One of my favorite things the internet does well is bully Ben Shapiro. The jokes about him being unable to make his wife wet are fucking gold. Look, you might say bullying is bad, but I don’t always agree. When you are trying to make some contrarian, bullshit argument for why some 70 year old grandma should have to go get a job, I’m fine with literally everyone bullying you into the ether. Ben Shapiro is another bullshit right-wing millennial white boy that is very impressed with himself. I like that he gets picked on by the internet as a group.
The East Wing of the White House is a good metaphor for American right now. It’s being torn down and torn apart, and it has been for a while. It was frustrating to lay in a hospital bed and watch the Democratic Party implode itself in 2024, and it’s been frustrating as I’ve healed to be sidelined and out of the fight. I’d venture a guess that nobody won more elections in the Lehigh Valley over the last 15 years as a campaign operative than me (there are other good ones), and probably not many won as many as me beyond the Valley’s borders, and I was basically rendered helpless, and forgotten by some. I’m a competitive person, and that plays into the frustration, but the bigger point is that when bad people of all political stripes win elections, people get hurt. Not usually powerful people, but people who can’t afford to get hurt. The shutdowns in Washington and Harrisburg, over genuinely dumb policy positions, are no way to run a society. Ripping health care from tens of millions of people is no way to run a society. Pushing junk public health policy is no way to run a society. But that’s what we’ve got.
So anyway, I joined a federal super pac this week. I’ll say more about it later, but the purpose is to push old fashioned Democratic values, supporting the hard working people who made and make this country great. We’ll take on all enemies, from any political angle, who want to plunge this country into chaos and division.
Last year in Easton, State Representative Bob Freeman beat City Councilwoman Taiba Sultana by such a wide margin that if it were any worse, he’d be winning by numbers on par with Saddam Hussein, Vladimir Putin, and other famous autocratic leaders. For full disclosure, I did work on his campaign, but also, I am not why he won. Bob won by so much because virtually everyone in Easton likes him, and for that matter in the other communities he represents. He’s been effective at legislating, and more importantly he has not one time in his career embarrassed his community. He’s a decent human being in a time when politics lack that.
Sultana’s campaign wasn’t going to be successful, but she probably didn’t help herself making every Easton City Council meeting a referendum on Gaza. Look, neither the State Representative or Easton City Council are for the destruction and death happening in Gaza. It’s a complicated, ugly issue, but they’re not the issue. I guess aiming at the wrong culprit is still her MO though. The Councilwoman wanted to put forward an ordinance protecting undocumented immigrants in Easton. For a variety of reasons, Easton really has no part in enforcing immigration. It’s out of their jurisdiction and they don’t allow their police to really be involved. It’s simply not an issue the Easton City Council can legally do much about.
So instead of the ordinance, the council decided to bring forth Councilman Ruggles’ 2017 resolution supporting the immigrant community in Easton, with additions based on Sultana’s proposal. You know what, I support that. A resolution stating the opinion of the city government, in particular on people being taken into custody without a warrant or any due process, is a good thing. The councilwoman’s proposed additions to the resolution dealt with what should be done with people at the border, which is somewhat of a different question, but even there I’m not saying they couldn’t say that. Of course, once Sultana started squaring off with Councilman Frank Pintabone about the language in the resolution, things went totally off the rails. Pintabone suggested her language watered down the message of the resolution. Then things went nuts:
Pintabone responded by stating the resolution does not offer protection of the federal government even if it calls out issues between the city and federal officials.
Sultana eventually said Pintabone was making such points because “undocumented immigrants cannot vote for you.”
Pintabone described Sultana’s commentary as “great talking points for your next campaign.”
She later said, “you want to make sure you have the vote of all the racists, all the white people.”
Huh? All the white people? all the racists? What in the actual blue hell is that? Yes, there are plenty of white racists in this world. No, not every white person is racist. This is probably more true in Easton than most other places. Easton is a mixed racial community. There are significant White, Black, and Latino populations in the city. There is a history of Asians in the community and particularly a vibrant Lebanese history in the city. Easton’s schools, even in the townships, are pretty well integrated. I know damn well there are some racists in the community. Saying all the white people are racist is insane.
Last I checked, Easton was just over 50% white (in the city, the surrounding townships are whiter). If you think that a group of people that large in your community are sworn racists, why in the hell do you want to represent them? Even better question yet, if you think the majority population in your community are all racists, and you’re the one standing against racism, how do you think you’re actually going to win? I have good friends in the NAACP and other community groups that are like minded, and not one of them would say all the white people in the community are racists. They might say we can do more to fight racism, but they would never make such a blanket statement as this. It’s reckless and it’s dumb politics. It kind of explains why just about 4 out of every 5 voters in the State House race didn’t vote for her. This kind of naked identity based attack is dying a painful death in American politics, and that’s a good thing. Easton deserves better than this.
Just based on his schedule and endorsements, it’s pretty obvious that ancient fossil/dinosaur/cranky old man Bernie Sanders either wants to run for President in 2028 or try to be the king maker for who Democrats nominate for President. Bernie is 84 years old and will be 87 in 2028. He is, in short, older than Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Al Gore, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, and probably a bunch of other national political figures who are very old, or in most cases, long retired. Also, all of them were at least able to win a nomination to run for President, something Sanders failed at twice, and in fact did far worse in his second attempt at. Bernie is a delusional nut, and not just for his archaic left views on policy. People don’t vote for the guy. He’s not as likable as he thinks he is, thanks to the internet. His record of king making? Tulsi Gabbard, John Fetterman, some failed pro-life Mayoral candidate in Omaha, and of course, that lady Shontel Brown blew out in Cleveland (“HELLO SOMEBODY,” Nina Turner!). This guy is a delusional crackpot that Democrats should be trying to stuff back in the school locker that the DNC braintrusts let him out of in 2016. He’s yesterday’s loser.
Here’s the thing though, Bernie doesn’t just have delusions for himself, he creates delusions for others. Take Graham Platner in the Maine Senate race. The latest “white savior” from the far left to run for office is certain he can win a U.S. Senate seat away from Susan Collins. Never mind that he never has won anything, he’s certain he’s the LeBron James of Democratic politics. He’s so certain that he’ll tell you that his past Reddit posts questioning why Black people don’t tip, downplaying sexual assault, and using homophobic slurs don’t matter. You know, he was just trying to get a rise out of people. Now he’s re-shuffling his campaign and making people sign NDA’s so you don’t hear any more about it. He figures people will just forget about it and elect their savior, who is of course, him. For a brief moment yesterday morning he got a poll that showed that primary voters were willing to excuse the early stuff. That’s sick, vile, and disgusting, and I hope is just a matter of Maine voters not knowing enough about it yet. I’m sure we will soon find out that the general electorate is not as forgiving. I guess it was the endorsement from a white supremacist might do it. Or maybe, and just hear me out here for a second, it was having a Nazi tattoo that he got on a drunken night in Croatia when he was 37 will kill his candidacy.
The whole entire premise of his campaign is dumb to begin with though. Sara Gideon didn’t lose to Collins because she was some super moderate. The attack at the end that Collins team ran with was that Gideon wanted to defund police. Of course though, Bernie Sanders, surprisingly Senator Martin Heinrich, and basically all the Democratic Socialist types are sticking up for Graham and saying he’s a great candidate. They think this stuff will go away, or voters just won’t care. Assuming voters in Maine don’t mind that he’s further left than Gideon, who they rejected in 2020, they probably will mind that Platner is a piece of shit human being. Collins and her backers will remind them of it, over and over again. His defense is basically that he was a drunken man child. I’m sure people will be cool with a Neo-Nazi Senator.
This is the kind of judgment Bernie Sanders shows over and over again though. He endorses delusional deadbeats in primaries who run on his populist BS. Here in the 7th District of Pennsylvania, that’s his guy, Bob “Crooksy” Brooks. Crooksy took $55,000 from his mother-in-law and didn’t pay it back He went to court, and lost, then lost his appeal too. His excuse is that it was all just part of a messy divorce. That’s one helluva long divorce- it was basically the entire marriage! Crooksy took the money in 2004, paid none back by 2008 and therefore signed a promissory note to pay the money back, then proceeded to pay back not one dime for ten more years before the lady filed suit against him. A full two more years went by before the case went to court, he still didn’t pay any money back, then he appealed the case on the grounds that the promissory note was no longer valid, so he didn’t need to pay. Seriously. This dude stiffed his mother-in-law and thinks voters in the most swing district are going to trust him as some sort of ridiculous “every man” figure.
Look, if we set aside for a minute that he became the President of the Fire Fighters union by pushing out his predecessor allegedly in dubious ways, or that the guy is a racist, a gun nut and militant religious wacko, and maybe the only statewide union President too lazy to go to Labor Day events, I think most normal voters understand that stiffing your mother-in-law for over 15 years brings up some serious issues in your trustworthiness. Explaining his laissez-faire views on political violence can be hard to get across to voters. Taking money, not paying it back, and then lying about it is much easier. In his delusional mind though, he thinks he’s Congressional material. Ryan Mackenzie will make him the poster-child for elder abuse by the end of this race, fair or not. He’s easily the worst candidate in this field. But he’s lecturing Democrats about supporting working people. Give me a break.
Maybe I’m over thinking it though. Maybe the sign came on the first day of the campaign- the endorsement from Bernie Sanders. The same Bernie Sanders who stood on stage with Tulsi Gabbard and told us she’s great. The same Bernie Sanders who rallied voters for John Fetterman, who now wants to sell out our health care. The same Bernie Sanders defending the guy with the Nazi tattoo in Maine. The same Bernie Sanders who is fine with stiffing your mother-in-law in the Lehigh Valley.
Texas gave 42.46% of it’s votes to Kamala Harris. California gave Trump 38.3% of their votes. North Carolina gave Harris 47.1% of their votes. Maryland gave Trump 34.08% of the vote. Indiana gave Harris 39.7% of it’s votes. Illinois gave Trump 43.47% of the vote in 2024. I could go on.
I picked these states specifically for a reason, but I could have picked almost any state. These are all states being mentioned as either currently gerrymandering their Congressional map or potentially. To be clear, their current Congressional maps we contested 2024 under do not match the electoral results of their state by any stretch of the imagination, and all are proposing to make it much worse. Think about it this way, at least a third of the people you would see walking down the street today in those states voted for the person who lost the election in their state. Their lucky if a fifth of their state’s Congressional delegation is in their party, and probably none of their Senators are. Congress has been totally dysfunctional since at least 2010, but the seeds of that started much earlier. Now there’s a decent argument that the entire institution is undemocratic, that it represses the voting rights of our people. The Presidency was designed to not be directly elected by the public. We stopped doing that with Congress long ago. We hold direct elections for Congress, they’re just patently unfair and misrepresentative of the public. The legitimacy is gone now. We knew the Senate was a farce. Now the House is too.
The only way to fix this, and I mean the only way, is to scrap our current district based system. Apportion the Senate based on population, there is no way California should live in a tyranny of Wyoming, and there’s no way Texas should have to with Vermont either. This is beyond stupid, and the concern of small states not being able to stop larger states is basically null and void if we’re going to be a hyper polarized country. Same in the House though. Why are we arguing over lines when the elections aren’t producing representative bodies anyway? Just apportion each state a number of seats based on population, and let them popularly elect them. Make some rules, so the whole Democratic ticket in Pennsylvania isn’t Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, but put everyone on a ballot and let people vote. You’d start seeing concerns besides partisanship show back up. If Pennsylvania votes 52%-46% for Democrats in 2026, then the result should be 9-8 Democrats. There shouldn’t be a way for a state legislature to partisanly make it 12-5 if the voters are giving two out of every five, or more votes to each party. This is madness.
As long as you have line drawing, you will have this partisan gamesmanship to steal a few more seats. You can’t end it. So just end it. Vote like a parliamentary system and get a Congress that represents the voters. Then we can talk about ending all the procedural garbage the nerds on Capitol Hill created to make sure nothing gets done.
Venezuela and Bolivia are actively rejecting Marxist ideology as their nations fail. The Cuban government is turning to foreign capitalists to solve their liquidity crisis, because Socialism has failed there. Socialism is collapsing across our hemisphere. Yet, Democratic Socialism is finding at least empathizers, if not outright sympathizers, all over the Democratic Party.
Zohran Mamdani can literally take pictures with unindicted co-conspirators in an infamous terror attack in New York City, refuse to call for Hamas to end, and say and do any number of outrageous things and there are Democrats backing him anyway, Democrats he has attacked. The Shapiro Administration and Chris DeLuzio are falling all over themselves to help a guy who stiffed his mother-in-law get to Congress from here in the Lehigh Valley. Graham Platner in Maine has damn Nazi tattoos and there are people defending him, saying “he was only 37,” and “he didn’t know what he got tattooed on himself,” as though that sounds better? Martin Heinrich, a ****ing U.S. Senator from New Mexico, literally still says he’s a good candidate. In fact, he goes further, to say he “obviously” doesn’t like this, but the real lesson is “stay off Reddit.” You cannot make this shit up.
You know, when Bernie started running for President as an already old man, it was stupid and all, but there were some half baked policies being discusses. “Medicare 4 All,” “Defund the Police,” and “Green New Deal” were all somewhere between not fully thought out plans (that could have been finished plans) and poorly thought up, stupid ideas that took actual problems and created new problems from them, but there was policy here. We are now at the point where “globalize the Intifada” and “you have to accept some Nazis to win back men” are actual arguments of the American left. I guess we could see this coming when “tough guy from Braddock” got a guy elected in 2022 who was in no way ready to serve in the U.S. Senate for Pennsylvania, but one would have thought that Fetterman’s utter and complete failure as a human being, let alone as a Senator, would have stopped that. It’s bad enough that he won’t fight for people’s health care, the guy has literally turned into an internet troll against the people who supported him in 2022 over Israel, an issue where I may agree with him more than not, but still find his cavalier, childish behavior disgusting.But we’re not just considering doing that again- we’re doing it on steroids.
Kamala Harris did not lose in 2024 because she moved too far right. That might make you sleep better at night, you might even be able to twist some parts of the story to make that seem plausible. Trump hasn’t gone up in every one of his three elections though, in raw votes and percentage, because the Democrats moved right. Millions of Biden voters, objectively considered the most moderate Democratic nominee in the post-Obama era, didn’t sit out the 2024 Election because the Democrats moved right. It’s a nice story that “Dearborn cost Harris Michigan,” but they voted against Biden in the primary and moved the numbers zero, they voted against Whitmer in 2022 and she won easily. Sure, in very blue enclaves it doesn’t matter if you nominate Zohran Mamdani, he’ll probably win. And then you can hope that he is able to enact some of the more popular policy stuff on housing and buses, and maybe all the “Intifada” talk goes away. At best, it’s a net neutral in competitive Congressional Districts, and my guess is it is much worse in the five or so neighboring seats to the city that might decide who wins the House. Of course, that message gets ignored. So much of the Democratic Party has decided to believe the myth that Dem-Socialist Populism is the only way to turn out the youth, who are the only way to win an election. They’re not only wrong, they’re exactly wrong.
Every vote Democrats have gained in the Trump era has come from the exact opposite of this populist brain rot. Kamala Harris became the first Democrat in my lifetime to carry college educated white men. Democratic midterm success in 2018, and to a large extent in 2022 was built off of college educated white voters and middle class Black and Latino voters. Joe Biden rode increased Black voter turnout and gains with college educated white voters to the most votes in American history. Bernie Sanders actually did worse the second time he tried to run for President. I get it, the guy has a following, he can get a crowd and a donor off the internet for you. What he can’t do is win you an election outside of a deep blue district. If you watched Sara Gideon get savaged in the closing days of the 2020 Maine Senate race with attacks that she supported “defunding the police,” and you think the answer to that is to nominate the guy with the Nazi tattoo who wants to take the party in a left populist direction, you’re a lunatic. It’s stupid, it’s not backed up in data, and it’s not backed up in facts. If you want to move on from “centering identity politics,” because “Hillary and Kamala lost,” I get that there’s a strategic argument to be had about what we talk about and how, but that’s very different from selling out the people who might vote for us for people who are loons and wackos, won’t vote for us, and will make us look even crazier than we already do. We’ve spent a decade trying to shame Republican supposed moderates into abandoning Trump, and they’ve spent a decade calling us hypocrites. In these people, we actually might prove them right.
I try to let the early results guide me when I do these rankings. We’re seven weeks in, can the top four teams be flukes? No, but if you put a gun to my head I’d say Philadelphia, Buffalo, Kansas City, the Rams, and Detroit are better. I’m not sure how San Francisco keeps winning games with their injured list, but they do. Now, does me saying I think the best teams aren’t the top teams yet mean that I don’t believe in my current top teams? No, there are good things happening with those teams. I’m just not ready to say that Bo Nix and Drake Maye are him yet. I’m sorry, I’m not sold that a Packers defense that gave up 40 to Dallas (basically double what Philly did without Carter) can win a title with Jordan Love having to outshoot that. I’m also not writing off Tampa just because they lost, but the injuries they suffered make me wonder. There’s a lot of things that don’t quite seem right yet here, but seven games is a decent sample size now. Frankly, some teams move up simply by not playing, because they don’t lose, and other teams get the benefit of the doubt because they made changes at QB or coach, and I at least believe some of what I’m seeing. We’re not yet at the point where some teams play out the string. In a few weeks we will be. I also think that as we see how the different division races are shaking out, we’ll see some teams who don’t have incredible records (think Cincinnati, if Flacco has a few more games like Thursday in him) rise up simply because they have a chance. For now though, this is where we are.
It wasn’t that long ago that Lehigh County was considered the more “red” county in the Lehigh Valley. It gave us a fairly consistent line of powerful Republicans at the federal and state level, such as Pat Toomey, Charlie Dent, and Pat Browne- or more succinctly, not MAGA. The GOP hasn’t won the County Executive’s post since 2005 (or right after George W. Bush was re-elected. The once Republican suburbs became the key for Susan Wild’s six year run. Nick Miller and Lisa Boscola represent the county in two of the state senate seats. The Republican Party is virtually obsolete in Allentown and Bethlehem, something that wasn’t true when I was growing up. In short, they’re not good at this.
It almost wasn’t that way in 2021. Phil Armstrong had a difficult re-election campaign. In 2017, he won by about 5% over a well funded and fairly normal Brad Osborne with 25,085 votes. In 2021, turnout went considerably up in the county by comparison (vote by mail) to 74,108 votes cast. Maria McLaughlin carried the county for Supreme Court with 37,002 votes and Lori Dumas carried it for Commonwealth Court with 34,303 votes. Timika Lane got more votes than Dumas (34,719) lost the county to Megan Sullivan (who actually got the most votes of all judicial candidates), and Democrats lost two of the three Court of Common Pleas seats (Tom Caffrey, Tom Capehart), with Zac Cohen carrying the third seat by 5 votes over David Ritter (trust me, I remember it well). As for Armstrong, well, he actually conceded defeat at one point in the night, which is only funny because he actually thought he was going to need to in 2017 and I kept telling him he was fine. Armstrong got 51.8% (36,873) to Glenn Eckhart’s 48.1% (34,255), a fairly close race for running against a guy who lost his seat as Controller. Republicans actually won 3 of the 5 commissioner districts as well, marking what was probably their best year in the county in years.
In 2023, the Democrats beat the brakes off of the Republicans in Lehigh County. Dan McCaffrey won the county by over 14% with 42,333 votes (57.03%). Jill Beck and Timika Lane carried the Superior Court race in the county comfortably, and Maria Battista is running again. Matt Wolf won the Commonwealth Court race by just under 8,000 votes, a blowout (55.2% to 44.6%). Democrats won all four Commissioner seats, and by a lot, with Jon Irons getting fourth and still beating the top Republican candidate by over 3,000 votes. The only contested row office race was Coroner, and Dan Buglio won by over 13%. It was, to be blunt, an ass kicking.
So what was the difference? In 2021, turnout was 74,108, or 30.9% of voters. In 2023, turnout was 75,127, or 31.1%. Yes, that’s slightly more, but it is not the kind of jump that should explain that kind of flip. Taking a good look at the current numbers for 2025, Lehigh County has 76,320 likely voters (voters in 2 of the last 4 county elections plus voters who have been mailed a ballot). Democrats hold a pretty substantial advantage in registration among these voters, with 37,661 to 31,823 for the Republicans, and another 6,836 who either independent, Green, or Libertarian. Republicans would need to win nearly all of the independent voters (literally over 90%) or cut into the Democrats ranks to win the race. On paper, Roger Maclean might not be an awful candidate to try that. He’s raised a paltry sum of money compared to Josh Siegel though, who is skillfully pointing out that Maclean isn’t up to the job. Also, his party is trying to use Charlie Kirk to inspire turnout. That’s not going to win over non-Republican voters to their cause.
It’s important to start out understanding Lehigh County this way- it’s similar to Northampton County, but the GOP has not won an Executive race there in two decades, they haven’t carried the county for President at all in that time period, they haven’t won the county for the Congressional candidate on their ticket since Charlie Dent left, and I guess basically I’m telling you that even their good years, they are not likely to win. The big reason is still Allentown, but they have steadily made gains in Allentown during the Trump era for President, and that still hasn’t changed the results because they’re losing voters in the suburbs, particularly the highest educated neighborhoods. But why did they get close in 2021? What was the difference? The answer can be found in voters who voted in 2021, but not in 2023 and have not yet received a ballot. The Republicans hold a roughly 2,600 voter advantage among these people. This Republican leaning group of voters came out and made it close in 2021, but they didn’t show up at all in 2023.
If turnout is somewhere between 2021’s and the 76,320 likely voters I have currently in the screen, there’s not much chance Maclean does all that well against Siegel. His whole campaign so far is “that liberal kid grew up in New Jersey!” and the days of that kind of crap exciting people are long over. Much like in Northampton County, the GOP’s best chance of changing their recent luck begins when *more* voters show up than are expected. In both counties, 2021 voters who didn’t vote in 2023 and haven’t requested a ballot have to come out for them, and maybe even some mid-term voters from their party too. Much like in Northampton County, I don’t think they have the guy to do it. The one caveat I will say here though is that this is basically an analysis of the Executive race, as Lehigh has a recent history of voting very different in their Court of Common Pleas races. Mulqueen may pull out a win without the electorate moving at all, and almost certainly will if turnout goes high.
You know, if I waited a day, I’d only have to really rank two teams. Instead, I know who #4-30 are going to be, and their order is pretty much preordained. After Game 7 of the ALCS is done, #3 will be locked in for the year. We’ve almost reached the end of the weekly, in-season rankings. These should be no surprise. One team has won the pennant, and they are #1. Two teams are alive, they’re #’s 2 and 3. From there, it’s all locked.
I got a text last night- “Josh IS endorsing Crooksy!!! Unbelievable.”
I won’t reveal the source of the text, but I guess if that’s the street word, it’s only like the twelfth time it’s been out there. If Crooksy thinks he has the Governor’s endorsement, by the 37th time or so he believes it, it has to be true.
If this is who the Governor wants, that’s nice, he won’t have a vote. My sense is he won’t spend on the guy’s behalf either, so who cares? We will see what the voters think of Crooksy’s record of backstabbing his way to the top of his union and deceiving his own family.
Apocalypse Vibes 