It’s now or never. It’s our final BradCast before Election Day 2024 and our last chance to open our phone lines to callers to have their say. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]
Either Kamala Harris will become the next President of the United States and the first Black, Southeast-Asian American woman to do so, or Donald Trump, a 78-year old, 34-time convicted criminal felon, adjudicated rapist and self-proclaimed wannabe-Dictator will. Those are the two choices.
So today we take a bit of time to make that case to those who are either undecided, planning not to vote at all, or considering voting for a so-called “third-party” candidate.
To that end, we open up the phones to listeners to make their own such case to other voters. Among those who did so was listener “Maura”, who described herself as being “a Republican and business owner most of my life.” Her argument to those voters is that, while Harris may not be perfect, “voting is a bit like getting on a bus. You have the option to get on a bus or not get on a bus. And if you’re going somewhere, you go to the bus that goes closest to where you are trying to go.”
She also went on to spell out a number of other things she likes about Harris’ policies and added at the end: “Plus! Plus! She is the only candidate that is likely to have the support in Congress, and to be able to support and protect our civil rights across the country. If we have civil rights, we must have them nationally.”
Before we get to a full slate of callers today, however, a few very related news items of note…
- Just another heads up: Donald Trump will declare victory on Tuesday night, whether he has actually won or not. Do not be surprised. Do not be alarmed. Do not be frightened. Do not be gaslit. It is completely, 100% expected in the event that he is losing and it will be your first post-election indication that he is attempting to steal the 2024 election as he tried, but failed, to do in 2020.
- On Sunday, Donald Trump reiterated his disturbing homicidal ideation at a rally by telling supporters he wouldn’t mind if someone “shot through the fake news” which was covering the event. That followed, just days earlier, a similarly appalling remark in which he mentioned Republican former Congresswoman Liz Cheney and suggested the idea of having “nine barrels shooting at her,” asking how she feels about being so pro-war “when the guns are trained on her face.” (For those Trump apologists who say those remarks were just fine, because “context”, I’d ask if they would be just fine with Kamala Harris, at a rally, declaring in any context: “Let’s put Donald Trump there with a rifle, with nine-barrels shooting at him, with guns trained on his face.”)
- Stunning news out of Iowa on Saturday, where the “gold standard” Des Moines Register poll run by Ann Selzer found Kamala Harris actually was leading Donald Trump — in IOWA — by three points on the last weekend before Election Day. If Harris is actually leading in deep-red Iowa, as the survey finds, what does that tell us about all of the other polls, particularly in so-called battleground states, that pre-election polling averages claim to be tied just before E-Day? Selzer has a remarkably accurate record over the years in her Iowa polling to the extent that polling guru Nate Silver, creator of polling average site 538, said about Selzer and her shock poll results on Saturday: “In a world where most pollsters have a lot of egg on their faces, she has near-oracular status.”
- Over the weekend, European Green parties from nearly 20 different countries, issued a joint statement calling on “US Green Party candidate Jill Stein to withdraw her Presidential candidacy, and endorse Kamala Harris.” The Euro Greens cite the U.S. party’s “close relationship” with authoritarians around the world and an election in which the stakes “could not be higher” on a host of issues, including climate change. “We are clear that Kamala Harris is the only candidate who can block Donald Trump and his anti-democratic, authoritarian policies from the White House,” they declared in calling for Stein to endorse Harris in a race they describe as “too close for comfort.”
- Longtime election expert and fellow Election Integrity advocate Jonathan Simon recently penned an open letter to the Green Party’s Jill Stein, including results from the so-called “Blue Wall” states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania back in 2016, noting that Stein’s share of the vote that year in all three states was larger than the margin of victory for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton that resulted in his winning the White House the first time.
- And, finally, before we get to callers and their “closing arguments” to undecided voters or those considering voting third-party, we share the closing argument, in his own words, from independent, self-described democratic socialist U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders on why he believes it is critically important to elect Kamala Harris despite his virulent disagreements with the Biden-Harris Administration’s policy on Israel and Gaza…
(Snail mail support to “Brad Friedman, 7095 Hollywood Blvd., #594 Los Angeles, CA 90028” always welcome too!)
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