Move over weird JD Vance, you’ve got company.

The Conservative party in the UK is going through the leadership search process after the shellacking they got in the last general election. It turns out that in some surveys, voters see them as being a little weird.

Conservative politicians have started to be seen as “weird”, and few members of the public – even including the party’s own voters – are able to identify the Tory leadership candidates, research suggests.
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The research by More in Common said the party struggled with relatability, particularly in Liberal Democrat areas, by focusing on topics “which excite the base, or the highly politically engaged” but were distant from ordinary people’s lives.

In a similar vein to the attack that US Democrats have levelled against Republicans, especially the vice-presidential candidate JD Vance, the research found “there is a danger that the Conservatives have started to become seen as ‘weird’”.
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It said that in seats won by the Lib Dems “voters would explain that they were voting Lib Dem in these traditionally Tory strongholds because Ed Davey’s party just seemed more ‘normal’”.

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Throughout his life, creepy Donald Trump has adopted the strategy taught him by his mentor, the late infamous Roy Cohn, that you never back down and never apologize. You always charge ahead and attack whoever crosses you, throwing everything you have at them. It helps if you have money and can threaten lawsuits. This can result in people being too intimidated to fight back, even when they are in the right. His staff clearly follow him in this.

But in the case of the Arlington cemetery fiasco, creepy Trump may have made a bad miscalculation. What should have been a one-day story if, as I suggested a few days ago, his staff had claimed a misunderstanding and quickly apologized to the cemetery staffer, has now become a multi-day story about violations of the law, thuggery towards government employees, and disrespecting the military.
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American elections, because of their absurd length, tend to focus a lot on various statistics in order to gauge the changing political fortunes of the candidates. But while each measure provides some indication of how things are going, one needs to treat each with some caution.

Opinion polls: These are probably the best measure of where the race stands but there are important caveats. The weird electoral college system in the US tends to have a bias towards red states so national polls have to be treated with caution. There are roughly seven so-called swing states (Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and North Carolina) that usually determine the outcome of the election. Polls taken in just those states have more significance than national polls. This does not mean that national polls are useless but it is estimated that Democrats need approximately a +4% margin in the national polls in order to have an even chance of winning the Electoral College.

Right now, it looks like Democrats are approaching that 4% margin, making the race even, which is a huge improvement from the situation just a month ago.

A fresh Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Thursday showed Harris leading Trump nationwide by 45% to 41% – a margin consistent with other surveys since last week’s boisterous Democratic national convention in Chicago that confirmed the US vice-president’s status as the nominee.
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A Fox News poll on Thursday showed the vice-president with narrow leads in three out of four southern Sun belt states; 48 to 47% in Arizona, and 48 to 46% in both Georgia and Nevada. In the fourth, North Carolina – which Trump won by just 1.4% in 2020 – the Republican nominee was ahead by a single point, 48 to 47%.

The poll represented a big jump on recent numbers recorded by Biden, who trailed Trump by six points in Georgia in April and by five points in Nevada and Arizona as late as June.

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David Kurtz writes that the Arlington cemetery incident is a clear example of how creepy Donald Trump and his campaign use thuggery to avoid the consequences of their blatantly wrong behavior.

The cemetery official who was pushed aside by the thugs in creepy Trump’s campaign has declined to press charges and the Army says that it considers the matter closed. Kurtz says that the fear of being doxxed and have the MAGA cult hordes descend on her and her family likely played a role in the decision to drop the matter.
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Sometimes one accidentally bumps into someone in a public space. What usually happens is that each person immediately apologizes to the other that is the end of the story, with both people moving on with friendly smiles, to indicate that there are no hard feelings. There is the no attempt to determine who is at fault or place blame over such trivialities. That is the behavior of normal people who have basic social skills. But on rare occasions, one might encounter someone who reacts angrily and immediately yells out “You idiot! Why don’t you watch where you going?” or something similar. Such people are boors who lack basic social skills and are best ignored and avoided.

There has been quite a bit of media coverage of an event that took place at Arlington National Cemetery where creepy Donald Trump and his entourage arrived for a photo op at the graves of dead military personnel. The problem is that federal law prohibits political photo ops in certain parts of the cemetery and that resulted in an altercation between creepy Trump staffers and a cemetery official who was trying to enforce the law.
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