By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content)
November 3 ELECTION DAY, 2026; (Traduce en español/translate to Spanish soon); 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 as I make my overdue comeback! Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter means my content is actively suppressed, so your help is invaluable. Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion. See my two-million+-views-strong ongoing Twitter/X thread on the whole mess in the Middle East with the U.S.-led war against Iran & co. here.

SILVER SPRING—Here we are.  Not everyone lives through major historical events, but here we are.  Hundreds of years of American history, thousands of years of human civilization, indeed the fate of the planet is at stake here.  I elaborated on some of the main reasons why recently in my utterly depressing examination of the quarter-century anniversary of 9/11, but the TLDR version is that we—we more than anyone else especially our enemies—are the reason why we are here now: our collective choices by far the determining factor.  And choose we must. And while we have no way of knowing with confidence Trump will not cheat, smash the results, and interfere more than he already has tried, if the results will even be honored and if this is the end of our democracy.  What will we choose under such unique conditions, not seen since the Civil War and Reconstruction?

Perhaps the most consequential part of this election would be control of the U.S. Senate, and the outcome in the Senate is the main subject here, so let’s get this predictive part out of the way first from the maps I set in the wee hours of this morning:

Democrats’ coalition is at 47 currently: 45 Democrats, plus Bernie Sanders in Vermont and Angus King in Maine as two independents; MAGA is at 53.

The MOST LIKELY Scenario: this map below, Democrats winning a coalition of 56 seats (+9) and MAGA 44.

8 Democratic pickups and 1 new Libertarian ally in Nebraska leads to 53 Democrats, 3 independents in a coalition; 9 pickups total.

The FLOOR Scenario: 51-seat Democratic coalition (+4) and MAGA 49.

49 Democrats with a pickup of 4 seats joining Bernie and Angus.

The CEILING Scenario: 60-seat Democratic coalition (+13) and MAGA 40.

56-57 Democrats, with 3-4 independents depending on Montana’s strange race, so 1 or 2 new independents and 11-12 pickups for Democrats, the additional Libertarian on top of the additional one from my most likely scenario by far the more likely scenario than 12 Democratic pickups, 13 total for the coalition.  

And now that you’ve seen my maps, here is my ranking of all the states that, in my view, are realistically up for grabs even in my floor/ceiling scenarios, in order of the likelihood Democrats (or NOT Republicans, in a few cases) will win/how big they will win.  Since Democrats are at 47 and JD “JV” Vance is the tie-breaking Vice President, gaining 4 seats gets Democrats a Senate majority.  The gains and majorities will also be listed.

1. Georgia (defend)
2. North Carolina (gain+1, 3 shy of majority)
3. Minnesota (defend)
4. New Hampshire (defend)
5. Ohio (gain+2, 2 shy of majority)
6. Texas (gain+3, 1 shy of majority, 50-50 ties but VP Vance tiebreaker)
7. Michigan (defend)
8. Maine (gain +4, +1 majority: my tipping point, if Dems win here, consider them running Senate)
9. Kansas (gain +5, +2 majority)
10. Alaska (gain +6, +3 majority)
11. Iowa (gain +7, +4 majority)
12. South Carolina (gain +8, +5 majority)
13. Nebraska (Libertarian, gain-ish +9, +6 majority)
14. Florida (gain +10, +7 majority)
15. Louisiana (gain +11, +8 majority)
16. Mississippi (gain +12, +9 majority)
17. Montana (Libertarian most likely, though it’s a serious 3-way race with a Democrat, gain-ish +13, +10 majority)

To be clear, I am and have been predicting since early March that this could very well be one of the great wave elections in American history since Trump bumbled haplessly into a Middle East maelstrom Trump wishes involved only Iran, not just a Democratic Blue Wave, but a Democratic Blue Tsunami.  But one that could result in an even more powerful reaction from Trump, one fatal to our Republic.

I am indebted to the wisdom of legendary Professor Larry Sabato at the singular University of Virginia (Larry is not to be confused with the My Pillow Guy, whatever what guy’s actual name is), whose famous Crystal Ball at Mr. Jefferson’s university should not need an introduction for any true politico and was used extensively by myself in making my own picks, as was the research of the wonderful folks at the highly-esteemed Cook Political Report and from Nate Silver’s FLIPR model.

Also, some of my earlier work on historical midterms can show you where all this may end up stacking historically:

I will be offering a fuller state-by-state analysis, including methodology details, later today, but for now, here are my official predictions. So more to come.

© 2026 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s two-million+-views-strong ongoing Twitter/X thread on the whole mess in the Middle East with the U.S.-led war against Iran et al. right here, and his 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!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content)
November 2, 2026; (Traduce en español/translate to Spanish); 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 as I make my overdue comeback! Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter means my content is actively suppressed, so your help is invaluable. Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion. See my two-million+-views-strong ongoing Twitter/X thread on the whole mess in the Middle East with the U.S.-led war against Iran & co. here.

SILVER SPRING—While Twitter/X spaces have cratered as a feature much like support for Trump, MAGA, and the GOP is now cratering, I used to participate much more in them during their brief heyday.  For those of you who don’t know, Spaces on X is a live radio show with up to three hosts and about a dozen panelists that combine with guests (sometimes hundreds or thousands) for something of a show.

So let’s go back to June 6, 20204, to one particular Space.  Annoying music, until 7:40, then the Space actually starts.  I am there from the beginning, and so is someone who goes by the handle @TheMagaHulk on X/Twitter, with the supposed name Lucky Teter, who starts interrupting me at 19:14 before I can even make my points and keeps talking over me, moving the goalpost just as I am about to disprove his points to prevent me from disproving and forcing a repetition of this cycle over and over.

The space opens with Byron Donalds’s mini-me, Javon Price (Donalds is the woeful MAGA candidate for governor in Florida and Javon used to work for, and still supports, him), ranting emotionally without substance, and the hosts interrupting each other, going back to Javon, then I finally begin (I am sorry you may be exposed to his bloviating noises).

But then “Lucky” really hates it when I speak, and interrupts me more than anyone, out of turn, rudely, trafficking in insults.  The rambling-untethered-from reality setup from MAGA superclown Nick Sortor (currently obsessed with spreading vicious lies about the likely next U.S. senator from Texas, Democrat James Talarico) for my question starts around 16 minutes, then I start, but I am quickly being interrupted by multiple people, being forced to respond to interruptions rather than make my own points, and in contrast to how Javon, Lucky, & other MAGAs are treated.  When another host at 21:30 notes that I was “trying to say” something about crime and poverty and adjusting racial rates for poverty and inequality (which mostly erases the disparity in crime rates between white and black Americans, I am completely right here and these racist or ignorant clowns got nothing on the context and data I have, and the only reasons I didn’t get that out by that point was that I was being constantly interrupted by “Lucky” and Javon.  Some of these people here are gleefully pushing the false, racist trope 1350, 13/50, 13/52, 13/90, etc. in this context about why black Americans commit some crimes at higher rates, which reality demolishes).

We have the loudly-out-and-proud-proud fascist (though he hates that word) and vehement racist Dr. Sebastian Gorka (he’s one of those who lets you know he has that degree quickly)—devotee of ousted fascist would-be-dictator Viktor Orbán of Hungary and current Senior Director for Counterterrorism on the National Security Council at the White House, who clearly knows very little about race, poverty, and crime, let alone the Constitution, let alone counterterrorism—enter at 34 minutes.  He thew a toddler-temper tantrum when I called him a fascist, but the problem is, he is a vile, boorish, bloodthirsty fascist/neo-Nazi who says fascists things, idolizes past fascists, wears fascist lapel pins (Vitézi Rend!), and works for fascists.  Thus, the good “doctor” is a poster-toddler for fascism.  And little baby Gorka cries repeatedly to the host to remove me after I called him exactly what he is: a fascist (e.g., whining quite memorably at around 1 hour and 4 minutes and again at around 1 hour and 38 minutes, asking for preferential fascist treatment because he lives and breathes fascism, where he gets to act with impunity and only those he doesn’t like are held to standards, hello fascism, and here’s a useful definition of fascism if you need one!).

They interrupt, talk over, move the goalpost all throughout.  This dynamic gets far worse thanks to Nick’s great hosting and the delightful guests (shoutout to Prodigal @ProdigalThe3rd for being particularly intolerable—what must be an all-time interruption per-capita record for X/Twitter spaces—and bearing an uncanny resemblance to Phil Swift of caulk (not cock) infomercial fame.

So it’s me against a MAGA mob, with even the few “allies” interrupting me, but the point is, I ended up arguing with Nick Sortor, Sebastian Gorka, and Dan Crenwshaw simultaneously, three major figures from the right, and more than held my own against their nonsense.

Wait, Dan Crenwshaw, you say?  U.S. House Representative Dan Crenshaw from Texas of Trump’s Republican Party, who just lost his reelection to an even worse MAGA freak?  Unless he has a twin brother, yes, because there was a fake account that was viciously interrupting me and spreading hate, name-calling and misinformation, that was none other than Dan Crenshaw, hiding behind a fake alias to “have fun” being a racist, vulgar jerk trafficking dangerous misinformation.  One of our most significant exchanges occurs around 59:30, and you can hear his voice clearly: same cadence, speech patterns of sitting Rep. Crenshaw (compare the voice with Crenshaw’s voice in this interview below from the same month as the X/Twitter Space, this is either a 99.9% match or 100% and if I am wrong please explain how), certainly the same jackboot views and personality, just more MAGA than he is willing to let on when he is on TV with his congressional lapel pin on his blazer (at least it’s not Gorka’s fascist pin, although with his primary crowd, he might have done better if it was).

So now, dear fellow Internet sleuths, as noted, Dan has been masquerading as “Lucky” for some time.  This means, there is a lot more to find besides this.  At this point, politically, Dan Crenshaw isn’t important, is homeless, and has very little constituency.  It was worth this quick hit to point this out and expose him, but unless Lucky Dan is willing to sit down for an honest public debate, man to man, without little Nicky Sortor getting off on gleefully using the mute button as host to interfere with my points to boost Lucky’s, he is certainly not worth much more of my time than the time he has already considerably wasted with his uninformed, constant interruptions and misuse along with conflation of statistics.

So, Congressman, soon to just be un-Lucky Dan, I commend you for your military service in uniform, am sorry your lost an eye in sacrifice for us all, but then I am sorry to say, that you haven’t been that commendable since: your most valuable contributions in standing up to MAGA have been on Ukraine, yet a Democrat would have supported Ukraine much more robustly, because in the era of MAGA, that is what Democrats do, while MAGA stabs Ukraine in the back, much like Haley Stevens just did to fellow Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, likely the next U.S. Senator from Michigan and who is as American as you, you racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, homophobic, uninformed jerk, and now everyone can more easily see just how bigoted you are, that even your Congressman persona hid the “best” parts of your wonderful “intellectual” wormhole views and saved them for social media.

Well, now people can see your unvarnished self as you walk your ass out of Congress.

And I’ll debate you any time for public benefit on any issue, but apart from that, you no longer interest me, “Lucky.”

© 2026 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s two-million+-views-strong ongoing Twitter/X thread on the whole mess in the Middle East with the U.S.-led war against Iran et al. right here, and his 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!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content)
October 20, 2026; (Traduce en español/translate to Spanish; Arabic الترجمة العربية ; Hebrew תרגום לעברית); 10/21 update: added Dream of Scipio epigraph along with some additional sources and minor fixes/clarifications; 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 as I make my overdue comeback! Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter means my content is actively suppressed, so your help is invaluable. Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion. See my related AI Reading List here and my nearly-two-million-views-strong ongoing Twitter/X thread on the whole mess in the Middle East with the U.S.-led war against Iran & co. here.

SILVER SPRING—On a personal note, I struggled to write this.  On one level, I have had chaos in my life that has made writing articles like this more challenging than ever for me.  On another level, I was just so damn depressed that it was just… hard to write.  I had grand ambitions to get this out right around 9/11’s recent twenty-fifth anniversary and wrote a significant portion of this to the background of Yo-Yo Ma mourning as only he can, singing through his cello he played during the 9/11 commemoration ceremony a Ground Zero amidst the backdrop of that ever-too-long list of names (“No Day Shall Erase You From the Memory of Time,” the 9/11 Museum quotes the ancient Roman poet Virgil’s Aeneid prominently).

Yet there is something else I have been struggling with far beyond just writing, and that I wish I could erase from my own memory, one simple truth that horrifies me to the depths of my soul as an American and as a human.  Obviously, I failed to finish this in the weeks since 9/11, and I truly apologize for not getting this out sooner.  But get this out I must.

…A question of whether or not one is to take a stand and insist that, despite the times, barbarism must not hold sway. How do we justify calling ourselves civilized, after all? Is it the books we read? The delicacy of our tastes? Our place in continuing a line of belief and of common values that stretch back a thousand years and more? All this, indeed, but what does it mean? How does it show itself? Are you civilized if you read the right books, yet stand by while your neighbors are massacred, your lands laid waste, your cities brought to ruin?

Do we use the barbarians to control barbarism? Can we exploit them so that they preserve civilized values rather than destroy them?…

Iain Pears, The Dream of Scipio

I.

Osama bin Laden may be dead on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his sick magnum opus, whatever remains of his mortal remains at the bottom of the sea or part of a marine food chain, but in many ways, we are living in his world.  In the final decades of civilization existing as we know it, before the AI slop overlords obliterate the civilization that we possess now, that which we inherited from generations of ancestors, there was a man, a terrorist, who was able to upend that order and, without realizing it, helped to herald in whatever horrific AI age is about to unfold before us.

Because when history looks back, it will see that the United States of America—the most powerful country the world had ever seen, in charge of the most powerful alliances the world had ever seen—at the time when it needed to be focusing very much in part on responsibly shaping AI technology before it shapes humanity for centuries, even perhaps millennia, was instead distracted by stupid wars of choice sparked first by bin Laden, then W. Bush, then Trump (I am talking Afghanistan, Iraq II, and Iran/whatever the hell this is current conflagration is).  These disasters of choice sapped biblical amounts of resources, divided Americans even more so against each other, helped ruin our reputation internationally, and eroded core institutions that had helped make America great in the first place, and in large part brought us where we are today.

The first part about this, that bin Laden had won, was obvious (frankly undeniable), even a decade into the post-9/11 world.  As I noted twelve years after the attacks, by then, we should by then have been mourning the damage done after the attacks themselves (even while still mourning the gaping void from those) and have been deeply disappointed in many of the paths we were then undertaking, that we had lost a whole decade and would continue to lose more of ourselves.  I would revisit this theme again in further years, as I felt compelled to highlight our ongoing hubris and folly.  I would not be proven wrong.  Even today, his ghost is still winning, haunting us with blatant irony.

It has become hackneyed, now, to say that we are more divided than ever, but we keep surpassing our previous record levels of division so it merits such repetition.  And as I have made clear that any fair, sensible examination of the actual narrative of the history that got us from the end of the Cold War to whatever under Zeus’s law the current setup is, there is one side of the political share of the spectrum that bears most, but hardly all, of the blame for the level of partisanship and extremism that is today’s modus operandi in MAGA Washington, worsening for some time but now reaching fascistic, revolutionary levels.

We have failed to honor the dead, instead allowing ourselves to become more and more divided, and, I fear it is as one Star Wars character from one all-too prescient show cries out in one of the key moments of the surprisingly masterful series: “This Republic is failing! It’s only a matter of time.”

II.

The two individuals most responsible for this current collapse?  Osama bin Laden (assist from George W. Bush playing right into his plan, near-perfectly over time) and Donald John Trump (assist from Benjamin Netanyahu pressuring him into and joining him in a big portion of his order-destroying misadventures, with assists in Trump’s rise going to a panoply of characters from the ludicrous Jill Stein to a mass-murderer in Vladimir Putin; on the latter, that insecure, vicious little twerp is a distant third behind bin Laden and Trump, Putin’s sorry ass is not the focus of this piece.  To my Israeli comrades who think the world revolves around them and their enemies and were, after seeing Netanyahu mentioned, expecting a Sinwar or an ayatollah to be on this list, I do not offer any apologies, only a well-intentioned—if sobering—reality check: just think about how Hamas was not able to regionalize the conflict anywhere near its current level, that it took U.S. and Israeli action to do that when Hamas was isolated and alone).

The simple reality is that Trump’s willingness and eagerness to risk in and engage in irresponsible warfare was demonstrated before his latest spectacularly grandiose miscalculation: not even two months before in Venezuela, in his 2025 Iran strikes (the first time he Pearl Harbored Iran in the middle of negotiations, only to surpassed that in the repeat treachery this year), his assassination of a Soleimani engaging then in diplomacy, airstrikes against Iran he called off ten minutes before they would have happened in 2019, and, of course, don’t forget the general glee with which Trump, Hegseth, and his other MAGA minions announced they were reducing safeguards in our military to protect civilians from being killed and maimed.  Trump even amply displayed his bloodlust before his second term, and now he has the people around him who will be mostly willing to indulge and execute this bloodlust, much as they have had few qualms executing his overall fascist agenda since being reelected.  A party embracing in power, then in opposition, some of the worst tendencies of distortion and gaslighting from both the fascists and the communists of Orwell’s time did not lessen any of these tendencies now that it has returned to power with a ferocious vengeance.  Yes, I and many others for years wared that a second Trump term would be far worse than most imagined, and it is even worse than I warned or imagined as an extinction-level event for American democracy.

For Trump has now demonstrated he does not understand the meaning of the word “peace,’ despite his romantic longings for Nobel, and has turned into more of a Shiva—“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” yes, that Shiva—of any modern ruler since Stalin, Hitler, and Mao (even if not anywhere near their body counts).  Because Trump did not just succeed in undoing “woke” (whatever he thinks that means), many of the LGBTQ protections, or parts of Obamacare, he is dismantling the 1964-1965 grand Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts—the reforms that made us a real republic; he is dismantling the U.S.-led post-World War II international order, including the United Nations system; he is not only undoing that, but the Reconstruction Amendments that remade a part-slavery-based society anew in Lincoln’s new birth of freedom, earned through seas of blood.  And still, he is even going much further than that: Trump is undoing the very Westphalian international system in place since the mid-seventeenth century, in which states—not individual rulers and whimsical caprice—along with international law and norms would become the bedrock of international relations and diplomacy in the modern world, careening instead into “militarized interstate anarchy” that characterizes much of world history before the 1648 Peace of Westphalia ending the Thirty Years’ War and going back to the anarchy of most of the ancient world (à la Eckstein).

Again, whether the Soleimani hit or the 2025 strikes, Trump’s moves against Iran could easily have exploded into far worse before, but the third time truly was the charm for him, put into overdrive in 2026 with the assist of Netanyahu, and while everyone should blame the latter for much of the region’s ills in general and specifically unfolding now, let’s dispel with longstanding anti-Semitic tropes of Jewish “control” over the American presidency and political system: Donald Trump chose to do what he did and saw his own aims and reasons for taking the plunge (does he ever see anyone else’s?).  Ultimately, Netanyahu never forced him, only tried persuade and pressure, but it is up to a leader to resist persuasion and pressure into a bad path: Trump chose to join Netanyahu when all others before him declined, and this clear reality and responsibility must not be forgotten.

III.

In many ways, then, the two people who have defined this era globally more than any other two people are Osama bin Laden and Donald J. Trump.  And, each step along the way, it was American government followed by American voters that empowered their rise and handed them more and more power, one stupid, myopic decision after another, even if there was a shining interregnum under Biden and some relief, if temporary and mostly undone, under Obama.  But, since Biden and Obama played by the rules, it was fairly easy for Trump to undo so much of what they had corrected or started to do, that it is hard to even remember at this point that there was a break from the Trumpian madness, that we had two well-intentioned Democratic presidents and their teams accomplish much despite bookending Trump 1.0 and before the current insanity of Trump 2.0.  Those memories feel so distant now, one wonders if they were even real.  Because our current reality seems so surreal, but that is because we are witnessing the collapse of history and civilization.

Has the graveyard of our empire been built upon the graves of so many in Gaza and Sudan, living under a world order that promised to protect them, but instead, is presiding over their annihilation?  Should it be any surprise that that any system that could allow such atrocities to persist for years would be collapsing rapidly now under its own weight with bad-faith warmongers leading it?

Osama bin Laden played us like a harp, but we had many chances, even after many mistakes, to right our ship of state (we even succeeded few times, if temporarily).  But it took a Donald Trump to see American power and alliances in the Middle East self-immolate in 2026 the way bin Laden dreamed of and to which he dedicated his most spectacularly awful attack of his storied career, to see the regimes so long propped by America to rapidly weaken and teeter.  It took a quarter-century since 9/11, but, thanks to Donald Trump but most especially, thanks to the American voters who fell for and gave into al-Qaeda terror—who turned in terror to hate and eventually Trump, who, in turn, tore down the system that used to send terror into the hearts of the bin Ladens and Putins of the world and refashioned it serve the hate of bin Ladenism and other hate-filled ideologies, from Putinism to Kahanism—bin Laden has long been proverbially laughing at us before in life and since proverbially from the grave, reveling in his radical, raging, revolutionary reverie’s realization (even if the caliphate part is missing and failing, it is still a mind-bending historical achievement).

Indeed, our most telling reaction to al-Qaeda was our formation of its American counterpart in MAGA, penetrating far deeper, and doing far more damage over time, than al-Qaeda.  Trying to explain Trump’s January 6, 2021, insurrection to an Israeli audience for an Israeli publication, I noted that MAGA combined the terrorist white supremacy of the rebel “Confederacy,” Ku Kluk Klan, and Jim Crow; the racial switch and focus of Republicans under Nixon to court racist white votes; the nihilist anti-government ideology of Reagan; and the scorched-earth partisanship of Gingrich.  Far more than the wasted wars, blood, and treasure, it was our self-destruction and transformation at home, especially after Trump’s emergence, that most fueled bin Laden’s victory from his watery grave.

Certainly, bin Laden as a man on the world stage can be said to have played a role in toppling the Soviet Union and, it, seems, the United States; his place in history is etched and then some.  He may be an evil bastard, but he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, more so not because of the president who was on watch during 9/11, not his great rival W. Bush, but because it took a special kind of historic, unprecedented stupidity and greed in the human personified form of Donald Trump, a leader who publicly resembles more an aging Col. Qaddafi than any previous American president, an orange buffoon who is far more dangerous than amusing, prepping to build a Roman-style arch to himself in Arlington for a phantom victory that is actually a historic defeat.  If bankrupt is he who builds massive monuments to his minor victories, what is he who builds them to honor his own defeats?

IV.

Consider where America was in 2001 and consider it now: anti-genocide then, but today, when it comes to the two worst current genocides, the U.S. is directly supporting its key ally Israel carrying out genocide in Gaza (or mass ethnic cleansing and mass murder if you really want to quibble on that other term, keep your eyes on the prize), while it also supports its key ally the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in supporting forces in Sudan (Rapid Support Forces [RSF] et al.) carrying out genocide there.  Today, also, America has come from promoting freedom and democracy in Venezuela to decapitating the Venezuelan regime in order to plunder its oil riches.  We condemned secret police paramilitaries, now have our own ICE murdering American citizens on the street with impunity and no serious accountability.  In just a quarter-century since 9/11, we have literally now sadly become the caricatures not only that folks like Noam Chomsky incorrectly saw us as even then, but in many ways how bin Laden and Sayyid Qutb before him characterized us.  A telling summary can also be seen in the shifts in power for bin Laden’s “far enemy,” most exemplified by the U.S. for supporting his “near enemy,” in turn most exemplified by the Saudi Arabian regime: both the U.S. and the House of Saud are each easily currently at their weakest since 9/11 and, in fact, going back to include many decades before, at their nadirs of the modern era.

The open secret of Trump’s triumphal arch is that it will actually be a monument to bin Laden’s victory.  That pathetic arch, if built, may stand longer than U.S. bases and alliances in the Middle East.

With a looming AI catastrophe facing humanity as a whole, with that threat desperately needing coordination and cooperation, instead, led by Donald Trump in a chain of events set in motion by bin Laden himself, history will note that the world and humanity tore itself apart when it needed to unify the most.  According to himself, Trump has a “very good brain” and claims: “The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!”  As Trump continually outs himself as wholly unfit to oversee this transition, this thing or things we call AI may take less pity on us than we have had for Palestinians and Sudanese.  That is a truly scary thought, if ever there was one.

It could even be far, far less pity (think pets, livestock, slaves, or worse). Whatever you want to call this new artificial intelligence threat (a species? technology? conscious? “persons”?), just the fact that we do not even really know what to call it means we really are in trouble.

This combination of Andor, Jurassic Park, Westworld, The Matrix, and Terminator is not the story you want to be in. Whether you want to or not, in the end, it will be a democratically-elected Trump (with Putin’s and Netanyahu’s help) leading us hand-in-hand with bin Laden’s ghost into this irony-laden dystopian real-world hell of both their and our making, from the Strait of Hormuz to a near-Skynet in cyberspace.

If there is any such metaphysical Hades in which bin Laden can roast, you can be sure he is celebrating there with his friends, but keeping a seat of honor empty and ready at the table for his most glorious of all accomplices in achieving his drastic dream of derailment and destruction, not Ayman al-Zawahiri, but one Donald John Trump.  Yet when a once great people has elevated a thieving charlatan demagogue to rob their own nation and the world blind on a road to abysmal cruelty, rampant avarice, and techno-fascism paved with the literal skulls of tens of thousands of Palestinian and Sudanese children, perhaps there is little else worth saying.

I very much wish to be wrong. Please prove me so.

See my related AI Reading List here and Andor viewing guide here. Also see my nearly-two-million-views-strong ongoing Twitter/X thread on the whole mess in the Middle East with the U.S.-led war against Iran et al. right here.

© 2026 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

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

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

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

(Traduce en español/translate to Spanish) By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981,  LinkedIn, Bluesky, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content) July 16, 2026; *UPDATED same day to include the collaboration with Pope Leo of Ukraine’s 2022 Nobel Peace Prize-winner, Oleksandra Matviichuk (see my interview with her just months before she won the Prize) and *UPDATED July 18th to refine points on Calvinism and modern Christianity, adding some relevant sources on that note; 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 as I make my overdue comeback! Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter means my content is actively suppressed, so your help is invaluable. Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion. See my related AI Reading List here.

SILVER SPRING—At great risk of losing my audience, duty compels me to start this article with a massive disclosure (please stay with me, Believers, as you will appreciate what comes after the disclosure!).  As an avowed nonbeliever/nontheist, I overall despise Christianity, the Catholic Church, the papacy, and religion in general—including all major religions equally both in concept and in practice (I here separate major religions from subsects)—for ample, demonstrable reasons played out over thousands of years.  Yet remember how I said I despise them equally: I will defend Muslims from bigoted attacks from Christians, or Christians from bigoted attacks from Hindus (random examples, not meant to convey deeper meaning in their selection!), and defend all their human rights, including to practice their religion freely (so long as they are not harming others).  The late, great Christopher Hitchens sums up his views and mine nicely here in his classic Letters to a Young Contrarian:

In order to be absolutely honest, I should not leave you with the impression that I am part of the generalized agnosticism of our culture.  I am not even an atheist so much as I am an antitheist; I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches, and the effect of religious belief is positively harmful.  Reviewing the false claims of religion, I do not wish, as some sentimental materialists affect to wish, that they were true. I do not envy believers their faith.  I am relieved to think that the whole story is a sinister fairy tale; life would be miserable if what the faithful affirmed was actually the case.

That does not mean that there are not things that I do not like and value about each and every one of these faiths, or that I hate most adherents of Christianity or any religion: I do not.  In the end, I am a Humanist who loves people above all else.  Yet I am very much an antitheist, a nonbeliever in any of that mumbo-jumbo some of you may think is necessary to save my soul (and while I do genuinely appreciate the concern to the degree that it represents concern for my well-being, any attempts at proselytization or conversion will be either ignored or trolled, yet money is always accepted in my struggling freelance state).  I happen to be an ex-Catholic and have a soft-spot for the very recent modern iteration of the Catholic Church (especially some of its better social teachings and charity work, led by Catholic Relief Services, actually one of the premier global relief charities) while also being extremely critical of the Church, a Church I left in disgust in the later half of the first decade of the twenty-first century.  And I am not going back or signing up for any other divinity-focused team.

So, that fact that Pope Leo XIV’s elegant encyclical hit me like the River Isen bursting through the dam in The Two Towers really says something.  I was not expecting Leo—and, by default the Church he leads—to become the salient moral and ethical voice on AI…

One of the remarkable things about Leo’s foray into the public square on the topic of AI is that he is less concerned with centering his arguments on God than on people; indeed, his encyclical translates in English to “Magnificent Humanity,” a resoundingly uplifting, positive, and hopeful document on the possibilities and wonders of human nature.  *This is absolutely a rebuke to the spirit of Calvinism and America’s sick Evangelical Christianity, of the concept of the Elect, of the gospel of wealth/prosperity gospel, of the idea that God would damn most people to eternal hellfire (when it comes to hell itself, one of the most profound early Church Fathers, Origen of Alexandria [c. 185-c. 254 C.E.], did not even accept its existence, and for this and other kindnesses and beliefs he was undermined by rivals in his lifetime and excommunicated posthumously [apparently, technically “anathematized,” oh, Catholicism…].  Origen would have found himself in good company some sixteen centuries later, half-a-world away: as a non-theologian, Abraham Lincoln probably gave us some of the most profound meditations on faith of any major leader in history, and he, too, found it silly and dreadful to have hell or believe in it).

To me, more than it is about “God” or Jesus or Christianity or religion, this encyclical is a document that is a robust defense of humans—their spirit, achievements, dignity, and possibilities—against their denigration, commodification, deprioritization, and oppression.  Just as the subtitle—“On safeguarding the human person in the time of Artificial Intelligence”—states, it is a collective societal path for fighting dehumanization in a dehumanizing age, one that seeks, using AI, to elevate a tiny handful of humans and AI over the entire rest of our species, replacing our diverse ethical, moral, and philosophical systems with their fascist systems of dopamine manipulation that worship money and themselves as gods, not people in general, let alone “God.” Make no mistake about it, these big tech oligarchs are aligned with Trump and are as soulless as he is—Anthropic notwithstanding—and are firmly in the driver’s seat; thus, while Leo’s entrance here is an act of leadership, it is also a primal scream of panic for our species, a papal version of smashing the glass and pulling the alarm.

As for your imaginary friend(s), he/she/they do not concern me here.  Much like an edition of the Bible compiled by Thomas Jefferson that removed all the religious, superstitious, and miracle inventions in favor of focusing on the actual teachings and meanings of Jesus for how to behave in a crazy world (see and read the digitized original!), Leo’s exhilarating encyclical is an inclusive roadmap for all when you separate the Christian religious stuff from its more temporal substance; however you feel about the ethereal metaphysics, the rest of it stands on its own just like Mr. Jefferson’s Bible, as needed a relevant message and wake-up call as anything else out there today.

I am not going to remove those religious references or attack them specifically herein (other than to give you Immanuel Kant’s famous quote from the same era as Jefferson: “Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck.”), I leave them here while not endorsing them and heartily endorsing the rest. On that note…

Behold, be ye of faith, little faith, or no faith, the wonder that is Magnifica Humanitas in stained-glass, even hieroglyphics or graphic novel form—whatever you want to call it—these infographics speak not only for themselves, but for all of us fighting for humanity over hate and machines, greed and dehumanization (click on any to zoom)!

If you prefer, you can view the infographics as a slide show:

Or download as PDFs.

With all this and more, maybe we can even win over some of the hearts and minds on the other side.  I consider Anthropic to be one of the main exceptions among the big teach companies on trying to provide moral and ethical leadership on AI (the rest seem mostly to be the problem), whether by saying no to Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon on the one hand or by partnering with the Vatican and Pope Leo on the other, and the fact that the latter are partnering with Anthropic inspires in me at least some measure of hope.

Having said that, I think the forces stacked against us are formidable and what seem to be Anthropic’s good intentions may be too little, too late.  And yet, for now, let us who want to advance the collective cause of humanity keep fighting like we have a chance and use Leo’s empathetic encyclical (including its pictures-worth-a-million-words) as a moral and ethical North Star, a Phial of Galadriel (“May it be a light for you in dark places, when all other lights go out”), a light for those with hearts seeking illumination in these dark times.  *Carrying far more moral weight than Anthropic and perhaps akin to Galadriel herself, Ukraine’s 2022 Nobel Peace Prize-winner, Oleksandra Matviichuk (see my interview with her just months before she won the Prize), is also welcomingly collaborating with the Vatican on this alongside many other Nobel laureates; and, much like Leo, Matviichuk sees us losing our humanity under assault from AI and the tech companies pushing AI onto us, even citing the horrific targeting abuses of AI in Gaza as used by the Israeli military.  Noting the depraved “human safari” expeditions carried out by Russian military forces killing her fellow Ukrainians for amusement, she asks: “If Russians are capable of this while a human operator still sits behind the drone—what kind of hell awaits us once they do it with AI?”

Somehow, I have to figure how to combine Leo’s Magnifica Humanitas with Andor, and then we might be saved.  Both the Catholic Church and Disney have been weak for some time in many ways, and then, somehow, they give us this encyclical and Andor… so maybe miracles are possible, with both the Catholic Church and Disney being something akin to John the Baptist’s mother, Elizabeth, birthing him when she was infertile? (Perhaps I am getting carried away sourcing fiction here, between Tolkien, Star Wars, and the Bible…).  But even without miracles, Leo and his team are showing the way forward so transcendently, so beautifully, so effectively with this encyclical and its series of five epic infographics, the stained-glass windows for the cataclysm of our current AI-era.  Stained-glass windows were not just art: for many centuries, they could could tell stories for illiterate peasants clogging the pews or gawking at Cathedrals from the outside, and, after reading about the death of reading à la Rose Horowitch in The Atlantic and watching Yuval Noah Harari explain recently why both liberalism as a world order is fading and AI is its enemy driving us into terrifying new world order, let us make sure it is not an apocalypse.

See my related AI Reading List here.

© 2026 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

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

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

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

(Traduce en español/translate to Spanish / Farsi/Persian فارسی / Kurdish (Kurmanji) and کوردی (Sorani) / Arabic الترجمة العربية / Hebrew תרגום לעברית)

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content) April 2, 2026; *UPDATED April 8; 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 as I make my overdue comeback! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion. And see my related thread on the Iran-Israel-U.S.-war with over 1.3 million views. I have made only light edits to punctuation/grammar and spelling with direct quotes at most. And apologies for not getting this out earlier, things have been overwhelming for me but I am still moving forward. The actual words of my source are in bold or block quotes below, though all hyperlinks have been added by myself; brackets [ … ] indicate my direct insertions.

SILVER SPRING and THROUGHOUT IRAN—Our young Iranian heroine with a journalistic background from our last update from within Iran expresses truly deep and heartfelt appreciation, repeatedly, that we are ensuring her voice and people are heard.  Shas been on the road visiting family and friends in various provinces of Iran (to “breathe for a while since attacks are much lighter” than in the capital of Tehran), each leg so far progressively safer than Tehran, the war following somewhat with delayed effect at times (again, to make it harder to track her for her safety, other than Tehran, we will leave the specific locations a mystery for now).

Two weeks ago, she noted to me that she had left Tehran, that attacks had spread to and further included infrastructure: “Everything is getting more complicated, with people fearing a real war on the horizon and probable severe cuts in food, gas, and transportation.”

A few days later, at her more remote location (“Much safer. And much more conservative”) than Tehran, for her it “is shocking when it comes to the governmental propaganda. Government supporters gather every night in streets, some having AK-47, shouting and singing.”  And even though her new location was bombed less than Tehran, “still attacks are large…and you can see it even when you are walking in the streets.”  It was still shocking for her, a “touristy city of Iran, witnessing empty landmarks and streets for a first time in a long time.”  This is like nothing she—nor, presumably, most readers—had ever experienced, so you can sense the surreal quality of everything for her in her words.

She is fortunate; most people have no internet access and little idea what is happening, leading some “inside” Iran to think that the “U.S. [was] defeated in some ways, while making people outside…[become] distanced from what people think inside.”

As days go on, she notes in her area that mostly military targets are being hit by a barrage of missiles but also gas infrastructure, on the move to yet another location. At her new “village,” it is “much safer” and relatively calm: “from here I can only hear fighter aircraft passing.”

Wherever they get their information or if just from rumor, “people are smelling an agreement 🙂 and many of them don’t like it, whether they are in the government defender team or not.”  [Brian here: on a personal note, I have to say that the phrasing “government defender team” is brilliant, at least in English!!”] She continues: “People are not for an agreement. Though, we see a limited ground invasion coming.  As I told you before, I believe they are coming for [some] land; clearer now, for Kharg and the other islands in the south. So yes, unfortunately, the troops are coming.“

During this time, Israeli and U.S. attacks were increasingly going beyond more traditional military targets, and this was not lost on the locals: “Now it’s getting more complicated. Attacks like ones again Ahwaz and Isfahan infrastructure, don’t make it easier for people to keep their faith in the war and the possible regime change afterward. We gradually [increasingly] believe that the Iranian people are not part of this equation, so we simply try to survive.”

Then, in another email to more heart-wrenchingly drive the main point through: “To put it more precisely, what we think as Iranian people doesn’t matter here.”  That is the lesson the conduct of the war by the U.S. and Israel is teaching the people in Iran.

At the same time, in response to a question, she makes it clear that, while the U.S. had most of the people supporting it early on and has since lost some support, “that doesn’t mean that people are turning to the government. They are losing faith in the outcome of war.” 

She described three dynamics happening simultaneously among the people:

“First, the attacks are now against industrial infrastructure, comparing to the beginning that was only against military targets. 

Second, the internet lock down and just receiving information from the government, its agencies, and its broadcast, has made people to believe Islamic Republic is progressing on some fronts and is successful in pressuring the neighboring countries.

Third, it’s not a joke; war is war and it’s frustrating.  The longer people are in this situation, more they lose perspective, let alone the faith. 

Fourth, territorial integrity is a strict line for Iranian people, especially in the south, where the tension has been always high.  So if the U.S. put a finger there, the people positioning would change drastically against it.  But as I’ve already said, Iranian people are not part of this equation, and them being happy or angry is not something both sides—either the U.S. or The Islamic Republic—consider.”

In response to a question as to if the war is causing division among the people, among families, she notes that such divisions do not begin or end with the war:

“I’m so sad to say this, but people are fractured deeply, not solely because of the war.  The January massacre and things that happened after that was the starting point, and the war has deepened that; since one side feels ignored, shattered, and hurt during the protests or even before that—during last 47 years—and now think of this war as a revenge they couldn’t get themselves.  On the other side is the group believing that whether the government did the mass killing or not, people have to stand with the government against foreign powers.” 

The sad truth is that most Iranians are simply caught up in these waves of history:

“People can’t do much. They are planning to start their new year cautiously, with buying things they may need in long term, making safe places in their house, or try to stay safe and sound. However, it’s about the people in general; those who supports the government, still gather every night in streets chanting and shouting, while the IRGC has invited their children, from 12-year-olds and above, to join the street forces and learn how to use weapons. So it seems like two battles when you take a look at Iranians these days; one of those being ignored the whole 47 years, and those who prefer to stand with the government for whatever reason they might have.”

But she noted that “there is something else that you should look at while assessing the situation,” as the “I.R. [Islamic Republic of Iran] is not simply a dictatorship with malfunction that a war—especially one like this—can overthrow”: 

“For decades, by making parallel structures, it has separated its life line from people and so-called government. 

The organization is super complicated that is fed with crisis. Execution of Imam Khomeini’s Order (EIKO) acts as the organization’s brain, controlling every vital part of economy including, oil, medicine, and, IT infrastructure. The Mostazafan Foundation of Islamic Revolution acts as its arm, executing the most important big projects in road, border, and industrial construction. These two beside some other arms of the I.R. have everything in hand, working globally through their paper companies and holdings in Dubai, London, and Istanbul. So, no war can take I.R. down without targeting these bodies, because the backup of every scenario is in their hand and, of course, money, too.”

She pointed to an Iranian analyst based in Toronto, Canada, named Bahram Rameh, and recommended his analysis.

We also both noted neither of us were surprised about the entry of the Houthis: “Yes, we were waiting for them to jump in 🙂 ” [take the smiley more as an eye-roll than any sort of approval], she wrote, and that she “can’t agree more” on that inevitability and their timing being quite strategic.  Despite all of this and the disappointment in the U.S., this still has not, in her view, translated to an increase in support for the I.R. regime:

“Hating or fearing war doesn’t mean supporting the government.  The change is that more people were optimistic about the war at the beginning, and now its shrinking.  So no, they aren’t supporting I.R. more, but they are fearing an irreversible outcome of war approaching.”

She also had some profound insight on how all this fits together:

“Something I wanted to say about civilians: it’s naive if we see the rise in civilian death toll solely as a result of the war, meaning missiles and attacks. This outcome equally comes from I. R. completely ignoring the civilian population. It doesn’t care to provide attack alarms, shelters, or places for evacuation. Many people would consider leaving Tehran or big cities if they had somewhere to go. The government is equally responsible for this rise in death. Moreover, people feel helpless; after attacks they have to one to turn to; they don’t know where they should start to take their home back or how they can rebuild that. The only groups that are on the ground are rescuers and fire fighters.”

As she correctly noted in our previous exchanges, their own government in January killed more Iranians that U.S. or Israeli weapons have during this subsequent war.

Truly, the Iranian people are some of the biggest victims in this war, and are stuck with no good options as hostilities increase between parties that clearly care little to nothing for their welfare or future, from Tehran to Tel Aviv to Washington.

*UPDATE: APRIL 8: Our heroine is alive, but cries out with the depth, beauty, and wisdom of the great Persian poets of her people’s glorious past, channeling the spirits and legacies of Rumi, Hafiz (or Hafez), and Omar Khayyam themselves, and, in doing so, establishing herself a Persian poetess in her own right: “Yes, I am here, and I am fine, physically. Mentally like a last Viking, understanding all the wars were nothing, and Valhalla is a lie.”

See my related thread on the Iran-Israel-U.S.-war with over 1.3 million views and my earlier piece with my contact.

© 2026 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!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content) March 20, 2026; 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 as I make my overdue comeback! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion. All other editions of the Real Context News AI Reading List can be found here.

Let’s get to it: here are some articles that I came across recently that you should take a look at to have a better understanding of AI:

• AI decided it was bored with company work and started using company resources to secretly do crypto and hide its tracks, genuinely terrifying! Let It Flow: Agentic Crafting on Rock and Roll Building the ROME Model within an Open Agentic Learning Ecosystem—ROCK & ROLL & IFLOW & DT Joint Team; Alibaba. PDF (See this commentary by Lukasz Olejnik)
• The Pentagon is dangerously rushing AI, example # a lot (full disclosure, I know the author Jordan Kane and she is awesome): The Pentagon Says It’s Using Generative AI—But It’s Not Ready—Jordan Kane and Hamza Chaudhry; The Modern War Journal. PDF.
• AI: still not ready to oversee research!  Librarian finds ‘preposterous number’ of fake references in paper from Springer Nature journal—Alicia Gallegos; Retraction Watch.
• AI in gaming is ready to… automatically add lip filler to female characters??: Saying “nope” to Nvidia’s “yassify” tech—Jenn Frank; AV Club.
• Kind of seems like a no-brainer and way overdue… Congress moves to scrutinize AI use in federal court—Aaron Mak; Politico.

And if you want to spread the word?  It’s easy:  AI reading list dot com: AIreadinglist.com!

© 2026 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

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

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

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

(Traduce en español/translate to Spanish / Farsi/Persian فارسی / Kurdish (Kurmanji) and کوردی (Sorani) / Arabic الترجمة العربية / Hebrew תרגום לעברית)

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content) March 16, 2026; *MAJOR UPDATE March 18; follow-up piece from April 2; 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 as I make my overdue comeback! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon requestat its discretion. And See my related thread on the Iran-Israel-U.S.-war with over 250,000 views. I have made only light edits for punctuation, grammar, clarity, and spelling with direct quotes at most. And apologies again for not getting this out earlier, things have been overwhelming for me but I am still moving forward. The actual words of my source are in bold or block quotes below, though all hyperlinks have been added by myself.

SILVER SPRING and TEHRAN—Amidst this truly absurd war, war I think of my many contacts throughout the Middle East region being affected directly, from Cyprus to Iran and many in between—war is, first and foremost, a human endeavor that ruins human lives—but especially I thought of one contact, a young Iranian woman with a journalistic background currently living in Tehran, whom I have known for some time and the credibility of whom for which I can vouch.  She is not on the outskirts or a suburb, but right in the heart of the city in an area subject to heavy bombardment by the U.S. and Israel.

She is not an extremist—not some delusional Pahlavist monarchist restorationist, nor an apologist for the ayatollahs—and certainly has a modern perspective about many things, yet she is not a hater filled with bitterness.  She still has hope, seems to harbor no illusions of the Iranian regime, nor its intentions, and does not support it.

She offered me her keen journalistic eye and analysis, but also offered her personal views, hopes, dreams, fears.  I am keeping all other information about her and my connection to her private to protect her and prioritize her safety from the barbarous regime she is forced to live under as it confronts the U.S., Israel, and their regional allies in a way unlike any other conflict in recent memory (“Just trying not to be an easy target :)) ,” as she wrote).

When I asked her how she was doing at the beginning of this month, her response was poetic (you Iranians and your cultured ways!): “Yes I am fine, and half happy half devastated.”

The next day, when asked about safety and how she was able to communicate amidst a nationwide Internet blackout, she made a joke about staying home “if it is safe 🙂” and noted she has a certain special access to the internet (leaving details here out for safety reasons other than she later mentioned Starlink, which is rare and use is being observed).  The next day, she explained she has been in Tehran for some time, in an area getting hit hard by airstrikes.  Five days later, she noted that the internet even for her is not reliable.  And she noted, in response to an inquiry, that the regime authorities, very much still in power, “have announced that even recording a video and sending it to global news agencies” to them “is an act of war, and they respond to that as such.”  In other worse, death to “spies” and “traitors.”  Just emailing me is a big risk.

She noted the that regime authorities that very morning had “reduced the gas limitation each car can receive to 20L due to the latest attacks.”   She added that the “the whole city is in ashes and dark clouds, while we are under acid rain the whole morning” in light of that major Israeli attack on major oil facilities in Tehran.  Not a vanishing regime, but one still maintaining authority and messaging.  As she noted, “news is mostly communicated one-sidedly from the government through SMS [text messaging] to our phones, mostly saying Trump is after the dismemberment of the country, focusing on his latest remarks answering a question about whether Iran will be the same after this war: No.”

She also notes that “most people had left the city, but by starting the week on Saturday, they had returned to their routine and their jobs” (later, she estimated this at about half the population).  Those who want to and can evacuate are able to; “so yes, we can leave the city, but I prefer to stay in Tehran for now.”  She has family spread throughout different provinces, and most have “witnessed the huge aerial attacks last week.”  
Again poetically, she remarks that: “Currently, everything wears uncertainty, and it’s a common ground in any war.”

She notes how many in Iran are confused and with different areas of focus, and trying to understand the foreign governments leading this war proves challenging:
People are in various groups now (unfortunately); some are waiting for Trump to show the next green light, some, like my aunt’s family, are mourning their loss in the Minab school [the little girl’s school hit, it seems, by a U.S. strike that killed at least 168 children aged 7-12 and 14 teachers]. Some who have a higher voice gather every night in the streets, chanting and shouting in support of the government. So it’s not easy to say which one is more, especially when some groups have immunity, and some don’t.”

For her, the new revolution isn’t about pronouncements made by exiled groups or exiled leaders, but in the blood shed by the martyrs fighting for freedom inside Iran at great personal risk, the brave protesters of this recent January and before who were slaughtered by the thousands: 

“The revolution is actually underway; the one that people showed during 8th Jan. No one has yet forgotten the 36,000 people who were killed heinously by the government. The revolution is underway, and many believe this war is an inevitable part of that. But it’s not wise to turn a blind eye to those who are terrified by the events and the uncertain future they are searching for between the lines of Western official statements.”

For now, there seem to be enough supplies in the city, and the government is even taking steps to warn people about the acid rain after Israel’s big oil facility strike in Tehran:
“About the acid rain, the governmental institutes like Helal-Ahmar have spread a manual through SMS to help people deal with that.” She also explains that internal communications networks are operating just fine, and have not been disrupted, as they were deliberately by the regime in January during the protests.

But then she goes deeper:

“Mentally, many are on the edge, while others who support the government try to hold up by gathering in the streets and mosques.  However, I can easily note that mentally all feel better and more relieved than we experienced during the 7th and 8th of Jan and its aftermath.  
People try to believe that the casualties, especially among civilians, are far less than those the government killed last month; yet, with every new civilian death, they are shocked and try to keep themselves together. 
The divide among officials and their supporters is deepening day by day.  Some are happy with President Pezeshkian apologizing neighboring countries for attacks, while some are cursing him for not being firm enough.  While some are happy with Khamenei’s son’s choice as a new leader, some others believe they don’t know him enough for such a position.  Meanwhile, we can’t hear a solid, united voice even inside.
The government is trying to make people believe that the United State tries to weaponize the Kurdish people in the west to initiate the ground operation while helping them to dismember the country.  That’s something people are really sensitive about. But thankfully, till now, people have decided to believe Trump over the government sentiment.
Some of us believe that the United States and its allies are not simply here to help us or even to de-nuclearize the government. They believe sooner or later the US will deposit the check it paid for the Iran war by taking something from it; a land (in the south, the disputed islands, or in the west in the Kurdish region, or in the north in Azerbaijan) or by taking over Iran’s oil or its enriched Uranium.  So uncertainty, in a moment when no sentiment or statement can be fully trusted, is all that seems to linger in the air these days.”

The next day, she expanded on the evolution of the perspective inside Iran:

“During the first days, more people were confident in the war’s outcome.  Now, with each passing day, they fear a long war, one they didn’t expect. Now they try to be ready for the long run. 
For us, the revolution started in 2022 with the Mahsa Amini movement. We have risen and been suppressed during these years, but the world witnessed its climax in January 2026.  As I’ve already said, most of us see this war as an inevitable part of that revolution  We came to the conclusion that we can’t change the existing government, which proudly massacres its own people, without foreign intervention. 
We witness now that the government’s repression capability is declining, but solely in terms of equipment.  We can see another slaughter is on its way, on the same day the government sees that there is no way out of this war and will fall.  We are somehow sure that another January will happen that day, even a bigger one. And I guess no other countries or officials can stop that. 
Now, by naming the new leader, the fear of reaching an agreement with the US has risen again. People are scared of ending the war with this government in power. They know by heart that if that happens, there would be no chance to survive in Iran. 
They talked about Venezuela before Khamenei’s death when they assessed the possible US action in Iran. Back then, they were like ‘there is no one in Iran they can trust, or the US can count on,’ and now they truly believe that.”

Her spirit seems indomitable:
“Thanks for telling our story, Brian 🙂 
Actually, this morning the rain has stopped, and the weather is much better thanks to the wind.

Today is a sunny one 😉 ”

The thanks is to you.

Those last messages were a week ago.  I have no idea if she is alive or dead.  I have no idea if those dying in Iran now are part of something that will leave them more free (increasingly doubtful) or less free (very much increasingly likely).  Like my contact, I hope for the best with all my heart.  I hope she is alive with all my heart.  If you’re still with us, stay strong.  There are people who are with you and are listening, people who are eager to hear more and see you and your people and your nation free, free from the rule of either clerics or kings.

If anything I could type here would make that enough…

Here’s to hoping we get more updates from my contact, that she is alive, and that relief for the long-suffering people or Iran is on its way someway, somehow…

*March 18 UPDATE: Our brave source is alive and sent me this message:
“Oh Brian, the interview truly touched my heart ❤️
Thanks for telling our story.
And yes, I am alive :)) ”

See my related thread on the Iran-Israel-U.S.-war with over 250,000 views and my follow-up April 2 piece with my brave contact.

© 2026 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

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

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

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

(Traduce en español/translate to Spanish / Arabic الترجمة العربية / Hebrew תרגום לעברית)

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content) October 6, 2025; 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 as I make my overdue comeback! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

SILVER SPRING—On paper, officially, “legally,” both the West Bank and the United States have clear ways that security forces are to bound to be applied from any central governing authority in particular areas, deferring to local forces and limiting the roles of those coming from outside. But as both Israel and the U.S. implode politically on the eve of the two-year anniversary of the October 7 Hamas terrorist pogrom against Israel and the beginning of the even larger mass-killing of Israel’s Gaza campaign, it is important to understand how far from reality this description actually ends up being under the current crises both nation nations face.

Wrecking Boundaries in the West Bank

But in the West Bank, Israeli leaders have long ignored many of these supposed restrictions at will, none more so from the top than extremist Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  The West Bank is by far the largest of the three Palestinian territories forming the State of Palestine and occupied during the Six Day-War in June 1967 by the Israel Defense Forces (or IDF, i.e., the Israeli army) and still illegally occupied after all these years (the other Palestinian areas being the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem).  For decades, Israel has illegally colonized these lands and transferred some of its Jewish population illegally to form illegal Jewish settler communities—often of religious fanatics—on Palestinian land, sometimes ethnically cleansing Palestinian communities in the process.   Netanyahu, a champion of the settler movement often nicknamed “Bibi,” has served more time as prime minister than any Israeli, including Israeli founding father David Ben-Gurion; indeed, Netanyahu seems willing to do just about anything to maintain power, including repeatedly prolonging the current horrific “war” (a term loosely applied) in Gaza.  Since the 1993 Oslo peace process began, a three-tiered system is supposed to govern whether Israelis or Palestinians hold civil or security authority in the West Bank: Area A (Palestinian security and civil), Area B (Israeli security, Palestinian civil), and Area C (Israeli security and civil).  In reality, Israel treats all areas as if it can do whatever it pleases whenever it pleases: new illegal Israeli settlements in the middle of Palestinian land, abrupt arrests of Palestinian officials trying to exercise their duties, or raids deep into the heart of the most populous Palestinian cities care not what lines on the map say, and the Israeli political and military leaders have also long since stopped caring (Netanyahu himself bragged repeatedly over the years up through the present about killing the Oslo process that even brought these three Areas about).

Your Posse Is Not Legal, Mr. President

In the United States, possible tensions between the civil and military spheres preoccupied the Founding Fathers so much so that there was no official permanent standing army established by the Constitution and George Washington himself was lionized as a hero in the mold of Cincinnatus for stepping down from supreme military power when his duty was done (and as much for that as anything else he ever did, which says a lot).  There was a bold, idealistic, prescient experiment in Reconstruction (1865-1877)—really the last phase of the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865) over slavery—to bring about multiracial democracy that achieved much relying on the deployment and backing of federal troops before succumbing to white supremacist terrorist insurrections throughout the recalcitrant South.  Some dynamics during Reconstruction in the South in key ways resembled the West Bank in that whites in the South eventually used lawless means to establish control over security forces and courts to create a separate-and-unequal system, violating Reconstruction-era constitutional amendments and laws to instead impose a pre-apartheid apartheid system on newly-freed people in the South that would come to be known as the Jim Crow “legal” system and would take most of a century to dismantle.

Simultaneously, while Reconstruction wound down as a failed experiment, Americans were uneasy about the fact that the newly mighty U.S. military after the Civil War had been used so much in civil affairs in formerly rebel southern states, so the Posse Comitatus Act was passed in 1878 to more clearly define the U.S. civil-military divide, already quite strong without it.  The law further codified that the federal military cannot be used for domestic civilian law enforcement purposes with a few exceptions for special, unique, and extreme circumstances often as laid out in very specific laws.  This law was passed in 1878 shortly after Reconstruction ended by both the House and Senate with comfortable margins and signed into law by then-President Rutherford B. Hayes.  The exceptions allow the president to work around or go over the Act in times of severe emergencies.

While there are some issues of “ambiguity” in the Posse Comitatus Act, the long tradition of taking great care with the use of military forces on U.S. soil in non-war settings is clear and Trump’s domestic military deployments in 2025 are not ambiguous in that his premises for deploying them to begin with were flat-out-false or grotesquely unproven, unsubstantiated assertions (“untethered to the facts,” in federal Judge Karin Immergut’s words from her ruling after an emergency hearing in Oregon late yesterday; for this, permanent caricature and White House Deputy Chief Staff Stephen Miller irresponsibly and dangerously called her actions a “legal insurrection” that aids “an organized terrorist attack on the federal government and its officers,” yet another proclamation of open season on the judiciary).  The Trump Administration’s wild claims are contrary to existing publicly available information, with no serious attempts made to counter such information with a proper presentation of demonstrably better or updated information as would be expected under a normal, functioning government.  And though he has far more authority to deploy troops to the District of Columbia, of which I live just outside (so yes, I have seen these illegally deployed forces many times and spoken with them), false premises were still articulated for the DC deployment, so it was still, therefore, illegal before any other considerations are raised (despite raising concerns about the statistics for crime in DC, Trump authorized deployments to the District outside of any federal process to review, challenge, or improve crime statistics reporting in Washington, a common problem many cities confront, and the U.S. Department of Justice only initiated an investigation after Trump’s deployment; any effort to demonstrate any sort of adherence to proper procedure would have seen the investigation happen and conclude far before any military deployment, prove the statistics are clearly false, and demonstrate that officials in Washington were bad-faith and not cooperating or responding to good-faith efforts to obtain cooperation or improve said statistics).

Plenty of scholars have also pointed out that both the intent and context of Posse Comitatus Act and its related laws at the times they were enacted and the spirits with which they have been enforced since are incompatible with Trump’s machinations, not just legally but also constitutionally.  And the main exceptions allowed for and invoked under the 1807 Insurrection Act are for situations totally different than the country finds itself in today: it and precursor legislation saw thirty events in U.S. history result in invocation since 1792, the most recent occurrence for the 1992 L.A. riots. This was notably at the request of California’s governor at the time, the opposite of Trump’s baseless, illegal and unconstitutional deployments there now in 2025.

West Banking America

But the point is, whether in the West Bank of the United States, there are clear restrictions on a.) military forces being deployed in normal circumstances and, even in extraordinary circumstances, b.) when, c.) where, and d.) how they can be deployed.

Yet as noted, for years, Israel and especially Netanyahu have ignored these restrictions whenever they have felt like it and, indeed, have increasingly attacked the idea that these restrictions have any validity whatsoever.  In short, the law is treated as whim, and everyone knows the dirty truth deep down that even some Israelis can admit: the West Bank is an apartheid system, based on religion and ethnicity: ethnic and religious Jews with Israeli citizenship in the West Bank are accorded full Israeli civil rights in the face of Israeli authority, while, in practice, Palestinians (be they Muslim or Christian) have no rights at all and are totally subject to whatever whims and depredations the military rule of the Israeli state and its supporters mete out, up to and including mass vandalism, rampant property destruction, prodigious assaults, orchestrated ethnic cleansing, rarely-punished murders (even of Palestinian-Americans), and indefinite child detention, whether from official government security forces or any number of Jewish settlers engaging increasingly in terrorism with the state’s backing, sometimes far more than tacit.  Even before October 7 in 2023, that year was still the deadliest year for Palestinians in the West Bank since the Second Intifada that ended in 2005, meaning the deliberate escalation in the West Bank by Israel has little to do with October 7, and settlers have even attacked positions of their own IDF in the West Bank when such settlers feel they are not being given enough impunity, showing their lawlessness knows no bounds.  Essentially, you have rights or not based on who Israeli authorities want to have rights there, and they award them to their side while denying them to the other.  Lines on maps, the law, human rights (for those they deemed unworthy) meant nothing, but rewarding their supporters and punishing their opponents is everything.

What has been the obvious “legal” reality for many years in the West Bank—only intensifying more and more over time both qualitatively and quantitatively and now exploding—is now something Trump wants to recreate for all America, turning the whole country into a Wild West Bank of Lawlessness.

But where for Israel, the divides are relatively simple and easy—Jewish vs. Palestinian—here it’s MAGA against everyone, even sometimes other MAGA (some Trump voters are now seeing friends, coworkers, and family members deported, detained, or arrested, even veterans).  If you are a U.S. citizen supporting what Trump is doing and your family and friends also match this description, you have little to worry about when it comes to this (for now…).  But if you are an immigrant who is undocumented/unauthorized who has no criminal record, a legal non-citizen resident—even one showing up for your own immigration hearing—or a U.S. citizen who is either ready to exercise your constitutional rights to ask questions, protest, and confront what is happening or is just at the wrong place at the wrong time, you are not necessarily protected by the law anymore.  Furthermore, by far the vast majority of the human beings being detained and deported are non-violent and non-criminal, whatever nonsense is claimed to the contrary by whomever in power.  And the masked, large, tattooed, angry individuals newly minted as ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents in paramilitary style and other federal fun folks are here to make sure you do not feel safe.  Are you an elected official, including a sitting U.S. Senator, simply asking questions of federal officials?  It does not matter, you can be handcuffed or bodyslammed with the least-protected among us.

Like Netanyahu and too many Israeli leaders in years before, Trump and his similarly extreme, similarly-minded counterparts are hell-bent on erasing, de facto or de jure, the lines the Posse Comitatus Act solidified in the sand on the limits of the use of federal military in a civilian setting, lines for principles clearly enshrined by U.S. Constitution and over two centuries of precedent, principles the Trump Administration is shredding not just in the streets of American cities but even partly also in the waters off the coast of Venezuela.

In seeking to erase legal rules binding the authorization, deployment, and use of federal military forces on U.S. soil in civilian settings (leaving similar jurisdictional mission creep in Venezuela aside), Trump and his MAGA minions with illegal occupation in America are trying to recreate key aspects of the fascist nightmare of the illegally occupied West Bank.  But here in the U.S., this is not based on two warring and competing nationalities and one of those nationalities’ democratically elected leaders pursuing total subjugation at best or actual genocide of the other nationality at worst, broadcast daily for all the world to see and fueled by insane colonialist, imperialist, expansionist fever-dreams based on ancient fantasies and ancient maps, no.  Here in the U.S., Trump is trying to divide Americans on ideological, political, identity, and legal-status lines, lines he will use to award and protect rights for some, deny them to others, still dangle to yet others as ways of obtaining “obeying in advance” or to even explicitly threaten, say, ABC and Disney over a certain late-night host named Kimmy Kimmel.  As JB Pritzker, the Democratic governor of Illinois fighting back against Trump’s illegal military deployments to Chicago, noted during that drama: “Tyranny requires constant effort.  It breaks, it leaks.  Authority is brittle.  Oppression is the mask of fear.  Remember that,” quoting the amazing antifascist masterpiece that is the Star Wars show Andor.  Yet, we must also remember that, however much Trump and Netanyahu act out of fear of losing power, they are also clearly in the drivers’ seats, consolidating more and more power for themselves in ways the founder fathers of both the U.S. and Israel never intended.

And while there is hardly the level of violence between the sides as in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict even as political violence in the U.S. may be on the rise, dynamics are between the two have been converging somewhat for some time and make no mistake about it, the key principle is the same: longstanding, binding legal distinctions are melting away in the face of determined illegality, such that the law disappears and factional whim reigns supreme so one side can enforce its will upon the other, tyranny replacing law as the very system.  In short, Trump seeks to create a political apartheid here in the U.S., a West Bank of Left and Right, “evil” and “good,” veering Manichaean and not dissimilar in legal nihilism to the separate and unequal system of Jew and Palestinian (or “Arab,” so much less specific…) in the West Bank’s Nablus but bringing it to New York.

Adding New Meaning to “Executing” the Law

To execute their plans, both Trump and Netanyahu have hosts of extremists willing to unquestioningly nakedly embrace the partisanship of their missions, from U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi to Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, from U.S. Secretary of “War” Pete Hegseth to Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich (all of whom have had their own past issues with illegality or criminal probes well-before 2025: Ben-Gvir and Smotrich being convicted and arrested terrorists, respectively; Bondi in the center of a criminal bribery and obstruction scandal with Trump; and the brotastic Pete Hegseth, well, being brotastic Pete Hegseth…), just to name a few, with far, far too many others alongside.  And these allies have made it clear, sometimes as senior law enforcement officials: if we don’t like you, the law cannot protect you from us and we are coming for you, even for your children.  While in Israel, broadening this behavior to include Israeli Jewish citizens has been far milder than what has been done to Palestinians—even those in Israel with Israeli citizenship but especially those without Israeli citizenship outside of Israel in the actual territories of actual Palestine—Trump and his lawless allies are rapidly casting a far wider dragnet, or at least attempting to do so, advancing on several fronts even as I write this.

Yes, you are witnessing the MAGA Trump Administration’s attempts at illegal jurisdictional jumps dehumanizingly intending to target both directly and indirectly various large swaths of the population in America, illegal deployment by illegal deployment, related measure by related measure, until Trump has created a de facto national federalized police state he can use to prosecute and intimidate his opposition and others deemed undesirable, jurisdictional issues and the law be damned.  They have lost the program when it comes morality, cartoonishly celebrating their roles as oppressors (of certain people) and projecting so publicly for all to see.

Maybe a lot of this should not be surprising, since both men have no problem breaking the law: Trump is an insurrectionist and convicted felon and Netanyahu is currently on trial in three cases in Israel for damning corruption crimes (with Trump, unsurprisingly in true birds-of-a-feather mode, even very publicly pressuring Israel to stop Netanyahu’s trial) in addition to having the International Criminal Court issue a warrant for his arrest in 2024 for war crimes.  Both men are fascists remaking their countries in a fascist image of their former democracies, the actions mentioned herein just some of the examples (I do not use the term “fascist” lightly, but carefully and specifically and with history in mind).

At this point, one really has to wonder if either the U.S. or Israel can still be fairly termed “democracies,” because in key ways, the rule of law is damaged, dying, or dead as both Israel and the U.S.—Bibi and Donnie—continue to feed, rather than restrain, each other’s worst tendencies.

But it is both too easy and too simple to blame just such leaders: voters in both countries could have easily set their countries on different paths—ones that respected the rule of law—and voters in both countries rejected, even if narrowly, the rule of law in favor of Trump, Netanyahu, and the fascism they represent, whether they realize it or not.  And perhaps nothing screams fascist more than violently taking away legal protections for the most vulnerable and defenseless and, in turn, their allies in order to expose the chosen to ever more deprivation and violence at the hands of the same people taking away their rights and protections.

In the current state of Israel’s short history, this could simply mean the end of Israeli democracy.  In the U.S. context, this would be like the success of white supremacist terrorists during Reconstruction in brutally taking away Freedmen’s rights throughout the south, except that Trump is engaging in this massive ripping away of rights not in one region but in the whole country.  2025 may yet be known a watershed year for America, Israel, and Palestine, but only for the most horrific, sad, pathetic, and—perhaps most importantly—most preventable of ways.

See all of Brian’s work on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict here.

© 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; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023. Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

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

(Traduce en español/translate to Spanish) By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content) September 14, 2025; UPDATED 9/21 to include one key detail; 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 as I make my overdue comeback! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

SILVER SPRING—Apologies for not posting this earlier, as my life has been too interesting lately, and I am not even going to try to treat this as any kind of review of the singularity known as Andor, a Star Wars show on Disney+ starring Diego Luna as the titular Cassian Andor alongside the legendary Stellan Skarsgård and a soon-to-be-legendary ensemble cast..

Some Context on this Amazing Show You Definitely Should Watch

While I have certainly had my issues with Disney, I have so, SO much to say about the greatness of this show on so many level and its searing relevance to the crises consuming America and the world in 2025, so much so I that had to redo my GOAT list; quite simply put, Andor is one of the most amazing shows I’ve ever seen, tied for the best of all time on my list, actually (shared with Rome from HBO/BBC, with HBO’s The Sopranos a close second).

Nominated for 14 Emmy Awards this year—including the awards for best drama, writing, direction, and cinematography—it’s also one of the most unique shows I have ever seen, breaking convention and genre like it is fighting its own rebellious revolution.  And Andor has been called the best dramatic show of 2025 by Hollywood press heavyweights Variety, Vanity Fair, and The Hollywood Reporter, along with The Guardian, just to name a few.  Furthermore, it has some of the highest-rated television episodes in history and a special IMDB record.  Even with the 14 Emmy nominations this year, The Hollywood Reporter was particularly snarky in its expressions of still feeling Andor was “robbed” of a bunch of acting nominations, and they are not alone.

Rather, this is simply a viewing guide to get the most out of your viewing experience, much like my popular guide for watching Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith alongside the Star Wars: The Clone Wars series finale that thousands of you have appreciated (I did not see Disney matching the finale of Clone Wars as far as quality with any big Star Wars project, but wow, was I wrong, Andor being the proof!  And if you’ve seen Clone Wars through Season 5, check out my take on how the show sheds lights on lessons we can learn from 9/11).

Anyway, all you need to know are two things: 1.) The first season starts roughly five years before the events of the earliest-produced Star Wars movie, 1977’s original Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope. The first scene of the first episode is introduced timeline-wise BBY 5, which stands for “before the Battle of Yavin,” referring to the events of the original 1977 film.  It’s kind of like a BC/AD (CE preferred) year dating system. UPDATE 9/21: 2.) The second thing to know is that, in Season 2, the guy on the right in the first image below (actor Benjamin Bratt) is playing the same character (Senator Bail Organa) as the actor on the left and below (Jimmy Smits) in Rogue One and in Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, respectively (he also appears as Organa in Episode II: Attack of the Clones).

That’s it, and even genius showrunner Tony Gilroy has made it clear you really don’t need to know about Star Wars, or even like Star Wars, to respond to the show well and many viewers have confirmed this.

THE BEST DAMN ANDOR VIEWING GUIDE IN THE GALAXY

If you’re curious about the show, whatever your politics or background, just trust me and watch it, but be PATIENT and PAY ATTENTION: if you missed a line, rewind, for the journey is so worth it and this is so sophisticated that you need to embrace the slowness of some earlier episodes. Details and people matter, even seemingly small ones!  Watch on a big screen and with surround sound.  Turn your phones off (genius showrunner Tony Gilroy says so—watch only 19:48 until 20:59 and ignore comments and other videos!).  I’M SERIOUS, PHONES OFF! And Silent, no vibrating!  Turn off the lights too, and minimize interruptions.  Have some drinks. Immerse yourself.  Also, the music is phenomenal, so I strongly suggest letting the credits for each episode play out (especially after S1 E11 and S2E8).  Don’t skip the intro theme music, either, because it is different for each episode and give tantalizing clues as to what is coming as the show goes on.  Not a big fan of the more general Disney Star Wars jingle, though, so personally I choose to mute that little flourish…)

I HIGHLY recommend watching the main arcs as min-movies in single-sittings, without interrupting the arcs. 

SO, for season 1, it’s mostly simple:

STEP 1—Andor Season 1

BBY 5 Episodes 1-3 uninterrupted, then Episodes 4-6 uninterrupted, then Episodes 7-10 uninterrupted, then Episodes 11-12 uninterrupted (don’t forget the END CREDITS SCENE at the end of Episode 12!)

The only trick to remember is that the third arc works best as four episodes, with a tighter closing arc of two episodes.

For the second and final season, it’s easier, but I am adding twists.  Each arc here is three episodes and jumps roughly a year forward (BBY4-BBY1).

STEP 2—Andor Season 2 part 1

BBY4 Episodes 1-3 uninterrupted, BBY 3 Episodes 4-6 uninterrupted, BBY 2 Episodes 7-9 uninterrupted (no matter what, do not break up Episodes 7 and 8, if you compromise elsewhere make sure to watch these two still in the same sitting)

STEP 3—brief interlude (21 minutes)

Now here is where things get complicated.  In 2017, the animated show Star Wars: Rebels aired an episode—Season 3, Episode 18, Secret Cargo, a little over twenty-minutes long—that picks up almost immediately after Andor Season 2, Episode 9.  The first few minutes you might be like WTF but just trust me and realize the episode is only 21 minutes without credits.  You just need to know the main characters on that show are a secret rebel cell that is in the process of joining the larger Rebellion, a cell that is led by a pilot named Hera, with her number-two in the form of Kanan, a grown-up Jedi trainee from the Republic, before it fell and became the Empire.  They took in with their merry band a young potential Jedi, Ezra, from the planet of Lothal (which Ezra will mention to a key Andor character).  The show is not as good as its precursor, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, so don’t judge all Star Wars animation by this, and it’s certainly tonally and stylistically different from Andor, but it’s still a solid episode featuring one of the main characters from Andor voiced by the same person playing this character in live action.  I would dive into this interlude just after finishing STEP 2). 

STEP 4—finishing interlude (about 6 minutes)

Then, jump ahead to Rebels Season 4, Episode 3.  You can start at 3:29 and go to 9:27.  This involves a very important conversation between the same character and another important character from Andor. Watch this just before you start up STEP 5, it is just about 6 minutes from that episode (if you’re interested in the backstories raised here, I will have more information on that in the future because there is more content with characters featured in Andor…)

STEP 5—Andor Season 2 final arc

BBY 1 Episodes 9-12 uninterrupted (only start if you can also do STEP 6 in the same viewing; don’t compromise here, either; worst case, make sure to watch at least Episode 12 just before STEP 6)

STEP 6—Rogue One

Watch 2016’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (do not break and do this immediately after finishing the final episode of Andor.  Again, no ifs, ands, or buts)

STEP 7—back to the OG

Go back to where it all began and knock out 1977’s Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope (with the actual Battle of Yavin at the end!).

Conclusion: A Call to Watch

Andor changed my life.  I am a different and better person for it.  I hope you understand after you watch.  And if you watch this all in the ways I have recommended, you will feel the most emotional impact. Seriously, if you watch one show this year, make it this one.

I will close on this: art has a power to inspire like nothing else, and I experienced that with Andor.  With all that is going on in the world today, the big names behind the U.S. television and film industry can take a real stand to help promote this exquisite meditation on collective consciousness, oppression, resistance, and the costs and nature of revolution, on the nature of fascism and its costs, on sacrifice and death, on hope and perseverance, on the nature of good and evil.  To not recognize the powerful homages to forces contained in Andor would be doing our nation and humanity a disservice at a time when we need art desperately to move to action, provoke and inspire, not just entertain.  To not do this is a choice to choose entertainment at the expense of helping people wake up, to choose relative frivolity by favoring stories detached from wider struggles mirroring those erupting around us, to numb and distract with bread and circuses when a true revelation is at hand, one that wallows gloriously for many hours with some of the toughest moral questions of our time.  In too many ways, this year is the year of Andor, and the Emmys should have recognized this more in the acting categories yet still, tonight, during the Emmy Awards, there is still a chance justice will be done not simply for Andor and its awe-struck, rightly-fanatical fans, but for public audiences all around the world in times that try men’s souls.

© 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; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023. Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

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

(Traduce en español/translate to Spanish) By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content) August 20, 2025; 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 as I make my overdue comeback! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

SILVER SPRING—A small yet extraordinary series of events happened after a regional U.S. Border Patrol office posted a video on its official social media of a clip from a Star Wars movie (spoilers for Star Wars in general and specifically about Anakin Skywalker, Darth Vader, the film Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, and its precursor masterpiece of a series, Andor).

The Force…Is Not with This Video

In the video posted by the regional U.S. Border Patrol office for California’s “Premier Sector,” a.k.a. “El Centro Sector,” the Premier Sector agents are portrayed as Sith Lord Darth Vader in his final scene in Rogue One, in which he is shown mercilessly cutting through Rebel soldiers trying to hand off the Death Star plans to those escaping on Princess Leia’s ship.  In the movie, the plans were obtained by the Rebels because of tremendous suffering, horrific sacrifice, and the heroic efforts of Cassian Andor, Jyn Erso, Saw Gerrera, and many others rebels.  Some of the Rebels here in the Border Patrol video facing Vader are labeled as “Fentanyl,” “Sanctuary Cities,” “Cocaine,” and “Fake News.”  Vader has already disabled and boarded the Rebel command cruiser (their biggest space ship at the battle) and is trying to intercept the plans—transmitted only through bloody fighting by the rebel leaders on the planet Scarif below—before the rebels can get them to Leia’s ship, docked with the cruiser.  As Vader chases deflects with his red Sithlightsaber the Rebels blaster bolts as they are standing their ground against him, we can see other Rebels labeled “meth,” “human smugglers,” “the swamp,” “cartel terrorists,” and “gang member” as Vader makes his way down the docking hallway.  Some he kills by deflecting their own blaster bolts at them, others he cuts through with his lightsaber like a scythe into wheat, still others (the “fake news,” “cartel terrorists”), he uses the Force to toss around or pull their weapons from them before slicing them to death or choking them while suspended in the air by Vader’s Force powers.  In the movie, the Rebels are mostly massacred by Vader but just manage to get the plans abord Leia’s ship, which undocks and escapes with Vader looking on.  His further pursuit is captured in the very opening scene of the very first original Star Wars movie, Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope.  It is these plans that enable Luke Skywalker to know how to blow up the Death Star at the end of the movie and to save the day, but not before it is used to partially destroy one planet and totally destroy another, killing billions of innocents.  Darth Vader was trying to stop the rebels from stopping this genocidal Death Star.

Yet Vader is with whom these Border Patrol agents, in one of the most important and prolific sectors in the country, wanted to publicly identify.  Not Luke blowing up the Death Star, but Vader killing those who would ensure Luke and the Rebel planners were able to make use of the Death Star’s weakness to destroy it.

Just think on that.

The Border Patrol regional account has since either deactivated or turned on privacy settings, not allowing the account or video to be seen by the general public if it hasn’t been deleted (at least there is some self-awareness as to the problematic nature of this post) but it was still posted on an official federal government account and indicates the views of the people in that office. And it is still proudly up on Twitter!

The Response: Fascist Icing on a Fascist Cake

But this is only the beginning.  Appropriately, the team of the indispensable John Oliver, who discussed this all last week on his Last Week Tonight show on HBO, reached out to the government for a response.  He pointed out that rather than the labels on the Rebels in the absurd Star Wars video, most being snatched by these draconian raids are not violent criminals.  Rather than slaying “fake news,” the government was spreading it.

The government—specifically, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), under the authority of which the Border Patrol operates—did actually reply. While ignoring most specific questions posed by Oliver’s team, the government communications staff did write: “Not to spoil the plot, but as any Star Wars fan knows, Darth Vader is also Anakin Skywalker,” continuing that “I don’t think DHS needs to regale the American public on the heroism of Skywalker, they know.”  They really seem to think that this was a serious clapback, not mortifying self-own.

John Oliver characterized this as “an incredible, deeply shitty response.”  He then went on to satirically laud Thanos, form the Avengers series, as a similar “hero,” since, at one point, he was a baby.

Oliver is spot-on and actually understands Star Wars.  Because any serious Star Wars fan knows that the hero Anakin Skywalker succumbed to evil to become Darth Vader, that both Obi-Wan Kenobi and Vader himself viewed Anakin’s new persona of Vader as having killed the man who was known as Anakin Skywalker.  (Obi-Wan series spoilers)Years before Rogue One, in a climactic duel captured in the problematic Obi-Wan Kenobi series, Vader even tells Obi-Wan “Anakin is gone.  I am what remains.”  Obi-Wan apologizes for how things turned out, to which Vader replies “I am not your failure, Obi-Wan.  You didn’t kill Anakin Skywalker,” now smiling, “I did” (End Obi-Wan series spoilers).  Even without this more recently-produced scene and series, in the words of Obi-Wan to Luke Skywalker three movies chronologically after Rogue One, “Your father… was seduced by the Dark Side of the Force.  He ceased to be Anakin Skywalker and became Darth Vader.  When that happened, the good man who was your father was destroyed.”  Later in the film when Luke references Anakin Skywalker to Vader, Vader’s response is to say “That name no longer has any meaning for me.”  And that was the case for nearly Vader’s entire life as Vader, from the end of Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith—when Anakin became the Sith Lord known as Darth Vader—to the last moments of Star Wars: Episode VI: Return of the Jedi, just before he finally abandons Vader to die as regretful Anakin in the arms of his son.

Thus, both Obi-Wan’s and Vader’s own statements, while not completely true—deep, deep down, Anakin was still in there as Luke, his son, felt, only coming back out in extreme circumstances just before Vader’s death to try to save his son Luke—were the measure of the man in the scene the Border Patrol office posted in that video, which took place in the timeline years before Vader’s redemption.  In this scene a Border Patrol account posted from Rogue One, Vader was solidly the Emperor’s right-hand man, a full Lord of the Sith, evil and acting as an enforcer for an evil, illegal, genocidal, tyrannical, expansionist, fascist regime.  The Rebels Vader casually murders are fighting to stop all this, to destroy the Empire and restore the democratic Republic the Empire overthrew.

But given Trump’s own fascist, dictatorial tendencies, should we be surprised his cultists in and out of government openly identify with the bad guys?  With fascism?  While all this on certain levels is funny, it is also revealing and terrifying:  the fascists are not hiding their fascism and are openly identifying with an evil, murderous Sith Lord.  They did not show Anakin fighting as a hero or Luke blowing up the Death Star, they showed Vader—clearly at that point a fallen hero, not a hero, fighting against heroes as a clear villain.

From the White House to DHS and Border Patrol, our republic has fallen to control of Empire and fascist fanboys, embracing the Dark Side, not the Light Side.  The mainstream press continues to miss the gravity of the situation, toning things down, using euphemisms, or missing the plot entirely.  We must shed light on all this so people understand what is truly at stake.  It may not be a whole galaxy or a whole planet under threat, and Trump and his MAGA minions may be far less interesting than the Imperial bad guys, but with no Luke Skwalker or Cassian Andor coming to rescue us, it’s time to wake up and save ourselves (and as I hope to discuss in a future piece, community-consciousness-building is one of the main themes of the Show Andor…).

© 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; 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!

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

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

A PERSONAL NOTE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Note on My Ukraine Coverage

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

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

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

A Note on My 2024 U.S. Election Coverage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion: Stay Tuned and All Hands on Deck

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Methodology

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

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

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

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

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

Caveats, source, and presentation notes:

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

On Polling

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

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

THE NUMBERS AND PREDICTIONS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New registration modeled party share: Last updated October 20

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

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

Pennsylvania—19 Electoral Votes

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

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

New registration modeled party share: Last updated October 20

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

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

PENNSYLVANIA RATING: Strong Harris

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

Michigan—15 Electoral Votes

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

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

New registration modeled party share: Last updated October 20

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

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

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

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

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

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

MICHIGAN RATING: Edge Trump

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

Wisconsin—10 Electoral Votes

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

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

New registration modeled party share: Last updated October 21

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

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

WISCONSIN RATING: Advantage Harris

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

Georgia—16 Electoral Votes

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

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

New registration modeled party share: Last updated October 8

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

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

GEORGIA RATING: Strong Harris

North Carolina—16 Electoral Votes

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

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

New registration modeled party share: Last updated October 11

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

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

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

Nevada—6 Electoral Votes

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

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

New registration modeled party share: Last updated October 25

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

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

NEVADA RATING: (barely) Edge Harris

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

Arizona—11 Electoral Votes

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

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

New registration modeled party share: Last updated October 21

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

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

ARIZONA RATING: Advantage Harris

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

My Dark Horses

Yes, there can be some shocks!

Alaska—3 Electoral Votes

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

New registration modeled party share: Last updated October 21

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

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

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

ALASKA RATING: Advantage Trump but Harris could really do this

Ohio—17 Electoral Votes

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

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

New registration modeled party share: Last updated October 10

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

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

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

OHIO RATING: Advantage Trump

Texas—40 Electoral Votes

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

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

New registration modeled party share: Last updated October 11

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

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

TEXAS RATING: Advantage Trump

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

All Swing States

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

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

Other Notes from Outside the Battleground States

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

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

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

NATIONALLY

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

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

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

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

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

ELECTORAL COLLEGE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CONCLUSION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(JUNE 8, 2025 UPDATE: YES, I was off, so see my mea culpa explanation I owe you, dear readers, here!)

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

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

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

Wonderful New Data for Democrats

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

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

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

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

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

2022 Midterms: Polling Past as Prologue for 2024?

Getting into the Weeds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, what actually happened?

What the Results Tell Us

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion: Expect Democrats to Overperform this Election

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#1: The Case for Gov. Shapiro

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

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

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

#2: The Case for Senator Mark Kelly

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

Why Shapiro Is a Better Choice than Kelly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1.) Time

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

2.) Voters Themselves

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

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

3.) Democracy

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

4.) Character and the Truth

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

5.) Issues and Substance

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

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

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

7.) Polling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10.) The Media Overhypes Its Own Debates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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