CHRIS CRUCIAL: Jeff Bezos just made a business decision 💰

PLUS: Is 2024 a "safe" election?

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1. It’s the money, stupid 💸💸💸

The Washington Post’s decision not to endorse a presidential candidate this year — which publisher Will Lewis announced in a piece on the website Friday — can be explained in a single word: Money.

Or, in the words of famed television producer Don Ohlmeyer: “The answer to all of your questions is money.”

Let me explain.

Yes, Lewis is the publisher of the Post. But know who Lewis reports to? A guy named Jeff Bezos. And you can be CERTAIN that the decision not to endorse — and, yes, the Post was going to endorse Kamala Harris — sits with Bezos.

Here’s how his organization reported it:

An endorsement of Harris had been drafted by Post editorial page staffers but had yet to be published, according to two sources who were briefed on the sequence of events and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The decision to no longer publish presidential endorsements was made by The Post’s owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. “This was a Washington Post decision to not endorse, and I would refer you to the publisher’s statement in full,” said Chief Communications Officer Kathy Baird.

Start here: Bezos is a businessman. A very good and very wealthy businessman. Do you know how Bezos got very wealthy? My making big (and good) bets. By seeing around corners. By always making sure that, whatever the possible scenarios, he was properly, uh, invested on both sides of them.

This is how business works. The lone goal is to make money. And money isn’t red or blue. What successful businesses do then is not deal with the world as they want it to be but the world as it is.

Look at this endorsement process then through businessman Bezos’ eyes: There is a slightly better than even chance that Donald Trump wins the election, according to smart numbers people like Decision Desk HQ.

And, because Trump is Trump, he will remember if the Washington Post endorses against him. He will seek to punish not just the Post but Bezos’ far more important company — from a financial perspective — Amazon. (Trump spent much of 2016 and his presidency bashing the “Bezos Washington Post.”)

Bezos knows this. Because of course he does.

Now, again from a business perspective, what’s the benefit of a Bezos-owned publication endorsing Harris? In the near term, it’s very unlikely to move any votes in a swing state.

(Sidebar: News organizations should get rid of editorial boards. They are antiquated and just cause trouble for reporters who have to answer for decisions made by editorial boards with whom they have ZERO contact.)

And, in the longer term, is a President Harris more likely to look favorably on a piece of legislation or a regulation that Bezos/Amazon want passed? No way.

Add it up and Bezos figures this: There’s a CLEAR potential financial downside to the Post editorial board endorsing Harris. And there is no clear potential upside to endorsing Harris.

(Yes, I know lots of people will cancel their WaPo subscription after this decision. I don’t think Bezos is worried about that money loss. Amazon is the 800-pound gorilla in his financial portfolio.)

Bezos made a business decision. Plain and simple.

Is it journalistically defensible? Not really. I get the idea — that Lewis trots out — that newspapers haven’t always made endorsements and shouldn’t be doing it. But, like, that’s the sort of thing you announce two years ago (or a year ago) not 11 days before the election.

As much as I think editorial boards need to go away (see above), if you have an editorial board, it is ludicrous not to allow it to weigh in on the presidential race. Why the hell else does the editorial board even exist then?

My most honest opinion: This is why you NEED to support nonpartisan and independent journalists like me. There’s no owner telling me what to do — or vetoing decisions I make. There’s just me.

Which doesn’t mean I will get every call right. I won’t. Or write — or say — things that you agree 100% with. I won’t.

But what you WILL get from me is radical transparency — you will know what I think and why I think it. No pulled punches. No bullshit. No hiding behind corporate overlords.

If that’s the sort of thing you can get behind, I hope you consider becoming an investor in what I am building. Nonpartisan. Independent. Honest. Authentic. Transparent.

2. Your vote is (probably) safe

In September 2020, Barton Gellman wrote a piece in the Atlantic entitled “The Election That Could Break America.”

In it, he detailed how a close election could allow Donald Trump to subvert the results — by leaning on obscure (and ill-understood) election rules and holes within the broader way we elect presidents.

The piece was remarkably prescient. Bart is back with a new piece — this one in Time magazine — with a more comforting conclusion: Many of the loopholes Trump sought to exploit in 2020 have been closed.

Here’s a bit of it:

But the arc of the evidence, based on interviews with state, local, and federal election officials, intelligence analysts, and expert observers, bends toward confidence. Since 2020, the nation’s electoral apparatus has upgraded its equipment, tightened its procedures, improved its audits, and hardened its defenses against subversion by bad actors, foreign or domestic. Ballot tabulators are air-gapped from the Internet and voter-verified paper records are the norm. Bipartisan reforms enacted in 2022 make it much harder to interfere with the appointment of electors who represent a state’s popular vote, and harder to block certification in Congress of the genuine electoral count. Courts continue to deny evidence-free claims of meddling. The final word on vote-certification in key swing states rests with governors from both parties who have defied election denialism at every turn.

The system, according to everyone I asked, will hold up against Trump’s efforts to break it.

The whole piece is long. But very much worth your time. Read it.

3. Friday AMA

My YouTube channel is at 46,000(!) subscribers. I am trying HARD to get to 50K between now and the election. I hope you become a subscriber — it’s FREE — if you haven’t already.

I make daily videos (and sometimes twice-daily videos!) Monday through Thursday. And then every Friday at 1 pm eastern I do a livestream where I take questions. Check out this week’s edition below.

NOTABLE QUOTABLE

“One of the things that I love about the American people is we can hold many thoughts at once.” — Kamala Harris, perhaps giving too much credit to the American people

ONE GOOD CHART

I am consistently amazed at how Chick-Fil-A NEVER gets my drive-through order wrong. And how McDonald’s seems to always screw it up. This chart — on the speed and accuracy of orders at fast food chains — is awesome.

SONG OF THE DAY

Spoiler alert: My favorite album of the year (so far) is by a band called Dehd. The album is called “Poetry.” So I was super psyched to find that the band just released a cover of the Pixies’ song “Mr. Grieves.” (Fun fact: I was the lead singer in a Pixies cover band in college.)

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