I’m a GI doctor — if you’re going to drink alcohol, this is a surprisingly healthy choice

As Election Day draws near, Kamala Harris’ message has shifted from conventional political issues to focusing on Donald Trump’s authoritarianism. Former President Donald Trump once fomented an insurrection against the US government, in a bid to block the peaceful transfer of power. He has described his political opponents as an “enemy from within” that should be jailed — or else “handled” by the US military. His own former White House chief of staff says Trump praises Hitler in private and would like to establish a fascist dictatorship. And he has dehumanized immigrant communities, and vowed to deport them by the millions (including many whom are legal US residents).  Meanwhile, Trump’s allies and running mate have touted plans to purge much of the civil service of disloyal elements, bend federal law enforcement to his will, and nullify any court decisions that get in their way. In recent weeks, Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign has tried to alert undecided voters to these facts. The Democratic nominee has played clips of Trump’s most authoritarian remarks at her rallies, called him a fascist on national TV, and released an ad focused exclusively on the threat he poses to liberal democracy. On Tuesday, she will deliver a closing speech at the site of Trump’s January 6, 2021, rally. All this represents a departure for Harris, who had focused more on conventional political issues — such as abortion and taxation — earlier in the campaign. Many Democrats believe her new message is a mistake — and they’re plausibly right.  To be sure, their case is counterintuitive: Common sense dictates that, when running against a Hitler-admiring authoritarian, it’s wise to emphasize that your opponent is a Hitler-admiring authoritarian.  But judging by the available data, swing voters are largely unmoved by such assertions, however objectively true and important they may be. Specifically, recent research by political scientists and pollsters suggest that undecided voters are less responsive to negative messages about Trump’s authoritarianism than positive ones about Harris’s economic agenda. This shouldn’t be entirely surprising. In the wake of historic inflation, the threat of higher household costs is far more tangible to ordinary Americans than that of authoritarianism. According to Gallup’s polling, the economy is the electorate’s top issue this year.  This said, Harris’s closing argument remains defensible — but only if her warnings about Trump’s authoritarianism complement her economic message, rather than overshadowing it. The case against the case against Trump’s fascism The theory for why Harris should focus on bread-and-butter issues instead of Trump’s autocratic ambitions is simple: Nine years after Trump launched his first presidential campaign, voters already know what they think about him. And if undecided voters still aren’t convinced that Trump is an authoritarian menace, they probably can’t be persuaded on that point. After all, Trump-curious voters remember Democrats issuing apocalyptic warnings in 2016, yet did not personally suffer nor witness any political repression during his time in office. To the contrary, they tend to recall life under Trump as utterly normal — at least, before the pandemic for which, in their view, he had little responsibility.  For such voters, this theory goes, claims about Trump’s “fascism” just sound like more of the overheated invective that have made our politics so toxic and divisive. They simply aren’t interested in debates over Trump’s character — what they care about are the election’s implications for their own finances. On the other hand, these Americans know relatively little about Harris or her economic plans. And they don’t know much about the downsides of Trump’s policy agenda, which command less attention from cable news networks than his incendiary rhetoric and personal scandals.  Therefore, the way to maximize Harris’s support is to focus the public’s attention on how she would materially help ordinary Americans — and how Trump would materially harm them.  This theory is buttressed by recent political science research, messaging testing, and survey data.  Earlier this year, the political scientists David Broockman and Joshua Kalla conducted an experiment to determine the Harris campaign’s most effective message. They recruited 100,000 survey respondents — a far larger sample than a typical poll — and randomly assigned them to watch one of 76 campaign advertisements of their own invention. Then, they asked the respondents how they would vote. Broockman and Kalla found that Harris did best when voters were exposed to messages concerning pocketbook issues. In fact, the five highest-performing ads in their test focused on Harris’s support for Social Security, Medicare, Covid-19 relief spending, a minimum wage hike, and reducing the cost-of-living, respectively. By contrast, an attack ad centered on Trump’s threat to democracy was the 27th most effective message.  These results might surprise politically engaged readers: If Trump’s authoritarianism is old news, how could the Democratic Party’s support for Social Security not be the same?  Yet in a survey taken by Broockman and Kalla earlier this year, half of respondents did not know Harris opposes cutting Social Security benefits, while a third were unaware she wants to raise taxes on the rich and corporations.  The largest super PAC aiding Harris’s candidacy, Future Forward, has replicated Broockman and Kalla’s basic finding. According to an email obtained by the New York Times, the PAC’s message tests have found that “purely negative attacks on Trump’s character are less effective than contrast messages that include positive details about Kamala Harris’s plans to address the needs of everyday Americans.” Survey experiments conducted last week by the Democratic data firm Blue Rose Research — in partnership with the Campaign For a Family Friendly Economy PAC — yielded the same conclusion. In their tests, Blue Rose asked respondents how they intended to vote, then showed them one of 30 Democratic messages, and asked them about their voting intentions a second time. The highest-performing message, which produced a 1.2 percentage point increase in Harris’s support after voters were exposed to it, went like this: This election is a choice between two different visions for America. Harris will take on price gouging to bring down grocery prices and lower the cost of health insurance. Trump wants to cut taxes for the wealthy. Harris wants to cut taxes for the middle class. You may not always agree with her but she will lift up the middle class and be a President for all Americans. By contrast, one of the worst performing messages — which increased Harris’s support by only 0.3 percent — was as follows: Trump’s own White House Chief of Staff, a former 4-star General, said in an interview on October 22nd that he agreed with many of Trump’s policies but still does not want him to become President again. The General said quote “he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.” Notably, on this point, Democratic super PACs and Democratic socialists see eye to eye: The Center for Working-Class Politics, a think-tank founded by socialists, partnered with the market research firm YouGov to run different messages by Pennsylvania voters in late September and early October. They found that an economically focused, populist narrative was the most popular message, while a narrative emphasizing Trump’s threat to democracy was the least popular.  Notably, spotlighting Trump’s authoritarianism performed especially poorly with blue-collar workers, and best with educated professionals (though even the latter group preferred the populist narrative). That’s potentially significant, since the key Rust Belt battlegrounds — Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — are all less college-educated than the nation as a whole.  The case for Harris’s closing message Nevertheless, there is still a reasonable case for Harris’s current strategy.  It case begins with the observation that Harris has not abandoned populist, bread-and-butter messaging. She is still airing ads touting her middle-class tax cut proposal, while spotlighting Trump’s plans for slashing taxes on billionaires. And the two most heavily funded campaign ads during the first three weeks of October were both economic appeals from Harris’s top super PAC. A ? on the most aired ads in the past 3 weeks as the campaigns make their closing arguments. The ad w/ the most money behind it comes from the pro-Harris Super PAC Future Forward."I work hard. I scrape to get by. Donald Trump wants to give tax breaks to billionaires but… pic.twitter.com/CUCmBdVB1S— Alex Thompson (@AlexThomp) October 22, 2024 The ad with the 2nd most amount of money is very similar and also from Future Forward. The main difference is that the first ad features a white woman and this one features a black man. pic.twitter.com/lFOHjTpO7S— Alex Thompson (@AlexThomp) October 22, 2024 Thus, the question is not whether Harris should tell voters about her plans for the economy or Trump’s aspirations for a dictatorship. No one believes that focusing exclusively on the latter is a good idea. Rather, the question is whether Harris should complement her populist messaging with warnings about Trump’s fascist instincts — or put every available resource towards making the case for herself on normal political issues, such as the economy and abortion.  The argument for the first option is potentially compatible with the message testing cited above: Even if the best message for most undecided voters is an economic one, warnings about Trump’s authoritarianism could still be the best argument for a pivotal subset of that group.  Let’s say that 15 percent of undecided voters are longtime Republicans who favor conservative economic policy but don’t like Trump. Ads focused on Harris’s fiscal agenda will do nothing to sway this group. But telling them that many former Trump administration officials believe the Republican nominee is a would-be dictator — and that conservatives like Liz and Dick Cheney are supporting Harris for this reason — could conceivably help them to reconcile a Harris vote with their Republican identities. To be sure, most undecided voters care more about Harris’s support for Social Security than Liz Cheney’s support for her. But there’s some evidence that a few might feel the opposite. Indeed, one Democratic pollster has actually found anti-Trump, pro-democracy arguments performing well. In a survey experiment earlier this month, Blueprint found that Harris’s most effective closing argument was: Nearly half of Donald Trump’s Cabinet have refused to endorse him. When Trump learned during the Capitol riot that his supporters were threatening to kill his own vice president, he said, ‘So what?’ and refused to do anything to ensure the vice president was safe. Republican governors, senators, and House members have all said the same thing: We can’t give Trump another four years as president. Blue Rose Research tried and failed to replicate this finding. And it goes against most of the available evidence. In fact, in a subsequent poll of swing voters in swing states, Blueprint itself found economic messages outperforming ones focused on democracy. Still, highlighting Never Trump Republicans’ concerns about his authoritarianism did work with one sample of voters. And that lends some credence to the idea that a small — but potentially significant — minority of undecideds are anti-insurrection conservatives. Given that this election is historically close, even tiny voting blocs could matter. There is one other argument for Harris to devote significant time and money to spotlighting Trump’s fascistic tendencies: Cable news networks are never going to devote a lot of airtime to the economic implications of Trump’s agenda, which are neither especially newsy nor sensational. A detailed analysis of the impact of Trump’s tariffs on consumer prices probably won’t make for good television, but the Republican nominee calling for the military to crack down on “the enemy within” does. Thus, if Harris wants to keep the media focused on Trump’s vulnerabilities — and fill up airtime that might otherwise go toward subjects unfavorable for the Democratic Party — she might be wise to amplify her opponent’s most authoritarian remarks, or the most alarming revelations from former Trump White House officials.  Considering the empirical evidence favoring economic messaging, however, Harris would still be well-advised to err on the side of an excessive focus on bread-and-butter issues. The responsible message is the one that works Some may feel that Harris has an ethical duty to sound the alarm about her rival’s contempt for liberal democracy, irrespective of what message tests say. After all, the American people deserve to know Trump considered having protesters shot amid 2020’s anti-police violence demonstrations, he plans to sic the Department of Justice on his political opponents, and many of his former aides fear he would be completely unconstrained in a second term.  I sympathize with this sentiment. But responsibility for informing the public lies with the media. Harris’s job is to win. If that requires speaking less about the threat of fascism than the risk of higher grocery prices, so be it. Loudly condemning authoritarianism is good, soundly defeating it is better.

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Sunday was supposed to be one of the greatest days of Dwyane Wade’s life. Back in January, Pat Riley, the longtime president of the Miami Heat, announced the team’s plans to honor Wade with a statue, and now it was finally to be unveiled. This would not be like the comically small statue of Philadelphia 76ers legend Allen Iverson that had been erected outside that team’s training complex in April. This would be a monument befitting the greatest player ever to wear a Heat uniform, according to Riley. It would dominate the entrance of the Kaseya Center, where the Heat play home games. Wade recognized the significance. A couple hundred players have been inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame, he told the Today show before the event. But in the NBA, statues of this kind are reserved for all-time greats, guys even casual fans know by their first names: Kobe, Magic, Michael.At the ceremony, Wade sat in the front row with his family, smiling warmly as Udonis Haslem, his teammate of 15 years, and then Riley, paid him tribute. The Heat’s home games may be packed with South Beachers, Haslem said, but Wade brought joy to all of Miami. He name-checked Liberty City and Overtown, historically Black neighborhoods. Wade’s grown son took the stage and said that Wade had always put fatherhood before basketball. They embraced. Wade wiped away tears. The moment of unveiling arrived. The eight-foot bronze statue was hidden behind large black panels. They slid open, flames shot out, and for a moment, a blast of fog obscured the figure’s face, adding to the suspense.Suspense is what the tuned-in viewing public has learned to feel during these unveilings. Some have been well received. The naturalistic bronze statue of Michael Jordan at the United Center, in Chicago, is like a Jumpman logo made flesh, and then made metal. It looks elemental, like it could be worn down for millennia and still maintain its fundamental character. But there have been misses, too. Earlier this year, the Lakers unveiled a Kobe Bryant statue with oddly stretched proportions and a too-angular face. It made Bryant look like a second-rate Terminator villain, and to add insult to injury, the inscription at its base was marred by misspellings. In 2017, fans of Cristiano Ronaldo were so aghast at a sculptor’s cartoonish bust of the legendary footballer that they hounded him into making a new one.It gives me no pleasure—and, in fact, considerable pain—to report that Dwyane Wade’s statue may be the worst of them all. Studio Rotblatt Amrany, the same firm that made Kobe’s statue, put 800 hours of work into it, we are told. And yet, as a likeness of Wade, it does not even rise to the level of wax works from Madame Tussauds. Amid a mounting backlash, one of the sculptors has said that no one else could do any better, a claim that flies in the face of the whole history of sculpture.Wade had asked the firm to memorialize a moment from Miami’s 2008-09 season, which seems to have deepened his bond with the city. Having just hit a buzzer beater in double overtime against the Chicago Bulls, Wade jumped onto the scorer’s table and screamed, “This is my house” to a euphoric home crowd. He was 27 years old. The statue gives him the thick, grizzled look of a man in his mid-50s. He seems to suffer from a rare elephantiasis, hyperlocal to the jaw. The eyes are all wrong. If Wade ever had to flee the country, and for some reason the detectives who pursued him overseas had only a cast of this statue to identify him, he would likely remain at large forever.[Read: The secret code of pickup basketball]In the late 17th century, a Bernini statue so incensed Louis XIV that he demanded that it be destroyed. The Sun King was obsessed with his own image. Bernini rendered him as a Roman general on horseback, but at some point, for reasons that are lost to history, he chose to carve a smile into the king’s face. Louis XIV must have found the smile out of keeping with the fearsome martial aura that he wished to project. He spared the statue, but had it moved to a distant section of the gardens at Versailles.I kept playing back the video of Wade’s unveiling, to see if he might betray a similar flash of anger. I wouldn’t have blamed him. The Associated Press reports that this was not his first time seeing it. He’d visited the sculptors multiple times while the statue was being produced, and had had a preview of its head. Maybe he’d reacted strongly then, before putting on a brave face for the cameras. Wade had to know that any wince or grimace would have worsened the social-media circus that was sure to come.[Read: Air Jordan is finally deflating]He took a few tentative steps toward the statue, hands clasped in front of him. He stepped to its side, to look at it in profile. He was polite enough. When his family joined him, he appeared to be moved. In his remarks, he asked, of the statue: “Who is that guy?” Some news accounts of the unveiling have seized on this quote, but it was clearly made in a spirit of humility, as in: How did a guy like me, from such modest beginnings, end up on a pedestal?Some people believe that who you are on the basketball court is who you are in real life. That is a child’s idea of wisdom, but in Wade’s case, there is some truth to it. He was pure grace on the hardwood. At 6 foot 4, he wasn’t one of the NBA’s giants. Wade was an everyman, albeit a shifty one who could leap fearlessly toward the rim, pinball between larger defenders, and score. The most beautiful thing was the way that he landed, almost always cleanly, on two feet, in the relaxed way in which you might come to rest on the bottom step of the staircase in your childhood home.By all accounts and appearances, Wade is just as graceful off the court. He certainly has the grace not to sour an event meant to honor him. Yesterday, after the statue had been memed nearly to death for 24 hours, Wade defended it, and stood up for the sculptors. He said that it doesn’t need to look like him, because it’s only an artistic expression of a particular moment. I think he deserved a better statue, but maybe, in the end, it was all his fault. Maybe his game was the problem. Maybe Wade moved too fluidly to ever be stilled in bronze.

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