October 22, 2024

Cosplayer-in-Chief?

Former President Donald Trump’s team took over a McDonald’s in Feasterville, PA (a suburb of Philadelphia), over the weekend. The restaurant was shut down for a few hours on Sunday to allow the candidate to stage a photo op with pre-selected “customers”, in an attempt to troll Vice President Kamala Harris. (Harris states that she worked at a McDonald’s when she was very young, but since records of her time slinging burgers and ice cream cones weren’t archived, Trump has been accusing Harris of lying about it.)

As he pretended to work, serving up fries to people at the drive-thru window, he also dodged reporters’ questions about raising the minimum wage. The Harris campaign scoffed at the event, with spokesperson Ian Sams stating, “He can’t understand what it’s like to have a summer job because he was handed millions on a silver platter, only to blow it.” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, well known for being a waitress before running for office, likewise slammed the former president, adding, “Donald Trump thinks that people who work at McDonald’s are a joke.”

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Musk in Murky Waters

Billionaire Elon Musk announced recently that he would be giving away $1 million a day to registered voters in swing states. Now, while on the surface, this might sound like a creative way to “get out the vote”, it falls into some legal gray areas. In order for people to qualify for the giveaway, they need to:

• Be a registered voter in one of the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin
• Sign his petition pledging support for the First (specifically, the right to free speech) and Second (the right to gun ownership) amendments of the Constitution
• Come to one of his rallies Correction: While the people who have won the “salary”* so far were attendees at rallies, it’s not a requirement. (*Musk is trying to get around some of the legal issues by calling the million bucks not a “prize”, but a “salary” for serving as a spokesperson for his PAC.)

The murky legal question regards a law that states it is illegal to pay people to either vote or register to vote. There’s significant debate over whether the Tesla CEO’s efforts run afoul of that law, including Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro calling on law enforcement to investigate the situation.

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Voters (Unknowingly?) Into Harris’s Policies Over Trump’s

Survey site YouGov.com recently ran a blind test of registered voters from all across the political spectrum on over 100 different policy proposals from the two candidates — without specifically mentioning which candidate supported which proposals. While Trump voters did tend to support the former president’s agenda, and Harris voters overwhelming supported the VP’s, the overall numbers showed an interesting shift. For all but a sparse handful of Harris’s proposals, the majority of those polled (including Democrats, Republicans, and independents) approved of her positions. As for Trump’s proposals, only about half of his agenda had a similar level of approval.

The Washington Post did a write-up on the results, and is also offering a quick 8-question interactive version of the survey, so readers can determine whose policies they like more. There’s also a longer version of the assessment that covers all 125 questions from YouGov’s original study. I myself took both the shorter and longer forms, and in both, found some surprises in my results. To try your hand at it, go to the link below:

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