Archive: Year: 2020

Last Tuesday night, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went on the live-videogaming site Twitch to play “Among Us” and encourage watchers to vote. At one point, 435,000 Twitch users were watching her live, and the video of her playing against fellow Rep. Ilhan Omar along with several Twitch VIPs, had more than 4.5 million views as of late Wednesday. To put those numbers in context, ranked against regular Twitch celebrities, AOC would be in the top twenty for peak views.Polygon, a Vox Media site that covers online gaming, called Ocasio-Cortez’s stunt “the future of politics.” “This is what is possible when a modern, tech-savvy politician attracts not just supporters, but fandom,” Polygon senior editor Patricia Hernandez wrote. Unlike old-fashioned cults of personality,...

If President Trump declares himself the winner of the 2020 election before the votes are all counted, we are heading for deep trouble. According to a recent poll done by Data for Progress and the Justice Collaborative Institute, 77% of likely Republican voters say they would trust Trump’s word if he did so (46% “a lot”; 31% “a little”). Similarly, 70% said they would trust Fox News (36% “a lot”; 34% “a little) if it made that call. No other major media outlets exhibit the same level of trust from likely Republican voters.While an optimist could read this survey the opposite way — only 46% of likely Republican voters said they trusted Trump’s word “a lot” — it should be clear that history hinges...

If past history is any guide, Senator Kamala Harris is going to be Joe Biden’s pick as his vice presidential running mate. And by past history, I mean, how often her Wikipedia page has been edited in the last SIX weeks.Um, but if you only look at the last three weeks of edits, it’s going to be former Obama national security advisor Susan Rice.Or, if you want to assume only the latest edits are the tell-tale signs, the winner of the VP sweepstakes might be Sen. Tammy Duckworth.Yes, it’s time for the quadrennial guessing game known as “Who will be VP?” and this year, while most of the rituals of the presidential nominating process have been demolished by the pandemic,...