24 reasons that Trump could win

If there's a second Trump term, we won't lack for explanations.

(Title renamed: 24 reasons Kamala is not at fault, excuses)

NATE SILVER OCT 20, 20241/2

This election remains extremely close, but Donald Trump has been gaining ground. One of my pet peeves is with the idea that this is Kamala Harris’s election to lose. I could articulate some critiques of her campaign, but if you study the factors that have historically determined elections, you'll see that she’s battling difficult circumstances.

So, today’s newsletter simply aims to provide a laundry list of factors that favor Trump, with many links to evidence in previous Silver Bulletin posts and elsewhere. These are in no particular order.

1. Harris is the favorite to win the popular vote,but the Electoral College bias favors Republicans by about 2 percentage points. In an era of intense partisanship and close elections, this is inherently difficult for Democrats to overcome.

2.Inflation hit a peak of 9.1 percentage points in June 2022. It has abated now, but prices remain much higher than when Joe Biden took office, and voters are historically highly sensitive to inflation. Democrats can also plausibly be blamed for it given intensive increases in government spending during COVID recovery efforts.

1. Though the reasons for this are much debated,voter perceptions about the economy lag substantially behind objective data, and growth in take-home income has been sluggish for many years for the working class amid rising corporate profits. BS

4.Incumbent parties worldwide are doing very poorly, and the historical incumbency advantage has diminished to the point where it may now be an incumbency handicap instead given perpetually negative perceptions about the direction of the country.

1. Populism is often a highly effective strategy, andmany Trump voters are indeed “deplorable” in the Hillary Clinton sense of the term.

2. Illegal/unauthorized immigration increased substantially during the first few years of the Biden/Harris administration amid a rising global backlash to immigration.

7.Harris ran far to her left in 2019, adopting many unpopular positions, and doesn’t really have a viable strategy for explaining her changing stances.

8.The cultural vibes are shifting to the right, and the left continues to pay a price for the excesses of 2020 on COVID, crime, “wokeness,” and other issues.

9.Voters have nostalgia for the relatively strong economic performancein the first three years of Trump’s term and associate the problems of 2020 with Democrats, even though they weren’t in charge at the time.

10.Democrats’ dominance among Black voters and other racial and ethnic minority groups is slipping. It may be unfortunate timing: the memory of the Civil Rights Era is fading. Educational polarization, which implies deteriorating Democratic performance among working-class voters of all races, may also be coming to dominate other factors. It’s possible this works out well for Democrats if Harris makes corresponding gains among white voters, who pack more leverage in the Electoral College, but there’s no guarantee.

11.Many men, especially young men, feel lostamidst declining college enrollment, contributing to a rightward shift and a growing gender gap.

12.Biden sought to be president until he was 86. Voters had extremely reasonable objections to this, and it neuters what should have been one of Harris’s best issues about Trump’s age and cognitive fitness.

13.Harris also got a late start to her race, inheriting most of the staff from the poorly-run Biden campaign. She’s proven to be a good candidate in many respects, but it’s always a big leap when the understudy is suddenly thrust into the spotlight. (BULLSHIT)

1. Harris is seeking to become the first woman president.In the only previous attempt, undecideds broke heavily against Hillary Clinton, and she underperformed her polls.

https://www.natesilver.net/p/24-reasons-that-trump-could-win

>>21805173

15.Trust in media continues to fall to abysmal levels. One can debate how to attribute blame for this between longstanding conservative efforts to discredit the media, a secular decline in trust in institutions, and various overreaching and hypocrisy in the press. But it’s hard for even legitimate Trump critiques to penetrate the mass public. Trump’s conviction on a series of felony charges hardly made any difference, for instance.

1. Trump has traits of a classic con man, but con artistry is often effective, and Trump is skilled at convincing voters that he’s on their side even if his election would not be in their best interest. Furthermore, Trump presents Democrats with a Three Stooges Syndrome problem: a range of plausible attacks so vast that they tend to cancel one another out. (BULLSHIT)

2. Democrats’ college-educated consultant class has poor instincts for how to appeal to the mass public, whileTrump has done more to cultivate support among “weird” marginal voting groups. (BULLSHIT)

3. Democrats’ argument that Trump is a critical threat to democracy is valid and important, given January 6 and Trump’s broad disrespect for the rule of law. But it’s a tough sell: ultimately, January 6 was a near-miss — it could very, very easily have been much, much worse — and Democrats hold the White House, the Senate, and many key governorships now. It isn’t intuitive to voters that democracy is threatened and Democrats may have staked too many chips on this line of attack. (BULLSHIT)

19.Foreign policy might not matter much to voters, but the world has become more unstable under Biden’s tenure. There has been a decline in democracy worldwide and an increase in interstate conflict, crises in the Middle East and Ukraine, deteriorating US-China relations, increasing immigration flows because of global instability, and a pullout from Afghanistan that negatively impacted Biden’s popularity.

1. The Israel-Hamas war split the Democratic base in a way no comparable issue has split the GOP base.

21.There are more left-leaning third-party candidates than right-leaning ones, and the former leading third-party candidate (RFK Jr.) endorsed Trump and undermined Harris’s post-convention momentum.

22.The richest man in the world, Elon Musk, has become a huge Trump stanand is doing everything in his power to tip the election to him. Twitter/X remains an influential platform among journalists but has shifted far to the right. Elon and Silicon Valley have also created a permission structure for other wealthy elites to advocate for Trump explicitly and provided a new base of money and cultural influence.

1. Trump was very nearly killed in an assassination attempt, and then there was a second one against him.The first attempt was closely correlated with an increase in favorability ratings for Trump, and polling shows he’s considerably more popular and sympathetic than in 2016 or 2020.

24.Harris has been running on vibesand has failed to articulate a clear vision for the country. It might have been a good strategy if the “fundamentals” favored her, but they don’t.

https://www.natesilver.net/p/24-reasons-that-trump-could-win

Sounds like Nate is desperate to be adored by Democrats!

'Lieutenant Dan,' who gained fame riding out hurricanes on boat, is arrested in FloridaAntonio Planas October 19, 2024 at 12:43 PM ED

'Lieutenant Dan,' who gained fame riding out hurricanes on boat, is arrested in Florida

Joseph Malinowski, who gained internet fame because of his risky decisions to ride out Hurricane Helene and Milton on his 20-foot sailboat, was arrested Friday on multiple charges including failing to appear in court, Tampa police said.

Malinowski, 54, known as "Lieutenant Dan," was arrested on two outstanding warrants for failure to appear in court and a misdemeanor charge of trespassing in a city park after warning, police said in a statement.

Officers warned Malinowski on Thursday that he was creating a health hazard because he did not have an “accessible marine sanitation device aboard his unregistered vessel and did not have record of proper disposal of waste,” police said.

Police try to persuade "Lieutenant Dan" to leave his boat ahead of Hurricane Milton on Oct. 9, 2024 in Tampa, Fla.

He was told to leave the Bayshore Linear Park and Dock but was still there Friday morning, police said.

Malinowski was taken to the Hillsborough County Jail, and his vessel was impounded, police said.

He remained jailed as of Friday afternoon, according to facility records. It was not clear if he had an attorney.

Malinowski survived Hurricane Milton aboard his sailboat after capturing national attention when TikTok creator Terrence Concannon posted a series of videos about his experience riding out Hurricane Helene.

He drew concern and scrutiny over his decision to remain at sea during the deadly storms.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com

https://www.yahoo.com/news/lieutenant-dan-gained-fame-riding-234213597.html?guccounter=1

(watch, someone will set up a GoFundMe for him, kek)

>>21805242

They are sick assholes, he gets a little attention, and they are jealous.

The Trials of Daniel Penny

The white student who killed a black homeless man on the subway last year is either a killer or Good Samaritan, depending on who you ask. Finally, a jury will decide. By Olivia Reingold October 20, 20241/3

“You feel like a man for killing a black man?” Those words were hurled from the back of a courtroom earlier this month at Daniel Penny, a 24-year-old former Marine charged with second-degree manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide in the killing of Jordan Neely, a 30-year-old homeless man and sometime street performer whose tragic death on the F train on May 1, 2023, was captured on video.Penny is white. Neely was black.

To Rachel Cyprien, the woman who did the shouting as Penny exited the courtroom, there are no two ways of looking at what happened on the subway that day, when Penny placed Neely, widely described as “erratic” and “threatening” by fellow passengers, into a fatal choke hold. It is simply “another lynching of a black man.”

“He’s a white man, a Marine, a trained killer who killed a black man, a homeless man, and no one cared,” said Cyprien, a real estate broker who wouldn’t state her age but kept a metal cane in the crook of her elbow.

To her—and many others—Penny is a villain, while Neely, a former Michael Jackson impersonator who grew up in and out of New York homeless shelters, could’ve used “the smallest gesture of humanity,” in the words of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—rather than Penny’s choke hold. In this, Cyprien was echoing a consensus that quickly emerged after the video of the incident went viral: that this was “another Black man publicly executed,” as then–Rep. Jamaal Bowman put it on X.

Within days, protesters were taking over subway stations, disrupting rush-hour traffic with chants like “homeless lives matter.” In the following weeks dozens were arrested, with police even seizing an unlit Molotov cocktail from a protester.

At a funeral service in Harlem, Reverend Al Sharptonlaid Neely to rest by remarking that Good Samaritans help the homeless, not “choke them out.”

Whether you saw the former Marine as a “Good Samaritan,” in the words of Florida governor Ron DeSantis, or his actions as a “lynching,” according to Julia Salazar, a New York state senator,seemed to depend more on preconceived assumptions about public order, self-defense, and the role of racism in American life than on the actual known facts of the case.

The fact, for example, that Neely suffered from severe untreated mental illness, bound up with a history of violence and drug abuse.The fact that he had been arrested more than forty times, most recently for punching a 67-year-old woman in a subway station. The fact that ajudge cut his prison sentence short to enroll him in a minimum of fifteen months in a treatment program, which he walked away from after less than two weeks.

The fact that no attempt was made to locate him, but there was an open warrant for his arrest when his increasingly erratic behavior on the F train began to alarm passengers, including Penny, who put him in the choke hold that ultimately killed him.

And the fact thatwitnesses noted that two other men helped hold him down that day, including a man of color, as Neely tossed garbage and screamed that he was “ready to die” or “go to jail” because he was tired of being hungry.

Daniel Penny is not being tried for a hate crime—no evidence has yet emerged that shows he was motivated by racism that day. But those facts have done little to puncture the narrative about white supremacy that followed him into court on October 3, his first major court appearance before his trial. That trial begins Monday.

He faces up to twenty years in prisonfor what happened on that spring afternoon, in which he entered the subway at Second Avenue as a student and left at Broadway/Lafayette as a homicide suspect.

On the thirteenth floor of New York City’s criminal court, Penny sat sandwiched between his lawyers, two athletic-looking men from Long Island, opposite a duo of female prosecutors from the Manhattan District Attorney’s office.Their purpose that day: to have a judge decide on the admissibility of footage that has been kept under wraps since the incident. The footage captured at least a half-hour of video from police body cameras, pulled from multiple officers on the scene, and Penny’s full interrogation at the local police precinct that followed.

https://www.thefp.com/p/daniel-penny-trial-jordan-neely-killed-subway

>>21805429

2/3

The prosecution wants this evidence admitted because they believe it is damning—especially when Penny tells an officer “I just put him out,” referring to Neely. The DA argues that Penny recklessly endangered Neely by choking him for six minutes.

“It doesn’t matter that other witnesses said that this person that was taken out had scared people before that,”Assistant District Attorney Dafna Yoran told the judge. “That has absolutely no relevance to whether the defendant is responsible ultimately.”(WTF Yoran has no profile on any attorney sites, with https://opengovny.com/attorney/2600708. Martindale Hubbel, etc. )

Thomas Kenniff, one of Penny’s defense lawyers, argued that all of the witnesses described Neely as the “initial aggressor, terrifying, unhinged, you know, threatening life and limb of the other passengers on board.”At the same time, witnesses described Penny’s actions as “very restrained.”

Kenniff added: “It wasn’t really a choke hold. He was just containing him.”

The New York Times boiled the full day of testimony, in which five NYPD officers testified about the incident, into a story titled “Penny Minimized Duration of Chokehold During Questioning, Video Shows,” pointing out the alleged inconsistencies between Penny’s initial descriptions of the event and video evidence captured by police. To Gothamist, a local NPR-affiliated publication, the takeaway was that Penny “told police at the time that he had put the man ‘in a choke.’ ” Even the New York Post focused on Penny’s statement “I just put him out” in what it called “dramatic video” from the day of the incident.

Almost all of the reports left out that after the alleged choke hold, an officer administered a dose of the opioid antidote Narcan to Neely—which could point to the victim’s history of drug abuse. The same officer who administered the Narcan ,Sergeant Carl Johnson, later called Penny a “Good Samaritan” in his summary of the crime. And in a 14-minute video compilation played by the defense, one woman was shown standing in shock on the subway platform,telling an officer that Penny “literally saved the train.”

When we broke for lunch, I caught Rachel Cyprien, the black realtor who’d taken the day off to watch the hearing, outside the courthouse to ask if any of those revelations—the Narcan, the witness statements describing Neely as “threatening,” and the favorable descriptions of Penny in the police write-ups—changed anything for her.

“No,” she said. “This is all bullshit. This is just a show because they’re going to let him off.” Then, she added, “This is another George Floyd.”

Less than 24 hours later, the judge released his decision:The footage in question is fair game. In the trial, which starts with jury selection on Monday, the 12 jurors will get to see for themselves what transpired that fateful day.

On May 1, 2023, asprogressive commentators and members of the Squad raced to portray Penny as a racially motivated murderer, the people of his hometown, West Islip, a hamlet of Long Island, were left wondering how it was that people could get the man they knew so wrong.

A few weeks after Neely died, I spent four days in West Islip to ask Penny’s family, friends, and neighbors: What kind of man is he, really?

• I encountered Stacey Volke outside the local elementary school. When I asked her if she knew Penny, she grimaced like she was holding back tears. Or anger.“Yes,” she said. “And he’s one of the best boys you’ll ever meet—a great kid from a great family.”

• She said Daniel is the son of her childhood friend Stephen Penny, who grew up “four to five houses down” from her on a tree-lined drive just steps away from the bay. It’s the kind of street where residents fly American flags out front, and cars have bumper stickers bearing the Marine Corps motto Semper Fi. Now, the average house on the block is worth more than a million dollars, but Penny told the New York Post—in one of his two media interviews to date—that the three-bedroom, three-bath house he grew up in dates back generations.

• “My grandmother was raised there,” he said of the tan cottage, first purchased by his great-grandfather in the 1960s. “And then my father and his brothers were raised there. And then me and my sisters were able to grow up there.”

• “We wouldn’t have been able to live that lifestyle on the water if it wasn’t for my family,” said Penny, who grew up surfing and playing lacrosse.

https://www.thefp.com/p/daniel-penny-trial-jordan-neely-killed-subway

>>21805521

3/3

Like most people in West Islip, an area that Donald Trump won by a landslide in the last two presidential elections, Volke was on guard, feeling that the media had tarnished the reputation of her friend’s son. She added that she planned to donate to the defense fund started by Penny’s lawyers, which at the time had already surpassed $2 million, because “just the legal fees alone could destroy them.”

“They say because he’s military trained he should’ve known what he’s doing,” she said of the criminal charges Penny is facing. But, she added, “Adrenaline can get the best of anyone.”

And “there were two others” who held Neely down on the train that day, she continued. “Why aren’t they being tried?”

The next day I met a waitress, wearing a gold cross around her neck, working a weekend lunch shift at a local diner.She turned out to be a former classmate of “Danny,” as most locals refer to Penny.

I asked her what she knew about the way Penny grew up.Was he imbued with “white privilege,”as his critics claimed? “I always just thought of him as middle class,” said the waitress, who declined to give her name.“Nothing fancy. Just regular.”

“He’s not capable of doing anything terrible and the subways in the city—those are terrible,” she added. “There’s always a gray area.”

Suffolk County, where West Islip is located, is one of the largest veteran communities in the country. The fire station has a 9/11 memorial out front, with the names of firefighters carved in stone—an ode to the nearly 100 town residents, including firefighters and law enforcement officers, who died in the attacks.

When he was just shy of 19, Penny enlisted in the Marines. He never saw combat but got to travel, serving two years in a unit that was deployed in Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Jordan, Greece, and Spain. Then, in June 2021, he “separated from service,” a Marine Corps representative told The Free Press, declining to specify if that qualified as an honorable discharge. In 2022, he moved to New York City in search of a new path. Last winter, he enrolled in an architecture program at a local Brooklyn college, working two jobs on top of his classwork.

Then on May 1, 2023, he met Jordan Neely.

Ever since then,Penny has become a Rorschach test: a mirror that reflects not what you think of Daniel Penny but what you think of white men, black men, racism, policing, mental illness, and the thing that we call “the system.”

In the days after the killing, that’s what Jordan Neely’s Aunt Carolyn wanted to talk about.“The whole system just failed him. He fell through the cracks of the system,” she told the New York Post.

Penny has been virtually silent since the day his life changed forever.Though The Free Press asked for an interview at least a half-dozen times, all requests were denied. At the hearing I attended, he didn’t say a word.

When I visited West Islip last spring looking for Penny, a lifeguard told me to try Gilgo Beach, saying “I think that’s where he normally surfs.” Another lifeguard told me to check out Democrat Point, a hard-to-reach section of a nearby state park.

I never saw him. But later, on a whim, I checked the blog of one of his old Marine buddies. There Penny was, snapped in a photo, taken on the shores of a Long Island beach.

By then, Penny had been charged with the crime that had divided America. But at that moment he seemed carefree. Shrouded in a dark hoodie, baseball cap, and sunglasses, he is kneeling next to a pickup truck in the photo. It’s a clear day, and he is posing next to a sticker on the truck’s bumper that reads: Justice for Daniel Penny.

https://www.thefp.com/p/daniel-penny-trial-jordan-neely-killed-subway

>>21805585

Call to DIGG

Rachel Cyprien, the black realtor== who’d taken the day off to watch the hearing, I caught who’d taken the day off to watch the hearing, outside the courthouse to ask if any of those revelations—the Narcan, the witness statements describing Neely as “threatening,” and the favorable descriptions of Penny in the police write-ups—changed anything for her.“No,” she said. “This is all bullshit. This is just a show because they’re going to let him off.” Then, she added, “This is another George Floyd.”

Judge Maxwell Wiley on Friday denied all motions to suppress evidence. Less than 24 hours later, the judge released his decision:The footage in question is fair game. In the trial, which starts with jury selection on Monday, the 12 jurors will get to see for themselves what transpired that fateful day.

D.A. Dafna Yoran

“It doesn’t matter that other witnesses said that this person that was taken out had scared people before that,”Assistant District Attorney Dafna Yoran told the judge. “That has absolutely no relevance to whether the defendant is responsible ultimately.”(WTF Yoran has no profile on any attorney sites, with https://opengovny.com/attorney/2600708. Martindale Hubbel, etc. )

>>21805690

CTDIt seems these three got some orders, especially Tish James is the NY AG, on Daniel Perry. The judge releasing confidential evidence, that should have been kept that way, is a bread crumb.

1. Rachel Cyprien, the black realtor (BLM possibly)

2. Judge Maxwell Wiley (? Except NY)

3. Assistant District Attorney Dafna Yoran (Directly under James)

Judge denies motions to suppress evidence in Daniel Penny's trial

Friday, October 4, 2024

NEW YORK CITY (WABC) – A judge ruled thatall evidencewill be permitted in the trial against Daniel Penny, the Marine veteran charged with putting Jordan Neely in a fatal chokehold on the subway last year.

Penny returned to court for the second straight day on Friday for a pre-trial hearing. The purpose of the hearing was to sort out what evidence will be presented at trial – including newvideo of what happened after the incident.

Judge Maxwell Wiley on Friday denied all motions to suppress evidence.

Penny, 25, is charged with manslaughter and negligent homicide in the murder of Jordan Neely on board an F train in May of last year after the deadly chokehold was captured on cellphone video by two tourists. Penny's lawyers say he acted in self-defense after Neely, who suffered from mental health issues, started displaying what some described as aggressive behavior.

Penny's lawyers say Neely had a psychiatric history of mental illness, didn't take his medicine, and was known to scare passengers.

During Thursday's pre-trial hearing, the court heard evidence from both sides. The cellphone video from the incident went viral and was widely seen –but the other video evidence the jury might see in the trial could make or break the case for both the prosecution and defense.

Prosecutors from the Manhattan District Attorney's officeplayed video of Penny being interviewed by NYPD detectivesat the 5th Precinct in Chinatown.

Throughout the video he was calm, and matter of fact, as he explained what happened. He can be heard saying, "I'm not trying to kill the guy, I'm just trying to deescalate the situation."

The two detectives clearly tried to get a better grasp of the incident and asked what he was thinking. "This guy was actually threatening. He said he wanted to go to prison forever," Penny said in the interview.

During the videotaped interview, Penny went over what happened several times and twice demonstrated the grip he had around Neely's neck and explained his decision to wrap his legs around him saying, "He starts to squirm, I hold him a little tighter."

Prosecutors also showed several body-worn cameras from the responding officers. In the video, Penny is standing around and at one point he was asked if Neely had a gun and he responded, "I don't know, I just put him out."

The Manhattan District Attorney wants the jury to see the videos to hear Penny's initial comments,but his defense said he was being treated as a witness at the timeand they wanted them out==. The trial is scheduled to begin October 8 and jury selection starts on Oct. 21. If convicted, Penny faces up to 20 years in prison.

https://abc7ny.com/post/daniel-penny-trial-ny-judge-denies-motion-suppress-evidence-marine-jordan-neelys-chokehold-death-aboard-nyc-subway/15393612/

>>21805458

Yes, exactly. Bragg and James are determined to make one innocent race in NY and it's not white.

>>21805752

Maybe, in a way, it's good to not suppress evidence, that way it will reveal how crazy Neely was.