Democrats Entering Panic Attack Stretch Of Campaign
Let's try to keep it together for another two weeks.
Democrats are freaking out over the presidential election. Any anxiety they feel is certainly not misplaced: Donald Trump returning to the White House would effectively end the American experiment — unless that experiment allowed for convicted felons, adjudicated rapists, and unrepentant coup plotters leading the executive branch.
NBC News reports that the Kamala Harris campaign is worried about possible cracks in the Blue Wall, specifically Wisconsin and Michigan. (Trump smeared Detroit the other week, but white people from Livonia and Warren know he’s just talking about Black people.)
They also fear that North Carolina could slip away, perhaps thanks to Trump’s ongoing lies about hurricane recovery. Harris was actually leading Trump in a North Carolina poll released on Tuesday, but Democrats just worry a lot, OK?
The prospect of another Trump presidency might have you sizing up your infant child for a rocket ship, but former pollster Adam Carlson urges caution.
“For every negative indicator there is for Harris (whether quantitative or qualitative), there always seems to be an equal and opposite negative indicator for Trump. What you see more of depends on your media consumption and social media algorithm/appetite for doomscrolling,” he wrote on Tuesday. “Everyone is bored and impatient. Everyone is grasping at straws (cherry picking polls and news stories, deeply flawed early voting analysis, etc.) No one knows who is going to win. Anyone who claims to be certain of the outcome is full of shit or deeply delusional.”
Democrats have freaked out over past elections that they actually won. After President Barack Obama bombed his first debate against Mitt Romney, he suffered a significant drop in the polls.
Conservative Obama booster Andrew Sullivan worried that Obama might’ve “thrown away” the election, noting that Obama’s lead among women voters had vanished in a post-debate poll that showed Romney up by four points.
“[H]as that kind of swing ever happened this late in a campaign?” he asked. “Has any candidate lost 18 points among women voters in one night ever? And we are told that when Obama left the stage that night, he was feeling good. That’s terrifying. On every single issue, Obama has instantly plummeted into near-oblivion.”
Obama’s campaign spokesperson, Jen Psaki, responded in what now seems familiar terms: “We’ve always run this race like we’re 5 points down. We know that there are going to be many ups and downs, some that you referenced, over the next couple of days. We have blinders on. We’re implementing our own game plan. We’re focused on getting our supporters out, communicating the choice, and we’ll sleep on Nov. 7 , not Oct. 7.”
But liberals feared that Obama was no longer the candidate he was in 2008 and had lost the fire from his first iconic campaign. The Guardian reported on October 22, 2012: “Obama campaign struggling to win over Florida voters as enthusiasm wanes.”
Four years ago Barack Obama's campaign was flooded by volunteers – the young in particular – excited by his vision of remaking America, and by the prospect of putting an African American in the White House. Now active support in Florida is visibly more sparse, and it may prove decisive as Democrats struggle to claw back the state from Mitt Romney.
"This election's not as inspirational as the last one was," said Robert Obry, deputy field organiser at a near deserted Obama campaign office in Ybor City, a historic Tampa neighbourhood popular for its bars, music and cigars. “This one is more about straight politics. Even my grandmother, who is a Republican, voted for Obama last time which kind of blew my mind. This time she's not voting for him because she says not enough has changed.”
Ultimately, Obama managed to hold Florida even without the Robert Orby’s grandmother endorsement.
On October 29 2012, NPR reported the results of a Pew poll that showed the race tied and Romney with a sizable turnout advantage — 76 percent of Republicans were classified as likely to vote versus only 62 percent of Democrats.
Romney led in the poll on economic issues, “such as reducing the federal deficit (51 percent to 37 percent) and improving the job situation (50 percent to 42 percent).” That was alarming for Democrats considering that the unemployment rate was 7.8 percent.
But why doesn’t Harris have a solid lead?
Last week, New York Times columnist David Brooks asked, “Why the heck isn't she running away with this?” The question ignores that the American electorate is politically polarized and almost every presidential election since 2000 has been close. Even the lone landslide in 2008 was tightly contested with the outcome far from certain. Politico wrote in August 2008 that Obama had “hit a ceiling in public opinion polling, proving unable to make significant gains with any segment of the national electorate.”
During the 2008 election, the economy was in free fall and incumbent Republican President George W. Bush had underwater approval ratings. Critics from the right and left complain online that Kamala Harris is somehow blowing a winnable race. However, she’s actually doing quite well considering that the fundamentals aren’t in her favor: Most voters disapprove of President Joe Biden’s job performance and Harris is attempting to run as a change candidate while serving as Biden’s vice president.
It’s obviously frustrating for Democrats that Harris must fight what seems like an uphill battle against a convicted criminal whose rallies are incoherent fascist karaoke performances. When Stephen King published The Dead Zone in 1979, America was still a nation where a presidential candidate using a child as a human shield was career-ending. Now, it’s just a random Tuesday for Donald Trump, and the New York Times headline would read, “Trump embraces young supporter in spontaneous rally moment.”
The reality is that the economy is thriving. Unemployment is at 4.1 percent, which is lower than in 2012 (7.9 percent), 2004 (5.5 percent), 1996 (5.2 percent), 1988 (5.5 percent) 1984 (7.3 percent) when the incumbent party won the presidency. The inflation rate has steadily dropped all year and is now just 2.4 percent, which is lower than it was in 2004 (2.68 percent), 1996 (2.9 percent), 1988 (4.08 percent), and 1984 (4.3 percent).
Obviously, Republicans campaign on misery and resentment. They don’t care about reality, and apparently the mainstream news outlets worry that challenging their lies might cost them their “objectivity.” (White) Americans were successfully convinced that Joe Biden is a senile Jimmy Carter and that they live in a sepia-toned economic depression, even while placing regular food delivery orders on DoorDash. That’s the same disconnect from reality necessary to believe that Trump is in any way qualified to serve as president again (or even the first time when he almost killed everyone with covid).
On a brighter note …
There is some encouraging news if you’d care to calm your nerves: According to Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, 56 percent of voters who’ve cast ballots in the state so far are women. (They were eventually 54 percent of the Michigan’s 2020 electorate, and Biden carried them by 14 points.)
Harris is leading Trump two to one in early votes, but even better, she’s well ahead among “late deciders.” An Emerson poll shows that while Trump led 52 to 48 percent among voters who made up their minds more than a month ago, Harris wins voters who decided within the last few weeks 60 to 36 percent. She even leads among those who say they might still change their mind, 48 to 43 percent.
The Harris campaign is closing better than Trump, with a message that’s focused on helping all Americans, regardless of political affiliation or identity, rather than dividing them for political gain. Let’s just hope that’s enough.
New York Times columnist David Brooks asking, “Why the heck isn't she running away with this?” still pisses me off, considering the NYT represent half the problem at this point!
I get the anxiety. Losing to Romney, McCain, or Dole just didn't have the "this could end things for America" vibe that putting a mentally deranged criminal psychopath in power again could have. We already saw that last time he let a million Americans die from COVID while he "took no responsibility at all" and actively hampered efforts to stop the spread of the disease. Losing would not be a "I tried my best" scenario. It'd be fucked.
And by all indications, this could really go either way--polls are tighter than they ever were in our lifetimes. Again, it wouldn't mean that much if polls were so tight between Obama and Romney, for example, but when it's this tight between a normal liberal Democrat and a gross thing that crawled out of Hitler fan fiction it understandably exasperates any decent American. Trump SHOULD have been crushed in the polls never to reappear. Instead, he could win. That's fucked up.
But getting angry over how unjust and depressing this is won't do anyone any good, it'll just break you down. What you can do is connect with the nearest swing state/district to campaign, hand out flyers, put up signs, phone bank, deliver absentee ballots, write post cards, donate if they're a downballot race (those are the ones where the money goes farthest), and talk to as many people as you can. I'm sure in all our personal networks there's at least a few "on the fence" voters who could benefit from a personal appeal, and not a harrangue.