Rain Perry

Hello!!

Since this is a "weekly, unless a topic becomes timely" email, here you go with a few quick updates.

Do yourself a favor and listen to at least the first few minutes of the Simon Rosenberg/Tom Bonier zoom "Why the data makes us optimistic." It's so great. You'll see why these two guys kept me sane in 2022 when everyone was flipping out over the polling, and they were spot on.

Data for the 2024 presidential election are starting to come in -- actual data of voter behavior like registration rates and early voting trends. So I'm thrilled to let you know that starting next week, you can visit the TargetEarly website and track all of it. This will help you internalize the calming mantra "watch the data, not the polls; watch the data, not the polls; watch the data, not the polls."

I'm always talking about the "Thirteen Keys" presidential election prediction model. Well, Professor Allan Lichtman made his 2024 prediction yesterday which debuted in a video report from the NY Times. Their reporting is cutesy and a little condescending, but it does give Lichtman a chance to explain his thinking on how each of the keys are playing out in this election. Make of the whole thing what you will, but his track record of correctly predicting, early, nine out of ten of the last elections (the outlier being Bush v. Gore) indicates that this oddball is on to something.

Strategy

• The debate between Harris and Trump is in four days. Here's where you can watch it.
• The cute little bunny at the top of this email is telling you "vote on Day 1!" It's a great idea for several reasons.
  • It shows our enthusiasm right out of the gate
  • It "banks" votes -- once you've voted, you don't have to worry about forgetting, or running out of gas on the way to the polls, or shenanigans trying to prevent you from voting.
  • If there's a problem with your ballot, it give you time to find out about it and cure it.
  • It leaves you free to spend time helping others to vote!

Hope

I recently linked to a Colbert interview with Nick Cave. In case you didn't get to watch it, here's the most moving part -- a big, strong argument for hope.

“You are right to be worried about your growing feelings of cynicism and you need to take action to protect yourself and those around you. … Cynicism is not a neutral position—and although it asks almost nothing of us, it is highly infectious and unbelievably destructive. In my view, it is the most common and easy of evils.
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"I know this because much of my early life was spent holding the world and the people in it in contempt. It was a position both seductive and indulgent. The truth is, I was young and had no idea what was coming down the line. I lacked the knowledge, the foresight, the self-awareness. I just didn’t know. It took a devastation to teach me the preciousness of life and the essential goodness of people. It took a devastation to reveal the precariousness of the world, of its very soul, to understand that it was crying out for help. It took a devastation to understand the idea of mortal value, and it took a devastation to find hope.
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"Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard-earned, makes demands upon us, and can often feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on Earth. Hopefulness is not a neutral position either. It is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism. Each redemptive or loving act, as small as you like … keeps the devil down in the hole. It says the world and its inhabitants have value and are worth defending. It says the world is worth believing in. In time, we come to find that it is so.”
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​— Nick Cave

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