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It is Tuesday, October 22. I'm your old friend, Michael Tracey, the less attractive but just as exciting fill-in host occasionally for dear old Glenn when he's away for whatever reason.
Tonight: We are going to go through another exhilarating repertoire of issues for you to all absorb. First, I happen to be in Asheville, North Carolina right now. I've been talking to voters, I've been surveying some of the damage, trying to get a sense of what impact the disaster relief efforts worth the disaster itself could have on voting, with North Carolina being a significant stage in the election. So, I will give you some preliminary observations on that score.
Secondly, I published a long-simmering article over the weekend on the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. campaign and his newfound alliance with Donald Trump. I think I've uncovered a couple of details that haven't gotten enough attention about that interesting alliance. I know many of you out there are going to have perhaps a harsh response to the article, but I'm going to try to keep it as factual as possible and if you have any objections, feel free to contact me and let me know what they are but I do think it's worth covering. So, we'll get into that.
And then finally, all the more exciting is Lee Fang, one of your most beloved guests on this program, journalist extraordinaire will be joining us. We're going to talk about issues related to what else but the 2024 election. We're exactly about two weeks away from Election Day and – no surprise here – but I think there are some critical aspects of the election that have not been sufficiently covered. So, hopefully, Lee Fang and I will have an opportunity to delve into those. That will be, I'm sure, exciting for all of you.
For now, welcome to another new episode of System Update, starting now.
One of my routines in the weeks ahead of Election Day for the past couple of presidential election cycles now is to be out on the road in the lead-up to Election Day. I don't want to stay cooped up in my domicile in a non-swing state. I would probably go a little crazy. So, for my own mental health reasons and also for the edification of you and for Glenn, I've been going around to different states over the past week and a half or so. So, I've been in Nevada, I've been in Arizona briefly, Georgia, Florida and now I'm in North Carolina. I came specifically to Asheville, North Carolina, because there's been a lot of confusion or uncertainty around the hurricane relief efforts and what impact the displacement of people and the aftereffects of the storm – a few weeks ago, Hurricane Helene – could have on the election. I'm not going to act like I just parachuted in here and have all the answers. I only got here basically yesterday. But I did want to give a couple of preliminary observations, because one thing that I've done in the short time that I've been here is go around to some of the early voting sites and just chat with voters. I've surveyed some of the destruction. I mean, some of it really is jarring. I've only ever been to Asheville once before; this was 7 or 8 years ago and found it to be a lovely little enclave within the Blue Ridge Mountains. I believe it is. So, obviously I was disturbed and upset to see a lot of the devastation, particularly in the arts district area that's just adjacent to the river in town, because there you drive through or walk through and it looks like Sarajevo or something. It's bad. I also toured around some of the more rural areas in the vicinity of Asheville and the fact that this hurricane impacted an area that is unaccustomed to such major storm events – it contrasts with, say, Florida, which does have more of an infrastructure built-up to deal with hurricanes and utilize their hurricane preparedness. That was one of the reasons why this Hurricane Helene is having such a major impact. They don't spend a lot of consternation, and questions, and debate around the efficacy or lack thereof of the federal government's response. So, I wanted to kind of remove myself, extricate myself from the social media chatter and go talk to some real people on the ground here. One observation that I did want to just relay is that even among the people who have firsthand experience with the disaster relief efforts, on the ground in Asheville who are or directly impacted, just in the in the conversations I've had thus far, you can discern a real partisan differentiation between how people interpret those federal relief efforts. So, just to spell out a little more clearly, what I'm getting at, I went to an early voting site yesterday in Nashville and spoke to people who were clearly more Democratic leaning. I put on the question of these allegations that the federal government has been inept and even perhaps that there's been some malice behind resources allegedly being withheld from North Carolina and other states in the region that have been most severely affected by Hurricane Helene, is there any truth to that? Does that comport with your experiences in the people who've been more Democratic-leaning? It's not hard to tell because we're out of early voting sites, so people are fairly forthcoming with their preferences, they're the most eager to defend the federal government's response because they've kind of politically polarized around the issue. If they did concede that there have been problems with the federal government's response or that the federal government has been inept, they would construe that as validating the critiques coming from Trump and the Republicans.
Trump actually happened to be here in Asheville yesterday. I attempted to attend his press availability event as media, but sadly I was denied. I don't know what the issue is, but I get denied from every Trump campaign event when I seek to attend as media. So, if anybody out there is listening and can help me resolve this mysterious problem, I'd be certainly grateful. I don't want to necessarily draw too grandiose conclusions from why this is, but I'm just reporting to you as a fact I can't manage to get accepted to attend as press any Trump campaign events. Why that is, I don't know. But Trump was here yesterday so, yesterday I talked to one older couple who were clearly Democratic-leaning. They were complaining about how Trump had caused traffic jams and they were just objecting to his appearance at all because it imposed logistical complications on the region and those complications are already quite severe because of the effects of the storm. They were incredibly adamant that there's been no real problem with the hurricane response. I even put to them, “Look, it wouldn't surprise me at all if there's been incompetence in the federal government's response to this or in FEMA's response because when is there not been?” I mean, I remember covering Hurricane Harvey in 2017, in the first year of the Trump administration, when an enormously devastating hurricane hit the Houston area in Texas and there were complaints about FEMA's responsiveness then, and they got even more extreme during Hurricane Maria, if people recall, that hit Puerto Rico, where the richest people were without power for I forget exactly how long, but weeks at minimum and there were tons of criticism. So, it doesn't really matter what administration is in power, at least as far as I've been able to ascertain over the years. FEMA's always going to have issues, especially when you have consecutive hurricanes in a particularly active season. So, I would put to these more Democratic-leaning individuals, you know, it wouldn't be surprising if there are problems with FEMA, but they would just reply that – you know, their instinct was one of, I think, a partisan reflex where they were shooting down the criticisms.
On the other hand, a lady who I spoke to as well, who I happened to snap a photo of with her consent. This is Barbara. She was at the same voting site. There she is: Barbara Freeman.
I had a lovely conversation with her and I asked her a similar set of questions. She theorized to me that there was some political reason why the government – at some undetermined level, could be federal, could be state, she suspected federal, meaning the Biden-Harris administration – had been derelict in providing the Ashville area with the resources required, but especially in the immediate aftermath of the storm's impact. She didn't have a firmly articulable evidentiary basis for this belief. I didn’t expect her to, I mean, these are just ordinary citizens taking in information about the world around them and drawing tentative kinds of inferential conclusions. But she believed that there was some motivation, political malice, really, behind the federal government's response. So, I asked her what would that motivation be. Why would the Biden-Harris administration knowingly and willfully withhold storm relief resources from the state that is a swing state? So, if you're going to get into that kind of base-level calculations, politically speaking, North Carolina is a hugely important state. It's actually a state where it's not inconceivable that Kamala Harris might slightly outperform based on recent polling, in contrast with other states like Pennsylvania that have shifted more noticeably away from her, although, you know, it's all really within the margin of error so it's hard to say with any certainty but what would the political rationale there be for the Biden administration to withhold the resources? I'm open to there being some genuine incompetence or malice but I guess my overall point here is that it's really hard to get a firm grasp on the efficacy or lack thereof of the federal government's response to the storm because people with an election coming up so soon are filtering all the data that they're inputting into their system through the lens of partisan polarization. I think you see a lot of that in terms of the social media chatter around the storm and probably also in the mainstream, quote-unquote, “media” or corporate media whose coverage – I think it's perfectly possible if they had been here – if there was a Republican administration in charge right now, the coverage of the storm's aftereffects or the inadequacies of the governmental response might be much more turbo-charged and condemnatory of the Republican administration. I mean, that's all perfectly possible to me.
Again, I don't claim to have all the answers but there's one other thing I wanted to show you. North Carolina is one of the states now that have very widespread early voting, as I indicated by my having gone to one of the early voting states yesterday and I do want to show something that's of note. Here is the North Carolina state data as of today for early voting.
I'm going to contrast it with the same data from the same date as of 2020. So, Democrats are still slightly leading in terms of the partisan affiliation of early voters. So, the Democrats are at 34.98. This doesn't tell you who necessarily they voted for because a Democrat could theoretically vote for Trump or a Republican could theoretically vote for Harris but North Carolina is one of the states where the partisan affiliation is reported of the early voters. They also have unaffiliated and then minor parties. So, Democrats are slightly ahead. But look at the shifts compared to 2020. If you would, in 2020 on this same very date, Democrats were way ahead. So, there's been a net shift of – I should do the quick arithmetic in my head. It's got to be like a net shift to Republicans of something like 5 to 5.8 points. Somewhere in that range. I was never particularly good at math in school, much less on-the-spot calculations, but just look, there's been a net gain of Republicans by a lot from the early voting now. In 2020, as you may recall, early voting, or mail-in voting, especially, was seen as much more of a democratic way of casting one's vote for whatever dumb reason that was contingent on the political circumstances of that time. Now, it's much more evenly distributed. Here 2020 info:
So, does that indicate that Republicans are making gains overall? It's hard to know. North Carolina was won by Trump, in 2020, despite Democrats having an early lead in the early voting. But I guess I just point this out to say that Republicans are making gains seemingly in a lot of states early, particularly the early-voting states that are considered to be swing states like Nevada and others. Are Republicans now voting in greater numbers in terms of early voting because they're more confident in the security of early voting compared to 2020 when it was seen as more of a statement to vote on Election Day if you're a Republican and Democrats also invested ideologically in the sanctity of mail-in voting, have those partisan dividing lines kind of broken up a bit and it's just now there's less of an explicit kind of partisan connotation to how one chooses to vote. I'm not sure, but it is something to, I guess just preliminary but preliminarily, bear in mind as you analyze some of these voting results.
Again, I'm not somebody who claims I have all the answers about going around observing things like a floating eyeball that just travels around and reports back to you but on the issue of FEMA, depending on who you talk to, the response has been great. If you talk to other people, the response has been terrible and there was some nefarious political intent behind the withholding of needed governmental resources. I mean, it is still pretty crazy to have seen some of the devastation I saw, especially in the more remote rural areas. You could tell why there might have been a delay in getting people what they need in those particular areas. The water services are still kind of busted. I mean, people are told not to drink the water. There are even debates that I've heard about whether people should even shower in the water that's been restored to the water systems. So, it is a big issue. And I do think that people who complain about there being a lack of attention to it, there might be some legitimacy to that. But, hey, I'm only one guy.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Why am I discussing this issue now? Well, I spent a month or more reporting a story about aspects of his now aborted campaign that I think deserve a bit broader attention. You can go to MTracey.net if you want to read the whole thing I'm not going to belabor you with every last detail. It's quite long and intensive.
Here's the point that I wanted to make and dry out and bring more people's attention to. You'll recall that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. starting in October of 2023, withdrew from the Democratic presidential primaries that he initially claimed to be running in and decided to declare that he was running an independent campaign. Lo and behold, perhaps based on the strength of his vaunted surname, or for whatever other reason, a lot of credulous podcasters brought him on and just showered him with all kindness because they were so enamored of his familial credentials, he did become according to a good deal of polling, the most formidable third-party candidate since Ross Perot, in 1992, and Ross Perot in 1992 made a huge electoral impact. There were points in the 1992 campaign in which Ross Perot was actually polling ahead of both Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush. It looked like he could actually win the election outright and there hadn't been anything really close to formidable as third-party candidates in all the years that passed since 1982 until this year when RFK Jr declared its independence and was going around soliciting donations to build a groundbreaking, earth-shattering third-party movement that, according to him, would challenge and dislodge the two-party, quote-unquote “duopoly.” He used that term himself on many occasions. So how did Robert F. Kennedy Jr. seek to get himself on the ballot in all 50 states plus the District of Columbia? Because it's a very Byzantine process. It's almost arduous beyond belief to even get oneself in a position to get on the ballots in all 50 states plus D.C. RFK Jr argued, perhaps with some legitimacy, that he was uniquely positioned to surmount those hurdles and get on all 50 state ballots, plus D.C. It's 51 ballots, actually. One of his strategies was to, in some states, form a new party called the “We the People Party” that was basically just organized around his outsized, adulated persona but, in other states, he went around to existing minor parties and petitioned those minor parties for their presidential nomination. So, if a minor party in a certain state already has ballot access because it has contested previous elections and gathered enough signatures, and gone through the process to get itself on the ballot, then he tried to get them to offer up their nomination for president so that he wouldn't have to go through the rigmarole of the massive effort that it takes to get on certain state ballots as an independent candidate.
When he dropped out of the race in August and endorsed Trump, I think rather melodramatically, one thing that I was curious about and I didn't see much coverage of was what has been the reaction to this turn of events by the minor parties whose nomination he saw and received so, I did something fairly simple when I interviewed a bunch of the heads of these minor parties. Here's an example of what one of them told me. So, this is Jim Rex. He's the founder and one of the leaders of the South Carolina Alliance party. Again, these are minor parties, so you may not have ever even heard of them. They're not electoral juggernauts, but they did have an infrastructure in place that RFK Jr. strenuously sought their nomination for president. So, here's what he told me.
