Now What?

The US Presidential election is coming to a head. Although 5 November 2024 is D-Day, early polling in numerous states has been going on for quite some time already.

In a country of some 340 million (not counting the undocumented), where voting is a privilege rather than an obligation, free hot dogs, going-on-a-billion-dollars for advertising and events, and, in the case of the Democrat Party, Hollywood celebrities, are all deployed to get-out the vote. As of writing, the polls put the two candidates, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, as even in the polls, or where in some cases one candidate enjoys a slight lead, it is within the margin of error.

The Varnished Culture called the result in 2016 for Trump a few months ahead of the poll, and in 2020, sheer exhaustion and Covid 19 (as Jane Fonda put it, ‘God’s gift to the Left’) rendered the election of Joe Biden as a sign of the epoch’s insanity, but we can claim neither local knowledge nor a degree in political science. Here we will give our impressions and try to predict an outcome.

Some factors to bear in mind:

The VEEP pick. That usually is fairly unimportant, resonating generally in terms of votes in the Vice Presidential nominee’s home state. Trump picked 40 year old J. D. Vance, of Ohio, and of “Hillbilly Elegy” fame. He was widely mocked for this choice but it turns out to be canny; the Buckeye State is a bellwether, which Biden won in 2020, and Vance has presented as sane, balanced, coherent, even (Lord Knoweth How) nice; his debate with Harris’ elect, Tim Walz, was a refreshingly courteous and respectful affair. Given the uncertain times, and Trump’s advanced age (78), it gives some impression of stability and continuity, should Trump do what no one has managed since Grover Cleveland.

On the other hand, Walz on the Democrat ticket might have been a mistake. Yes, he’s the Governor of Minnesota, which Harris must win to head towards the magic 270 electoral college votes. He seems avuncular and likeable. But his record is very progressive (e.g. tampons in boy’s school toilets), his governance of the State sub-standard (remember George Floyd and the ‘mostly peaceful’ protests?), and at 60, he does not suggest continuity (although if Harris wins 2 terms, that’s no problem). He’s got into trouble for ‘misspeaking’ (i.e., telling fibs about his military record, being in China during the Tiananmen Square atrocities, and so on), and has not distinguished himself in explaining those distortions, calling himself a “knucklehead,” and inviting ridicule, including by SNL – see below).

It may, or may not, have been a strategic mistake to pass over 51 year old Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, an even more important battleground state this November 5. But Shapiro is a practicing conservative Jew, and putting him on the ticket might have disrupted the Biden-Harris Two State Solution (namely, Michigan and Nevada).

Trump Derangement Syndrome. TDS in the U.S. is acute as ever, but less virulent, owing, in one of Ms. Harris’ favourite phrases, to the passage of time. Half of the country remains committed to Trump, remembering (whether rightly or not) a better time (see below). And he has already had 4 years in the job, in which he signally failed to start World War III, engineer a coup, or burn down the Reichstag (although some of his supporters and FBI plants tried this on January 5 and 6, 2021). They charged him with dubious felonies, visited on him crippling civil judgments, sought to sequester his bank accounts and real estate holdings, and continue to threaten to find him hanged in his cell at Rikers Island. They harassed and impeached him over fake Russian dossiers, and an equivocal telephone call to Ukraine. The FBI raided his home over some archival documents. They suppressed real ammunition against the Biden family, and had 51 government ‘intelligence experts’ declare the Laptop from Hell as Russian disinformation – only it happened to be genuine. There is little doubt that the power base in Washington DC badly wants rid of Trump for good, and the triumph of managerialism in western democracies has in recent years shown just how impotent, and dispensable, our elected leaders are.

To quote Ned Beatty in Network – “It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance! You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! … You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state, Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, … The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, … It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, … to see that… perfect world… in which there’s no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.”  [Frankly, we’d find Trump easier to bear.]

The Hitler Thing.

The President, the Vice President, sundry establishment politicians (of both major parties) and the legacy media, have been calling Trump a fascist, a dictator, a threat to democracy, and likening him to Hitler, for a long time. In recent weeks, this rhetoric has been elevated, suggesting that the Harris campaign is panicking, somewhat. This slur is unlikely to be cutting-through with the undecided, and it is worse than idiotic – it is irresponsible.

On 7 April, 2023, amid the criminal indictments swirling around Trump, we wrote; “In the 1968 Presidential Campaign, Marvin Garson wrote a mock interview with the ghost of the assassinated President William McKinley. McKinley ‘said’: “Don’t waste your vote on [Robert] Kennedy. They’re going to kill him.” Well, we saw how that turned-out. [And the Democrat Party withheld security from Robert Kennedy Jnr when he challenged President Biden, and took to the Courts to kick him off state ballots.] We imagine a terrible new script, where the ghost of Ronald Reagan says, “Don’t waste your vote on Trump. They’re going to kill him.” They came close on 13 July 2024 in Butler, Pennsylvania, and some time later, on one of the candidate’s golf courses.

Trump got a thick ear, and a big bounce, from that horrible event in Butler, where a troubled young man with a rifle, and Corey Comperatore, a firefighter, husband and father attending Trump’s rally, lost their lives. The incident was both an indictment of America’s twitchy trigger fingers and shocking lapses by the security services. But was it a lapse? The more you drill-down into the background, the more you begin to wonder. Joe Rogan, who hosts the most popular podcast in the U.S., with an audience just shy of 20 million listeners, said this; “I’m not accusing anybody of anything—just want to be real clear—but they have organized assassinations before. And when they organize assassinations, it looks just like that. And when they organize assassinations, one of the things they like to do is have some f****** loser kill the president and then they kill the f****** loser, and that’s a wrap.”

Harris is New. This is a plus and a minus. The plus is that ‘new’ is cool in an election; maybe she can do better than the two old guys before her. She is unlikely to be silly: she’s been a public prosecutor, District Attorney for San Francisco, the California Attorney-General, and was the junior U.S. senator from California from 2017 to 2021. But she has yet to set-out a credible vision of what her administration would look like. Her time in Congress was marked by extremely radical positions; she was even to the left of the Squad and Bernie Sanders. Banning fracking; Reparations for people who were not enslaved, paid by people who were not slave-owners; A ceasefire in the Middle East but no provision of ‘hoses’ to put the fires out; Massive tax increases; Inflationary government spending, projected to swell the national deficit to $2 trillion (over a decade). She has already backed-away from several of these policy positions, and is now insinuating that she would bolster the bulwarks against illegal immigration, a painfully sore point of the Biden legacy, and adopt Trump’s thought-bubble ‘no tax on tips’.

After President Biden withdrew from his Party’s nomination to be the candidate for 2024, with formal democratic processes to replace him dispensed-with, Harris had little time to establish herself with the American public. She can’t blame people for viewing her elevation to the Vice Presidency as a diversity hire, because that’s how President Biden foolishly said she was picked. The narrow window, after Biden dropped-out, sheltered her from harsh criticism for a while, and she did well in the debate with Trump and got a bounce from the Democratic Convention, but her campaign has faltered, due to her baffling incoherence in setting-out her agenda. She has dodged hard interviews (she did one on Fox with the gentlemanly Bret Baier, which bombed so badly that comedian Jimmy Failla said Hamas had issued a statement claiming responsibility) and there has not been enough dressing to drizzle over her multiple word-salad answers to simple questions. Her cackle pleases some and repels more. Yes, Trump’s mode of speech is often grotesque, but Harris’ statements are almost invariably incomprehensible. She seems uncertain, almost afraid; risk-averse, in trouble without a script, and has shed staff at an astonishing degree, with reports of tantrums and laziness. This might be “shaken off” by endorsements from such legends as President Obama, the Clintons, Robert De Niro, Taylor Swift, Oprah, Bruce Springsteen, Beyoncé, Lizzo, and Eminem, but these worthies are more likely to appeal to the already committed.

Her main role as VP was the so-called ‘Border Czar,’ a title she now gainsays, and this hurts her campaign, because an estimated 10 to 20 million folks have crossed the U.S. southern border in the last 4 years, quite a few of whom are on terror watch-lists, and the influx has led to some criminal causes célèbre, and severe fiscal stress on sanctuary cities such as New York, Washington, and Chicago. Trump’s bizarre and probably ludicrous riff – “They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the pets – of the people that live there”, has become both a meme and a pop song – and hurts him not at all – it just serves to drive-home a point that has objective legitimacy. Two Australian Prime Ministers won elections on tough border control, and issue-polling suggests the economy and immigration are top of mind in the US at the moment. Add to this the recent hijacking of apartment complexes in Colorado by Venezuelan gangs, and it adds-up to a toxic political brew. And Harris cops flak because she ran cover for Biden when his cognitive decline has been profound and of long-standing.

Don’t **** with a Biden. It is easy at times to forget that Joe Biden remains the President. He has been supine in recent months since dropping-out, spending time at the beach. He’s also been conspicuous by his absence on Harris’ campaign, possibly at her request, since Joe’s legacy is not one to commend to posterity. But he, and his wife, are reported to be angry at his ouster as the nominee, despite the attempts to clothe it in Washingtonian grandeur – he has not spoken to Nancy Pelosi, for example, since the coup. At the recent memorial service for Ethel Kennedy, widow of the martyred RFK, Biden and Barack Obama were huddled in deep, sombre, worried conversation, and no one believes they were discussing the late Mrs. Kennedy. One consistent polling phenomenon in this election is the ‘coy voter’, who intends to vote for Trump, but dares not admit it to pollsters, friends, and family. This goes some way to explaining why Trump was well behind in 2016 and 2020, and surged back later to win and come close, respectively.

Tucker Carlson has opined that the Democrat Party has become the party of angry women and weak men. And its party elders seem to maintain the practice of scolding voters who don’t elect their candidate. Mrs. Clinton did it in 2016 (“Basket of Deplorables”) and President Obama recently implied black men were shying-away from Harris because of misogyny. We can’t swallow that. Plenty of African American men would vote for a woman like Obama’s wife, or Oprah, for example.  ‘Anyway’, as Joe would say, if Harris does not win, expect some Biden reprisals before he leaves in late January 2025 (as well as pardons for his son, brother, and possibly himself). As the host of the recent Al Smith Dinner in New York (which Harris made a big mistake in not attending) joked, a small cohort of non-MAGA people hope Trump wins: they’re called the Biden Family.

The record. Much of the obloquy directed at Trump is actually projection. Trump gets leverage by styling himself as a non-politician, but actually, he campaigns old-school; loads of invective but also heavy on policy. He gets some traction from 2017-21: He threatened Putin sufficiently to make him check his ambitions in Ukraine. He wrought the Abraham Accords, the most critical progress in the Middle East for half a century. He effectively ended ISIS, including ordering the strike on the world’s then most dangerous terrorist, Iranian General Qasem Soleimani. He shook hands with, and shook the confidence of, Kim Jong Un at the DMZ. Inflation was under 2% on his watch, and his macho stance on tariffs assisted local manufacturing and reduced unemployment. Reuters reported that the S&P 500 stock market index was up over 50% since the November 2016 election. Trump proposed and passed the First Step Act, that reformed the federal justice and penal systems which unfairly and disproportionally targeted African Americans. He started construction on a border wall to staunch the flow of illegal immigration. He began negotiations for an orderly withdrawal from Afghanistan. All this while under relentless attacks by his political opponents, Washington insiders, and their minions. Along the way, he also made a myriad mistakes, but on the whole, his first term legacy might be summed-up as “He hurt your feelings and improved the nation.”

Our call.

As ever, the election will turn on 7 key battleground states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Biden won 6 of them in 2020, some (such as Georgia) very narrowly, but current polling suggests all 7, with their collective 93 electoral college votes, are in play. Demographers are suggesting a burgeoning minority of black men and Hispanics moving towards Trump, while white college-educated women are for Harris. For the first time, the General Executive Board of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters has not endorsed a candidate – previously, always a Democrat.

We hesitantly predict that Trump will lose the popular vote narrowly, but gain over 270 electoral college votes to win. However, we probably won’t know the result on polling day. But we also predict that he won’t be President #47. Some way will be found to prevent him taking office in January 2025.

UPDATE: 1 out of 4 ain’t too bad. Donald Trump won the election (as of update, he has garnered 312 electoral college votes) but he also won the popular vote, not achieved by a Republican since George W. Bush in 2004. And it all became fairly clear on polling day, although Mrs. Harris did not concede until the following day. Trump got about 2.5 million more votes than Vice President Harris, and he looks to have won all the swing states. He also greatly increased his Hispanic and Black voters, as well as young voters. The Democrat Party is sunk in the five stages of grief (and recrimination, and campaign debt): the only chipper one of them seems to be President Biden, who has invited Trump to lunch at the White House. Seems the invitee is no longer a threat to democracy.