A new set of HuffPost/YouGov polls find Democratic voters were thrilled with Senators Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris. Democratic voters and those who lean left were asked about last week's debates, and those two candidates were seen as "outperforming in their respective appearances, eroding former Vice President Joe Biden’s perceived edge as the most electable," HuffPost just reported.

For each debate night, 59% of those polled said Sen. Warren and Sen. Harris each did the best. Former HUD Secretary Julián Castro on the first night and former Vice President Joe Biden on the second night both came in second with just 16%.

But the comments respondents left may say even more than the percentages.

On Elizabeth Warren:

“She actually has plans instead of just vague talking points.” ― Utah woman, age 29
“She clearly identifies issues and has policy plans to address them. She’s direct and articulate about the mistakes being made by the current administration. She hasn’t got time for nonsense.” ― Kentucky woman, age 64
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On Kamala Harris:

“I think she is a warrior. She impressed me the day she announced. I believe Kamala Harris has what it takes to beat Trump and get our country going in the right direction.” ― Nevada woman, age 58
“She demonstrated how a good prosecutor has the skills to communicate powerfully. Her story is very compelling.” ― New York man, age 72
“She focused on the question at hand and spoke on the issues in a concise, direct, clearly well-informed way. She also showed strength, character, personality, and a confident path to the solutions she provided.” ― Kentucky woman, age 43

Side by side, Fox News’s and North Korean State TV’s reverence for their countries’ respective leaders is pretty telling.

Our planet could reach levels of carbon dioxide high enough in the next decade to lock in dangerous planetary warming of more than 2 degrees Celsius, but a Trump physicist is trying to discredit the science behind climate disruption.

William Happer, the Trump administration’s champion for carbon dioxide, reached out to a prominent conservative think tank, the Heartland Institute, for help. Happer claims that carbon dioxide is good for humans.
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Happer, who serves on the National Security Council, has said that carbon dioxide is being demonized “just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler.”

From top to bottom, the website, JoeBiden.info, breezily mocks the candidate in terms that would warm the heart of any Bernie Sanders supporter: There are GIFs of Mr. Biden touching women and girls, and blurbs about his less-than-liberal policy positions, including his opposition to court-ordered busing in the 1970s and his support for the Iraq war. Pull quotes highlight some of his more famous verbal gaffes, like his description of his future boss, Barack Obama, as “articulate and bright and clean.” The introductory text declares, “Uncle Joe is back and ready to take a hands-on approach to America’s problems!”
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Yet in anonymously trying to exploit the fissures within the Democratic ranks — fissures that ran through this past week’s debates — Mr. Mauldin’s website hews far closer to the disinformation spread by Russian trolls in 2016 than typical political messaging. With nothing to indicate its creator’s motives or employer, the website offers a preview of what election experts and national security officials say Americans can expect to be bombarded with for the next year and a half: anonymous and hard-to-trace digital messaging spread by sophisticated political operatives whose aim is to sow discord through deceit. Trolling, that is, as a political strategy.

Superficially, this might suggest a mere update of the kind of qualities seen in no end of politicians down the years. But hyperleadership represents something new, in so much as it is rooted online and based around a set of clearly identifiable and often very modern things: to quote Gerbaudo again, “an immaculate history of political engagement which gives the leader an impression of authenticity, ingenuity and honesty”, and “a down to earth attitude”, whereby the leader avoids complex language and presents themselves “as a common individual living like ordinary people do”. Obviously, not every hyperleader precisely reflects this template – Trump, for instance, affects to be something like a “common individual” in his mode of communication, but certainly doesn’t live like one. But by and large, the characterisation rings true, in plenty of countries.

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But starting with the fact that all the current hyperleaders in national leadership positions are men – clearly, old-school alpha males are a big part of this story – there are also reasons to worry. A superbase exists outside the usual forums of representative democracy, and to some extent defines itself against them. It is usually sustained by passionate support for a hyperleader and collective loathing of traditional politics and the media. As a result, anything perceived as an attack on a hyperleader will be maligned as being entirely motivated by base politics, and therefore instantly dismissed.

Thus every new verbal and behavioural outrage perpetrated by Trump is picked apart in the press and on TV while his supporters go into defiant raptures. The Labour party is accused, with plenty of justification, of having a deep antisemitism problem, but the issue has not, and will not be, taken terribly seriously by many Corbyn supporters. Few political stories in fact now seem to have any lasting traction, partly because our online discourse ensures that politics and the media exist in a constant state of distraction, but also thanks to the way in which hyperleaders and superbases ensure that far too many things are reduced to a narrative of one noble individual versus their adversaries.