On Election Day eve, there are no warning signs for Kamala Harris

Image via Free Malaysia Today/Creative Commons.
John Stoehr
November 04, 2024

Today is the eve of Election Day. It’s tempting to presume there’s nothing left to say, but there always is. What do you want to know? That’s the question I put to followers. I couldn’t reply to all today, but I will try to get to the rest tomorrow before the polls close.

Do you see any warning signs for Kamala Harris? – @Maryqiae

Actually, I don’t. The thing that has me most concerned is polling in swing states that show a dead-even race. Polls, however, have been problematic, to say the least. It’s not that I think they are wrong. It’s that I don’t trust them as much as I used to. What I trust more are things like history, campaigns and “the fundamentals.” Those things are pointing the direction of victory for Vice President Kamala Harris. Among other reasons, voters have already decided Trump’s fate. Harris can reasonably be expected to win the states Joe Biden won in 2020.

2020 was, of course, before the Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe and stripped rights from half the country, and empowered states to enact bans on abortions. The last two years have featured a steady and ominous drip-drip-drip of headlines about women bleeding out in parking lots and otherwise dying from pregnancy complications. A lot of people who otherwise hated abortion nevertheless still wanted it to be legal and are reacting badly to the policing of women’s bodies.

Nothing has broken in Trump’s favor during this election, not even his attempted assassination. That’s probably because whatever could break in his favor would have had to break against a tsunami the size of the generational backlash against Dobbs. Even in reliably red Iowa, something is happening such that white women over the age of 65, who would normally be expected to support the GOP candidate, are, according to one pollster, moving toward Harris by a 2 to 1 margin.

Do you think the election will make it to SCOTUS? – @MistyIvey2

The question is whether the election will be thrown to the Supreme Court. The fear is that Trump’s majority there will hand him victory.

That is a reasonable fear, and perhaps Trump himself is hoping for that outcome, but there’s only one circumstance in which that would happen – if the outcome of 2024 is as narrow as the outcome of 2000, with the winner decided by a few voters in one county in one state.

I don’t think it will be that narrow.

Don’t get me wrong. Our heads will spin with the number of legal challenges to vote counts in all swing states, just as we saw in the 2020 election. We can expect that from the Trump campaign. We may also see some skulduggery from GOP state election officials. Trump has talked about his “secret plan” to throw the election to the US House of Representatives, where it would be decided by state delegations. But I suspect such ideas and efforts to peter out, as they did the last time.

All bets are off if the outcome is razor-thin.

But I don’t think it will be.

I am curious how we heal the divisiveness. I am assuming Harris wins, but do we need to have some kind of process of finding common ground, rather than being split into two camps? – @Eldogal

This is a noble goal, and I applaud it, but I think the best way to “heal the divisiveness” in America is for the Democratic nominee win the election and establishing with that victory a new national consensus.

There was a time when centrism meant Democrats sounding like Republicans. That was in the wake of Ronald Reagan’s twin landslides. These days, in light of Trump’s unique threats to democracy and freedom, the Republicans who are backing Harris already sound a lot like Democrats. That’s the beginning of a new consensus. I would expect that trend to continue if Harris wins, if voters start feeling a growing economy and if the GOP continues drifting toward fascism.

What are your thoughts on MAGA not accepting the results? Do we see a repeat of the J6 coup attempt? – @the_bmusic

Maga is not going to accept the results of this election any more than they accepted the results of the last one. We all need to accept that. Other things we need to accept, because they will happen, include:

• Propagandists like Elon Musk spreading more lies.
• Some magas acting out violently.
• Some attempting another insurrection, perhaps.
• Denial by magas that Harris is a legit president.
• Total obstruction by congressional magas.

There will be blood, as it were. The question is how much. If Kamala Harris wins by a nose, a lot. If she wins convincingly, not so much.

But here’s the thing: We can’t let democracy depend on whether terrible people accept reality. If we do that, we will all go insane.

Instead, democracy must depend on good people who will to stand up for it and who will demand with the fullest voice possible that the authorities enforce the law when the magas inevitably break it.

If Donald Trump were running against a younger white male candidate, would this race be as close as it is? – @bevlogsbe

The presumption is that Harris’ race and sex are giving lots of white people a reason to take a second look at a lying, thieving, philandering sadist whose negligence during the covid pandemic killed a million of us and who attempted a paramilitary takeover of the US government.

My answer is maybe, but I don’t think so.

I don’t say this out of some misguided sense that Americans are less racist and sexist than we are made out to be. We are indeed those things and so much more. No, I say this because I don’t think the election is as close as it appears. It seems close, because the people who provide information about our politics have, for reasons that are far less noble than democracy and freedom, made it look that way.

So even if the Democratic nominee were white and young-ish and male, the Washington press corps would almost certainly find some way to play along with the Trump campaign’s effort to smear him. That combined with the news media’s need for fresh material that will get our attention would probably result in the appearance of a close race.

Lest we forget, Joe Biden’s “liabilities” were not restricted to his advanced age. The Republicans and the rightwing media apparatus spend a year building him up as the head of a crime family. House Republicans wanted to impeach him under the false pretense that he corrupted US foreign policy to enrich his son, Hunter, in Ukraine.

Why are we not hearing more from election official about election security to debunk all the nonsense about cheating? – @grantra

I was wondering the same until I heard Kamala Harris’s answer to a similar question. In essence, she acknowledged that Trump was sowing doubt about the election integrity. But assailing him for doing so risked compounding the problem. That’s why, in so many words, she chose to reassure us that the system is sound, that we can put our faith in it, and that nothing can undermine the people’s sovereignty.

Those are fine words, but what about bad actors? That’s for people who are not running for president to handle. For instance, Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner. During a presser today, he said, “Anybody who thinks it’s time to play militia, F around and find out.

He added: “Anybody who thinks it’s time to insult, to deride, to mistreat, to threaten people, F around and find out. We do have the cuffs. We do have the jail cells. We do have the Philly juries. And we do have the state prisons. So if you’re going to try to turn an election into some form of coercion, if you’re going to try to bully people, to bully votes or voters, if you’re going to try to erase votes, if you’re going to try any of that nonsense, we are not playing. F around and find out.”

I don’t have access to all local news media everywhere, but I’m guessing other law enforcement officials are also getting out in front of local news cameras to send a similar message to their communities, though I’m also guessing not quite as colorfully as Larry Krasner did.