and that my chances of winning are so low is that the local press, let alone the national press, are mostly not covering these events.  And to me this is mystifying.  As I noted regarding the last debate at the beginning of this month, there was no local TV coverage: restaurant fires, lost pets, car accidents, and fraternity hazing were all larger priorities.  The local outlet Maryland Matters was absent at both debates; the local paper Baltimore Banner was at the last one, but not this one in Baltimore (strange considering the paper’s name).  I found no local TV station coverage for this more recent one, either.  And while sometimes this is at least partly on the organizers not reaching out enough, as a journalist here, I can say regardless of whether or not the organizers are contacting journalists, it is the job of the journalists to keep track of and cover these events themselves.  And here in Maryland, they are clearly failing in their jobs, whether television stations, newspapers, or websites, with the admirable exception of The Baltimore Sun and its intrepid Jeff Barker filling this role for it.

There is absolutely no excuse for this.  With Hogan’s entry, Maryland’s U.S. Senate race is one of the most interesting and important Senate races in the whole country, so there is certainly reason for more national-outlet coverage, but that the local outlets cannot even be bothered to cover this race properly now with less than two months before the primary and less than six weeks before early voting begins is an absolute disgrace.  I keep going around and asking Marylanders if they even know who is running as a Democrat for U.S. Senate, and most of the time they can’t mention one, let alone two, of the frontrunner candidates.  More often, they know Hogan is running.  And this is in a blue state.  Sure, some of is this because both Trone and Alsobrooks are fairly obscure when it comes to statewide recognition: most voters don’t even know who their U.S. House representative is, let alone their county executive.  But a lot of it is also the lack of media coverage.  All these local outlets should be covering all the candidate debates and there should be far more interviews with each candidate, including myself.

It’s as I wrote on my campaign website before the last debate:

To explain why this event and others like it are so important, I want to tell a story from the incredible book Dismantling Utopia: How Information Ended the Soviet Union, by local son of Maryland Scott Shane, a friend and mentor and an incredible reporter and author who covered crime, national security, and the Soviet Union/Russia for decades first at The Baltimore Sun (as a result he played himself on The Wire!) and later at The New York Times, winning two Pulitzer Prizes for his reporting.  He tells the story of a young, “boyish physicist” named Arkady Murashyov who ran in the 1989 Soviet elections for the Congress of People’s deputies, the first contested elections Russia in over seventy years since the 1917 election that the Communist Bolsheviks made sure did not end up counting for much on their quest for power by coup and terror.  Debates between candidates were televised live, and in one race in a district north of Moscow, the unknown Murashyov debated “older, better-known, and more conservative competitors” for over two hours, arguing that Communist one-party rule was the root of all the USSR’s problems.  Amazingly—in a society under some of the worst oppression on earth for some seven decades with no competitive elections or free debates in public throughout this era—Murashyov won the seat and became the leader of the Congress’s “radical” wing.  As Shane writes: “Without the televised debate the unknown Murashyov might well have lost” (pg. 151).

This says everything about why I need this debate and am counting on attendees and viewers to spread the word about what I know will be a powerful appearance by myself.

Voters need more exposure, not less, from their candidates.  It is remarkable that in 2024, Maryland has had such a closed race with so few events in which the candidates can stand up to public scrutiny and scrutinize each other with now there being only ten weeks left until the primary and early voting beginning before then.  Instead of being about name recognition of spending on television advertisements, let’s make this race about ideas, plans, and qualifications.  Let me be your Murashyov, a breakout star who can upend this race and be an injection of youth and fresh ideas I am ready to run with hard for Maryland and the nation.

Lack of Media Coverage Limiting Voter Engagement and Awareness, Suppressing New Voices

If these past two debates with me were properly covered and both were given properly-recorded high-quality recordings for all voters to easily see and access, I like the odds of my surging now at least somewhat in the polls, if not to the levels of Trone and Alsobrooks, at least clearly to third-place apart from all the other second-tier candidates.  And maybe that will happen still, but without coverage, without voters actually being able to see me perform well and comparably side-by-die a sitting U.S congressman and a sitting county executive, it will be so much harder and who, really, will ever even know about my debate performances?  How will voters even know the differences between the candidates or their ability to hold their own on a debate stage?  Why is the local media AND national media not prioritizing this?  And why aren’t the Democratic Party organizations and affiliated groups clamoring to promote these events and ensure proper attendance, let alone press coverage?  The only answers that make sense are that the Democrats’ plans a.) did not plan for Trone to be ahead of Alsobrooks and b.) did not plan for Hogan to be the GOP opponent, which I explained in more detail earlier. 

But it’s time to adjust now, and there is little time left since early voting starts in less than six weeks and the primary is less than two months away.  So consider me a Plan B: I can hold my own on the debate stage, get this race focused on detailed discussions of the issues and how to beat Hogan, and at least help push the frontrunners out of their comfort zone to be better prepared for Hogan on one end of the spectrum and offering a possibly viable third alternative on the other.

So let’s make this a three-person race by supporting and including me through to the end and let the voters decide: at the last two debates, I was the only second-tier candidate able to speak in detail on the full range of issues, and since neither front-runner is current polling ahead of Hogan in the most credible poll, voters deserve to be able to explore other options.  So it’s time for the press to do its job and start properly covering this race and for Democrats to push hard for that coverage, lest they sleepwalk into Larry Hogan giving Ben Cardin’s long-held seat to Republicans, a disaster we must avoid for so many reasons.

See related articles Maryland U.S. Democratic Primary Debate Raises Questions on Frontrunners’ & Party’s Readiness to Take on Hogan. Can Frydenborg Emerge As Third Option? and Petty Feuding Between Trone and Alsobrooks Does Not Honor Ben Cardin’s Legacy. Vote for Me Instead! And see all of Brian’s Maryland U.S. Senate race coverage here as well as Brian’s official campaign website.

© 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!

Yes, I am using my own news website to promote my ideas I am putting forth as a candidate for U.S. Senate for Maryland and I won’t apologize for it!  This is part of a series of articles discussing my ideas to fix America as a future U.S. Senator.

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, Threads @bfchugginalong, LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content) March 6, 2024; see related March 2 article Petty Feuding Between Trone and Alsobrooks Does Not Honor Ben Cardin’s Legacy. Vote for Me Instead! and see all of Brian’s Maryland U.S. Senate race coverage here; 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—Until recently, the assumption was that whomever won the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate would be the next U.S. Senator from Maryland, replacing Ben Cardin’s long-held seat.

But the entry of relatively-recently-former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, a two-term Republican who was one of the nation’s most popular governors during his tenure and left office in early 2023 with ridiculously high approval ratings, into the race has rapidly shifted this thinking: Inside Elections downgraded the rating of the Maryland Senate race from Solid Democratic to Likely Democratic, as did the Cook Political Report’s Senate Race Ratings system.

But Saturday’s candidate forum debate gave Democrats even more reasons to worry about the November Senate race.  This weekend’s debate—moderated by The Washington Post’s hero columnist Jennifer Rubin—was the first Maryland U.S. Senate Democratic primary debate of 2023 and only the second overall between the folks who form the pool of potentials to challenge Hogan, taking on increased significance and stakes than if Hogan had not entered the race, but before we get into the debate, we need to look at how we got here.

The Maryland Democratic Party’s Plan Has Failed

First, let’s talk about Maryland’s Democratic leaders’ approach to this.  It was clear early on in this race that they had planned beforehand to consolidate behind Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks depending on certain circumstances, and those circumstances were met and met some time ago: there is no doubt she has the most impressive list of endorsements of any candidate in this race by far when it comes to Maryland politicians.  And I want to be clear: it’s great that Country Executive Alsobrooks has deep relationships with fellow officials and lawmakers throughout the state, speaking to her star power and deep roots established over decades of hard work and results in the state.  Part of this may have been motivated by all the buzz around No Labels and Larry Hogan making a Senate run from him seem distant until recently—perhaps the idea being that without a serious Republican challenger, picking an up-and-comer who only had county-level experience as an office-holder would not matter much in the end—but it is hard to know what exactly was going on in this behind-the-scenes process.

U.S. Representative David Trone’s entry into the race, obviously, was not a welcome development for their plan.  Whatever that plan was, it was not to put together a significant series of prominent public events put together by the statewide Democratic Party to put Alsobrooks, Trone, or any other competitors on the stage to face scrutiny from the public and from each other in actual debates: the chance to do that came and went long ago.

Here we are now, then, with little over nine weeks to go until the primary and both candidates having little name recognition statewide and facing little scrutiny or even media coverage thus far with a far more competitive general election on the horizon after the entry of Larry Hogan, known by virtually everyone in the state.  Rather than be tested in a rigorous primary process, the two main candidates have been kept from what in many cases in many states would have been a more robust, open, and public contest.  And now time is running out: the May 14 primary is fast-approaching and early voting begins May 2, less than two months away.

And this second debate event was only held at that two-month-away mark, just a few days ago.  Neither of those two events were run by or vigorously promoted the state Party, neither were properly broadcast live (there was a Zoom video broadcast that was later posted for the latest debate, but the audio/video quality, pathetically, was horrific: my middle school plays had better audio/video quality by far than the video of the last debate that is the only video posted thus far; still, you can make out most of what I say quite clearly with if you’re willing to trudge through).

In fact, all of 2023 went by with only one minor debate in Prince George’s County and that came only early in December, one that was deliberately closed and not even trying to open a broader discussion: the event, organized by Latino Democrats of Prince George’s County (LDPGC), limited participation to just three candidates: Alsobrooks, Trone, and Juan Dominguez, the sole Latino running in the race, with a $200,000 fundraising threshold requirement for participation that was suspiciously close to the total that Dominguez had declared raised by that point.  To be clear, I am not implying any sort of nefarious collusion between Dominguez’s campaign and LDPGC, and I have connected with Juan repeatedly, who has always been friendly, respectful, candid, and professional towards me.  I did try to engage with LDPCG repeatedly and the interactions were repeatedly rude, dismissive, and perfunctory, it being all too clear they wanted nothing to do with me.  While I hope to improve my relationship with the organization in the future, it was crystal clear to me they did not want an open forum of any kind, just the two major candidates and the one Latino candidate, with a fundraising threshold conveniently designed to keep everyone else out and just the right threshold to allow Juan to participate.  Such a constricting, limited, undemocratic approach based solely on a financial metric seemed wholly inappropriate for the very first debate of the primary season, especially in the Democratic Party.  I made my displeasure publicly known at the time and even successfully crashed the event, garnering about as much TV coverage as the three candidates on stage.  In any event, the respectable Juan, whose voice would still have been a thoughtful one in this race had he stayed in, has since dropped out of the Senate race and is instead running for Congress in Maryland.

My best guess was that the Maryland Democratic establishment (to the degree you can call it that: I am no conspiracy-theory-minded Bernie Sanders voter) that had decided on Alsobrooks (not saying Alsobrooks or her campaign were part of this) decided once after Trone entered the race that their endorsements would still be enough and that the best thing would be to shield her from a vigorous competition with Trone that might do damage unnecessarily and/or even give an advantage to him, their non-preferred candidate, but that, hey, either way, the Democratic nominee was expected to easily win against whatever Republican would be nominated.

But now that Larry Hogan has entered the race, neither Alsobrooks nor Trone have been tested nor challenged much in any kind of tough debate format thus far during this election cycle, and there won’t be any more debates after May 14 until, presumably, one of them would debate Larry Hogan.  The only way for the candidates to be forged into sterner stuff, to have them really get experience on the field of battle in this particular campaign before debating Hogan, are the remaining primary debates. Without another candidate making substantive challenges to the two frontrunners (and I make the case below why that should be me), we should not expect a dramatically better debate performance from either Trone or Alsobrooks in any of the other remaining primary debates than their performance from this weekend, nor first debate, whoever get the nomination, against Hogan.  And that should worry us all.

About the Debate…

Soon into the debate, it was clear that two of the five second-tier candidates were utterly unprepared and have no business running; they literally declined to answer multiple questions on the grounds that they just straight-up admitted they know little to nothing on the issues in question.  Two others out of the five made points almost exclusively related to one to two of their pet issues and generally failed to connect their candidacy or experience to the broader set of issues.  One of these two spoke very slowly and said little, the other more articulate and more seriously, but neither will have any impact on the race.

The two frontrunners Trone and Alsobrooks did just fine, neither really outperforming the other or damaging or gaining at each other’s expense in a significant way.  While overall their answers were generally competent and articulate—each definitely having some good moments and good points—both had some pretty bad moments, too.

At one point, Alsobrooks was unwilling to answer a basic question as to what is something she should have done differently in her career as a public servant: she entirely dodged the question and just talked about how “listening” is important, coming off as insecure and inauthentic in being unwilling to just give an honest answer about a simple lesson learned.  Even before that, Alsobrooks was asked a simple question about her evolving position on the death penalty.  She took up the full allotted time to answer to give a word salad that gave no clear indication of what her current position on the death penalty was.  Trone, understandably, responded by essentially saying: “You didn’t answer the question at all, what the heck is your actual position?”  Alsobrooks then responded by… attacking Trone for being rich (yes, really).  Not just rich, but really rich.  And for spending a lot of that rich money of his on this race, in which he is polling comfortably ahead of her (though there is so little independent/non-partisan polling that it’s still actually possible the race is wide open).  Her attacks on him had nothing to do with the issue being discussed or the question asked and just came off as her trying desperately to hit him in a rehearsed way on his wealth and to portray him as an out of touch rich guy, a line of attack that seems to be 90% of her attacks against him in general, a large portion of her campaign e-mails and communications, and certainly most of her attacks against him during the debate, with at one point Alsobrooks calling Trone a one-man super PAC.  Such a charge is not really accurate or fair since his situation is that he is a person who is largely funding who own campaign, which is most definitely not a super PAC.

I recently addressed Alsobrooks’s gratuitous classist attacks against Trone, as well as Trone’s silly attacks against her as a “career politician,” though I think when I made it clear over the weekend in my debate introduction that attacking someone for being a career politician would be like attacking Ben Cardin—the man whose seat they are trying to replace and who had forty years of government experience before running for the U.S. Senate—I might have preemptively discouraged Trone from using that line of attack against her; still, he might have felt comfortably enough ahead not just with the one mainstream poll but with his consistent campaign polling that (even some are polls his campaign organized, still shows him up along with an independent poll as up by a lot) that he might have decided to not use that line of attack against her on his own regardless of what I said, but if he had tried that line of attack, my introduction would certainly have deflated such an attack.  He was definitely less aggressive in attacking her than she was and than he was at the December LDPGC debate.

As for Trone, at one point he fumbled what should have been a great opportunity from moderator Jennifer Rubin, who asked how he would win over independents and Republicans.  He started talking about how to beat Larry Hogan, not really answering the question, so Rubin cut him off and pressed him.  He then basically said he didn’t need Republicans.  Not only was this cringeworthy, it avoided playing on an obvious strength of Trone because he represents a rural district with a lot of Trump voters.  This was a totally unforced gaffe, one he realized because he later gave the answer he should have: that if anyone could win over independents and Trump voters between him and Alsobrooks, it would be him given the nature of his district, his bipartisan record, and his background as a businessman.  Instead, it is is disturbing that he could have whiffed so easily on what should have easily been a home run for him.  And like Alsobrooks, he did not look that good when they mixed it up.  Finally, he, too, often came off as giving lists that voters might not have understood, but was generally strong in touting his record and accomplishments, especially when talking about his objectively strong bipartisan record in the House (conversely, every single member of the county council—the legislative branch at the county level in Prince George’s County—with which Alsobrooks has to deal is a Democrat, a point Trone could have made to contrast his political experience favorably against Alsobrooks’s but failed to).

And while each often gave good answers, they didn’t seem stellar.  As noted, sometimes they listed accomplishments in such a shallow perfunctory way without really explaining them, though I would give Trone a slight edge because talking about his work in Congress was more transferrable to being a prospective U.S. senator than some of the accomplishments Alsobrooks touted.  To be fair to her, that is an issue not so much with her specifically as with the nature of county-level executive politics compared to legislating at the Congressional when it comes to running for Senate—which is part of Congress—and it’s one of the most serious issues I have and that many others have and will have with Alsobrooks’ candidacy: that as a county executive, even if she was the best county executive in the nation, that type of government experience is just of such a different nature and of such a different level and type of work done compared to legislating and working within the Senate that is will be seen as many as not the right kind of experience for the job.  Conversely, a member of the House like Trone has a type of experience that is much more relevant to and like the work of the Senate.  In other words, this point—and it is a big one that Alsobrooks has not been pressed to address on the campaign trail, by Trone or by a media highlighting, understandably, the historic nature of her candidacy making her possibly the first African-American U.S. Senator in Maryland history and only the third African-American woman elected and the fourth overall in U.S. Senate history—is her political Achilles’s heel and she cannot afford not to address in a deeply thought-out, deeply competent way.  While the historic nature of her candidacy is most certainly to be celebrated, that does nothing to address the concerns raised by what we can call the “county question,’ which would be just as valid were we talking about a County Executive named David Trone whose candidacy would not the historic nature that Alsobrooks’s candidacy clearly does.  Yet some of her supporters in the audience when I raised this point on stage and with whom I spoke after were in denial about this and dangerously seemed to think this was a non-issue.  It may be for her enthusiastic supporters—and many of them are enthusiastic—but it is almost certainly going to be one of the top concerns about her candidacy not just in the primary but certainly even more so if she were to face off directly against Hogan, a contrast that would be her biggest weakness apart from her relatively lack of name recognition compared to Hogan, who left office with as high as a 77% approval rating little over a year ago as a Republican in a deeply blue Democratic state.

I already mentioned that there was a real failing in terms or producing a quality audio/video recording in the past debate, but I want to be clear that this and other failings were not the failings of the main organizers and sponsors—the Women’s Democratic Club of Montgomery County, Montgomery County Young Democrats, and Greater Silver Spring Democratic Club—which undertook a Herculean effort to organize this event with their partners, stepping into the galactic-sized black hole left by the state Party and other major Maryland Democratic organizations in failing to produce the only real open debate so far (again, that earlier one was prohibitively exclusionary).

I will also say that most of the local news media absolutely failed on this event: some of the top local weekend stories in the area had to do with someone killed in a crash, a bus driver finding a missing person, a neglected dog found in a park, a fire at a restaurant, and the University of Maryland suspending its fraternity/sorority events…  Nothing from the local television stations on this event at all.  This isn’t responsible local journalism.  I also contacted and engaged in a conversation with C-SPAN with the blessing of the main organizer to get live TV coverage, but it was too difficult on short notice to arrange coverage at the time.

Yours Truly, the Clear Third Place in the Debate (No, Really!)

Three newspapers, including two major ones, did actually cover the event, and I received substantive coverage in two out of the three, including both big ones.  Rubin’s own Washington Post actually quoted me:

But even lesser-known candidates framed themselves as an alternative to sending Hogan, who left two terms in office with high job approval ratings, to help tip the razor-thin balance of power in the chamber toward Republicans.

“We need a Democrat, not Larry Hogan,” said candidate Brian Frydenborg, a journalist who has never held public office.

The biggest Maryland-based paper, The Baltimore Sun, also quoted me:

The other five Democratic candidates have struggled to compete with Trone and Alsobrooks for money and attention in the race.

“Let’s make this a three-person race. We can do better,” said one of them, Brian E. Frydenborg of Montgomery County, a writer, researcher and consultant.

Apart from me, no other candidate besides Rep. David Trone and County Executive Alsobrooks were quoted in these three papers.

A local outlet that did actually cover the debate, MoCo360, quoted me, too, again making me the only candidate quoted apart from the two front-runners:

In his closing statement, Frydenborg bemoaned the frequent verbal warfare between Alsobrooks and Trone, amid the dearth of substantive policy differences between the two. “I think David and Angela have excellent backgrounds in many ways, [but] I’m very disappointed about the way they talk to each other and the sniping,” he said. “It’s not about the issues. I don’t know what they were attacking each other over—I can’t understand it half the time.”

A new local outlet, The Baltimore Banner, decided to poke fun at me for partaking of honey in between questions; reporter Pamela Wood could have followed up on such Pulitzer-worthy reporting with an inquiry and that would have revealed I was recovering from severe bronchitis and that the honey was part of my doctor-recommended efforts to keep my voice functional, but apparently honey is more on the minds of Maryland voters than the substantive answers I gave to serious questions, despite the applause some of those responses generated from the audience even though I literally had only one person I actually knew attending and most of the audience was composed of supporters of Trone and Alsobrooks, with even one of the second-tier candidates having a respectable support group in the audience.  I had at least as much applause as that other second tier candidate with a small following present, and I think actually more.  All this in spite of Honeygate!

Considering that I was the only second-tier candidate who was substantively quoted by The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun, and MoCo360, and considering I had at least as much or more applause than any candidate other than Trone or Alsobrooks, I think it is absolutely and objectively fair to declare myself a third-place finisher in this debate, far ahead of the rest of tier-two even as I am, admittedly, far behind the two frontrunners.  Yes, it would be delusional on my part to even suggest I am somehow nipping at the heels of Trone or Alsobrooks and I will not.  Still, anecdotally, almost everyone I spoke with from the audience told me I was in their top three.  But anecdotes aside, by using the type of media coverage and applause I received as relatively more objective measures and, as few metrics beyond that are available, there are none other to award a third place, even if it is distant one.  So I fairly award myself what I admit, again, is a distant third place in my capacity as a political analyst, a role in which I have a pretty good track record for years now.

Conclusion: Reasons to Seriously Worry, Reasons to Seriously Support Me (or at Least Keep Me in the Debates!)

Both Rep. Trone and Country Executive Alsobrooks are impressive, accomplished individuals; both have accomplished more in their lives than I gave (though I will point out I am 11 years younger than Alsobrooks and 25 years younger than Trone).  But I still believe my specific type of experience makes me a better candidate specifically for the U.S. Senate: over two decades of engaging academically and professionally with national-level and international-level issues on-the-ground from Washington to Jerusalem compared with far less—less than a quarter of that just—for Rep. Trone and none for County Executive Alsobrooks.  If we were going to be voting for the best business leader or best county-level leader, I would recommend voting for Trone or Alsobrooks, respectively, over myself.  But we are not.  We are voting for an office that I am many would agree that would be better filled by someone with more experience on the relevant issues and how the work at the Senate and international level, and that person—the only person fitting that description—in this race is me.  And frankly, I think Congress would be a lot better off with far more policy wonks, academics, and serious researchers in office than there are now: it is their work that often enables people like Rep. Tron and County Executive Alsobrooks to craft and execute the best policies in Congress and county government, respectively.

While Trone was spending most of his life running an alcohol retail business, I was engaging on issues ranging from gun violence to racism, from genocide in central Africa to the Israeli occupation of Palestinians, from terrorism to humanitarianism and all while Alsobrooks was involved in the important issues at the county level in Prince George’s County, but not on these issues as they play out at the U.S. Senate-level and international-level.  Trone’s accomplishments as a businessman are impressive as is his work in the House, as are Alsobrooks’s achievements in Prince George’s County.  But I have by far the most experience with the relevant issues at the level a senator will be engaging with them and it is not even close.

In a race where none of us can compete with the relevant resume Ben Cardin brought to the table when he ran in 2006, my diverse set of experience spread out over more than two decades can be said to be more relevant to being qualified to be a U.S. senator than many more years as a businessman (and just a few in Congress) or many years as a county-level politician.  At the very least, voters deserve to have the chance to hear from and engage with a journalist and academic such broad and deep expertise on the national-level and international-level issues at stake in this race in addition to hearing from a businessman recently-turned Congressman and a top county-level leader.  Let’s broaden the conversation, allow voters to make a more informed decision, challenge the frontrunners to be better candidates if one of them is to face Larry Hogan, and open up the Democratic Primary to be a three-person race before complacency, false assumptions, a reluctance to have the frontrunners go through a rigorous primary that would make them better candidates, and questionable levels of the type of relevant experience might hand a crucial Senate seat to Larry Hogan and the Republican Party at a time when America is in the fight of its life against internal Trumpist insurrectionist fascism aided and abetted for nearly a decade by Russian President Vladimir Putin and his fascist allies.

Does this all mean that we should panic?  No.  But does it mean that we should be worried about the final outcome of this race in November?  Yes.  Would allowing a third candidate like myself—a candidate of substance and seriousness who wants to focus on issue and experience, who has respect for the Democratic Party and the two frontrunners, can operate on the spectrum of presenting a viable alternative on one end to, on the other end, training the frontrunners to be better candidates by forcing them to: address their weaknesses, answer hard questions, and defend serious challenges to their ideas and qualifications—be better for everyone involved—Democrats, the two frontrunners, Marylanders, and all Americans—no matter who wins the primary?  Yes.

Whether for a better primary or a better candidate, vote for and support me for U.S. Senator for the great state of Maryland or increase the risk of a Hogan—and Republican—victory in November.

See related March 2 article Petty Feuding Between Trone and Alsobrooks Does Not Honor Ben Cardin’s Legacy. Vote for Me Instead! And see all of Brian’s Maryland U.S. Senate race coverage here as well as Brian’s official campaign website.

© 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.

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Thirteenth episode on the on the train wreck of insanity and depravity that is the 2024 Republican presidential nomination contest: focusing on the Iowa caucuses and the other early contests: the New Hampshire primary, the Nevada caucuses, and the South Carolina primary as well as how the rest of the race will unfold and why incumbent President Joe Biden will beat Trump.

Notes (more to come):

Title Screen photo credits: ABC/The Hill

The Republican 2024 presidential nomination primary/caucus calendar, per New York Times

All 2024 Republican presidential race polling, national and state, per FiveThirtyEight

On the details of Ron DeSantis’s catastrophic failure on COVID-19, with Florida having the 10^th highest per capita death rate after some very early advantages, see this Guardian article, this BMJ article about the DeSantis Administration lying about COVID statistics, this Washington Post article covering DeSantis’s debate with Gov. Gavin Newson of California

On Ramaswamy’s extremism: See this New Yorker article

On Haley’s history of problems with the Civil War and slavery, see this Washington Post article and this from WHYY/PBS/NPR

All the numbers behind the Selzer poll

On Ann Selzer’s legendary status as a pollster, see FiveThirtyEight

Des Moines Register writeup of the Selzer poll with Selzer’s commentary

On the weather in Iowa for this caucus, see the New York Times

Myself and the late legend Christopher Hitchens savaging the caucuses

When I said Jewish community, I was referring the one in then-Palestine, known as the Yishuv

A primary without a competing caucus in Nevada would be more representative, but since Trump is the leader of a cult there, Republicans might boycott the primary en masse, so it might not be more representative under these conditions, it will depend on If there is decent turnout.

My discussion with Rula Jebreal

On Biden’s frustrations with Netanyahu, see Barak Ravid in Axios and oh so many others and my discussion with Noga Tarnopolsky

My article on Trump, insurrection, and Gen. U.S. Grant

© 2023-2024 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Consider donating if you appreciate this content. Also see Brian’s deep-dive on the 2014 Israel-Hamas war.

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 (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook) November 7, 2022 (with some minor grammatical/typographical/clarity fixes made November 9; would have been earlier, dear readers, but I am having my WORST case of the flu ever… get your shots!! *correction appended: this article originally misstated the year the last time midterm turnout was this high, 1912 instead of 1914)

SILVER SPRING—If polls were all we had to go by, I’d be far more worried about the current midterms culminating (more or less) tomorrow, Tuesday, Election Day.  But, my weary and worried Democrats and other defenders of constitutional freedom: I come with tidings of great joy!

Let’s Talk Polls

Over the summer, polls were trending in Democrats’ favor.  More recently, they have been trending in Republicans’ favor.  Given the fact that by multiple measures most Republican candidates at the national- and top-statewide-levels (or almost most) are now questioning or denying the outcome of the 2020 presidential election (or quietly accepting those who do) and are thus supporting Trump’s Big Lie fascist insurrection coup effort to destroy the Constitution, free-and-fair elections, and the rule of law as the transition from political party to personality cult continues—and that most of those so-called “election deniers” are expected to win—this understandably creates anxiety among not only Democrats, but also Republicans and independents who want America to continue as a true democracy that respects process and minority rights.  Collectively, the polls have gone down for Democrats in key races and have significantly lowered their chances of holding onto the House and Senate in the eyes of analysts and the predictive models they follow.  With democracy itself at stake—should Republicans be able to block most of Biden’s agenda while in charge of even just the House for the next two years and then, voters blaming Biden put Trump back in White House, we may see an end to free and fair federal elections in elections after—you could say it’s time for Democrats and others willing to defend the Constitution to panic.

To those who prioritize democracy over demagoguery, though, I bear the following message: take heart, and have hope, because polling data—while the most prominently utilized data in predictive election analysis—is not the only data, and it’s possible some of that other data in certain circumstances may actually trump (sorry, couldn’t resist) the polls, and specifically in the 2022 midterms.

How?  Polls are complicated: complicated to construct and complicated to interpret and judge, and even understanding what makes the best pollsters the best can be challenging.  Pollsters basically base what portions of their sample—you are not going to interview everyone, literally, but a far smaller group that you hope to draw conclusions from—and/or how they will weight/adjust them towards being more appropriately male, female, rural, urban, suburban, black, white, Hispanic, younger, older, educated, less educated, etc. on a number of factors, often involving a level of guesswork and highlighting balances that pollsters think will reflect turnout considered alongside the general demographics of the country or state (especially registered or likely voters) and/or the portions of groups present in previous electorates.  If they are not weighting on previous elections or the latest demographics and along census results from the American Community Survey, they may base on their own models or look at a range of models for the current election.

Furthermore, one would not include a large sample of Asian or Jewish voters in Idaho or Montana, but would include such in California or Florida, respectively.  Pollsters will often try to have the proportions approach similar types of recent elections and/or other recent election cycles.  For examples, midterm elections, presidential-year elections, primaries, special elections, and referenda all tend to have different demographic balances overall and there are also differences state to state, although turnout in this election is thus far breaking midterm records and thus calling into question how much previous midterms would be accurate predictors.

In addition, there is the margin of error: each poll has a +/- margin-of-error range, say, 3.5%, meaning that if, say, the numbers the polls give one candidate leading another are 51 to 48, both the 51% and the 48% could easily be 3.5% higher or lower; the margin of error says that, generally, with 95% confidence, the results will fall within that range.  For polls to be “off,” the final results would have to fall outside of that +/- range.  It is important to note that, given this, polls that show candidates are closer than the margin of error range should essentially be considered ties.

So what could throw polling off in an election?  If, for some reason, a certain demographic group or groups was or were either significantly overrepresented or underrepresented, something that would either significantly drive up turnout or lower turnout among one group or another.  Say, rural voters, or black voters, or… women.

See what I am getting at?

An Idea…

What I am saying for these 2022 midterms is that I am expecting there is a very good chance of a polling error missing democratic women voters’ surge inspired by the overturning of Roe v. Wade in a way that will mean victory for Democrats, who should overperform their polling predictions by at least several percentage points and therefore win most close races, that a new group of women who would otherwise not vote in a midterm will now vote (32% of eligible female voters did not vote in 2020, compared to 35% of male ones, though it should be noted that 2020 had the highest overall turnout since 1900).

Simple logic would dictate that, after the Supreme Court’s radical decision to overthrow a half-century of precedent (despite assurances hints from certain conservative justices that they would not) in the Dobbs case (and its ruling’s draft’s leak) that destroyed the constitutional protections afforded by the Roe v. Wade decision, you would see a lot more women turn out to vote than in a typical election.  And this thought gave me much hope, but it was basically on a wing and a prayer along with some solid logic, and that was all I had.

Until I found more data—hard­ data—that suggested the polls here are off and off because they are undercounting female votes.

…Consecrated into Form

Enough with the abstract, then; let’s get into the hard data that has since given concrete form to my abstract hopes and hunches!

When I was thinking about all this, I asked myself: when was one of the last times pollsters underestimated turnout among a particular demographic group that turned out in significantly higher portions and that this caused an upset-win for the side not favored in the polls?  In 2016, to name one example, with rural white voters turning out in very high numbers for Trump and their participation at that level was not anticipated by most pollsters, giving him his wins in three key swing states that were heavily favored for Clinton.

In related votes after Dobbs this year, there are multiple serious data points in actual electoral contests backing up my main thesis.   First, with the Kansas referendum on allowing a lift on current protections in the state constitution for abortion rights, there had been just one poll beforehand, predicting the vote to allow tampering with abortion rights would win by four points; it was voted down by 18 points, a 22-point swing against expectations and a triumph for abortion rights.

And there have been multiple special congressional elections since, with Democrats overperforming their expectations by an average of nine percentage-points across four special elections from June-August (in the one that resulted in a Democratic victory, in New York’s 19^th District, Democratic victor Pat Ryan focused on protecting abortion right as a top issue; and this leaves out a fifth special election, Alaska’s ranked-choice election, which a Democrat won and will be be discussed later).

Ok, but an abortion rights referenda and five congressional special elections are not the same as the midterms.  What could indicate more specifically that female turnout would be significantly higher in this midterm election than others and that pollsters would miss this, overrepresenting Republican voters in poll tallies and underrepresenting Democratic votes, particularly women?

As I noted, polling is generally based on tinkering around with normal turnouts or models for the current year.  In this case, looking at women in recent elections according to exit polls, they already generally turn out in slightly-higher numbers than men (across all major racial categories) and thus form more of the electorate, with pollsters already taking this into account.

Let’s look at a competitive swing state for this year’s midterms, Arizona.  In the 2018 midterms, women in Arizona were 53% of the electorate for the U.S. Senate race to 47% for men, and 52% to 48% for men in the 2020 presidential election.  One recent poll I saw in Arizona for this year’s midterms has the same portions as the last midterm there.  Other midterm polls in Arizona have proportional female-male sample-population breakdowns closer to the more recent presidential election, but all the Arizona polls I saw in which I could see the breakdowns reflected some sort of preexisting gender imbalance in favor of more women voting and close to the gender breakdowns of recent elections.

To pick another state, for midterms in Ohio in 2018, it was 51% women as voters in the U.S. Senate race there to 49% men and, for president there in 2020, it was 53% women as a share of voters to 47% men (here’s two polls I checked that are close to matching the latter and one that’s in between).  Try the same for more Arizona or Ohio polls, or especially other 2022 battleground states (I have), and you will mostly (perhaps always?) see the same.

Nationally, for both the presidency and the U.S. House in 2020, it was 52% women to 48% men as a share of the vote, the same for midterm House results nationally in 2018, the same for the presidential election in 2016 (current generic ballot national polls also show the same or a close gender gap in favor of women).

In general, even if there seems like there might be a slightly larger-than-average gender gap, I have seen these presented as unweighted (sometimes you just get more of respondents in a certain category randomly) and it isn’t clear that this gap was not mitigated by weighting.

Thus, most polls in the U.S. are now reflect something of that 53-51-percent-female to 47-49-percent-male breakdown in their samples and/or are adjusted by weighting to reflect this.  In other words, there is already a built-in “women vote in most elections more than men” factor with most polls and has been for some time.

This means that any new surge in women voting in this midterm—particularly women registering who are far more prone to be Democrats and/or young, which would far more predispose them to prefer laws/policies that allow women to decide their own bodily and reproductive autonomy without (or just minimal) government regulation—would be missed by the current crop of polls.

The next question I am pretty sure you have on your mind is—“Well, whatever Mr. Smarty-Pants Blah-Blah, do you have any actual data that there are far more women—specifically women who would lean pro-choice—registering to vote than men for this midterm now?”

The answer is “YES! Yes I DO!”

The Current Hard Data on Voters in the Current 2022 Midterms

For the following I must thank—of all outlets—Teen Vogue, specifically an article by Fortesa Latifi (if you doubt her awesomeness, just know that her Twitter background image is of Tony Soprano in his pool with his beloved ducks), who introduced me to the unique work of political data professional Tom Bonier (CEO of TargetSmart, a political data operation) and his New York Times op-ed.  Tom has been providing some invaluable takes on the current midterms and they bear much weight in supporting my thesis of a big polling miss.

Notably, he has been detecting huge rises in the portion of female voters registering to vote in the period since the Dobbs decision has been an issue.

Tom also compares this to 2020 election data, hardly a year where women were weak in turning out (they outvoted men by four points, 52% to 48%) and finds that in 2022, differences over the same period of time in 2020 were drastic, with far higher portions of women registering than in 2020 and with a significant portion of states in 2020 even having men outregister women.

Specifically, Bonier notes that for our current year they looked at 45 states and that in 41 of those 45 states, women increased their share of voter registration after Dobbs (and the four states that did not had automatic registration).  With its unique ballot measure on abortion, Kansas led the way, but also among the highest states were Alaska (which had just elected its first Democrat in a half-century—and first Native Alaskan—Mary Peltola, to the U.S. House and even over Sarah Palin, but just to finish the recently-deceased Republican representative’s term for a few months; she is up for reelection on Tuesday and looks to win again), and the three key swing states of Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Ohio.

You can see the breakdown from this recent September here:

If many of those look like huge gaps, it is because they are.

And for a relative sense of how big these are, here Tom provides the data at the same time from 2020:

Not only is the gender gap far larger in favor of females compared to 2020, but about one-third of states had a gap that favored men at the time.  Those gaps in favor of men have disappeared in 2020 except for literally three states, two of which (Georgia and Oregon) have automatic registration (and in Georgia, women were requesting more of a share of mail-in ballots than they did in 2020).

Bonier helpfully takes updated numbers (with even larger gaps) from October 2022 imposed on October 2020 numbers, and the differences are all the more striking:

And these gaps are not fading over time:

And if there is any doubt that the women forming the gap are overwhelming registering to preserve their rights to choose, to bodily autonomy, and to reproductive freedom, the same period shows not only major increases in Democratic share of registrations and major drops in share of registrations for Republicans but also a big bump in the portion of under-age-25 voters registering compared to the same period in 2020: in other words, young women are flocking to register to vote and to vote as Democrats relative to other elections.

In fact, in 31 out of the 45 states analyzed by Bonier in September, under-25s were increasing their vote share after Dobbs. And these are not polls that are estimates.  These are sets of hard voter registration data.

To quote Tom Bonier, “Women Are So Fired Up to Vote, I’ve Never Seen Anything Like It.”   

Reinforcing Current Voter Data

There are other key sets of related statistics that only reinforce my thesis.

Early and absentee voter turnout overall and in many states are up significantly since the 2018 midterms: as of the tally for the end of Sunday (and this will update today), up over 8.2% and over three million votes in absolute terms (Republicans’ share of early voting is down from 2018), with nearly 3.1 million more Democrats having voted early in this midterm than in 2018 by the tally the Sunday before that midterm (you can find roughly similar differences in many other states, including key swing states like: Arizona, Georgia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—but North Carolina, for example, bucks that trend—just to name a few).

In the past few election cycles, the early game has heavily favored Democrats, most famously in 2020, so it is interesting to note that Democrats are improving on their best area.  But, you might ask, could that signify a weakening of their weakest spot: in-person voting on election day, an offset that might negate or surpass whatever proportional gains they are making in early/absentee voting?

Here’s where things get interesting: Pew, one of the most consistently reliable sources of polling research, notes that, compared to 2020, 14% more—34% vs 20% back in October 2020—Democrats polled in October indicated they would vote in person on Election Day, almost one-and-a-half times greater, compared to only a four-percent intended-increase on Election Day participation by Republicans (they were already high, at 50% in 2020).  It would be one thing if Democrats’ margins over early/mail voting Republicans were offset significantly by some sort of matching inverse behavior from Republicans, but this is not happening.

Instead, while Democrats are increasing nationally and in many key Senate-race states their already larger portion of early/mail-in/absentee voting despite a major decrease in their overall portion of their votes cast this way, they are also increasing majorly their presence where they were weakest: at polling stations on Election Day; Republicans, meanwhile are also decreasing their vote share of their overall votes with early/absentee/mail-in votes, though less so, but are also far less so increasing their Election Day turnout, only by four percent to the Democrats’ 14%.

Provided the Pew data is accurate (and it usually is), this means Democrats are pretty much set to gain ground on Republicans’ in both early/mail-in and in-person Election Day voting.

Additionally, consider what was just discussed in terms of overall turnout: early voter turnout is setting recent records in many states and for the U.S. as a whole in 2022 for a midterm election and the overall vote is expected to surpass 2018, which was the biggest proportional midterm turnout of voters since 1914. If the voting margins in favor of Democrats over Republicans for early voting are higher now than they were in recent elections, and, on top of that, a much higher portion of Democrats are set to vote in-person on election day in 2022, a higher turnout seems capable of reinforcing both Democrats’ advantage with the first and its mitigation of the gap regarding the second.  

This may seem a bit confusing so I will try phrasing this another way: in what are currently polling as very close elections (within those margins of error!) and knowing there is already an absolute increase in early/absentee votes for Democrats by 3.1 million votes compared to the last midterm (compared to an decease of about 0.95 million Republicans) as of tallies from closing on Sunday-two-days-before-the-midterms, and with Democrats set to increase their overall portion of their vote on Election Day by 14% (compared, again, to just 4% for Republicans), combined, this more than “suggests” a greater anticipated turnout for Democrats than polls do.

And this effect goes for those polls asking people to rank issues: abortion is also being underrepresented there because the women who prioritize it are also being undersampled and/or underweighted.

Does All This Really Mean Democrats Should be Favored?

Let’s unpack all of this: early voting and mail-in voting overwhelmingly favors Democrats; if they are outperforming their portions relative to Republicans in early voting compared to 2020 and 2018, that’s a good sign for Democrats.  But with COVID not as much of a problem, Democrats voting early and mail-in are down as a proportion of total Democratic votes cast.  You might be thinking: “Wait, even if the margin of Democrats voting early or absentee is higher relative to Republicans, if a lower portion of Democrats are voting early, would that not hurt Democrats, since Republicans are much stronger on Election Day?”  No, again, because Democrats are making up for it by voting in-person a lot more on Election Day this year.  So, again, this means that Democrats are outperforming both their margins in terms of the share of overall early voting and their share of the overall in-person Election Day voting, improving their margin where they are weakest and weakening the GOP’s advantage where it is strongest.  And with more women, Democrats, and young people overall registering, and with Pew’s October survey only having a four-percent-higher share of Republicans’ total votes coming from Election Day in-person voting compared to 2020, will Republicans have enough to overcome these other powerful trends in favor of Democrats that I have highlighted?

I think not.

Taken together, all this suggests Democrats will represent a higher share of the overall votes this election cycle than in previous ones, and, alongside the far higher post-Dobbs portions of women vs. men registering to vote, the also higher portion of Democrats registering, and the higher-than-usual under-25 crowd registering, well, this adds up to some serious math in favor of the Democrats.

Polling is a lot of guesswork, but early voting data and voter registration numbers are hard numbers that are not projections based on samples: in other words, that data is based on actual behavior and factual in a way polling is not; a poll could put together a weighted sample that does not actually reflect the election turnout, as discussed earlier, but the voter registration and early voting data are simply what they are.

So this means that there are multiple data points of compelling, hard evidence based on real-world numbers and not estimates, that the current set of polls—in particular failing to account for a mass mobilization of women that should have women forming a significantly higher portion of the overall electorate than elections in the past—are significantly underrepresenting the female vote as a portion of the overall turnout and, thus, are favoring Republicans by at least several percentage points across the board.

By significantly, I mean enough to swing most key races in most key swing states, as those races are neck-and-neck and are basically polling ties within the margins of error.  This means you can expect the portion of votes not only to be, in this sense, significantly higher for Democrats than the polls are indicating, but that, in those close elections, most of those races should break in the Democrats’ favor, with the gender gap making a serious—and the—difference for the Democrats in most of these marquee races, for, even though the level of the gender gap varies, in almost every state, it still favors women (and pro-choice-type women) and far more than it did in 2020, when Democrats won the presidency, Senate, and House.

All this, in the end, is heartening to me.  In many past elections, people were not fired up or fired up enough.  They didn’t vote because they didn’t feel enough “enthusiasm” or were sore losers that preferred another candidate did not win their party’s nomination: they were asleep at the wheel of their own democracy.  Well, after 2016, by the 2018 midterms, they woke up, and by 2020, they drove the car out of the ditch they had crashed it into back in 2016, so it would be a damn shame for them to go right back into that ditch by rewarding the people who sought to overthrow the government in a coup, resulting in the first non-peaceful presidential transfer of power in U.S. history, going back all the way to 1797 overall and 1801 between parties, to hand the people supporting and excusing that ongoing insurrection attempt the very keys to the halls of power after they literally smashed those halls’ windows and smeared feces on their walls as they sought out our elected leaders with deadly intent.  The initial results of this midterm election are evidence that we will not reward the traitors.

What Would It Take for Me to Be Wrong?

In an ideal world, people not of a particular group could lead proportionately in supporting a different group.  In the real world, members of any group better be prepared to stick up for their own rights more intensely than anyone else.  In an ideal world, we could count on men to dismantle patriarchy as much as women, even more so since they have a larger part in its construction and implementation.  In the real world, more women than men are going to have to try and try harder than men in order for patriarchy to be dismantled.

To be clear: I have faith in women.  I think they have been awakened in the way Japan’s Admiral Yamamoto apparently feared America would be awakened after Pearl Harbor.

I generally find Bill Burr to be funny but also sometimes crass and offensive, and you can determine for yourselves what you think of him in this clip but his point within about the WNBA’s issues with selling tickets—that not as many women and feminists attend WNBA games as men and macho-types attend NBA games—stands.

I hope I didn’t lose any of you with the tough love from Bill Burr, but the point I am making here, ladies, is that we still have a free and fair election system (they may make it harder on purpose for some of you specifically to vote, but they still can’t stop you or your vote if properly cast from being counted) and that, if I am wrong and this data somehow doesn’t mean a big surge in women voting to protect the rights of women to bodily autonomy and reproductive freedom, it’s not going be because of patriarchy, it’s going to be because, when faced with a threat from patriarchy, far, far too many women simply shrugged, didn’t mobilize to vote, or just prioritized other “issues” they foolishly perceived Republicans to be “better” on; as I noted, these elections are close, and it won’t take an insane number of you to make that difference between victory and defeat for Democrats: the vast majority of those 32% of women who did not vote in 2020 don’t even have to vote, just enough, and your rights are preserved.  If women fail to do so when it is so easily in their power, too many of them will have surrendered their rights without a real fight.

To be clear, some women are the enemies of women’s rights: about a third to 40% of women think abortion should be illegal in all or most cases; (Pew and Gallup, respectively).  There are more men that think this (though not dramatically), but those are hardly insignificant minorities of women.  And enough men support you that only a modest increase in pro-choice women voting in this election could have a real impact.

So, again, I have faith in women and that they are going to embarrass the pollsters, but if I am wrong, well, that’s basically the only explanation, sadly, all things being equal (other than the polls somehow being skewed significantly and wrongly in favor of Democrats across the board): that not enough additional women voted, that too many thought it was another “normal” election and did not take their own destinies into their own hands when they could, that only a minor surge resulted that did not have enough impact.  I wish with all my heart that all men supported a women’s right to choose, but please do not rely on us to protect your rights for you, ladies, you vote for your rights!

That may sound harsh, but if my analysis is accurate and Dobbs overturning Roe does not mobilize a significant number of new female midterm voters determined to protect abortion rights, and if Democrats come out on the short end along with abortion rights for all American women, then that would be a crushing disappointment (and I can say the same for everyone equally of all genders when it comes to protecting democracy from fascism).

Having said that, any men on the fence or who didn’t vote but can, please join those of us already doing our part…

Conclusion: Democrats Should Outperform Their Polls and Hold Congress! BUT VOTE ANYWAY!!

Having expressed my reservations and covered my ass, I really am confident the Democrats will hold onto Congress after all the votes are counted and at least increase their position in the Senate, and that a surge in women voters unanticipated by the polls will be the main reason why. 

Because folks, the normal 53-51 female vs 47-49 male breakdown just isn’t going capture what is happening this year.  That’s what most polls, even in the states where there have been huge increases in the portion of women registering over men, are sticking to (in fact, every poll I have looked at where they display this information clearly is within or very close to these pre-Dobbs margins).  So you can safely take many of the polls you are looking at and add at least a few points to Democrats, take a few percent away from Republicans—that’s if these polls are generally accurate apart from this glaring issue—and you will have your actual outcome.  And polls are estimates, but the voter registration data is actual registration data.

Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight recently noted that if there was a significant across-the-board polling error, it could mean either a blowout by Republicans or actual gains by Democrats, depending in which direction.  Well, given what we know from what I’ve told you here, we can safely assume the latter is more likely, and that is what my premise has been: an across-the-board if varying polling error that is inflating what GOP performance will be and deflating what Democratic turnout will be.

Which sounds great if you’re not ignorant or a fascist.  As I noted a while ago, we’re past normal right-left “issues,” for the survival of our democracy is stake (and I’m sorry, but poo-poo to anyone saying it was stupid for Democrats to campaign in part on saving freaking’ democracy!): to quote Gen. Ulysses. S. Grant: “There are but two parties now, traitors and patriots and I want hereafter to be ranked with the latter, and I trust, the stronger party.”

I think preserving women’s rights to bodily autonomy and reproductive freedom and standing up to fascism and authoritarianism are deeply allied fights.  And, again, I think the hard voter data I outline here favors Democrats in these midterms.  If we do win, THANK YOU LADIES!

In the end, though, just make sure you vote!

*correction appended: this article originally misstated the year the last time midterm turnout was this high, 1912 instead of 1914

© 2022 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.

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By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981; LinkedIn, Facebook), July 11, 2022 (**updated July 13 with an excellent exposure on the part of The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin on how the mainstream press distorts their narratives on Biden; *updated July 12 with new polling data proving my point)

SILVER SPRING—I’m a big Star Wars fan (spoilers for Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith in this paragraph), and this past month was a big one for Star Wars fans with the (somewhat, but not entirely, disappointing) Obi-Wan Kenobi series, with key scenes bringing us back to Order 66, when clones with chips implanted in their brains were forced against their will by the chips to turn on their Jedi leaders.

I feel that the members of the “respectable” (as opposed to fascist propaganda/disinformation) media might even have some sort of chip in their brains when they cover Democrats: from the New York Times to the Washington Post, from CNN to MSNBC and many, many other outlets, it seems there is a near-constant need to push a “Democrats in DISARRAY!” narrative regardless of the facts.  These hot takes or seemingly analytical pieces almost invariably take one of a few approaches:

• “I, Smarty McSmart-Pants, awesome journalist that I am, am going to call out Democrats/President Joe Biden for not accomplishing X, Y, and/or Z!”—but with little to no regard for the actual balance of power or even proper procedure, let alone historical precedent, how Congress or the presidency actually work and what each can and cannot do or what it would actually take to actually do said thing(s).
• Interviewing and quoting a selective selection of activists, voters, or party folks (“some” or “dozens” out of WAY, WAY MORE—literally out of hundreds, thousands or, when it comes to voters, millions), nearly all of whom are obscure and folks 99% of readers have never heard of before and who will all complain (“whispers”!?) about Democrats’ leadership/direction; this will be presented without noting that their collective complaining is not representative but while offering some token pushback from a couple of people who are far more representative without noting they are, in fact, more representative; aggregate polling data (as opposed to citing one or two polls, if any) showing how most relevant people feel is usually ignored because of either laziness or “the narrative.”
• This or that outlier or outliers within the Democratic Party or its caucus (usually the Squad, Bernie Sanders, or other far lefties—wonderful clickbait for click-hungry websites—but sometimes the defiant two-headed albatross of relatively conservative Democratic senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema) complain/tweet and/or their criticisms of the Party as a whole are presented as major stories in and of themselves and as examples of overall Party “dysfunction.”
• Sensationalizing the clickbaity thoughts of anonymous staffers, usually in the White House (and the White House has a lot of staff) or a campaign but sometimes in Congress, griping about this or that, which upon review are usually just the result of banal office politics, generational conflict also typical in today’s newsrooms, devoted acolytes wanting “MORE” for their masters or stans wanting “MORE” for the object of their stanning, and personal egos blown way out of proportion; even if you read between the lines, it’s more about individual staff clashes/competition or their projected desires for this thing or that person than anything originating from the big-name figures with whom they are associated.  Typical red-flag sentence emblematic of these articles: “This article is based on interviews with more than two dozen current and former administration officials, lawmakers, congressional aides and other Democrats close to the White House who spoke on the condition of anonymity to freely discuss the president’s private conversations.”

Sometimes, yes, these types of articles are on to something.  Most of the time, it’s just hot air, unrepresentative whining, or simply “whispers,” as in, articles that resemble more tabloid gossip columns than news articles that should actually be written.

In Data We Trust: The Current Congress in Historical Context

The problem is, almost none of this—and I mean absolutely none except for the best-of-the-best of such takes—is based on any serious data-oriented research.  The data is there, it just isn’t properly engaged with, but let’s set the record straight with some mind-blowing facts for those of you being inundated by the “Dems in Disarray” narrative:

1. No party has ever been as unified in its Congressional voting (“party unity vote” average) in both the House and Senate as today’s Democratic Party, with the possible exception in the Senate of just one year of Federalist Party Senate voting in the first few years of the 1800s
2. Specifically, the Democratic Party has never been more unified in terms of its Congressional voting records than it has in recent years, including a record high for all of-American history in 2021 in both the House (98% average) and Senate (97% average)
3. In recent years (last decade), party unity has been close between the two parties in the House, but in the most recent years the Democrats have been more unified, while the parties have alternated in recent years in the Senate, Republicans beating Democrats for all of Trump’s term but Democrats winning for all of Obama’s two terms and with Democrats setting a new record for unity in 2021

Reread that if you need to, but let’s be clear: this current Democratic Party in recent years overall and especially in 2021 was the most unified major party in history where it counts the most: in its votes in Congress.

It’s even more impressive when you realize that the Democrats have only a narrow edge in the House and are essentially tied in the Senate with Vice President Kamala Harris as the tie-breaker.

I came across a telling, wonderfully-data-driven article by that guided me to this understanding by Niels Lesniewski and Ryan Kelly for Roll Call from March 1 of this year, covering the years of the half-century from 1972 to 2021, and have used its chart above and table below:

Being the data- and history-oriented researcher that I am, I wanted to know the full record, and while I plan to continue finding more presentations of this data, so far the below chart from this other study is the best (and only) full account I have come across thus far in chart, table, or graph form (plenty for recent decades but not going all the way back the Founding of our republic):

In that all-encompassing chart, “Democrats” and “Republicans” include their antecedent parties from early American history, thus, the Federalists would account for that “Republican” spike in the Senate that comes close to 100% in the very early 1800s; the graphs are small and it’s hard to tell the exact year or numerical value, so I laid that out as the only possible exception to the numbers the 2021 Democrats put up the in Senate and clearly no one has beaten them in the House (where average party unity has only increased since the end of the chart).

The other chart below the comprehensive one shows the level of majority strength in each Congress since Republicans were first seated there in 1855.  As anyone can see, a tie “majority” in terms of party balance in the Senate is exceedingly rare, and since the Senate seated Alaska’s and Hawaii’s first senators in 1959, bringing the Senate’s total to 100 senators when fully seated, the only other time there was a 50-50 Senate at all was during the 107^th Congress, from January 20, 2001, until May 24 of that year, when Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords left the Republican Party to caucus as an independent with the Democrats, giving the Democrats an effective 51-49 majority for the remainder of that Congress until January, 2003.  For those few months before Jeffords’ defection, the situation was the same as now just in reverse in that the Republicans had a 50-seat “majority” with a tie-breaker vote able to come from their Vice President, then Dick Cheney, as Democrats have with Harris today.

Other than that, there are the odd the exceptions during the 83^rd Congress, from early 1953 to early 1955, when throughout its term the deaths of nine senators and resignation of one caused a number of leadership changes in a close Senate, some of which led to shorter-term ties but with one situation leaving a tie for more than two-thirds of a year.

Before that, you have to go all the way back to a crazy situation from the 47^th Congress in 1881, which began with a tied Senate that lost its tie-breaking ability when President James Garfield was assassinated late that year and replaced by Vice President Chester Arthur, as there was no constitutional provision for replacing a vice president and, therefore, no person to cast a tie-breaking vote after Arthur was sworn in, a situation that thus lasted until the beginning of the next Congress in 1883; before that, a Senate balance-of-power tie had never happened in all the years of the Senate’s existence going back to 1789.

Biden’s and Democrats’ Accomplishments in Context: A Bipartisan Past vs. Our Partisan Present

In all these instances, like the situation today, there was only a small lead for the same party with the tie-breaking vice president in the other half of Congress, the House of Representatives.  But as the graphics I have provided above show, partisanship was significantly less intense, bipartisanship significantly more common, in these other eras than today.  This allowed some major accomplishments to actually happen easily even in 50-50 Senates.

In 1883, President Arthur was able to get the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act passed with overwhelming bipartisan support, which formed the basis of the modern civil service.  The next time there was a split Senate in the 1950s, there was also a spirit of bipartisanship on a broad variety of issues, leading to legislation passing that established both the Small Business Administration and what would eventually become the Department of Health and Human Services; President Dwight Eisenhower’s major legislation concerning tax reform, along with major bills regarding nuclear regulation and expansion of both unemployment and Social Seucrity benefits, were all enacted with overwhelming bipartisan support, among other bills passed in a similar spirit.

In the next period when there was an effective tie in the Senate, no major legislation was passed, but just days after Jeffords’ late May defection, President George W. Bush saw his massive tax cut bill’s final Senate passage by a significant bipartisan margin.  Yet the massive reorganization of the government’s security apparatuses (including the Patriot Act and the bill creating of the Department of Homeland Security) and major reforms to education and prescription drug benefits for Medicare during the 107^th Congress all occurred only after the 9/11 attacks of September 11, 2001, when there was a period of historic bipartisanship, if only temporarily (these big wins came from Republicans even when the Democrats had a 51-49 Senate majority with Jeffords).

Of course, today’s situation is quite different from these: not only are most congressional Republicans in a long–extremist and increasingly-fascist Republican Party openly shielding former president Trump and other plotters of his 2020-2021 attempted coup (a term I used at the time) and perpetuating the lies that the 2020 election was stolen by phantom “fraud” while preparing to be able to carry out another coup attempt if Republicans lose the 2024 presidential election, on legislative issues, they are engaging in extreme obstructionism and partisanship.  Their primary method for this is in utilizing the 60-out-of-100-vote-threshold filibuster for just about everything they can to block about as much as they can of the Democrats’ agenda from passing.  As both parties have 50 votes, in most cases, Democrats need 10 Republicans senators to advance legislation and overcome a filibuster, so even when there is bipartisan support, inaction can reign unless at least a full one-fifth of Republican senators are on board.  In recent decades, filibuster use (and abuse) has become unprecedented, particularly so by the Republican Party and especially—even exponentially—so since Mitch McConnell became the leader of Senate Republicans in 2007, a role he still holds today.

In the face of these key differences, looking at all that Biden and Democrats in Congress have been able to accomplish so far—including numerous large votes through one of the only ways to circumvent a filibuster in what is known as budget reconciliation (among them a massive COVID relief bill) as well as a once-in-a-generation historic infrastructure bill, historic aid for Ukraine in the face of rampant Russian imperialism, and the first federal gun legislation in roughly three decades (the last being hammered out by Biden himself in 1994, when he was still a senator), and with time still left in this Congress for passing further major legislation—this much is clear: no majority has accomplished more with such low margins in the Senate in American history in the face of such extreme partisanship and organized obstructionism from the opposition party.  The few major accomplishments of the Biden Administration and the Democratic-led Congress that were bipartisan were the exception, not the norm, a departure from the entire modern era and the last few times there was a Senate evenly divided as today’s is.

I am not suggesting there are not other factors or that this tells 100% of the picture: falling just short of enough votes on Biden’s would-be-signature Build Back Better legislation surely counts more than most typical legislation, and there are things that are sometimes not brought up for votes because of awareness of existing problems within a caucus or opposition from Republicans wielding a filibuster.

Yet the main point made above still stands: of all the different individual metrics out there, the average party unity not only counts a lot, but it is hard to think of a metric that counts more.  In this current record heights of party unity on display from Democrats with Speaker Nancy Pelosi leading Democrats in the House, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer leading Democrats in the Senate, and Joe Biden leading the Party overall from the White House, the Democratic Party in 2021 and in recent years collectively, then, has been the most disciplined and unified major national political party in U.S. history when it comes to actual legislative votes.

Another Inexcusable Media Fail

Churchill once famously remarked: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”  With Joe Biden, we can honestly say: “Never in the field of American presidential politics was so much expected by one man with a narrower political ‘majority’” (really a 50-50 tie with a tie-breaker in one-half of Congress and a very slim majority in the other.  And despite major, entrenched opposition to most of the Democrats’ efforts, they have still accomplished much and improved the situation where they are actually capable of effective change quite dramatically compared to the situation they inherited: an America reeling from COVID and its accompanying economic meltdown as well as reeling from Trump’s treasonous coup attempt.  Obviously, the elephant in the room today is inflation, which presidents and congresses generally have little ability to mitigate well in the short-term even if people don’t want to acknowledge this simple Economics-101 truth (with their record profits, why are we not questioning oil companies more??).  And apart from inflation, the metrics for the economy for Biden for most of his presidency thus far have been strong (admittedly less so the past few months).

Yet there is a huge gap in the public perception of Biden and Democrats and their actual popular accomplishments.

The relentlessly negative coverage of Biden and the Democrats—the media’s pursuit of the whole “Democrats in Disarray” narrative in the face of historic data that thoroughly discredits this narrative—is a big part of the reason for this.  Just as was the case during the Democratic primaries, the media is also relentlessly portraying Biden as just-about-to-collapse in terms of his Democratic support, based on no serious larger empirical analysis, with near-mindless, pointless speculation about who might be the Democratic nominee in 2024 other than Biden more than two years out from that year’s presidential election (and even before this year’s midterms!) despite Biden’s and his vice president’s repeated, clear statements on running together again in 2024 as a ticket.

**Update July 13: Perhaps the most exemplary recent example of the mainstream press’s gross distortions has been adroitly addressed by Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, a Never Trump conservative who is one of the most incisive of the major newspaper columnists on the media’s failures in the current era. She notes that in a recent New York Times article trumpeting its latest poll with Siena College, the framing is almost entirely anti-Biden, beginning with the headline (and, again, this is just one poll): “Most Democrats Don’t Want Biden in 2024, New Poll Shows” and how key findings from the poll that Biden would still beat Trump and that 92% of Democrats would stick with Biden vs. Trump in 2024 are buried after 15 paragraphs of negativity and after multiple graphics. In this Biden hit-job, Times clearly chooses to emphasize what will damage Biden (CNN and others discussed the headline all day) while making the reader really put in effort to find the positives mentioned so deep into its story. Behold, the Times, exposed and noted. And this is the default tone most reporters and editors in the mainstream media resort to when it comes to Biden and Democrats in general, because… “narrative.” Their preferred narrative.**

But just as much to blame is the childishness of the American people, who clearly expected Biden to fix, well, pretty much everything within a year and now blame him for the country not being back to a total normal after a once-in-century pandemic, after four years of fascist-leaning insanity under Trump, and now during a twice-in-a-century large-scale European war.  Americans currently clearly do not understand the unique gravity of historic problems faced—and well-mitigated—by Biden and that none have easy solutions, especially with a country and a Congress as divided as they are.

No president could have righted all the wrongs plaguing the U.S. on January 20, 2021 in one, let alone two, years—certainly not the criminal coup plotter Trump or his Republican Party focused more on overthrowing the constitutional order and preventing the legitimate peaceful transfer of power than on actually governing or dealing with real problems affecting actual Americans—so for the media and the public to hold Biden to such a standard is not just down-right myopic, but threatens to undo so much of the progress that has been made by returning incompetent would-be-fascist demagogues to power.

Yet even with one of the worst polls for Biden from a major, respectable pollster to date (the June 25-28, 2022 Economist/YouGov poll), he still has the approval of over three-quarters of Democrats (76%: 34% strong, 42% somewhat) while only 18% expressed disapproval (only 9% strongly).  On top of that, the Democratic Party was still seen in that poll as more favorable (if just slightly and within the margin of error) than the Republican Party.  And, again, I abhor highlighting single polls to discuss a president’s approval rating—all too common an article headline or framing in the press these days (a general weighted average should always be included in those, but rarely is)—but I did this just to show how high his approval rating is among Democrats in, again, one of his worst polls among respectable polls begun no earlier than June 22 up through the first respectable poll conducted and released in July (since I wrote most of this, polling from early July is not much different, but Democrats’ approval of Biden went slightly up in a newer Economist/YouGov poll [77%] poll while being significantly lower in a different pollster’s most recent data [69%, from Reuters/Ipsos from July 5–6, their lowest yet, down from 72% in their previous poll]; new polls are coming out even as I am about to post this, too, but, to quote the great Jedi Master Yoda: “Difficult to see.  Always in motion is the future;” they may be up or down in a week or a month, and we will only see what happens in time; *update July 12: as if to make my point for me, the next Reuters/Ipsos poll, from July 11-12, has Biden’s overall approval up up 3 points, his overall approval down 4 points, and his approval among Democrats up 5 points, to 74%*).

Those numbers would still mean crushing defeats for anyone challenging Biden in a primary (although, again, that hypothetical would be happening a year-and-a-half from now, a different world).  Still, the overall numbers with voters are not good, though it should be noted that, especially in today’s overcharged media cycles, the overcoverage both of such polling data and especially inflation (relative to other major aspects of the economy like low unemployment and growth in both jobs and wages) creates something of a negative feedback loop for Biden, helping to drag or keep those polling numbers down.  In contrast, polling for Democrats has just improved in the wake of the radical judicial activism of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade, with now just under four months to go before the midterm elections.  And if Democrats surprise many and hold on to Congress or even gain seats in the midterms (and, at least in the Senate, polling is indicating they may very well increase their number of seats there), there is a good chance Biden’s approval will increase, too.  And all of this in the context of the myopic coverage that inexcusably misses the data proving the Democrats’ historic discipline and organization, which will be key in they succeed in the midterms, even if the media does not acknowledge this reality.

Conclusion: A Need for Professional Journalism

So, to recap, 1.) not only is Biden’s job performance as president still eliciting approval from an overwhelming majority of Democrats, who are still overall united behind Biden—making all the “who will replace Biden?” news stories irresponsible, premature speculation—but 2.) Democrats’ performance in Congress is the empirically provably best of not only any major political party in the modern era, but in all of American history (with one possible exception of the Federalist Party in the early 1800s in just one half of Congress), higher now than the supposedly better organized Republicans 3.) and Biden and Democrats’ accomplishments are the greatest of any party with such a narrow “lead” (tie) in the Senate when facing such intense partisan opposition and obstruction.

These are not my opinions: these are simply the facts, fully supported by data, history, and context, as I have proven here.  It’s far, far overdue for coverage in the media to reflect these empirical realities, for journalists, editors, and producers to stop ignoring this irrefutable empirical data in favor of their own biased, selective, and inaccurate “narratives.”

© 2022 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see my 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), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

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!

(Russian/Русский перевод) By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) March 13, 2022; excerpted and slightly adapted from his article The Beginning of the End of Putin? Why the Russian Army May (and Should) Revolt published by Small Wars Journal March 8, which was featured on March 9 by Real Clear Defense, The National Endowment for Democracy’s (NED) Democracy Digest, and SOF News; see related RCN articles excerpted and slightly adapted from that piece:

• March 9: A Look at Putin’s Disgraceful, Heartless, Barbaric Treatment of Russian Soldiers and Their Families
• March 11: On Casualties Counts in Russia’s War on Ukraine
• March 19: Time for the Russian Army and Russian People to Revolt and Overthrow Putin
• September 16: I Saw This War Could Be Putin’s Undoing All the Way Back in Early March

Also see Brian’s preceding February 21 Small Wars Journal piece The Utter Banality of Putin’s Kabuki Campaign in Ukraine, featured by SOF News on February 26; see related RCN articles excerpted and slightly adapted from that piece:

• February 21: Why Is Putin Doing All This Now?
• February 25: How to Lose Nations and Alienate People, by Vladimir Putin
• March 1: Putin’s NATO Narrative Is Bullshit
• March 16: Putin’s Zombie Russian/Slavic Ethnonationalism Is Utterly Banal

WASHINGTON and SILVER SPRING—The focus of my last excerpted article was to show how disgustingly careless, even cruel, the Russian military has been with the lives of its soldiers, how abusive and deceitful they have been to these fighting men of Russia and their families.  And the point of this is to acknowledge that, by such unforgivable conduct towards Russia’s own soldiers and their families, Putin and his cronies may have finally sowed the bittersweet seeds of their own demise.  This was one thing with the hundreds of concealed deaths over eight years with “volunteer” deployments into rebel-held portions of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions (known together as the Donbas) in Ukraine’s east (discussed in more detail earlier); it is already an entirely different phenomenon with thousands of deaths less than two weeks into Putin’s exponential escalation in the whole of Ukraine.

Even allowing for the possibility that some of the images and video coming out of Ukraine are not authentic, there is still (as I have noted recently) a lot of real footage of dead Russian soldiers and destroyed Russian vehicles, evidence of Putin’s lies to his own people and his lack of competence in managing and leading Russia’s army, evidence that increasingly destroys his credibility not only with his own people but his own soldiers and their officers.

The dead collectively are something that is very hard for Kremlin spinmasters and apologists in Russia and around the world to explain away, an undeniable public monument to Putin’s astounding failure.  The truth is enormous, visible even from afar, and death on the scale that the Russian Army is experiencing just across a border where many Russians have friends and family cannot be hidden by Putin from his people forever: Russia is not North Korea, its people not North Koreans.

As more and more Russians take in parts of the horrific picture, they will realize how totally they have been gaslit, how pathetically their army has performed under the leadership of a man so desperate to project strength that he literally rides around shirtless on a horse to pose for photos for public consumption.

The key psychological component here is that the foundation of Putin’s regime rests on the idea of restoring Russian strength.  So when the Russian people realize how totally degraded the Russian Armed Forces are after two decades of Putin’s leadership, only able to beat up on Georgia and Syria and utterly humiliated by its first real challenge under Putin’s Potemkin regime in a war with far smaller and far weaker Ukraine—which Russia has always regarded as a little brother, a former vassal of Russia in recent centuries—and understand that thousands of their boys have been needlessly slaughtered in a needless war as Russia hits its economic nadir and apex of isolation under well-deserved historic sanctions, there is going to be massive public outrage.

For Putin’s whole bargain with his people was “Give me your fledgling democracy to discard and I will raise you up and deliver you from the pit of Boris Yeltsin’s humiliated Russia,” yet Russia finds itself now—after only a matter of days into Putin’s absurd war—precisely where Putin promised to move it away from: the weak laughingstock status of the Yeltsin years, not respected, just tolerated because of its nuclear weapons and natural resources.

As more and more Russians realize this, Russians overall will realize that the bargain it struck with Putin repeatedly over the years is null and void, that they owe him no allegiance or support since the little man delivered (after some stability) mainly illusions and repression: the weakness of the Russian military, state, and international standing has now been exposed in a matter of mere days to the whole world as the Ukrainian people kick the Russian Army’s ass, the U.S.-led international order roars into action to show how defenseless the main institutions of Russian daily and economic life are rendered if America and its allies will them to be so, and the world overall isolates Russia as a pariah as no top-tier state has ever been isolated before. 

This last point bears some spelling out: Germany, Japan, and Italy had each other and numerous vassals during World War II.  Today, Russia could only muster the support of four other pariahs—Belarus (essentially its puppet), Syria (its mass-murdering client-state), the Stalinist/Maoist relic of North Korea, and basket-case Eritrea in a historic 141-5 vote at the United Nations condemning Putin’s invasion of Ukraine (China, Russia’s supposed new “best friend,” wanted no part in the historical record of being seen to be emphatically on Russia’s side here, settling for a cowardly pathetic abstention, a choice shared by 34 others).

According to a major CNN poll conducted shortly before Putin launched his full Ukraine war, when asked “Would it be right for Russia to use military force to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO,” half of Russians said “Yes,” one-quarter “No,” one-quarter “Don’t know;” if the war was framed as one “to ‘reunite Russia and Ukraine,’” that support dropped to only 36% “Yes,” “No” rising to a plurality of 43%, with 21% as “Don’t know.”

It is remarkable that the numbers for war are not higher when one considers the insane media atmosphere inside Russia and how it trickles down throughout public life in Russia.  It is a constant Orwellian bombardment of an alternate universe, one where Russia is a perpetual victim fighting against the whole world.  Ukrainians with relatives and friends in Russia (as well as the pro-Russian separatist parts of Ukraine’s Donbas and a very Russian Crimea controlled by Russia since that region’s 2014 invasion and annexation) are even having inane conversations with these brainwashed relatives and friends, those relatives and friends telling the dismayed Ukrainians laughable fictions about the reality of the war.  So strong is the pull of Kremlin propaganda that these wayward friends and relatives believe fantasy over their own blood as they dare to lecture on the invasion to those actually living through the bombs and shells of the invasion.  Much like America’s Trumpist Capitol insurrectionists in the U.S. believe in an alternate reality bellowed out by Fox News and its ilk, so, too, does Putin’s base in Russia (and the few Ukrainian regions with high-proportions of Putin-loyalists) loyally and enthusiastically consume Russian state-run television networks’ non-stop barrage of the world according to Putin (and it is no coincidence that the American rightist and Kremlin media ecospheres have tremendous overlap, as I have noted in detail before).

As a result, most Russians actually get their news from state-run media, so most Russians, then, simply do not have an accurate understanding of what is currently happening in Ukraine and believe as fact many absolute falsehoods while rejecting actual facts.  Because of the relentless propaganda, lies, and straight-up gaslighting that is the media and government apparatchik public landscape in Russia, they think that this has been a limited humanitarian peacekeeping operation mostly in the Donbas area of Ukraine with few Russian casualties. 

But there are others in Russia who see past the propaganda and disinformation.  And the brittle reality of the Kremlin’s fake news operations can come crashing down like a house of cards in the face of hard realities, none more likely to cause this than thousands of dead Russian soldiers and their enraged families.

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

© 2022 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see my 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), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

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!

A Real Context News Special Report also available as a PDF file

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) June 7, 2021; updated June 15, 2021, to take into account the June 14 NATO summit in Brussels; cited by NATO LibGuide on Cyber Defence; condensed rewrite for Small Wars Journal September 24 also cited by NATO LibGuide on Cyber Defence and featured by Real Clear Defense; see Brian’s related review of one of the most important books on national security to come out in years, Nicole Perlroth’s groundbreaking This is How They Tell Me the World Ends; see his related articles: December 24, 2020, The History of Russia’s Cyberwarfare Against NATO Shows It Is Time to Add to NATO’s Article 5; February 17, 2017, Trump, the Global Democratic Fascist Movement, Putin’s War on the West, and a Choice for Liberals: Welcome to the Era of Rising Democratic Fascism Part II; and December 7, 2016, The (First) Russo-American Cyberwar: How Obama Lost & Putin Won, Ensuring a Trump Victory

SILVER SPRING—Alliances between nations must adapt to retain power over time, and in no area has warfare evolved more in recent years than in cyberwarfare.  Article 5 of NATO’s founding 1949 North Atlantic Treaty mandates that if an “armed attack” is carried out against a member state, all member states (currently thirty, including the most powerful Western nations) “shall” consider that attack and any armed attack on even just one member state “an attack against them all” and “will assist” it, up to and “including the use of armed force.”  As the centerpiece for over seventy years of the West’sPax Americana, global military power, system of alliances and collective defense, and ability to project combined strength anywhere on the planet, NATO must adapt to the present by adding cyberwarfare—including information warfare—to Article 5.

Cyberwarfare As Modern Warfare

An obvious point in favor of including cyberwarfare in Article 5 is that, by far, the most effective, damaging, and destabilizing attacks against NATO countries since 9/11 have been cyberattacks, most carried out by Russia.  The term “information warfare” (“a new face of war,” quoting a RAND Corporation report) refers to a key element of this cyberwarfare and includes the word warfare to indicate these are hardly benign, normal influence operations and are, indeed, the types of operations that have always been part of any serious conventional war in modern times.  Even in the nineteenth-century, von Clausewitz wrote that “War is…an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.”

The ever-evolving concept of warfare in our digital age, then, does not have to include shots being fired from guns, and it is naïve to not consider cyberwarfare as simply another form of war in the twenty-first century that uses force in the digital realm to achieve results in some of the same spirit as traditional armies: attack, defense, deception, sabotage, destruction, and to pressure actors to change behavior.  Clausewitz most famously wrote that “war is merely the continuation of policy [or politics] by other means” and would have well understood cyberwarfare (sometimes just termed cyberwar) to be war and well within that “other means” category.

The two countries that have led in cyberwarfare are Russia and China, the first (and weaker, but bolder) being NATO’s (and America’s) clearest top state enemy (even if unofficially but clearly in a de facto sense), the second (and stronger, more reserved) being America’s clearest top state rival in a holistic sense, as China has engaged and led in much non-weaponized hacking and espionage (admittedly common among major powers), but has not, say, brazenly released stolen information or disinformation in a way timed to significantly interfere with NATO member states’ elections (as Russia has).  And though China has its own sophisticated influence operations, Russia undisputedly has led by far in acts more hostile than espionage (uniquely so among major powers) since its watershed 2007 Estonia cybercampaign (such campaigns might better be termed cyberassaults than cyberattacks, the latter a broader, far more common term which can even apply to a single high school student’s cyberattacks against his own school district).

Russia officially views NATO as a “threat,” and since that 2007 Estonia cybercampaign, has become far more aggressive and threatening towards NATO, often playing with internal NATO nationalisms and blanketing NATO nations in cyberattacks, including election interference and bolstering of secessionist campaigns, with notable cybercampaigns being carried out against over twenty NATO member states (leaving aside its campaigns waged against non-NATO states). 

Furthermore, de facto, non-declared wars are the most common type of war in the modern era even if the term “war” is not specifically used.  America, for example, has a long history of undeclared war going all the way back to the Articles of Confederation and the early days of the Washington Administration involving conflict with Native Americans and also the John Adams Administration’s 1798-1800 Quasi-War, then popularly termed “The Undeclared War with France.”  Furthermore, as one scholar notes, “the legal state of war is possible without actual fighting.”

Taking all this into account, then, it is hardly unreasonable to consider Russia and NATO in a state of undeclared cyberwarfare and, therefore, a state of undeclared war.  One of NATO’s flagship publications, NATO Review, even published analysis in 2017 acknowledging that Russia was waging “non-kinetic political war on the West.”

In fact, as I have argued for some time, a truly deep look would expose Putin and his Kremlin conducting a clear de facto war to destroy NATO, the West, the EU, and Western democracy; to fracture trans-Atlantic and European unity and even the unity of individual Western nations; and to foment, fund, and favor the rise of far-right ethno-nationalists and secessionists friendly to Russia and hostile to the U.S. and NATO in NATO countries and elsewhere, all while savaging those in the center and mainstream left not preferred by Putin.  The parties Putin helps usually have much in common with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s banally nationalist United Russia party, which has struck up mixes of formal and informal alliances with several significant European political parties in major NATO states. 

Though there have been military moves by Russia in Ukraine and Georgia—two NATO aspirants—the main weapons in its undeclared war on NATO are not tanks, bombs, or jets; rather, they are bots, trolls, and fake news.

The Nature of Russian Cyberwarfare Confronting NATO 

Through hacking, disinformation, propaganda, and other cyber-methods, Russian campaigns that advance this war have been able to affect political outcomes in numerous NATO countries to suit (or, at least, more suit) Putin’s agenda.  These efforts are coordinated through powerful branches of the Russian government and close Putin allies in and out of the Kremlin, often using thousands of fake accounts to artificially bolster the reach of their lies, which, in turn, are augmented within the target countries by native agents and allies (with unwitting true believers long being dubbed “useful idiots”).  In many NATO countries—including the U.S.—Putin is even popular with far-rightists, no doubt in part because of Russia’s robust information cyberwarfare.

Reigning as the supreme disruptor on social media, Russia spews a “firehose of falsehoods” that has been massively effective, distorting and gaslighting the public discourse so that Russia’s preferred narratives are wildly amplified beyond their natural organic reaches, influencing many millions, thus helping to create an atmosphere where disinformation is sometimes consumed even more than actual news and doubt about even basic truths becomes widespread.

Domestic media outlets can be crucial instruments to this end of Russia’s, not only enthusiastic right-wing media outlets, but also far-left media outlets and figures (Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi being two of the most prominent examples); as long as the Russian narratives further their narratives—usually attacking more mainstream and/or moderate parties and figures—these more extreme domestic outlets are often happy to unquestioningly parrot the Russian-projected “information,” and whether it is illegally hacked or not even vetted matters little to them.  The distortions, lies, and unsubstantiated claims then become such a large part of the conversation that mainstream media latches onto this disinformation—sometimes echoing it, other times critiquing it yet still amplifying it—and the Russian narrative itself then becomes mainstream, as I have previously explained in detail.

And once Putin’s favorites are in office in part because of Russian disinformation, they in turn further spout Russian disinformation from the highest levels of the government and even copy Russian tactics (as former FBI counterintelligence agent Asha Rangappa illustrates with the U.S. case).  They also pursue policies favorable to the Kremlin (e.g., weakening anti-Russian sanctions or creating geopolitical power vacuums for Russia to fill) and obstruct investigations into Russia’s cybercampaigns, making it all but impossible to effectively fight back.  Terrifyingly, both America’s 2019 Mueller report and the British Parliament’s Intelligence & Security Committee’s exceptional Russia report released last year note damning examples of obstruction in their respective governments.

With such additional feedback loops, Russian cyberwarfare is thus a gift that keeps on giving, with domestic news outlets and coopted politicians doing Russia’s dirty work for and alongside it.

The Big One: Targeting America

The revelations of Russia’s devastatingly far-reaching months-long government and corporate espionage hacking, known as the SolarWinds attack, and the Russian cyberattack against the third-party-run e-mail system of America’s main international aid agency, USAID (a multipronged attack that used access to that system to hit some 150 government agencies, think tanks, non-profits, and human rights groups that have been critical of Putin and Russia)—both carried out by the S.V.R., Russia’s equivalent of the C.I.A. and one of the main successor agencies of the notorious Soviet K.G.B.—highlight recently exposed Russian cyberwarfare against the U.S., NATO’s largest pillar.

The same can be said for a recent significant attack on major U.S. cybersecurity firm FireEye, almost certainly also carried out by the Russian government, and for two recent ransomware attacks—one on the Colonial Pipeline and one on meat plants of JBS, the largest fuel pipeline and meat producer in America, respectively (in the latter, plants in Canada and Australia were also hit).  These ransomware cyberattacks were carried out by DarkSide and REvil, respectively, two criminal hacking groups thought to be based in Russia or former Soviet-dominated states and that are widely understood to have tacit approval and protection from the Kremlin (to put some perspective in an aside here, it should be noted that after al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks—the only time NATO ever invoked Article 5—Afghanistan’s Taliban regime was overthrown by the U.S. because it gave harbor to al-Qaeda and did not hold the terrorist group to account, refusing to comply with American demands to shut down its camps, hand over its leaders, and arrest the rest of its members).

Much like Russia farms out parts of its aggressive foreign policy to Russian oligarchs, the Russian mafia, and Russian mercenaries in playing a sordid, cynical game of “deniability,” (something I have noted many times before), so too does it work similarly with hackers outside the Russian government.

Prior to the recent discovery of the activities outlined above, Russian cyberwarfare efforts against the U.S. have included clearly and repeatedly promoting unrest and division, pushing both disinformation about the coronavirus and illegitimate conspiracy theories of coordinated massive fraud in the 2020 U.S. presidential election.  Before the election, the Russians’ cyberwarfare effort was all-in on attacking the main political rival (Joe Biden) of their preferred top candidate (Donald Trump).

Of course, division and brainwashing in America have hardly been created by Russia, but it is and has been obvious that these efforts are hardly in vain: multiple credible surveys and any casual examination of social media show that vast swaths of the American public—even many in senior leadership—are buying into this disinformation, believing nonsense about both coronavirus (including millions doubting coronavirus vaccines) and the 2020 presidential election.  All this undermines effective public health measures (literally helping kill Americans) and confidence in the very foundations of our electoral democracy.  In addition, all this Russian content and its fallout obviously does not stay confined to America: international populations’ opinions of America and its political system along with their own views on coronavirus and vaccines are being affected, too.

In the words of journalist George Packer, “antisocial media has us all in its grip.”

The new Biden Administration, then, has its greatest initial challenge—the coronavirus—made even worse by this Russian cyberwarfare even while it will face an unprecedented (excepting Lincoln) crisis of legitimacy in the eyes of millions of misinformed (and disinformed) Americans.

Cyberwarfare a Larger Threat Now to NATO than Terrorism

Russian cyberwarfare focused on election interference in the U.S. in 2016—what I called back in December of that year the First Russo-American Cyberwar—has already caused damage to America, its democracy, and its reputation that is hard to exaggerate, with effects not only still being felt by the U.S. but guaranteed to still be felt for some time.  In contrast, physical terrorist attacks in NATO countries since 9/11, while tragic, have still had comparatively limited effects.  Even Russia’s own 2018 Novichok chemical weapon attack on British soil against Russian military intelligence officer turned spy for the UK Sergei Skripal in Salisbury had more symbolic an effect than anything else, dwarfed by the damage from Russian efforts to tip the 2016 Brexit vote in the direction of Leave or the effect of Russia’s campaign to amplify Scottish secessionism (now increasingly likely and sooner rather than later, an outcome that would obviously fracture and devastate a UK already severely weakened by Brexit). 

As I explained in my analysis of the aforementioned excellent British parliamentary committee report on Russia, Britain’s own official self-reflection made it clear that the solid response (and solid effort to bring in allies to take part in this response) to the Salisbury attack needs to be replicated when it comes to other Russian hostile actions, the clear implication being to include Russia’s cyberwarfare, especially political interference.

The same idea can be applied to NATO as a whole, which does have a Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence located in Tallinn, Estonia.  Yet even today, one-sixth of NATO—Canada, Luxembourg, Albania, Iceland, and North Macedonia—are not members of this Centre, though, encouragingly, the first two are in the process of joining, new members have recently been added, and non-NATO states Austria, Finland, Sweden, and Switzerland are “Contributing Participants,” a status available to those outside of NATO; other non-NATO states Japan, South Korea, Australia, and Ireland also intending to join in that capacity.  There are also plans for a new military cyberdefense command center to be fully operational in 2023 at the main NATO military base in Belgium.

Overall, NATO considers “cyber defence…part of NATO’s core task of collective defence” and has since 2014, when the Alliance first explicitly laid out the theoretical possibility of invoking Article 5 in response to a cyberattack (though only “on a case-by-case basis”).  Since then, NATO has “pledge[d] to ensure the Alliance keeps pace with the fast evolving cyber threat landscape and that our nations will be capable of defending themselves in cyberspace as in the air, on land and at sea,” repeatedly reiterating the possibility of Article 5 being invoked in response to a cyberattack, including just this past September.

Update June 15: A communique issued by NATO from its Brussels summit on June 14, 2021, is heralded by some, including the White House, as a “new” cyberdefense policy but actually reiterates already vague and repeatedly articulated positions discussed above, namely, that NATO states “reaffirm that a decision as to when a cyber attack would lead to the invocation of Article 5 would be taken by the North Atlantic Council on a case-by-case basis,” hence, nothing much really new in actual policy and note the use of “reaffirm.”

Falling Short 

Official working papers, conferences, interviews, statements, and raising possibilities on the subject are one thing, but a concrete, clear policy is another, and NATO has nothing of the sort.

The vague idea seems to be that if a cyberattack was “serious” enough, Article 5 would be invoked, but there is no definition of what this threshold would be, and, frankly, this idea seems rather myopic: death by a thousand cuts is still death and has the same effect as decapitation, so tolerating many smaller attacks and sending a clear signal that there will not be a collective Article 5 response to them is simply bad policy.

Consider, too, that Russia would never be able to get away with flying over NATO skies and dropping leaflets of hostile disinformation by the millions onto NATO populations.  It could never get away with doing so once or once in a while, let alone consistently and during sensitive times of pivotal political decisions or unrest in the targeted countries, and yet this is exactly the cyber-equivalent of what Russia is getting away with against NATO’s most significant member states and many of its smaller ones, too.  And while Russia sending in Spetsnaz special forces to steal sensitive information from U.S. bases in Alaska or use physical weapons to sabotage or destroy government computer systems in Lithuania would be viewed automatically as an Article 5-triggering act of war, the same results over and over again from several years of unrelenting cyberwarfare are not, even though this has done more damage to NATO than any Soviet Army did throughout the decades-long Cold War.  This is, in part, because of NATO: the USSR and then Russia did not dare use armed force to attack any NATO state for fear of that explicitly guaranteed Article 5 collective response (even when NATO-member Turkey shot down a Russian military jet over Syria in 2015).

Yet when it comes to cyberwarfare, NATO is practically inviting Russia to attack and get away with it, with the Alliance quite consistently demonstrating its inability and unwillingness under its current framework to respond collectively to Russian cyberaggression.  As noted in the aforementioned UK Russia report, “Russia is not overly concerned about individual reprisal” against its aggressive acts, most certainly including its cyberattacks, with even the U.S. clearly inspiring no fear.

Language can often be tricky, and terms like “war” should never be thrown about lightly.  But with the advent of the internet and the realities of the modern world, NATO cannot become complacent with preventing traditional warfare while failing to adapt to cyberwarfare.  Pretending cyberwarfare is not war and allowing cyberwarfare in real-world practice to be kept out of NATO’s Article 5—leaving individual members states flailing independently and ineffectively against a determined, capable, and organized de facto enemy content to stand down its conventional forces against NATO while unleashing its cyberunits upon it with impunity—has not discouraged Russian cyberwarfare against NATO, it has encouraged it.  Article 5 makes no exception for smaller armed attacks, and any serious collective cybersecurity defense should make no exception for smaller cyberattacks.

An Urgent Need for Drastic Reform

Throughout New York Times cybersecurity reporter Nicole Perlroth’s recent book This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends—the indispensable, terrifying, definitive account of the development of cyberwarfare and the mess in which we currently find ourselves: a true must-read for anyone hoping to understand how grave is the danger we are facing at this very moment—a constant theme is that we need paradigm shifts in the way we approach cybersecurity, whether the private sector, government, or individual citizens collectively.  You can tell she was having trouble sleeping while researching and writing her book, and we should be, too.

At several points in her book, Perlroth notes that the U.S. in the past rebuffed attempts to discuss some sort of international cyberwarfare convention or treaty, feeling it was the undisputed champion in the cyberarms race and not wanting to give up that advantage.  That ship has long sailed, and just in the last few years a number of rival and hostile governments have greatly managed to shrink, maybe even close, that gap, and with Western countries far more wired than their main rivals and enemies, they are far more vulnerable—with far more to lose—to cyberwarfare.

As FBI Director Christopher Wray recently lamented, the threat cyberwarfare poses to the West has “a lot of parallels” to the threat of terrorism after 9/11.  Echoing Wray, former CIA director and secretary of defense for President Barack Obama, Leon Panetta, warned in a recent interview conducted by Perlroth that he fears we will not do what needs to be done before a “Cyber Pearl Harbor” may cripple us.

Perlroth warns at the end of her book’s epilogue that “many will say” that “these…critical assignments of our time” to deter and defend ourselves from cyberwarfare “are impossible, but we have summoned the best of our scientific community, government, industry, and everyday people to overcome existential challenges before.  Why can’t we do it again?…We don’t have to wait until the Big One to get going.”

How to Revise Article 5 and the NATO Treaty Overall

Considering that the West’s main advantage over Russia is that people like the West a lot more than Russia—manifesting itself in close diplomatic, military, and economic ties about which Russia can only fantasize—the easiest way for the West to face and counter this dire and worsening cyberthreat from Russia is by leveraging its alliances, and, more than anything else, this means involving NATO and involving it in a big way. 

U.S. President Joe Biden himself penned a recent Washington Post op-ed in advance of his upcoming trip to Europe for a NATO summit and to confront Putin face-to-face, writing: “In Brussels, at the NATO summit, I will affirm the United States’ unwavering commitment to Article 5 and to ensuring our alliance is strong in the face of every challenge, including threats like cyberattacks on our critical infrastructure.” 

He can do that by proposing to strengthen Article 5 itself.

With Russia’s rampant cyberwarfare only intensifying and its clear pattern as a bad-faith hostile actor, a paradigm shift in the international system for deterring cyberattacks is absolutely necessary.  Since NATO is the premier defensive alliance of the West, formalizing cyberwarfare’s relationship to Article 5 is a necessary leap forward on this much-needed path and the only way forward for NATO to maintain credible collective defense as the twenty-first century progresses. 

To this end, “or cyberattack” must be added after each instance of the words “armed attack” in Article 5 (e.g., “The Parties agree that an armed attack or cyberattack against one or more of them…” [emphasis added]).

As other Treaty articles have (sometimes subsequently) modified the scope of Article 5, I propose the following definitions of cyberattack are added in a new Article 15:

This crucial definition of cyberattack allows more traditional espionage to stay out of discussions of cyberwarfare for collective defensive purposes while making clear the singular degree of the SolarWinds operation or anything like it will not get such a pass.  It also means there will finally be a way to effectively counter and deter the massive weaponized disinformation campaigns conducted by Russia while also protecting citizens, including journalists and cybersecurity staff, who are on the front lines of this war.

While the Alliance is free to decide how it wants to respond when using Article 5, in many of the situations, appropriate coordinated cyberattacks coming from all of NATO’s member states would be the most conceivable and likely response except for far more serious cyberattacks.

Conclusion: Expanding Article 5 Is Necessary and Overdue

The early twenty-first century’s second decade has been something of a Wild West, with Russia emerging as the biggest beneficiary in terms of cyberwarfare as defined above.  While China has also benefitted in terms of massive espionage and acquisition of Western intellectual property, it is Russia that has used the lawlessness of the cyber domain from a collective security standpoint to engage in the most egregious acts (most recently and most notably with the unprecedented SolarWinds) and ransomware attacks), acts that could easily be defined as hostile acts of war.

The time for lawlessness is over, and, with no statute of limitations on cyberattacks and the just-proposed framework not precluded by the current NATO treaty, NATO would be in its full rights (and is overdue) to invoke Article 5 against Russia now for its cyberwarfare so that Russia’s cyberwarfare will cause Russia far more pain than any damage it inflicts.

This has not been the case, but it must be.

Revising NATO’s Article 5 as suggested herein (leaving aside invocation) will not only clarify the rules for NATO enemies and rivals, but also for the members of a NATO Alliance itself that is in desperate need of clarity and strength on this issue.  It will also make NATO once again an alliance that instills fear in the minds of Russian leaders (as it did with Stalin and subsequent Soviet leadership) who would engage in reckless acts of aggression against NATO or its states, even if “just” through cyberwarfare.

Member states recognizing that they are in a state of war—cyberwar, but still war—with Russia and unambiguously making cyberwarfare a key plank of the Alliance’s main collective defense mechanism is essential, then, to keeping NATO the force for deterring aggression it has been for many decades.

Projecting such strength, both on paper and in practice, will serve as a real-world check against further Russian cyberattacks when inaction and lack of clarity has not, enhancing the security of every NATO member state and perhaps even eventually forcing Russia to a point where productive engagement, not adventuristic brinksmanship, is its chosen priority.

© 2021 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

See Brian’s related review of one of the most important books on national security to come out in years, Nicole Perlroth’s groundbreaking This is How They Tell Me the World Ends; Also see my related article on the UK Parliament’s singularly excellent Russia report and my discussion as a member of a panel with author and Senior International Correspondent for The Guardian, Luke Harding, on Russia’s bad behavior

Also see my 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), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

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) May 27, 2021; also published May 31, 2021, on The Times of Israel Blogs; see my related article: Death, Stupidity; Rinse, Repeat: What Is New, What Is Old in Latest Israeli-Palestinian Tragedy

SILVER SPRING—When horrible things start happening around the world—especially in the Middle East, and especially in Palestine and Israel—it often seems as if the U.S. cannot win when it comes to the cries of various mobs, both in the street and online, claiming—sometimes accurately, other times not—to represent various factions: “America, how come you don’t to more to stop X horrible thing by Y horrible people, do more to help Z people?” often concurrent not only with opposite cries switching X and Y but also “America, why don’t you just stay out of such-and-such conflict, all you do is make things worse” and even “America, why don’t you just completely stay out of the entire region?”

Practically Speaking

To be fair, it would be an understatement to note America has made grievous mistakes in the Middle East, from former disgraced President Donald Trump’s rapid betrayal of the Kurds in late 2019 to assisting the horrific Saudi-led war in Yemen and the cataclysmic 2003 invasion of Iraq.  But a fairly consistent, longer-term problem has been America’s unbalanced position in the Israeli-Palestinians conflict, in particular, not doing enough to stand up for Palestinians as a people and allowing certain Israeli abuses of Palestinians to continue with impunity (abuses that are also self-destructive for Israel and Israeli Jews).

With any of many outbreaks in violence (Israeli-Palestinian or otherwise), real-world practicality demands that the priority be bringing about a swift end to violence in an effort to save as many lives as possible.  There are some well-meaning but idealistically naïve or blinded folks who will demand, before we even talk about stopping the violence, that we settle the root causes—even calling for a complete surrender of one side on all core issues about which it is fighting—but this is an obscene waste of time while fighting is erupting and the focus needs to be on immediately prioritizing individual human life.  During longer wars, negotiations over longstanding core issues are, of course, to be encouraged, but with individual rounds of bombs falling or gunshots ringing around civilians, the exact same issues that have driven the conflicts of which they are a part will almost invariably be there when that particular round of violence stops.

The only serious exceptions to this are when overwhelming force can actually bring about a decisive end to most of a conflict, but this is rare and in the case of Israel and Palestine, no glorious Saladin-like armies from Arab states will destroy the Israeli state—certainly Hamas has no such capability—while Israel invading and occupying Gaza in a bid to totally wipe out Hamas would certainly not go as Israel would intend and would see such terrible level of casualties and an inflammation of tensions and violence in the region that pressure for it to stop short of such a goal would be unlike anything we have seen with any of Israel’s other major campaigns against Palestinians.  So Israel is not going to wipe out Hamas in Gaza and neither Hamas nor any Arab or Muslim state (let alone any other) is going to invade and dismantle the Israeli state, nor end by force Israel’s control over holy sites in Jerusalem, military occupation of the West Bank, or siege of Gaza.  Thus, the idea that violence is somehow going to address the root causes is absurd.

So, again, it is not that dealing with the root causes is not essential, is that they are going nowhere fast during any particular round of violence and ending the violence is, therefore, both the moral/ethical and practical consideration that must take precedence.  Having said that, once the violence has stopped, the imperative very much should be to then focus on the root causes to avoid further violence and achieve justice, security, and peace for the greatest number of people.

What Biden’s Critics Miss

I have followed President Joe Biden’s career for decades (I even interned in his Senate office in 2006), and I do not think any of this is lost on him.  My gut feelings on this are at least partly validated by the heartening conduct of his Administration throughout the eleven-day crisis between Israel and Hamas and its spillover conflicts between Israeli security forces and other Palestinians and between Arabs and Jews in Israel’s internationally recognized, pre-1967 borders.

A good chunk of the media coverage has framed Biden and his team as haplessly overcome by events in the Middle East, with some takes stating that he is all but ignoring the plight of Palestinians and is simply reflexively supporting Israel and still others that Biden’s supposedly weak support for Israel or even supposed hostility to it is to blame for the latest round of violence.  All of these are deeply myopic takes that cannot see the forest for the trees at best or are bad-faith propaganda and disinformation at worst.  In fact, Biden’s approach seemed relatively fairly balanced and nuanced in ways that, more important than anything else, yielded results and saved lives.

First, let us be clear about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: he has had no problem defying or embarrassing American presidents and senior officials in the past, including this one in the month before the recent hostilities, when he rejected repeated criticism from Biden Administration officials—including National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan—for plans to dispossess Palestinians in East Jerusalem and expand and create Jewish settlements there and in the West Bank (the very day before Hamas began its rocket fire into Israel, Sullivan expressed to his Israeli counterpart that the White House had “serious concerns” about efforts to unjustly evict Palestinian families in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem, part of a larger campaign of demographic engineering by Israeli right-wing nationalists).

With the reality that Netanyahu and his country have increasingly embraced right-wing nationalism, if Biden had publicly and loudly chastised Netanyahu and Israel, Netanyahu would have felt compelled to not look as if he was cowing to American pressure and would have only continued Israel’s military operations longer to demonstrate his independence and strength to his domestic audience (remember he is in the fight of his political life to hold onto power while he is simultaneously on trial for corruption).  This would have meant the Israel Defense Forces (Israel’s military, or IDF) killing and wounding many more people and possibly causing the conflict to both intensify and spread while also risking more Israeli lives, even if far fewer.  And Biden has known “Bibi,” as Netanyahu is often called, for decades, knows him relatively well, and has a far better sense than most politicians of how the embattled Israeli prime minister will and will not react to things, including public pressure.

Yet many foreign critics and those to Biden’s left vocal in their anger about his support for Israel—the left’s sometimes raucous “progressive” crowd (Progressive being a much older label for a far more productive historical movement)—seem not to understand this.  Their outrage that Biden was not more vocal in condemning Netanyahu betrays their lack of understanding of basic politics and diplomacy, missing how there is usually far more to politics than speeches and noise (that should not surprise considering that Bernie Sanders is essentially their spiritual mentor and the tactic of screaming at and shaming Democratic voters into nominating a “progressive” for president in 2016 and 2020 failed miserably; to Bernie’s credit, his crushing loss in 2020 seems to have humbled him into a more practical and productive approach).  After all, America is one of the few counties where public opinion favors Israel strongly, so even as support for Palestinians has increased significantly (especially on the left), there is not the political support for a sharp turn away from or reducing support for Israel and such a move could not only cost Democrats the House in midterm elections, but the White House two years later, rendering any major shifts by a Biden Administration moot as a new Republican administration would surely undo those changes and become even more pro-Israeli and less supportive of Palestinians, as was seen under Trump.

Speaking of, to his right, Biden’s critics insanely claim he and his policies are the reason for the outbreak of violence when Biden has done very little other than restore formal diplomatic relations and to reinstate some $235 million in humanitarian, economic, and development aid to Palestinians—aid that the Trump Administration, led by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, had cruelly, spitefully, and needlessly cut—while also separately adding COVID-19 aid.

If any American approach has failed recently, it is the incredibly one-sided “pro-Israel” policy of the Trump Administration—including Kushner’s “absurd” “peace” plan—that has deepened the anger, resentment, and helplessness already pervasive among Palestinians while letting Israel feel it could act against Palestinians with impunity, furthering overall division, which intensified and accelerated the dangerous dynamics that exploded over the past few weeks, as I noted just recently.

Biden’s Practicality and Early Results

If anything, critics to both Biden’s left and right seemed to not be aware of what was really happening behind the scenes even as they missed some very public cues.

Instead of starting a public feud with a longtime (if very problematic) ally, Biden refrained from antagonizing Netanyahu in ways that would have been counterproductive and resulted in more death and destruction and instead had himself and his administration act in ways that worked to preserve and exercise leverage over Israel while working intensely when they felt the time was right to rapidly bring about an end to the violence.  In doing so, they consciously tried avoiding what they now saw as a counterproductive approach taken by the Obama Administration during the last major Gaza conflict in 2014 (which I analyzed in detail at the time).

Early in this most recent flare-up, Biden publicly asserted that “Israel had a right to defend itself”—for all the flaws of any particular nation, virtually no nation would not respond with military force against a terrorist group firing rockets into its cities—even while he and top officials also early on expressed a desire for a quick end to the Israeli operation (Biden himself said “My expectation and hope is this will be closing down sooner than later)” and that it was their position to “urge…de-escalation of violence” (this from Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken) and to still pursue a state for Palestinians.

Top officials also early on framed the conflict as very much in part about the systemic issues faced by Palestinians, especially the evictions going on in East Jerusalem, which were raised in conversations throughout (in spite of the efforts of some Israelis to pretend or delude themselves into thinking that the structural issues had nothing to do with the latest round of violence).

As the conflict dragged on, other concerns about civilian casualties and the safety of journalists in Gaza were publicly aired by the Biden Administration, and specific calls for lessening Israeli restrictions on and increasing freedom for Palestinians were also made.  Eventually, calls for a cease-fire—at first gentle, then firmer—made clear that Biden and his people felt it was time for Israel to let up.  And Biden has long made clear he generally did not intend to air America’s dirty laundry with Israeli in public.  That there even were these milder public statements, then, made it clear there was serious pushback going on behind the scenes, and the softer public statements were concurrent with a series of calls—six between Biden and Netanyahu and many others between American and Israeli officials—that were the key parts of the more private pushback.  This was not unqualified support or one-sided; far from it, and throughout and after there were statements along the lines that Palestinians, too, deserved safety as well as dignity and freedom and that reiterated American commitment to the two-state solution (by far the most sane of the various “solutions” that are bandied about) that would result in a Palestinian state, a long-held U.S. position Trump, Kushner, and Blinken’s partisan-hack-predecessor Mike Pompeo had all but abandoned.

Having long made clear he would not lean towards slamming Israel in public, Biden effectively worked behind the scenes to pressure the right-wing Netanyahu—who has not shied away from crisis exploitation and punishing military operations with heavy civilian casualties—to wind down military strikes on the eleventh day when Netanyahu’s security cabinet voted unanimously to agree to a cease-fire; if you think Biden’s quiet but strong diplomacy did not play a major and leading role, consider two points here: one, that Israel’s government is pretty right-wing and anti-Arab in policy and sentiment, and two, that the a plurality to a vast majority of Israelis were against a cease-fire and wanted the IDF to continue operations against Hamas in Gaza (in three Israeli polls, Israelis opposed the cease-fire 72 to 24, 47 to 35, and 48 to 40 percent).  Taking all this into account—that Netanyahu and many of his people would not be generally inclined to keep the IDF operation as short as it ended up being, that stopping it as early as they did was actually a liability domestically when it came to public opinion, and that the cabinet vote was still unanimous—it is hard to argue that Biden Administration’s role in the timing of the cease-fire and shortening of the conflict was not decisive.

And since the cease-fire has taken hold, Biden and his top diplomat Blinken have continued to emphasize America’s commitment not simply to Israel but to “equal” treatment and respect for Palestinians.  As Biden noted in his address just after the cease-fire took hold:

“I believe the Palestinians and Israelis equally deserve to live safely and securely and to enjoy equal measures of freedom, prosperity, and democracy.  My administration will continue our quiet and relentless diplomacy toward that end.  I believe we have a genuine opportunity to make progress, and I’m committed to working for it.”

The next day, Biden was even more specific: “We still need a two-state solution.  It is the only answer. The only answer.”

Focused on rebuilding America after a devastatingly bungled pandemic response under the Trump Administration, Biden has not been keen in his first few months on the job to dive into dramatic foreign engagement on the part of the U.S., but now that America is beginning to hit its stride again amidst his administration’s exemplary handling of the pandemic and with a crisis erupting between Israelis and Palestinians, he and his competent people have shown themselves capable of addressing sudden crises and of recognizing that such crises demand U.S. engagement not only to calm the waters but to take serious if not rushed or frantic steps to try to address root causes.

Thus, just months into his presidency, Biden has passed his first major international security crisis with a deft yet subtle approach, the type of qualities that were utterly lacking in the White House for the entirety of Trump’s residence there.  And rather than treat the crisis as a distraction, he has, as noted, rightly recognized it as “a genuine opportunity to make progress,” dispatching to the region his top diplomat in Blinken, who is already working to restore a sense of balance after the clear failure of Trump’s gratuitous neglect of Palestinians.

As case in point: Netanyahu does not want to hear anything about the two-state solution, which he has worked for decades to undermine, but that is exactly what Blinken doubled down on after meeting with Netanyahu and in Israel and, later that day, Palestinians President Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank:

“Ultimately, there’s a possibility of resuming the effort to achieve a two-state solution, which we continue to believe is the only way to truly assure Israel’s future as a Jewish and democratic state, and of course to give the Palestinians the state they’re entitled to.”

He also made clear that America will seek “to address some of the underlying causes that could, if not addressed, spark another cycle of violence.”  Furthermore, Blinken met with Palestinian activists, pledged significant new aid to Palestinians, reiterated strong opposition to the Sheikh Jarrah evictions, and announced the reopening of a U.S. consulate in Jerusalem that had been closed by Trump and was a significant venue for separate engagement with Palestinians.  Few of these moves are welcome ones to Netanyahu or many other Israeli officials or citizens, so, despite claims to the contrary and accusations of being one-sided, the Biden Administration is sharply departing from the extremist approach of its predecessor and will do a lot more to stick up for Palestinians even if many Palestinians would desire further, more immediate, more dramatic action.

Too Early to Write off Biden’s Efforts; Cease-fire Orchestration Reason to Hope

Cynicism, understandably, abounds when it comes to the struggle between Israeli and Palestinians, but Biden’s critics miss the mark in failing to see his and his administration’s major role in shortening this latest round of fighting and in taking both symbolic and substantive steps away from Trump’s one-sided policy towards far more engagement with and support for Palestinians.  Additionally, the commentary that Biden will do little-to-nothing to address the deeper issues is wildly premature, just like the initial commentary on his involvement (or supposed lack thereof) during this latest round of fighting.

Both in clear public actions (if not dramatic or bombastic) and in even more “intense,” to use Blinken’s word, behind-the-scenes efforts, we are seeing Biden and his administration engage in this most intractable of issues and he may yet surprise us with far greater results over time regardless of the verbal gymnastics of critics to his right and left, of Palestinians and Israelis alike as well as their supporters unhappy with his approach.  For most of these critics, a lesson in how real diplomacy works has just been given by Biden and his team.

© 2021 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), and be sure to check out my podcast interview with Georgia election officials Brad Raffensperger and Gabriel Sterling, both cited in Trump’s second Senate trial!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

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SPECIAL Fifth Mini-Episode

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Notes:

In this special, brief fifth episode, I do a dramatic reading of my recent article: To Save the Republic, Trump and Trumpism MUST Be Defeated Now and Biden Must Take Office in January. The written version has many links to detailed discussions about issues I touch upon in my piece or to specific information/examples. After my reading, I discuss what’s at stake and what has to happen going forward in this time of crisis and decision.

© 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!

Fourth Episode: Election Day Edition

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Notes:

In an Election Day-episode, my old professor, Dr. Mark Rush, the Director of International Education and Stanley D. and Nikki Waxberg Professor of Politics and Law at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, discusses polling in American politics, the 2020 election, the Supreme Court, and partisanship and division in the country.

Link to the Five Thirty Eight polling averages mentioned

Here are links to two versions of the article of Dr. Rush’s that was mentioned

© 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!