IT’S BEGINNING TO LOOK A LOT LIKE TRUMP 47

 

10/11/24

 

Like most of you, yours truly has been following this election with more than the average observer’s degree of interest and sense of frustration, or downright anger, that our choices have come down to Vice-President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.   Neither would do anything to address what may be our nation’s greatest problem, or at least its greatest problem addressable by politicians:  our leaping, catapulting, exploding debt.   Neither candidate inspires much confidence in his or her intellect or grasp of the issues.   Neither displays anything resembling a sense of history and its ramifications for the present.   Neither seems to know much at all about economics that can’t be displayed on a teleprompter and/or fed to him or her five minutes before a speech.   Neither seems up to the task of doing the hard political work necessary to fortify our dramatically depleted military, our last line of defense in a dramatically, if not fatally, dangerous world.   In short, neither has any business being president of the United States, but here we are.   That we have reached this point says a lot more about the state of our nation than it does about either candidate, but that is another, more fundamental, issue.  

 

So who will win this contest of shallow thinking carnival barkers?   It’s still a bit early to be making a definitive call, but I’m starting to get the idea that we are about to experience Trump 47.   Normally, a state-by-state analysis is necessary to make such a call (See my much heralded  TRUMP WILL WIN, AND WIN BIG, ON TUESDAY, 11/4/16), and I may be doing such an analysis in the next week or so, but the thoughts and analysis below apply to the electorate in general and, more to the point, to the seven or so states that will decide this contest, unless my final point turns out to be more than idle musing.

As yours truly sees it, the 2024 electorate is  divided into three camps:

1.       Those who hate Mr. Trump.

2.       Those who love Mr. Trump.

3.       Those who can tolerate Mr. Trump but can’t tolerate Ms. Harris.

 

The first two groups are static; neither will grow nor shrink.   The strong, engrained feelings engendered by Mr. Trump are not going to be changed in the next few weeks.   The first group is the largest group of the three, but none of the three comprises a majority of the electorate.   So if the Republicans are going to win, they have to expand #3, those who can tolerate Mr. Trump but can’t tolerate Ms. Harris, to the point at which it and #2, those who love Mr. Trump, together comprise a majority of the electorate.   The logic involved is very simple but implementing it won’t prove to be easy, despite the help that the GOP seems to be getting from Ms. Harris in this endeavor.

 

Wait a minute, you might interject.   Why isn’t there a group #4, those who love, or at least like, Ms. Harris?   Simply because this would be such a minuscule group of people that addressing, or even acknowledging, it would be a waste of time.   There are few people who support Ms. Harris because of her policies, persona, experience, or ability to lead this nation.   Her entire appeal lies in her not being Mr. Trump and her whole campaign is based on hatred of Mr. Trump.   People are not working hard for Ms. Harris because they want her to be president; they are working hard for Ms. Harris because they don’t want Mr. Trump to be president.   In her supporters’ minds, Ms. Harris is thus the ultimate lesser of two evils.   Howard Stern’s comment, made directly to Ms. Harris’s face, that, yes, he will be voting for her, but that he would vote for “that wall over there” if it were running against Trump, is far more emblematic of today’s Harris supporters than most of them will admit in private.

 

This regrettable state of the Democratic Party is its own fault.  It was handed the ultimate political gift when President Biden decided, or was told, to abandon his campaign.   (See my seminal THE DEMOCRATS KICK A GIFT HORSE IN THE ARSE, 7/22/24, and earlier posts cited in that article.)    The American electorate was, at the time and probably now, disgusted, or at least highly uncomfortable, with both Mr. Biden or Mr. Trump.   Either of the two parties that could somehow dump its standard-bearer while the opposition party kept its ticket-topper was bound to win…unless the Democrats, when given such a chance, nominated Kamala Harris, who was the only Democratic, other than Joe Biden, that could lose to Donald Trump.   And what did the Dems do?   They kicked their gift horse in the arse by nominating the hapless Ms. Harris.  If they had nominated Shapiro, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Kelly, or a whole host of others, there would indeed be a fourth category of voters, i.e., those who love, or at least like, the Democratic candidate, and this election would be over.   But, gutless, spineless, and ever sensitive to the perceived sensitivities of any of its constituencies, the Democrats nominated Ms. Harris.   But I digress.

 

So does the GOP have a chance of expanding the pool of those who can tolerate Mr. Trump but can’t tolerate Ms. Harris?   Yours truly thinks it has a good chance of doing so for a number of reasons.

 

First, most elections are won or lost on the economy, and polls consistently show that voters have more confidence in Mr. Trump’s ability in economic matters than they have in Mr. Harris’s prowess in this area, which seems as foreign, arcane, and difficult to her as does particle physics.   The Democrats could argue, and legitimately so, that economic growth and employment are in great shape right now and that the stock market rally of the last four years has made a lot of people, perhaps especially a lot of Republicans, wealthier.    But the point the Dems miss in making that argument is that inflation is not only the great destroyer of civilizations but is also the economic phenomenon that affects everybody.   And, yes, the Dems could argue that inflation is now down…to a level about the same as the highest level it reached during the Trump presidency.   Further, if the Dems were smart, they would let those few among them who understand the way the world works point out that a large measure of the inflation that the GOP so decries can be ascribed to Mr. Trump; it was Mr. Trump who nominated the hapless Jay Powell for Fed president.  Mysteriously, or maybe not so mysteriously, the Democrats have not made this argument, or at least have not done so loudly and repeatedly.  

 

Regardless of the legitimacy of many of the Democrats’ counter-arguments to the nearly laughable “The economy is in the pits” GOP argument, what matters is how people feel and what people know.  People know that prices, broadly measured, are about 20% higher than they were when Mr. Biden took office and, according to the polls, they feel that Mr. Trump could do a better job on the economy than Mr. Harris.  Judging from Ms. Harris’s observations on the economy, which sound distinctly like they are coming from a ten-year-old, they are probably right. 

 

Second, not only do polls show that people think Mr. Trump would do a better job on the economy than Ms. Harris, they also show that people think Mr. Trump would do a better job on immigration and crime.   So if one of the candidate is perceived to be better on the economy, immigration, and crime, which candidate would you bet on?   There is always abortion, an issue on which the electorate looks far more kindly on  the Democrats, largely because of the GOP’s ineptitude on this issue.   But is abortion strong enough to outweigh the economy, immigration, and crime?   Probably not, but remember 2018, when the Dems wrested effective control of Congress largely due to that very issue.

 

Third, the vice-presidential debate may prove to be more consequential than any VP debate in history and far more so than most pundits, including yours truly, initially thought .   Governor Tim Walz did manage to pick his nearly lifeless carcass off the canvass as the debate progressed and made it hard not to like him personally, but, all-in-all, he got his head handed to him by Senator J.D. Vance.  Mr. Vance was cool, calm, collected, and in control of the facts.  He joined Mr. Walz in making the debate, mirabile dictu, that most rare occurrence in today’s malignant politics: a civil affair.   Mostly, though, Mr. Vance did much to convey the idea that he is not the he-man woman hater that the press has made him out to be.   He was reasonable and calm, somebody with whom many might not agree but with whom many would not be uncomfortable, let alone alarmed.  

 

Why was the ordinarily barely consequential VP debate so important in 2024?   Given Mr. Trump’s age and questionable approach to taking care of himself, and, to put it as gently as I can, the passions Mr. Trump enflames in this increasingly violent world, Mr. Vance is more likely than a typical vice-president to move to the Oval Office before 2028.  Even if the unthinkable does not happen, given Mr. Vance’s youth and innate appeal, a Vice-President Vance is far more likely to be become president in the 2028 election than would typical and/or former vice-presidents.    After this debate, I can almost guarantee you that a lot of people who could not even countenance a Vance presidency before the debate are now at least not appalled by the idea.

 

Fourth, given the Biden administration’s near outright assault on the internal combustion engine and Ms. Harris’s enthusiastic support for this effort, Ms. Harris is going to have a very difficult time carrying the state of Michigan.   The antipathy toward those who have decided that we must abandon the internal combustion engine, by force if the proper “incentives” don’t work, is not limited to auto workers; it is felt by Michiganders of all walks of life who are, and have since about 1903, been fiercely supportive and protective of the industry that has become, in many ways, synonymous with their beautiful and normally prosperous state.   A conversion, fast or slow, wholesale or retail, to electric cars will not bode well for Michigan or its prosperity, and Michiganders are not likely to vote to cripple their state for the sake of the dreams of those on the coasts who consider the lifeblood of the Great Lakes State somehow evil.    If Kamala Harris cannot carry Michigan, she is in big trouble.  

 

If the Democrats had selected Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who is popular in her home state (or at least was until the sacrilegious video she recently made involving a Dorito masquerading as a Catholic Eucharist made anybody, Catholic or otherwise, question not only her feelings regarding the sacred, but also her intelligence, common sense, and attitude toward at least 20% of her constituency) and, of necessity, has always been supportive of its most salient industry, as their standard-bearer, Michigan would not be a much of a problem for the Democrats.   If the Democrats had picked Josh Shapiro, the immensely popular and usually at least somewhat reasonable governor of Pennsylvania, they would have virtually assured themselves of victory in the Keystone Commonwealth, thus rendering Michigan somewhat less important.   But, no, the Democrats had to nominate Kamala Harris, whose origins in San Francisco and its environs make winning either Michigan or Pennsylvania more difficult than it had to be.

 

Finally, and maybe most importantly, the “reverse Bradley effect” that I cited in perhaps my most famous post, TRUMP WILL WIN, AND WIN BIG, ON TUESDAY, 11/4/16,  i.e., the tendency of many Trump voters to not admit their support for Mr. Trump in polite company is far from dead.   In fact, given that the hatred of Mr. Trump that was still, as hard as it is to believe, embryonic in 2016, has been nurtured, kindled, stoked, and enflamed for the last eight years, with plenty of help from Mr. Trump himself.   Mr. Trump is now a bigger villain among those who hate, or merely dislike, him than he was in 2016; hence, admitting that one is going to vote for Trump subjects one to even more vilification and ostracization than it did eight years ago.    Yet it seems, to this observer, that there are more people who want to cast the type of protest vote that, at its core, constitutes a vote for Donald Trump.   With Mr. Trump within, or very close to, the statistical margins of error in all the swing state, these “Who?   Me?   Vote for Trump?   No Way!” votes from places you wouldn’t expect could make all the difference.

 

One more thought…

 

While all pundits, including  this one, agree that this will be a very close election, yours truly is starting to get the impression, simply from talking to people and paying attention, that this might not be as close as people think.   There is a chance, albeit a small one, maybe 10% or, at most, 20%, that this could be something of a blowout.   Ms. Harris is unwittingly doing her mightiest to expand the aforementioned Group #3, i.e., those who can tolerate Trump but can’t tolerate Ms. Harris; the more she eschews answering substantive questions in favor of babbling inanely and incoherently about her middle class background among people who are proud of their lawns and her amorphous plans for an “opportunity economy” while disavowing her long-held views that might be all the rage in San Francisco but are anathema to voters elsewhere, the more people question her substance, her ability, her seriousness, and her trustworthiness…and the more tolerant people might be toward even Mr. Trump if she is the alternative.  

 

This will probably be a close race, but there is a small chance that it breaks big for Mr. Trump, or, more properly, away from Kamala Harris.