The Election’s Home Stretch

Photo by Elvert Barnes from Silver Spring MD, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

It may be difficult to believe, but Election Day is two weeks from today.

It always seems like a big day will never get here. When it does, it seems unreal. It’s like looking forward to Christmas as a kid… or more accurately, it’s like the day a painful and dreaded surgery finally arrives. Maybe a root canal.

It will be nice to finally put Election Day behind us, if only to get rid of all the political ads. I’ve been very careful to avoid putting my phone number out there to political groups, but the television and streaming internet ads are annoying enough. One day last week alone we got four Trump political mailers.

What follows Election Day may be worse than the seemingly endless campaign. The election remains a tossup so the odds are roughly equal that you’ll be disappointed no matter who you favor. If you don’t favor either candidate, you’re sure to be disappointed.

Even worse, a new Axios poll found that a fifth of Republicans think Trump should take steps to seize power if he loses the election (compared to 12 percent of Democrats if Harris loses). About 30 percent of Republicans believe that violence may be necessary to save the country compared to eight percent of Democrats. These numbers are disturbing on both counts, but, as I wrote recently, a Trump loss in particular leaves open the possibility of more post-election violence, and the more we normalize post-election violence the tougher it is to step back from the brink.

And the election likely won’t be over on Election Day. Close elections mean days of counting early and absentee votes. State governments could speed this process by allowing early counting and setting Election Day as the deadline to receive absentee ballots. Blue states tend to do better on allowing early counting while red states are better at limiting late-arriving ballots. Both sides are to blame for the delays.

In Georgia, more than a million voters have already cast ballots. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has promised a swift count, saying that all early and absentee ballots will be reported by 8 pm on Election Day.

Delays feed into conspiracy theories and lack of faith in the system. To some extent, this may be by design. Marjorie Taylor Greene is already on spreading the same conspiracy theory that cost Fox News and Gateway Pundit millions of dollars, claiming that Dominion voting machines are changing ballots.

Gabriel Sterling, a top Georgia elections official and a Republican, denied the allegations and said there wa an “isolated error by the voter.” For those not acquainted with Georgia’s system, voters are asked to verify their choices before submitting their ballots, and a hard copy is printed out that can be tallied separately.

Another video going around that purportedly shows a woman changing votes is from 2020. Erick Erickson helpfully points out that the woman in the video, Misty Hampton, was a county election official who had to enter a password to do what she did. Even then, her actions would leave a trail since computer totals would not match the hard copy records. Hampton is being prosecuted for her role in a voting machine breach in Coffee County, Georgia after the 2020 election.

As we enter the final stretch, the candidates are making their final pitches to the voters, and I have to question whether Trump really wants to win. I’ve long said that Trump is unable to play it straight for more than a week or so, but The Former Guy’s recent behavior would have MAGA supporters screaming “Dementia!” if it was Joe Biden.

For instance, last week at a town hall in Pennsylvania, Trump abruptly cut the question-and-answer session short after two attendees fainted and said, “Let’s just listen to music.” What followed was about half an hour of Trump awkwardly swaying to music.

Over the weekend at another Pennsylvania rally, Trump spent 15 minutes talking about Arnold Palmer, notably waxing eloquent about the professional golfer’s “unbelievable” genitalia. From there, the candidate often described at the only choice for Christians veered into a profanity-laced description of Kamala Harris as a “sh*t vice president” and attacked absentee voting even as I get Republican mailers in Georgia encouraging early voting.

Some Trump rhetoric is much darker. The Former Guy has continued to double down on stolen election claims, defended January 6 as a “day of love,” and denounced his political opponents as “the enemy within.” At times, Trump has even suggested using the National Guard and/or the active duty military against “the enemy within.” He also called for the FCC to cancel CBS’s broadcast license after a tiff with “60 Minutes” in which Trump claimed the show deceptively edited a Kamala Harris interview.

Part of me think that Republicans would like to see Democrats violently take to the streets if Trump wins. This would both provide cover for MAGA’s January 6 violence and give Trump an excuse to crack down on the opposition.

Trump’s competence, mental state and temperament have led about half of his old Administration to either not support his candidacy or to outright support Harris. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs under Trump, General Mark Milley went so far as to say Trump is “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person to this country.” It would have been nice if Milley had said this back in the primaries rather waiting for Bob Woodward to publish his comments.

Compared to all this, Trump’s stunt of working a short shift at a McDonald’s as a fry cook seems almost normal. As it turns out, the restaurant was closed and the entire event was staged, but it did make for an interesting moment on the campaign trail, and the memes spawned by the stunt are definitely worth surfing the internet for.

Whether it was effective is another question. Republicans cheered the move while Democrats said it reeked of desperation. The point of the exercise, Trump’s claim that Harris lied about working at McDonald’s, was undermined when the restaurant chain could neither confirm nor deny Harris’s McJob, saying, “We and franchisees don’t have records for all positions dating back to the early 1980s.” Some likened it to the Michael Dukakis tank photo-op that backfired in 1988, but we won’t know whether the ploy worked for a couple of weeks.

Donald Trump isn’t the only one with problems, but Kamala Harris’s problems are more of the normal, sane variety than Trump’s. Harris recently accepted a tough sit-down interview with Brett Baier of Fox News. Accounts of her performance vary with partisanship, but Harris seems to have given a forceful if somewhat vague performance.

The Harris campaign did get a late start, but at this point she’s had about three months to develop smoother answers to simple, straightforward questions like “What would you different from Joe Biden?” and “Are things better now than they were four years ago?” The fact that Harris is still stumbling over these questions is political malpractice.

The Democratic nominee did have a quick retort to a heckler in Wisconsin. When an attendee yelled “liar” at the vice president (not “Jesus is Lord” at some right-wing posts are claiming), Harris responded by directing him to the “smaller [rally] down the street.” As this incident, the Fox interview, and her debate with Trump show, Harris can be quick on her feet so I don’t understand why she keeps getting tripped up by softball questions.

The Harris campaign also brought out the big guns in an attempt to address her problem with black men. Former President Barack Obama is on the campaign trail stumping for Harris with strong criticism for hesitant black voters. In other news of things that might backfire, some have criticized Obama’s haranguing as insulting.

As Harris struggles with black voters, Trump continues to struggle with whites. A new CNN analysis shows that Trump’s edge among noncollege whites is eroding. This is in addition to his problems with college-educated whites that I discussed last week. While Trump still leads in this demographic, his margins are smaller than in previous years. This could be a deciding factor in the Rust Belt where noncollege whites make up one of the largest segments of the electorate.

At the risk of repeating myself, both candidates are flawed, and I didn’t even get to policy or Trump merchandising watches, Chinese-made Bibles, and a non-transferable crypto coin or Elon Musk’s possibly-illegal million dollar raffles for swing state voters. It has already been a weird year and the next two weeks are going to get even weirder.

My opinion is well known. I’d grade both candidates poorly on policy, but one candidate is clearly more serious and qualified than the other. One candidate clearly lacks the fitness and temperament to be president. I put my ballot where my mouth was and voted for Kamala Harris last week. I sincerely hope that by the time we vote for president again, Republicans will have let Trumpism run its course and returned to their traditional conservative roots.

Yeah, I don’t expect that either.

Elon