Aug.31
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Saturday Q&A

Thanks for being patient! This one's a little shorter than normal, and no reader question of the week.

For anyone working on this week's headline theme, here's another tip: "Weird Al" Yankovic did three Michael Jackson parodies, and all three of them, as chance would have it, hint at the theme.

Current Events

D.C. in Portland, OR, asks: Why on Earth would the Trump campaign act like a**holes at Arlington Cemetery? I simply don't see any upside; the connection to some blame on Biden or Harris is an enormous stretch and does not seem worth the effort.

(V) & (Z) answer: Someone who is advising Trump must surely have taken note of the fact that the Afghanistan withdrawal was the incident that put Joe Biden's approval ratings permanently underwater. It is also possible the campaign has polling data showing that Tim Walz is peeling some military votes away from Trump. And finally, it is certainly the case that the Trump campaign had struggled mightily to find a line of attack against Harris that actually lands with anyone outside the base.

And so, Team Trump cooked up this Arlington stunt. The first problem is that Trump and his people seem to think only about the "pros" of stuff like this, without considering potential "cons," and that they might well do themselves more harm than good. We suppose that's not terribly surprising; much more capable political operations have made screw-ups like this (think Michael Dukakis and the tank picture, Jeb!, Rudy Giuliani taking a pass on the early primaries, etc.). Anyhow, the news is now full of "Trump disrespects the military again" stories. That is obviously not what Trump '24 wanted.

The second problem here is that, as you point out, trying to blame Harris for this is a giant stretch. First, (and keep reading for more detail), the blame really belongs to nobody. Second, to the extent that it can be pinned on someone, that someone is either Donald Trump or Joe Biden (or both). Trump is potentially entitled to blame because his "art of the deal" dealmaking created the pre-conditions for a hasty withdrawal. Biden is potentially entitled to blame because his administration oversaw the withdrawal, and the buck stops with the sitting president. But the sitting vice president? Did you ever hear anyone blame Thomas Marshall for the Lusitania? Henry Wallace for Pearl Harbor? Al Gore for Oklahoma City? No, because the American system of government doesn't work like that.


D.E. in Lancaster, PA, asks: What with the scandal involving Donald Trump and cutting a campaign ad in Arlington National Cemetery, Trump keeps mentioning that this was the third anniversary of Abbey Gate and how President Biden and Vice President Harris did not observe this "important date." I remember the withdraw of U.S. troops from Afghanistan but I swear this is the first time I've heard of Abbey Gate. Could you refresh my memory and why, all of a sudden, it's such an important anniversary that Trump has never mentioned it before?

(V) & (Z) answer: During the hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan, a suicide bomber named Abdul Rahman al-Logari blew himself up outside of Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, killing 183 people and injuring hundreds of others. Among the casualties were 13 U.S. soldiers killed and another 18 wounded.

The Biden administration was aware of intelligence warning of an attack, and did what it could to prevent it. The problem is that the best way to try to protect the lives of American soldiers was... to get them out of Afghanistan as rapidly as was possible. Critics of the Biden administration (specifically, politicians who don't know or don't care that what they are saying is wrong) blame the attack on the withdrawal being too hasty. In fact, the problem is that it was not hasty enough. The Department of Defense conducted a 2-year-old investigation into the attack, and released a report in April of this year. The conclusion was that ISIS-K was determined to carry out the attack, had numerous willing would-be bombers, and that the tragedy was not preventable.

And you are right to put "important date" in quotes. Do you know what Trump was doing on the first anniversary of the attacks? He was huffing and puffing on his boutique social media platform, as the news of the Mar-a-Lago raid had just broken. And you know what he was doing on the second anniversary? He was huffing and puffing on his boutique social media platform, as he had just returned home after being booked and mugshotted in Georgia. It would seem it was not an important date until he was trying to score some political points against Kamala Harris.


T.L. in West Orange, NJ, asks: You wrote that "none of the law enforcement who were there for the original act, including the Secret Service, were willing to hold Trump and his staff accountable. "

If the Secret Service in particular cannot be trusted to uphold the law, are there grounds for reassigning and replacing said agents? Despite past scandals involving them, I'd like to be able to entertain at least the notion that the Secret Service members are generally competent and law-abiding people.

(V) & (Z) answer: It is certainly possible for agents to be reassigned or terminated if they do not do their jobs properly. We doubt that the Arlington situation is serious enough to justify such punitive actions, especially since there were other people on the scene with responsibility for enforcing the rules.


J.A. in Puerto Armuelles, Panama, asks: So, Donald Trump illegally used Arlington National Cemetery as the backdrop for a tawdry photo-op, apparently even involving staffers physically forcing a cemetery staffer aside, likely another crime.

Given that his Secret Service detail not only failed to intervene, but accompanied Trump during his criming and were then also breaking the law, would you care to rethink your assessment that Secret Service agents would do their sworn duty and prevent Trump from fleeing the country if he tried that?

(V) & (Z) answer: You are comparing apples and oranges.

The laws broken during the Arlington trip are somewhat obscure; there's no evidence that the U.S.S.S. even knew that what was happening was illegal. More importantly, and as we note in the previous answer, there were people on site who are specifically responsible for enforcing the rules at Arlington. Law enforcement tends to be very sensitive to jurisdictional issues.

If Trump were to flee the country, the U.S.S.S. would know for certain that he was breaking the law. On top of that, if they did not do anything, they would arguably be accessories to the crime. Nobody can know exactly what would happen until it actually does, but the odds are overwhelming that Trump's protective detail would not just look the other way.


Z.C. in Beverly Hills, CA, asks: What's the penalty for Trump violating the law with his Arlington cemetery visit and who would enforce it and how? Can someone go to jail for this?

(V) & (Z) answer: You have to pore through federal law, and piece together an answer, but 32 CFR 553.32 says that "Memorial services and ceremonies at Army National Military Cemeteries will not include partisan political activities," while 38 U.S. Code 2413 says that the penalty for unlawful demonstrations at cemeteries is up to a year in prison and a fine of up to $50,000.


D.T. in Columbus, OH, asks: You had an item that described the convention ratings as better than 2020, but lower than 2008, 2012, and 2016. But you also previously mentioned that Nielsen ratings do not include online streaming numbers. This seems like a rather significant limitation for Nielsen, perhaps comparable to a political pollster only calling landlines.

The media/technology landscape has changed significantly since 2008. Isn't it entirely expected that viewer numbers would appear lower, as more people migrate to "streaming only" media consumption? I don't have cable, but I watched the convention speeches live every night, on Hulu. Presumably, I did not count as a viewer this year.

So are the convention viewer numbers actually lower this year? Or have we just gotten worse at measuring them?

(V) & (Z) answer: Nielsen takes steps to capture everything that a person watches on their TV, whether via over-the-air broadcast, cable box or streaming service. However, they largely do not track any viewing that takes place via websites, particularly on non-TV devices like cell phones and desktop computers.

So, you are right that the ratings are not telling the full story. We've been trying to write an item on the streaming numbers, but they are not easy to find, and even when you CAN find them, they generally disagree wildly. One problem is whether you count at the point of origin or the point of receipt. The former is easier to do (C-SPAN.com or CNN.com or YouTube can easily measure how many streams came from their site) but it's also not comprehensive. What about the people who watched through TikTok, Vimeo, eX-Twitter, etc.? A second problem is exactly how long a stream has to run to be considered "one view." A third problem is that it's none too easy to avoid double-counting people who might watch on TV and then also on a streaming platform.

The only firm numbers we were able to find were on the website of the Democratic National Party (see here for an example). We did not move forward with an item for two reasons. The first is that we obviously don't want to take a political party's information at face value without additional confirmation. The second is that even the DNC is only claiming the viewers it can measure, on content platforms it controls (for example, the Harris-Walz YouTube channel). So, while their numbers could be exaggerated, they might actually be low. For what it's worth, the DNC thinks that the number of streaming viewers was slightly greater than the number of non-streaming viewers, meaning total viewership of around 50 million people per night.


J.L. in Chapel Hill, NC, asks: Why didn't Al Gore and John Kerry speak at the DNC? Speakers typically seem to be party heavyweights. Trump has upended that, going for sycophants, but the Democrats have mostly hewed to it. I was surprised they didn't. Was that a slight? Are they out of favor because they lost? Or were they featured in some other way that I missed?

(V) & (Z) answer: There's probably something to the notion that the Democrats wanted to put forward a show of strength, and winners are better for that than losers. But the bigger issue, we think, is that those men no longer have an obvious constituency. Bill Clinton was there for white, working-class voters. Hillary Clinton was there for suburban women. The Obamas were there for Black people, young people and liberals. What current Democratic faction has an obvious affinity for Gore or Kerry?


K.C. in West Islip, NY, asks: In "We're Officially in the Messy Part of Ballot-Printing Season," You listed ten states, and addressed whether Robert Kennedy Jr. was on, off or maybe on/off the ballot.

One of those ten states was Texas and you referred to all ten as swing states. I get that the recent polls have Kamala Harris only down about five or so points, and Ted "Cancun" Cruz in a statistical dead heat to hold his seat in the Senate but do you really, truly and honestly consider Texas a swing state? If so, why? It feels like we've been chasing that red rainbow for a long time, arguing it's about to go purple, but it never does, and I really don't see how it could this year either. For that matter, Ohio too? Does Ohio so deeply hate J.D. Vance that Harris won't lose there by at least 10%? What's your thinking that I'm missing?

(V) & (Z) answer: In fact, we did not describe the ten as swing states. We took great care to describe them as "the ten swingiest states." And we picked those ten because we wanted a round number, we wanted to cover different types of scenarios, and we wanted to try to squeeze in all the places where it is at least plausible that Kennedy could affect either the presidential race or the U.S. Senate race.

Politics

C.S. in Waynesboro, PA, asks: It seems pretty obvious Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) was working hard to get Joe Biden to drop out. But I've read (so of course it HAS to be true) that she wanted a mini-primary or brokered convention, and I've read that she wasn't excited about Kamala Harris getting the presumptive nominee status from Biden right away. My questions is this: If what I read is true, who did Pelosi want to be the nominee, if not Harris?

(V) & (Z) answer: There is no public evidence, and no particular reason to believe, that Pelosi had a preferred nominee in mind. And if she did, it was probably Harris.

Pelosi was operating with the same handicap that we (and many others) were: Since there was no precedent like this, there was no great way to know how it would unfold. She apparently assumed (as did we, along with the many others) that Democratic voters would react badly to replacement-by-fiat. If you could go back in time, and explain to Pelosi how things actually played out, she would probably have zipped her lip about the need for a mini-primary or brokered convention.

There is only one reason we write "probably" in that previous sentence. Pelosi is a skilled player of 3-D chess. It's at least possible that she knew how things would play out, and that she approved, and that she publicly pretended NOT to approve, so as to send the message, "Hey! Don't think this is coming from the party leadership, because it's not."


J.B. in Radnor, PA, asks: Let's say Kamala Harris wins the presidency this November but Republicans flip the Senate. How likely is it the new Republican Senate Majority Leader simply refuses to bring any of Harris' cabinet appointees, ambassadorships, etc. up for a confirmation vote? And what recourse would Harris have if Biden's already confirmed appointees refused to stay on for Harris?

(V) & (Z) answer: It is very unlikely.

First, the blowback would be enormous, including from some members of the Senate Republican Conference.

Second, if the entire Senate Republican Conference did not play along, then the nominees would eventually be confirmed. It only takes 51 votes for cloture on nominations.

Third, leaving the positions unfilled would invite Harris to appoint temporary officers, perhaps much more lefty than would otherwise be the case.


C.A.G. in Athens, GA, asks: I have been avidly following the crap-ton of money being donated through ActBlue. I don't know how much of it goes to the Harris campaign, but certainly a great deal of it does.

Since we all know that there is a point at which a gajillion more commercials per hour don't make a difference, what do you think the best use of Harris's campaign war chest would be in order to translate the dollars into actual votes?

(V) & (Z) answer: Among things they will actually consider, voter registration (though time is running out in most places) and get-out-the-vote operations.

They won't consider this, but if we were advising the campaign, we would advise running a series of commercials. But instead of advancing a specific partisan message, the subject would be Americans who did extraordinary things in order to be able to vote, and talking about what a privilege it is. For example, a Black person who risked being lynched to vote in the 1960s. Or an immigrant who came from a dictatorship, joined the military, and was injured, just so they could achieve U.S. citizenship. Then, air those commercials on networks whose viewership skews young, Black, woman, etc.


A.L. in Highland Park, NJ, asks: What do you think of this article in The Guardian, by Jeff Yang, about Kamala Harris attracting Asian American voters? He points out there are 15 million Asian voters in the U.S. and significant numbers of them live in swing states like Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Arizona. A concentrated move towards the Democrats could affect the numbers.

(V) & (Z) answer: Truth be told, we think Yang has to crank out some number of column inches per week, and that he sometimes fudges a bit to make that happen. Further, as an activist, he sometimes engages in wishcasting.

There are two fundamental problems, which we've written about before, and which Yang sorta acknowledges. The first is that "Asian-American" is an unbelievably broad descriptor, arguably even more imprecise than "Latinos." Perhaps the best way to make this point is this: anyone who is an Ashkenazi Jew is arguably Asian-American. Certainly anyone is is Israeli is. And then there are Saudis, Pakistanis, Iranians, Chinese, Filipinos, Malaysians, Japanese, Indian and Russian Americans, among others. It's not just people who look like Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA). How can a politician possibly speak to all those disparate groups?

The second problem is that, despite Yang's shaky insistence to the contrary, people who identify as Asian are largely concentrated in blue states. In the seven swing states, the self-identified Asian-American population is as follows: Nevada (11.4%), Minnesota (6.3%), Georgia (5.3%), Arizona (4.9%), Pennsylvania (4.6%), Michigan (4.1%) and Wisconsin (3.7%). A lot of those people are already Democratic voters. Another bunch are non-persuadable Republicans. Some aren't going to vote, no matter what. Some are not citizens. Some are children. The residue just isn't large enough or homogeneous enough to justify making an aggressive play for them. MAYBE if they were single-issue voters, but they are not, not by a long shot.

Several of the swing states, including Pennsylvania, Georgia and Michigan, do have a somewhat sizable Indian-American population. Given Harris' background, it probably does make sense for her to emphasize that part of her background when campaigning in those places. For example, she could visit the best Indian restaurant in Philadelphia for a photo-op.


J.E. in San Jose, CA, asks: You proposed that a President Harris might consider Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) for a Cabinet post, which would potentially flip a seat because Gov. Janet Mills (D-ME) is on the blue team.

Should West Virginia and Montana flip, this would switch a 51-49 Senate to a 50-50 one, thus returning control to the Democrats.

How plausible is this scenario?

(V) & (Z) answer: We think it is plausible Collins might accept a Cabinet slot, based on the notion that the end of her career is near, and that the seat will probably flip to the blue team anyhow once she vacates it.

However, if you add "oh, and it will also flip the partisan makeup of the Senate" to the equation, that would be very tough for Collins to swallow. She's still a Republican, and a loyal one. The only way she would MAYBE go for it is if she was somehow persuaded she was striking a massive blow against Trumpism. And that would only be plausible if the GOP chose a Trumper as the majority leader, as opposed to someone like Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX).


G.S. in Basingstoke, England, UK, asks: A quick "please explain your thinking" question. You wrote, of Pete Buttigieg, that "He could certainly be retained in his current post, as Secretary of Transportation. If there is to be a promotion, he's a veteran, and so could move up to Secretary of Defense, perhaps. He'd also be a very good Secretary of Education."

Given that Buttigieg is—to my recollection—multilingual, that he has an military intelligence background, that he's quite capable of "going into the lion's den" and explaining/advocating for political positions, and that he seems to have the Vice President's ear—wouldn't an apposite position be Secretary of State? Or is this role spoken for?

(V) & (Z) answer: The general expectation is that secretaries of state have some significant foreign policy or diplomatic experience—ambassadorship, longtime service on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, longtime service in the Department of State, former First Lady, things like that. Buttigieg has some useful skills, but he can't really claim to have any foreign policy credentials on his résumé.

It is true that Donald Trump didn't care much about such qualifications, but most of his Cabinet picks were not suited to their posts. And even Rex Tillerson had some experience, in the context of negotiating with foreign governments and business owners over oil contracts.


P.M. in Reading, England, UK, asks: Granted I'm in the U.K., and may not understand the intricacies of this, but even if Trump were to sack all the civil servants, surely their replacements would have to be hired under the 1883 Pendleton Act rules? Or have they found a way to circumvent this?

(V) & (Z) answer: First, when you are hiring tens of thousands of people, it is relatively plausible to get some less-than-stellar people through. More important, however, is this: Currently, most civil servants can do their jobs as they see best, without fear of being fired just because they angered the president or one of his underlings. If Trump manages to re-classify most jobs as Schedule F, then anyone who displeases him could be fired at any time. A person who does not want to lose their job, or cannot afford to lose their job, may be compelled to do his bidding, even if they don't support him or his agenda.


K.A. in Takoma Park, MD, asks: Donald Trump says he is fine with states deciding the abortion issue. Does that mean that what happens in Massachusetts, Maryland, Connecticut and California is just fine with him? What do you think his right wing supporters say about that?

(V) & (Z) answer: First, just to be clear, Trump does not care one whit about abortion policy. He will never need to get an abortion himself, and if he accidentally gets someone pregnant, he has the money to make that go away.

What he cares about is votes. And his problem is that his base is largely anti-choice, while the swing voters he needs are largely pro-choice. He's been flailing about, as a result. First he tried to wash his hands of the whole thing by framing it as a states' rights issue, and thus not the responsibility of presidents. That was not earning him any support, so this week he came out strongly pro-IVF, and he also said that Florida's 6-week cutoff for abortions is too harsh. This enraged many anti-choice folks, so then he said yesterday he would vote against the Florida abortion amendment, which means he is voting to keep the 6-week cutoff. There is absolutely no consistency here, especially when a person is taking radically different positions on a critical issue in the span of less than 48 hours.

We will have an item about this on Monday.


D.T. in Columbus, OH, asks: Is it unusual for the same state to remain a "swing state" for an extended period of time?

Two decades ago, Colorado and Ohio were both regarded as competitive states. But both of those have now shifted (in opposite directions) towards reliably voting for one of the parties. States like Arizona and Georgia have become the new swing states.

But throughout that same timeframe, Pennsylvania has more or less remained competitive. Is this just a coincidence, where population shifts have benefited both parties about evenly? Or is there something special about Pennsylvania that keeps it competitive?

(V) & (Z) answer: Needless to say, it takes a few elections for a state to become swingy, since there as to be some reason to believe that state could go either way. Sometimes, swing-state status lasts for only a decade or two, but sometimes it lasts generations. New York was a swing state for nearly a century, from roughly the 1830s to the 1920s.

As to Pennsylvania, we suppose that what keeps it swinging is that the two blue cities of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh (along with their suburbs) are growing at the same basic rate as the red area between them (known as "Alabama" to some and "Pennsyltucky" to others). It is also the case that the issues of coastal Pennsylvanians are often very different from those of interior Pennsylvanians. So, a right-wing pitch, or a left-wing pitch, can be successful, depending on how well it's sold.


C.M. in Coral Springs, FL, asks: I see the big seven always being polled. Does the DNC or other pollsters even poll other states? If Florida, Iowa, Ohio, or even Texas gets a little closer, wouldn't the Harris/Walz team want to know so she can schedule events and campaign there?

(V) & (Z) answer: It's a bit of an overstatement to say there have been no polls outside the big seven, of course. Just this week, we've had polls of eight additional states, including some states that are not remotely in doubt, like Missouri and California.

In any event, you can bet your bottom dollar that the professional politicians and political organizations are polling anywhere that might be remotely close, because they need to know where to invest their resources. Even if a state is not in reach, other down-ballot races might be doable. So, if any of the not-yet-swingy states begin to move into swing territory, the pros will know that, even if the organizations that conduct polls for public consumption miss it.


R.H.M. in North Haven, CT, asks: I would be interested in your take on the mixed messages being sent by swing state polling. In Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, we see poll after poll showing both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris neck and neck, sometimes with him in front, sometimes with her, but always within the margin of error. At the same time, we see the Democratic Senate candidates in five of these states, and the gubernatorial candidate in North Carolina, running firmly and consistently ahead of their Republican opponents, by double digits in some polls. What is happening? Is ticket-splitting back from the dead? Or is one set of polls missing something? I just can't imagine that the Democrats in all of these states are going to run ten points ahead of Harris. If ticket splitting is really dead, then what is happening with these polls, and why is no one talking more about the inconsistency?

(V) & (Z) answer: If we dismiss the possibility of ticket-splitting of the sort that was much more characteristic of generations past, we have the following theories for you:

In short, there are many possible explanations.


M.B. in Dubois, PA, asks: I discovered your site in 2004 as a volunteer for the Kerry campaign. Having read it nearly every day since, and being a resident of West/Central Pennsylvania in the "Alabama" portion that James Carville describes, I sense Kamala Harris could come close to duplicating the Obama numbers of 2012 and win the state by 4%-5% points. Am I daydreaming? Your thoughts please?

(V) & (Z) answer: You're not daydreaming. We are not saying it WILL happen, but it COULD happen.

We can see three arguments you could make. The first is that, consistent with the theories above, the undecided voters in the state are mostly hidden Harris voters.

The second is that, consistent with the theories above, the polls are overstating Donald Trump's support.

The third is that, at the outset, the polls had Harris in a dead heat with Trump. Now, 40 days later, her average lead is 1.5 points. If she continues to grow her support at the same pace, she'll end up around... 4 points higher than Trump.


C.E. in Clifton Park, NY, asks: Talk me off the ledge! While Tim Walz is quickly becoming one of the most likeable politicians of my lifetime, I keep looking at the polls coming out of Pennsylvania and not liking what I see. Is picking Walz over Shapiro going to cost Harris in the end?

(V) & (Z) answer: If Harris loses, and if Pennsylvania would have swung the election, then there will be a million "she should have picked Shapiro" pieces.

However, at the moment, Harris has to like the trendline in Pennsylvania polls (see previous answer). Further, unless you have a time machine and you re-run the cycle with the Shapiro VP condition, you cannot know: (1) what would be lost by not having Walz on the ticket, and (2) whether or not Shapiro might hurt the ticket, either by alienating Israel-skeptical voters, or by saying or doing something impolitic.

In the end, Harris can only do the best with the information she had at hand. When she was picking a running mate, she made what appears to be a very solid choice. That's all someone can really ask for.


M.M. in San Diego, CA, asks: While most polls seem to be conducted over a few days, a week at most, Activote polls take place over a minimum of 3 weeks. Why? Are their results really all that valid? A lot can happen in 3 to 4 weeks to change opinions, as we have all just witnessed.

(V) & (Z) answer: They take the view that polling over a long timeframe eliminates dead cat bounces and other transitory changes in support. Few other pollsters agree, but it's not a completely unreasonable viewpoint.


M.Y. in Ilton Head, SC, asks: In past elections, you used Rassmussen polls as one of your standard polls. I know they skewed right but they also ending up closer to the result than most. When I look on the website, the polls still are right leaning but at very hard to understand. Why do you not include them anymore?

(V) & (Z) answer: First, don't give them more credit than they deserve. Some of their results were pretty accurate. Some of them were WAY off. If only half your polls are on target, or close, and it's not clear which half until after the election, that information is not that useful.

Beyond that, Rasmussen is more opaque than just about any house when it comes to their methods. Nobody expects them to share their "secret sauce," but they often obscure their questions asked, their sample sizes, and other basic info that pollsters generally provide. This makes it hard to evaluate their work, even superficially.

Finally, Rasmussen has developed a thriving business in servicing partisan hackery. For example, they provided polling "data" to the Kari Lake campaign that "proved" she actually won the Arizona gubernatorial election. Since she did not win, this "data" was presumably made up, or seriously manipulated. (Also, keep reading for another example of hackery.)

For all of these reasons, we do not trust them. FiveThirtyEight, which allows many more pollsters into their sample than we do, has also delisted Rasmussen.


M.B.T. in Bay Village, OH, asks: In marketing, there is a survey technique sometimes called "drip tracking" in which a small number of interviews, maybe 60, are done each day, day after day, using the same core questions within the same population. I think the advantages are obvious, especially when there can be abrupt changes, such as entry or exit of competitors, new products, new ad campaigns, and so on.

Have you heard of anything like this in political polling? It seems even more appropriate for political polling, especially in, say, the last 6 months of a campaign leading up to an election. Imagine if this had been going on starting in May and the information we could have gleaned by watching the scores shift over time. Even if the weighting system used to model the electorate is flawed, it would still deliver a lot of information as long as the methodology stayed consistent.

(V) & (Z) answer: This is sometimes done in political polling, but it's pretty rare because it's difficult and expensive to pull off. USC-Dornsife did a tracking poll in 2020, but apparently decided not to repeat that this year. The only active tracking poll we know of, right now, is from... Rasmussen. It is a daily accounting of Joe Biden's approval, which seems a little beside the point at this point. The sponsor of the poll is Matt Palumbo, who is doing so in order to promote his book Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers: How the Left Hijacked and Weaponized the Fact-Checking Industry. Are there are any additional questions about why we don't trust Rasmussen polls?


N.M.D. in Duluth, MN, asks: I have a question about the national debt. I read that we are heading to "financial armageddon," and not one politician seems even the least bit concerned about it. That since we have been a country, we have created $152 trillion worth of wealth and that our national debt stands at $142 trillion.

I'm wondering: (1) if this is factual information, and (2) if debt is at an all-time high, and savings at an all-time low, and (3) is this the most serious issue of our time?

(V) & (Z) answer: It is easy to find people, almost exclusively right-wingers, citing these figures. We cannot find the original source, much less a source that shows their work. Nonetheless, we will take our best shot at it.

To start, the numbers here are clearly dishonest. It may well be that the $152 trillion worth of wealth figure is correct, but if so, that is not accounting for inflation. Keep in mind that the federal government spends more in one year, in 2024, than the U.S. GDP for the entire 19th century.

More importantly, the $142 trillion figure is not the national debt, which is actually around $35 trillion right now. The $142 trillion includes not only that money, but also ALL future unfunded liabilities. So, for example, a kid born yesterday is presumed to have a life expectancy of 83 years, and a retirement of 20 years, and thus a price tag of some hundreds of thousands of dollars for Social Security and Medicare and the like. But doing it this way ignores the fact that federal government income might well go up, particularly if Congress makes adjustments to keep Social Security, Medicare, etc. solvent. And it definitely ignores the effects of inflation.

Another problem is that the debt figures being bandied about do not account for government assets. The U.S. owns trillions and trillions of dollars worth of land, buildings, equipment, etc. When that is considered, the books are not as imbalanced as they look. To use a crude parallel, a person who earns $60,000 a year, and "owns" their home, but has a $400,000 mortgage, does not generally consider themselves to be hopelessly in debt.

One other thing. Alexander Hamilton understood, at the outset of the United States' democratic experiment, that there is value in having a national debt because it makes the people who own the debt stakeholders in the success of the country. In his time, Hamilton was thinking primarily about U.S. citizens. Today, the entire world's economy is balanced on the U.S. economy (and its debt). That significantly mitigates against the possibility of a catastrophe.

What it amounts to is this: There are vigorous debates about how problematic the United States' debt is, or whether it's even problematic at all. And the figures you mention are from people who think the answer is "deeply problematic" and who want to scare others into agreement. We simply cannot take such simplistic, dishonest analysis seriously. And even if one agrees that the national debt is deeply problematic, there is no chance whatsoever that it is the most serious issue of our time. The potential impact of global warming, if unchecked, will make a potential default on the U.S. national debt look like a walk in the park.

Civics

C.L. in Boulder, CO, asks: I saw, that one of (Z)'s favorite authors is William Poundstone. Has (Z) ever read his book Gaming the Vote: Why Elections Aren't Fair (and What We Can Do About It)? The book discusses better voting methods and concludes that range (a.k.a. score) voting and approval voting are better than instant-runoff voting (the most popular form of ranked choice voting). Poundstone is even listed as a Contributor on the website for the Center for Election Science which advocates for approval voting.

The Electoral-Vote.com website, like so many other outlets, focuses mostly on "RCV" and pretty much ignores all other good voting methods. I wonder why that is. Do you disagree with Poundstone's conclusion? If so, what are your points of disagreement?

(V) & (Z) answer: (Z) has read the book and likes it. The fact that we only ever discuss instant-runoff voting is not related to our view of the book, or even of other systems of voting. It's because instant-runoff voting is the only alternative to first-past-the-post that has shown any potential to actually gain traction in the United States.


R.C. In Des Moines, IA, asks: There are three independent senators who caucus with the Democrats. What does it mean exactly to caucus?

(V) & (Z) answer: Broadly speaking, for someone to be a member of a caucus (Democrats) or conference (Republicans) implies three things: (1) that they attend regularly meetings of the caucus/conference, including strategy meetings; (2) that they are given committee seats from among those distributed by the caucus/conference and (3) that they largely follow the caucus'/conference's party line when voting.


F.F. in London, England, UK, asks: I don't think you answered D.M. from Spokane, who asked about creating new requirements for the presidency. I can see if Congress wanted to reduce the minimum age to 25, as that would be in direct conflict with the Constitution and the Constitution trumps a law passed by Congress. But the law that D.M. proposes, to bar felons from serving as president, is not in direct conflict with the Constitution, so there ought to be nothing to trump.

(V) & (Z) answer: We are not sure what to tell you, other than you are not correct.

The Constitution is a legal document—a contract, in effect—written primarily by attorneys. When it says (paraphrasing), that "the requirements for a president are they have to be 35, a natural-born citizen, and a 14-year resident of the U.S," what it is really saying is ""the requirements for a president—the ONLY requirements—are they have to be 35, a natural-born citizen, and a 14-year resident."

If you believe that Congress can pass a law making any changes, other than ones related to age, citizenship, and residence, then how about a law that says "the president must have a penis" or "the president must be at least 6 feet tall" or "the president cannot have voted, at any time in their life, for anyone named Clinton or Obama"? None of those things is in direct conflict with Article II, or with the amendments, either.


D.S. in Fort Collins, CO, asks: To use one of the former president's favorite bits of phrasing, "many people have said" that the Supreme Court decision Trump v U.S. (granting presidents broad immunity for acts in office) was poorly decided. As it turns out, those "many people" are actual legal experts and I (not a legal expert) tend to agree. I've read, for example, that it's a decision on par with Plessy v Ferguson, which was famously overturned by Brown v. Board of Education for being flat-out wrong.

Assuming for a minute that making the president a de facto king is contrary to the intentions of people who did everything they could to make sure the president wouldn't be a de facto king, how does Trump v U.S. eventually get overturned? For Plessy v Ferguson, we had to wait 58 years, but then at least it wasn't hard to find someone who'd been harmed and could bring a case. Now that the original indictment, which led to the decision, has been superseded with a new indictment specifically modified to get around the decision, how does this "settled law" become unsettled?

(V) & (Z) answer: There are three options, and all of them are tricky. The first is a constitutional amendment. The problem here, of course, is that the bar for amendments is very, very high.

The second option is a new court case that overrides the old one. There are two particular problems here. The first is that the Supreme Court has to grant cert, which this Court seems unlikely to do. The second problem is that, quite often, the new case does not quite line up with the old case, meaning that only some portion of the old ruling is overturned. For example, Brown didn't actually overturn Plessy. It merely overturned Plessy in the context of education. It took additional cases for transportation, public accommodations, etc.

The third option is a law passed by Congress that tries to work around the decision. The first issue here is that such a law is not likely to get through the current Congress. The second is that the law would end up before the Supreme Court, eventually. And one has to assume that if it's the same nine people, they'll strike down the new law.

Joe Biden knows all of this, and he decided that the amendment route was actually the most plausible. If it's going to be either of the other two, either it's going to take some time (like decades), or it's going to take some big-time changes in Washington (like the end of the filibuster and/or changes to the structure/jurisdiction of the Supreme Court).

History

L.K. in San Francisco, CA, asks: Which U.S. presidents were the children of foreign-born or immigrant parents? Certainly Barack Obama, but I think his father never became an American citizen.

(V) & (Z) answer: Besides Obama, whose father was a Kenya-born British subject, the following presidents were children of at least one foreign-born parent:

Nearly all of these folks became U.S. citizens eventually, but not all of them (e.g., Jackson's father). Note also that the list does not count presidents whose parents were born in the British colonies prior to independence.

Obviously, Kamala Harris is the child of two immigrant parents. If she's elected this year, she'll be only the second president who can say that.


F.S. in Cologne, Germany, asks: A few months back, you mentioned Clausewitz' ideas about war, as a means of presenting the context for the Civil War. But did Ulysses S. Grant, William T. Sherman and Abraham Lincoln actually read Clausewitz? And is Clausewitz the most influential German in U.S history that has never lived in the U.S.?

(V) & (Z) answer: Readers may be thinking this question sounds familiar. If so, that is correct, since we answered it last week. Here is our original answer:

We do not have any evidence that indicates any of the three men read Clausewitz. If any of them did, it would likely have been Lincoln, who acquired books on strategy to try to get up to speed while on the job.

That said, the three men were all part of a military establishment that included men who HAD read Clausewitz (e.g., Henry Halleck). They could well have gotten a primer from their colleagues. Further, the things that Clausewitz saw, and analyzed, they saw too, and could plausibly have figured out for themselves.

And among Germans who never lived in the U.S., but had a big impact on U.S. history, the most significant are undoubtedly Karl Marx and Adolf Hitler.

We have rarely gotten so many e-mails telling us a history answer was wrong, wrong, wrong. Remarkably, the declarations of our wrongness went in completely opposite directions, either asserting that OF COURSE Grant and Sherman read the book as part of their military studies, or that THERE IS NO POSSIBLE WAY Grant and Sherman read the book.

When we write these answers, we have to balance between "answering the question" and "writing too much." If we indulged in too many digressions and too much detail, we'd use too much time AND the posting would be too long (if it's not already). So, we kept that answer relatively simple. But, given the number of e-mails we got, we're going to do something we haven't done before and revisit a question with additional detail.

To start, On War was published in 1832... in German. That's a bit less than a decade before Grant and Sherman, neither of whom spoke German, enrolled at West Point. It is true that the two men were getting a "military" education. But one should not assume that means 4 years of wall-to-wall instruction in military theory. In fact, one of the most important tasks was training plebes to become engineers. So, there were a lot of courses in math and the like. On top of that, the military theory advanced in On War ran entirely contrary to what was being taught at West Point at that time.

So, it is highly improbable that the two future generals read On War as part of their coursework. That said, then, as now, there were scholarly journals targeted at military professionals. This included The Military and Naval Magazine of the United States. Starting in 1835, that journal began to publish comments, not on "the legendary book On War," but on "the interesting new work you might not have heard about, called On War." You can see the first remarks on the book here in an 1835 edition of the journal (search for "Clausewitz" or advance to page 428). Eventually, the journal published several lengthy excepts, translated into English. There were also bootleg translations of the book, thought the first official English-language edition did not appear until the 1870s.

This means that Grant, Sherman and Lincoln could have read all or part of On War, though the two generals were not really known as intellectuals who made sure to follow all the latest journals. Considerably more likely is that they would have gotten a rundown from one of their colleagues who WAS an intellectual, like Henry "Old Brains" Halleck. There were also several generals in the Union Army—Franz Sigel, Carl Schurz, Alexander Schimmelfennig—who not only spoke German, but who had lived in (and fled) Germany, and were considerably more likely to be up-to-date on what German military professionals were thinking and writing.

Perhaps this answer illustrates why brevity is sometimes the appropriate choice. These additional paragraphs explain exactly why we said what we said, in much detail. But they don't change the actual answer, which is that there's no evidence Grant/Sherman/Lincoln read the book, and if they did encounter it, it was almost certainly in conversation with colleagues who DID read it.


B.C. in Walpole, ME, asks: I just saw my first political ad asserting that if Harris is elected, she'll take away all our guns. I'm trying to remember the first Democrat who was going to take away all our guns. Biden was going to do it. Hillary Clinton was going to do it. Obama was definitely going to do it. I remember that if Al Gore was elected, he was going to take away all our guns. How far back does this go? Back to Gore, or further? When did this begin?

(I'm barely old enough to remember, on the playground of Grahamwood Elementary School, Memphis, learning from some of my better-informed classmates that if John Kennedy is elected, we'll have to go to school 12 months a year, though no one at the time mentioned that Ted Cruz's father would be instrumental in preventing this.)

(V) & (Z) answer: [CANDIDATE X, WHO HAS BEEN SLURRED BY HIS/HER OPPONENTS AS A RADICAL] will take away [THING Y] is one of the oldest lines of attacks in U.S. politics. In 1800, for example, it was claimed that if Thomas Jefferson was elected, he'd take all the Bibles in the country and burn them.

This being the case, it's at least possible that the "he or she will take your guns" bit has been in use for generations or centuries. But the first documented example we know of was in 1976. In that year, Ronald Reagan was trying to steal the presidential nomination out from under Gerald Ford. And in an effort to win over George Wallace voters, the Reagan campaign distributed a flyer in Southern states claiming that Gerald Ford wanted to take away everyone's guns. That's right, the first instance of this was Republican-on-Republican (and thus a violation of Reagan's Eleventh Commandment of politics, "Thou shalt not attack a fellow Republican.")

Gallimaufry

R.D. in Paris, France, asks: My mother tongue is French, and thus I have noticed that you use quite frequently some french words in your blog. For example: "president du jour," "Biden fils/Biden père", etc. What is surprising is that I haven't noticed that on other English-speaking websites, like Politico or CNN. Moreover, I understand nearly all of your items (except for the baseball analogies), whereas on other websites, there are frequently some passages that I don't fully understand (my English level is good, but not perfect). Is it because of your academic background, or do you have any ties with European French-speaking countries (it cannot imagine that it is the influence of the French-speaking 'Nades)?

(V) & (Z) answer: We don't have a great answer, but we'll toss out a few thoughts. First of all, one of us does live in the Netherlands. Not a French-speaking country, obviously, but you never know what words will migrate.

On top of that, by virtue of our professions, we do presumably have above-average vocabularies. That means we're more likely to be aware of words in other languages that achieve things that cannot be achieved in English. To use your example, in English, you can call a father "senior" and a son "junior." But that usage is most common when referring to father and son who have the same name, as in the Donalds Trump. If we try to use it for the Georges Bush, we invariably get e-mails about how George W. Bush is not "junior," because he and his father have different middle names. On the other hand, fils and père communicate the father/son relationship, and are not exclusive to a father and son with the same name. So, fils/père is more accurate AND doesn't result in a bunch of e-mails.

At the same time, somewhat contrarily, our professions have also taught us that you have to remember you're communicating with an audience that has a lot of different experiences and sets of knowledge. So, while we sometimes use words that are somewhat obscure, we figure people can look those up. It's a lot harder to look up concepts, so we try to use things that will be broadly familiar, or that we explain, or that we provide an explanatory link.

And we categorically deny that Canada has influenced our behaviour, and take great offence at the notion that we are just a mouthpiece for our neighbours to the north. We're not a couple of hosers who can be bought off with a handful of toonies. Now, if you'll pardon us, our poutine is ready to eat, eh.


This item appeared on www.electoral-vote.com. Read it Monday through Friday for political and election news, Saturday for answers to reader's questions, and Sunday for letters from readers.

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