Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday! We are eight days from the midterm elections and hells-a-poppin’. Your fully caffeinated roundup includes: why the New York Times buried our own elections under Brazil’s, where the president’s former lawyer, now a Supreme Court justice, granted the president’s campaign two hours of overtime; six pollsters quietly backing away from their own polls; and the C&C Espresso model, which starts Democrats with ten shots and deducts one for every crisis until there’s nothing left in the cup.
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Sometimes the most important news is what the corporate media isn’t covering. The “critical” midterm elections are now eight days away. But this morning, the New York Times’ website was dominated —a full quarter of the top of the page— by a suite of election news and interactive graphics about Brazil’s elections. As its top entry in an extended list, the Grey Lady reported, “Lula Defeats Bolsonaro for Brazil Presidency, in Blow to Latin America’s Right.”
I get it; the New York Times is feeling fizzy on hopium because this must seem like some kind of commie turnaround. Progressives have been mourning a long series of left-wing losses in Central and South America, and a win for “Brazil’s progressive president” and “most influential statesman” must be welcome news for them, even though it’s just one (albeit large) country, and even though on every conservative platform the big election news from Brazil is about the last-minute Supreme Court interference there, which may have swung the election for the leftist leader.
As ever, corporate media is flocking together. Here’s the morning headline from the Washington Post, with the same over-the-top, gushing enthusiasm— and a nearly identical headline:
But at least the WaPo, at the tail of its subheadline, referenced the controversy when it admitted that “Bolsonaro called for the election to be annulled.” Late last night, candidate Flávio Bolsonaro told reporters in Brasília, “It is impossible to recognize the election results given the circumstances under which things unfolded. We’re not here to play games.” (And I don’t think he meant the World Cup.)
This story is more convoluted than a Mexican telenovela. The conservative candidate, Flávio Bolsonaro, is the son of former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, who was himself defeated in a sketchy election in 2022 and then tossed in jail by his dwarf-like successor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. For his part, da Silva is the incumbent, has served something like four terms now, and plays a kooky Latin American communist on TV but has a thick capitalist streak when it comes to his personal finances.
It is inarguable that da Silva looks just like a sinister garden gnome who lost his hat. Corporate media lovingly calls him “Lula.” Which is a girl’s name, but never mind.
But be cautious; we are just entering the hot-takes phase. The elections finished mere hours ago. There is no reason to think anyone yet has reliable or meaningful information from Brazil about yesterday’s election— except, of course, we know that a country of 214 million people managed to finish counting its votes overnight. Unlike California. (What are you doing, California?)
The vacuum of reportable information means there’s not much point yet in analyzing anything. This is an unassailable fact that obviously did not stop the Times and the Washington Post from drawing massive political conclusions. “The result,” the WaPo article confidently announced, “showed voters in Brazil, Latin America’s largest democracy, declining to join the region’s marked rightward shift in which a wave of conservative candidates won office and built alliances with Trump.”
A Lula victory was not widely expected. One Bloomberg headline yesterday used the word “improbable,” which is the closest that magazine will ever get to calling a leftist election fake.
As near as anybody can figure out, three minutes before polls closed at 5 pm Brazil time —while Bolsonaro was leading— a Supreme Court judge (who is reportedly Lula’s former personal lawyer) issued an order keeping the polls open because of “transportation issues,” which could have described a Waymo getting stuck in a puddle somewhere. Some local media reports described detailed problems with São Paulo buses that either failed to pick up voters or did not show up in sufficient numbers. Who knows. Unhelpfully, late in the afternoon (while he was losing), Lula babbled, “We will not allow robbery, banditry and bandit mayors.”
Bandit mayors? Nobody’s sure exactly what he meant. It’s something he imagined about a local mayor suppressing buses in one city someplace.
But the apparent result of the Supreme Court’s order was —and this is far from clear— that, with inconsistent notice of the order in that critical three minutes, Bolsonaro districts closed, while Lula districts stayed open for two more hours, and a communist rabbit popped out of the gnome’s hat. Abracadabra!
Regardless of what happened on the ground, nothing says Election Integrity like the previous personal lawyer of the losing candidate suddenly changing the election rules at the last minute.
📉 In other words, welcome back to our dear old friend: election-day chaos. Yesterday’s headline from the South China Morning Post:
Obviously, Bolsonaro supporters smell a giant rat that looks like a magical lawn ornament. And who can blame them? Sources variously reported things like: Brazil’s Supreme Court had never issued such an order before; Brazil has a special Elections Court with sole jurisdiction and the Supreme Court never should have been involved; and of course, everyone is jumping up and down and pointing at the direct personal relationship between President Lula and the Supreme Court judge who issued the order. Who, it should be added, Lula appointed.
This is all perfectly fascinating. It rhymes with our own 2020 election. As I said, it would make a gripping telenovela. Next week: the generalissimo takes his revenge! But we have our own elections in eight days, lots and lots of them, with what they confidently assure us (as always) are the highest stakes in human history.
Yet the Times devoted most of the viewable area on its home page to Brazil’s fake election story. Not ours. Why?
📉 Glance back at the screenshot of the multi-story treatment the Times lavished on this morning’s Brazil election story. You should immediately notice that not one of its many articles leads with the stolen election chaos. (You have to dig into the stories to find any reference to that somewhat important fact.) Times readers —who must be the most uninformed group in the world— will confidently assume everything went swimmingly and wonder why the younger Bolsonaro stubbornly refuses to concede.
As for me, I am unsurprised. This is not news. Lula got into office in a sketchy election, and then threw the elder Bolsonaro into prison in a purge just like the Democrats tried to do here. Lula has been in office —in control of the election infrastructure— for four years. Why anyone expected this year to be different is beyond my ability to understand.
If anything, Brazil’s conservatives crushed it by getting so close the communists had to whip the old “extend the elections” out of the bag of tricks at the last minute. Now they must sit down for dinner and begin eating fallout stew. I expect Secretary of State Marco Rubio will have a lot to say about all this, once the facts are better understood.
Setting all those unknowables aside, there remains a solid media malpractice story. The Times is so high on its Brazilian “blue wave” narrative that it is trying to shrink the “stolen election” story down into a “sore loser” story. The media shenanigans are a good story, but there’s a better one, one closer to home.
The real story is why The Times is suddenly so fascinated with talking about other countries’ elections.
📉 Obviously, the Times isn’t saying why it prefers talking about Brazil’s elections and not our own. But we can draw some safe assumptions. And the biggest one is that, if the Democrat Blue Wave were playing out the way the Times has been predicting since last fall, we can assume we’d be hearing all about that.
The polling stories that, until recently, decorated the Times’ home page like Target holiday accessories are now in a funk and a depression, mired in a gloomy Eeyore moment. On the entire Times home page, only a single sidebar story included the word “poll.” Eight days out! And even that was an op-ed titled, “Opinion — Is a Blue Wave Coming? 6 Pollsters and Pundits Offer Their Best Guesses.”
Best guesses! My goodness! Where did the Democrats’ confidence go? It’s a bad sign when the headline doesn’t ask how big the wave will be, but rather asks, “is a blue wave coming?” To be fair, all six pundits predicted a Democrat pickup of either the House or Senate. But not fulsomely. New Republic staff writer Perry Bacon offered, “I’ll go with the heart and predict a solid Democratic win — but not an epic blowout.”
Ruh roh.
When asked to opine about the current state of the polls, which still claim a Blue Tsunami, the six got even more cautious. “What polls offer is perspective, not prophecy. They have taken us as far as they can,” Equis Research founder Carlos Odio carefully explained. “I believe the polls are broadly correct,” election newsletter author Charlotte Swasey hedged, but added, “I’m expecting the polls to be slightly too optimistic for Democrats.”
“I could absolutely see the polls being wrong again,” mega-forecaster Nate Silver conceded outright, “especially in the Midwest, where they have overestimated Democrats in the past.” That is one way of putting it.
Given the dramatic implosion of three or even four fake polling firms (depending on how you define ‘fake’) within the last 60 days, it is perhaps unsurprising that the Times and its op-editors were not offering full-throated endorsements. (If you missed those stories, check the last couple C&C editions.)
📉 Now for the Coffee & Covid forecast. The truth is that nobody knows. Weekend scrollers will have seen even reliable conservative influencers express concern and, at times, pessimism. Democrats almost always lead in early voting, and this is a midterm election, after all. Concern and pessimism are unwarranted at this point.
I offer you a much simpler model. We’ll call it Espresso. In the Espresso model, Democrats start with a caffeinated ten-point advantage, since the out-of-power party consistently —but not always— picks up at least one chamber in midterm elections. The reason is not occult. Unlike presidential cycles, midterms are low-turnout elections, which gives angry partisans a major advantage. That’s it.
So Espresso begins as follows: Democrats +10 shots of Brazilian coffee, GOP 0.
Now we begin deducting shots of espresso due to the Democrat polycrisis. We won’t even try to weigh the issues. We’ll just lop one shotglass off for each problem.
Democrats, -1 shot: the money disadvantage. ActBlue is under criminal scrutiny. USAID is gone. Mega-fundraiser Southern Poverty Law Center is under indictment. The GOP has eight times DNC’s cash on hand. Money isn’t everything, but it obviously counts.
Democrats, -1 shot: the socialist infection. DSA candidates are proving just as toxic as everyone thought they would. In Michigan, for example, Democrats are even defecting from the Muslim Brotherhood candidate Abdul Mohammed El-Sayed and some —the “Democrats for Rogers”— are even voting for the Republican’s senatorial candidate, Mike Rogers. Headline from Deadline Detroit, October 18th:
Democrats, -1 shot: Trump’s GOTV strategy. The GOP is doing everything it can to treat this like a presidential cycle. It held a midterm convention (a GOP first). Trump is holding a month of daily rallies. Media has sneered that the numbers of MAGA voters are too small to make a difference, but this underestimates the power of motivated groups in low-turnout scenarios.
Democrats, -1 shot: Despite Democrats’ best efforts with their black pill brigades, early signs of depressed Republican turnout are not appearing. Republicans have overtaken Democrats in Texas and are closing fast in Florida. (Note: Texas doesn’t track party registrations, so these are modeled estimates. But still.)
In Florida, Democrats led by +54,739 (including mailed ballots) as of Thursday, but that lead shrank to around 6,000 as of this morning. Republicans are surging in in-person voting. WLT Report, four days ago:
Democrats, -1 shot: Their brain-damaged “brand.” The Democrats’ brand problem is so bad that its candidates have been running against their own party. That is an understandable self-preservation instinct, but it ironically makes the branding problem even worse. Headline from Axios, September 25:
It hasn’t gotten any better since late September.
Democrats, -1 shot: the polling implosion. Democrats’ top strategy is polling, but thanks to an untreatable rash of fake polling company stories, the entire strategy has been rendered useless, to the point that major pollsters who make their living are now saying they ‘could absolutely see the polls being wrong again.’
I could continue, but let’s not beat a dead donkey. Quickly, as a few more examples, additional shots were deducted as follows:
-1 for the Republican redistricting advantage.
-1 for mass deportations.
-1 for the election crimes enforcement surge.
-1 for the federal poll watchers dispatched to problematic districts.
-1 for GOP/DOJ proactive lawfare, such as in California and Alaska.
Altogether, the C&C Espresso model deducted -11 shots from Democrats in total, leaving them at negative one compared to the GOP baseline. Not espresso. Decaf.
Here’s the thing: none of the polycrisis factors included in the Espresso model are a normal part of anyone else’s midterm analysis. This is not a “normal” midterm election. We are off the map and the in-car GPS is on the fritz.
Predictions might be social media catnip, but they aren’t actually predicting anything. (Including, for the record, mine.)
Eight days out, the game remains anyone’s to win. It all depends on sustained Republican turnout. GO VOTE. Encourage your friends and relatives to get to the polling booth. Give them a voting guide. Offer to drive. Bake them fancy cupcakes with too much icing. Use your masculine or feminine wiles, as appropriate. Vote early. Vote often.
We have this. Let’s roll.
Have a magnificent Monday! Come back here tomorrow morning, when we’ll cover the badly ignored story of the dramatic events in Haiti. You won’t want to miss it. Plus even more essential news and caffeinated commentary.
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Then Jesus again spoke to them, saying, “I am the Light of the world; he who follows Me will not walk in the darkness, but will have the Light of life.”
— John 8:12 NAS95
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As everyone knows, you can vote Communists in. Voting them out is virtually impossible.