Boots on the Ground

Assisting Israel: The United States is becoming further entangled in Israel’s fights. News broke over the weekend that our military is sending Israel an advanced missile system called the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, or THAAD—along with 100 American troops to help operate it.

Israel is still weighing possible responses to Iran’s barrage of ballistic missiles two weeks ago, which Iran says was retribution for Israel’s killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah (in September) and Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh (in July). Iran also attacked Israel in April; both then and in the more recent attacks, the Iron Dome and U.S. naval destroyers were able to shoot down the vast majority of the missiles. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has reportedly been mulling retaliatory strikes on Iranian nuclear and oil sites.

The THAAD system is “a ground-based interceptor designed to shoot down ballistic missiles,” per The Wall Street Journal. The U.S. supplied it to Saudi Arabia back in 2019 to help it fend off attacks from the Houthis, “marking the system’s first known use in a military operation,” according to Defense News.

Israel, of course, has been at war with Hamas since it conducted a massacre inside Israeli territory on October 7, 2023, and Israel has been fighting Hezbollah since roughly then as well, but it only recently sent troops into Lebanon. Both Hamas and Hezbollah are Iranian allies, as are the Yemeni Houthis, who have been both terrorizing container ships in the Red Sea and attempting to strike Israeli cities.

It’s not especially surprising that the United States is coming to Netanyahu’s aid, but this deployment is still an aggressive and highly visible show of support with consequential timing: We’re less than a month out from a presidential election, and whatever happens in the Middle East is sure to affect domestic politics here, especially if we’re putting boots on the ground.

2024 race: Data from Democratic and Republican Party performance over the last two decades have shown increased polarization among educational attainment lines: The Democrats have been becoming the party of college-educated voters, and the Republicans doing increasingly well with the working class. “The increasing educational divide is coming into tension with the most longstanding feature of American politics: racial polarization,” writes Nate Silver on Substack.

Black voters have long been foundational to Democratic Party support; Hispanic and Asian voters have been mostly Democrat-leaning, though a bit less steadfast. But as Silver notes, “Black and Hispanic voters are more working class—less likely to have completed college degrees—than white ones. So in principle, a continued increase in educational polarization would lead to erosion in Democratic support among these groups, but gains with white ones. From an Electoral College standpoint, this would actually be a good trade for Democrats since white voters are overrepresented in their impact on the Electoral College relative to their share of the overall voting population.”

That appears to be happening: “If these trends are real,” Silver says, “then you’d also expect to see shifts in the electoral landscape, with Harris making gains in the whiter states, including the Blue Wall battlegrounds of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania—but Trump improving his performance in the more racially diverse Sun Belt. And you do get exactly that in some surveys. A pair of NYT/Siena polls on Saturday found Harris leading Trump by 4 points in Pennsylvania but Trump up by 6 in Arizona.” But there’s also a lot more that could be happening, from electoral depolarization to polling errors to a huge realignment in which race is no longer such a big indicator of which party people will vote for. More on what could be going on here.

Scenes from New York: The New York Times investigates one of Mayor Eric Adams’ advisers and her ties to the Chinese Communist Party.

• “Goldman Sachs Group Inc. upgraded its forecasts for China’s economic growth in 2024 and 2025 after Beijing unveiled a series of measures to shore up growth, including plans for greater public spending announced over the weekend,” reports Bloomberg. “The bank expects China’s gross domestic product to expand 4.9% this year, up from 4.7% previously. It also lifted its growth prediction for next year to 4.7% from 4.3%, according to a report dated Sunday.”
• “SpaceX in its fifth Starship test flight on Sunday returned the rocket’s towering first stage booster back to its Texas launch pad for the first time using giant mechanical arms, achieving another novel engineering feat in the company’s push to build a reusable moon and Mars vehicle,” reports Reuters. 
• The presidential race is so very close:

New NBC News National Poll
(1,000 RV; 10/4-8; MOE +/- 3.1%)

Trump 48%
Harris 48%

Last month (post-debate)
Trump 44%
Harris 49%

— Steve Kornacki (@SteveKornacki) October 13, 2024

• This is actually a huge speech issue:

.@elonmusk‘s personal political views should play no role in the California Coastal Commission’s evaluation of @SpaceX‘s plans to launch rockets in the state.

The commission’s objections are non-binding, but its members appear to be pushing for greater oversight over the… pic.twitter.com/Eq7b3R5whj

— FIRE (@TheFIREorg) October 12, 2024

• Interesting take:

SF’s approach to the chronically homeless is to treat them as urban megafauna in protected habitat

This is both elevating and dehumanizing; e.g. social norms dictate that you simply step around a person who very well may be dead and go about your day, as one would with wildlife https://t.co/uP8QNYeIDL

— Mason (@webdevMason) October 13, 2024

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