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This week, we did just that. Five writers were kind enough to send us election-year postcards, of a sort, from Florida, Washington state, Georgia, Pennsylvania and California. Some are funny, some more grim. They report angry banners, shrugs of ennui and local politicians warning ominously of drug-addled bears (okay, one of the writers is Dave Barry, obviously).
One set of insights comes from nonfiction writer Melissa Fay Greene, who smartly enlisted an Atlanta-area real estate agent to tell her about who’s moving in and how they’re affecting her increasingly purple state. As this agent helps newcomers and Atlantans find homes in the burbs, she has a front-row seat to how the electorate is changing. Some even see Georgia’s swinginess as a draw: One family, she reports, “literally told me that once all the other priorities checked out, they wanted a state where their votes would matter.” Believe me, we Washingtonians get it.
We’ll be checking back with these writers as Election Day approaches, so stay tuned for more of what they’re seeing on the ground.
Forecasting November, Part II
Say you’re not an anecdata kind of person — you want cold, hard numbers. Perhaps you can deduce our future from polls. That’s what a serious person (who, uh, demanded to know the future) would do, right?
Think again, says Jen Rubin. The polls that media outlets keep shoving in your face are way less significant than they sound — she points out one example where a supposed movement in President Biden’s direction is actually all within the margin of error. “Rather than pretend that political gurus can anticipate results,” she counsels, “the media would do better to focus on ‘not the odds, but the stakes,’ as New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen puts it. Not only are the stakes — the fate of democracy — immensely important in 2024, but the odds (the polls) at this stage are virtually meaningless.”
Personally, I think of this as a kind of blessing from Jen. You’re free! Stop reading polls! Depending on your level of Polling Derangement Syndrome, you just got hours of time back between now and the election. So yes, you must live with the uncertainty. You can use all that extra time to fret about the stakes instead.
Change is coming fast to the stunning Pacific coastline of California, where landslides are increasingly imperiling the houses and communities that cling to the cliffs.
In a lyrical guest piece, Jennifer Allen recalls living in Portuguese Bend, the neighborhood now considering that intensive protective plan: “The land had its demands. You deferred to the rattlesnake sheltering in the shade of your porch, gave space to the tarantula crawling on the bookshelf. Wild peacocks had the loudest and final say. … You learned to wait out the strongest storms like the horses in the stables: with patience and civility.”
Admittedly, that description might make you want to move there. But Allen is clear-eyed about the risks we humans are taking by depending on the volatile cliffs to stay beneath our feet, and the greater and greater sums required to keep them there — as if we, not nature, were in charge. Ultimately, she writes, “the land isn’t falling apart. We are.”
Smartest, fastest
- Perry Bacon takes a look at how the religious right has seized control of one of the two major American political parties, even as the nation’s religiosity is distinctly on the wane.
- A dismayed Catherine Rampell weighs in on what she says might be “Trump’s most inflationary and economically destructive idea yet”: intentionally weakening the U.S. dollar.
- Prospective jurors in Donald Trump’s hush-money trial have gotten a long list of questions calculated to weed out people who “have any strong opinions or firmly held beliefs about former President Donald Trump.” Do such people really exist? asks satirist Alexandra Petri, offering some juror-screening questions of her own.
It’s a goodbye. It’s a haiku. It’s … The Bye-Ku.
All these months ahead
Who can say which candidate
Falls into the sea
***
Have your own newsy haiku? Email it to me, along with any questions/comments/compliments/complaints. We’ll see you tomorrow!
