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Five reasons for confidence that have nothing to do with polling data

In case you hadn't noticed, over the course of the first week of the Kamala Harris presidential campaign, when it was hard to know what was real or what was happening, "weird"

What a weird week. Just eight(!) days ago, Joe Biden was the presumptive Democratic nominee, his party and the campaign were dead in the water, and its voters were begging for a miracle. Today, 99 days out from the election, the Kamala Harris campaign is pulling in donations hand over fist, polls have shifted to […]

Governor Romney has repeatedly promised that on his first day in office he will work to repeal Obamacare. Insurance companies will again be free to deny my family coverage for whatever reasons they see fit. The Ryan budget which Governor Romney plans to enact as president includes enormous cuts to Medicaid. A vote for the Romney/Ryan ticket is a vote to completely destroy the financial security and medical safety of my child and family. If you are planning on voting for him I’m sure that you are doing it for other reasons but these will be the consequences of that decision. You may not like hearing it but it’s the truth. A vote for Romney/Ryan is a vote that will hurt hardworking Americans like me and my family.

To be sure: voting systems are exceedingly vulnerable. But there are much more subtle ways to mess with them. And what we need are regular risk-limiting audits that can detect mischief or error.

There is no hidden agenda here. The strategy and tactics are as far out in the open as those voters standing in line for hours waiting for their turn to vote. This transparency—of motive and of evidence—is also what distinguishes the complaints that Democrats have about Republican tricks on voting from Republican complaints about Democratic tricks on voting. Widespread "in-person" voter fraud or voting by illegal immigrants exists mostly in the minds of conspiracy theorists. Yet proof of voter suppression is visible to all of us with the naked eye. All we have to do is look. There is no political equivalence here—only more lamentable false equivalence.

With last night's results, one can choose to see things two ways: (1) emboldened by their success and the obvious movement of the electorate in their direction, liberals will resolve that this time things will be different, that their willingness to be Good Partisan Soldiers depends upon their core values not being ignored and stomped on, or (2) inebriated with love and gratitude for Obama for having vanquished the evil Republican villains, they will follow their beloved superhero wherever he goes with even more loyalty than before. One does not need to be Nate Silver to be able to use the available historical data to see which of those two courses is the far more likely one.

I don’t agree with this completely, but it’s a solid argument. More broadly, the political problem of the Democrats is that they’re a party of capital that has to pretend for electoral reasons sometimes that it’s not. All the complaints that liberals have about them—their weakness, tendency to compromise, the constantly lamented lack of a spine—emerge from this central contradiction. The Republicans have a coherent philosophy and use it to fire up a rabid base. The Dems are afraid of their base because it might cause them trouble with their funders. Romney believes in money. Obama believes in nothing. Most liberals want to write off Obama’s bad performance as a bad night. It’s not just that. It’s a structural problem.

"America should take a chance and make Barack Obama the next leader of the free world." A cautious but firm and thoughtful endorsement from an excellent publication.