For the love of God elect Elvis Presley's cousin in Mississippi.
Democrats are reeling from a new poll that shows Donald Trump ahead of Joe Biden in key states. Biden is not only hemorrhaging young voters and voters of color who may stay home on election day, but some have even flipped to Trump.
For the least helpful analysis of what Biden should do, let’s turn to the New York Times.
“What can Biden do?” David Leonhardt asks. He suggests, first and foremost, that the Biden campaign activate the ‘anti-MAGA majority,’ noting that a large part of Biden’s support in 2020 came from people so disgusted by Trump they either voted for Biden or, if too fanatically Republican, sat out the election. In 2020, I interviewed several 2016 Trump voters who couldn’t stomach voting for him again, for reasons ranging from his uncouth behavior on the world stage to the fact that Trump’s immigration policies literally got their wives deported.
But, “At least he’s not the other guy” pitch? 2020 isn’t 2024 (no one’s told pundits about the passage of time). In 2020, the “other guy” had spent four years battering the American public with unhinged melodrama, mortifying public displays and the sense that every day could bring unimaginable catastrophe. These were amplified into world-ending events by cable news and social media caterwauling.
People vote with their emotions. And you’re not going to generate the same level of terror and outrage this cycle, just because, I don’t know, some Attorney General in some state somewhere is indicting Trump on something. Meanwhile, Americans want a little drama, for Heaven’s sake, in an age of a churning news cycle and attention spans shaped by Twitter for the olds and TikTok for the youngs. And keeping Biden largely out of the news and cloistered gives the impression he’s feeble and that Trump is strong.
Leonhardt also cites the economy and immigration, noting that Biden hasn’t bragged about his economic policies or his harsh immigration crackdowns enough. On the latter issue, he repeats the idiotic political “truism” that Americans are congenitally averse to open migration. They are largely against it—but that’s because Republicans and Democrats and overpaid pundits have been telling them it’s a bad thing forever. This narrative will always benefit Republicans, no matter how many people’s wives Joe Biden deports. It’s like crime. The more Democrats fear monger about crime to burnish their tough-on-crime bona fides, the more it helps Republicans who always just say, “Democrats are soft on crime.”
What Leonhardt does not address is the fact that Biden, and possibly Democrats forever, have lost one of their most dependable “at least he’s not the other guy” voting block—American Arabs and Muslims. Whatever Can Biden Do? Go back in time and refuse to facilitate the massacre of thousands of children.
Democratic operatives should stop listening to people like David Leonhardt—he regurgitates what they already think! And what they already think might put Trump back in office. Drop your assumptions! Build new narratives! 1. Immigration is good—you’d be dead of a heart attack right now if immigrants hadn’t imported other countries’ far healthier cuisines to the U.S. 2. Crime is down and “tough-on-crime” policies actually make violent crime worse longterm.
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Let’s discuss Elvis Presley’s second-cousin, Brandon Presley, a Democrat running for Governor of Mississippi. Presley served as the mayor of Nettleton, Mississippi, from 2001 to 2007.
A standard political assumption is that Southern red states are doomed to be governed by right-wing monsters. After all, they’re not filled with enlightened liberals like blue states! But you know what? Time to shake up that assumption too. Housing in blue cities in blue states is so expensive that many young people and people of color can’t afford to live there. The only Democrats that get elected have to grovel to the police unions. It’s my pet theory that the most potential for progressive change is seeded in blue/purplish cities in red states. You see it in races for District Attorneys—with a surprisingly low-grade amount of national attention (compared to the atomic bomb levels of attention paid to Chesa Boudin’s recall in San Francisco) purplish cities in red states are electing reform DAs.
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So far, with the exception of Steve Beshear in Kentucky, this hasn’t extended to the state executive branch.
Presley, a Democrat, is challenging Republican Governor Tate Reeves in Mississippi and making inroads. At the risk of sounding excited about a politician, I have to say that everyone should drop whatever they’re doing and look this guy up.
HE WANTS TO EXPAND MEDICAID IN THE STATE. I'm sure you guys already know this, but I think it’s. worth shouting from the rooftops that this will literally save thousands of lives.
“Brandon Presley knows firsthand the importance of access to affordable healthcare,” his website reads. “His mama knew there was a problem and put off seeing a doctor because she couldn’t afford it - it caught up to her and she passed away too early from congestive heart failure.” He wants to cut an unpopular grocery tax. He’s running on fighting corruption, curtailing gifts from lobbyists to lawmakers, and strengthening the state’s ethics commission. And he wants to increase funding for public education.
The Times reports that the Cook Political Report recently found that the election had “morphed into a competitive fight.” He has the goods to catapult into national politics: he’s young, attractive, and apparently, can convincingly say the phrase, “My mama knew that….”
Reeves, naturally, is painting him as a soft-on-crime. This is because Presley has signaled opposition to the =GOP state legislature’s banana republic coup against Jackson’s majority Black population and leadership. I wrote about it here: Hostile Takeover in Jackson . The legislation would have allowed state lawmakers to create a state-run separate police department, carved out separate judicial districts for the city’s Black population, and appointed judges rather than allowing the community to elect them.
The proposed law, H.B. 1020, was beginning to draw attention outside the state for its brazen assault on local control in a Democratic city with a rich Civil Rights Movement history. But rather than address those concerns, the governor resorted to familiar hyperbole, bordering on non-sequitur, and described Jackson as “the murder capital of the world.”
By no metric did Jackson’s homicide rate justify such a claim. But it did maintain the messaging used by white state lawmakers to advance H.B. 1020 over the unanimous objection of Jackson’s entirely Black slate of local lawmakers. When the bill passed in early March, it overturned the local election of judges by transferring appointment power to the chief justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court; gave the attorney general sole authority to appoint prosecutors; and greatly increased the size and scope of the state-run Capitol police, to the point of creating a parallel police force with jurisdiction over all of Jackson. (The original House version of the bill was even more draconian: it called for an entirely separate court system for Jackson and attempted to make Supreme Court-selected judges lifetime appointees.)
The law passed over the collective opposition of the city’s elected officials, as well as that of Jackson’s 40-year-old Mayor, Chokwe Antar Lumumba, who see the bill as a hostile takeover of an 83% African-American city by a state Congress dominated by white representatives of rural counties.
“They don’t think Black people can govern themselves,” the Mayor told me. “They want to seize through policy what they can’t achieve through a democratic process.”
Presley opposes the legislation. In June, Reeves tried to paint Presley as soft-on-crime because of his opposition to H.B. 1020, claiming he was dodging questions about public safety. In response, Presley noted that he was actually against the usurpation of local governance.
“I was a small-town mayor,” Presley said. “I wouldn’t want the state Legislature coming to tell me how to run my police department. Simple. I do not agree with unelected judges.”
That is simple.
The election is tomorrow. Presley is officially considered a “long shot.” But a new Public Policy Polling poll showed the candidates neck-in-neck: the Democrat drew 45 percent support while Reeves clocked in at 46. AOC was a longshot too. The election is tomorrow. Beware of what conclusions pundits draw from the results.