🇺🇸 Harris for President: a preliminary analysis

"Fuck. It's over."

Once again, we find ourselves at that crossroads where the disorganized stakeholders in the US&A democracy, busy as always with other matters simultaneously important and mundane (e.g. raising kids), must face off against the army of morons and bootlickers who would allow, and the malevolent and deranged few who would implement, the dismantling and conversion of that democracy into a fascist kakistocracy.

Less than two weeks ago, all seemed lost:

While you could plausibly read that comment as “oh, this guy wishes Trump was actually killed”, an equally plausible^[1] interpretation is “for fuck’s sake, this guy tried to kill Trump and instead gave him a gift that you couldn’t buy for a fucking billion dollars — handing him the election on a fake-silver platter, with a side of ketchup”.

Biden already seemed destined to lose to Trump. This was more like a nail in the coffin.

Then, something very predictable happened

I know it seems like that shooting was months ago, but it hasn’t even been two weeks! Then, a few days later Biden… was no longer a candidate. There’s a lot I could write about that, and about Biden and his presidency, but that’s not where I can add value, so I won’t.

Instead, I will provide a brief analysis of the state of the election race. TL;DR — Although the situation remains dire, there is a path to victory for Harris.

A week ago, I didn’t think so. Even before the fascist dotard got shot in the ear, I was saying things like:

There’s no chance Biden will remain in the race, no matter what they are saying now. But, even so, if the Democrats put Kamala Harris at the top of the ticket, they will just lose anyway.

It will be fucking Hillary Clinton 2.0. Anoint the candidate that makes Democrats feel good.

But no successful election strategy is predicated on somehow turning voters into the better people that you wish they were.

America is too racist, and too sexist, to elect Harris.

But the first 72 hours provided new information. And based on that new information, my assessment has changed.

Biden had no chance to beat Trump. That wasn’t obvious at the outset. It became obvious in the way Hemingway described going bankrupt: Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.

I thought Harris also had no chance, and that the only hope was for the Democrats to really roll the dice with a contested convention (or equivalent) and end up with somebody like Pete Nerd or Mark Astronaut as the candidate.

But, I was wrong. Harris does have a real chance to beat Trump. This analysis is mainly for the friends and family who don’t have time to read the state-by-state polling, and dig into the situation on the ground in each battleground state. I did all that, leveraging the fact that I finally got COVID (after procrastinating the latest (fifth) vaccination I could have gotten for free 🤦‍♂️) and had to spend a week alone in a room.

Don’t get it twisted: the electoral system is still rigged in Trump’s favor. And there are a lot of voters in the handful of states that are going to decide this who won’t vote for a woman, much less a black woman. But there is a path to victory for Harris. It’s possible. They will need to run a near-perfect campaign.

And, happily, that’s the first surprising piece of new info: the campaign that Harris for President is running so far has been very, very good. That’s a surprise, because her first presidential campaign was very, very bad. I mean the campaign organization itself was widely panned as second-tier at best; it couldn’t make decisions quickly; it couldn’t always execute them once made; infighting and squabbles; then they ran out of money.

Now, one of the things unique about Harris, compared to all the other potential replacements for Biden, is that she was his running mate, and therefore can inherit the Biden campaign, along with all of its people. And she did. The campaign changed its name to Harris for President the day Biden announced he would not seek re-election.

But …so what? The Biden campaign has been losing — badly — to a fat, old, obnoxious, mentally ill sex offender and convicted felon. Granted, they also had an impossible mission: Biden, as we all saw, was no longer a candidate that could win the election. But we didn’t really know if this campaign was any good.

But now we know. They’re good. They showed that in the first 48 hours.

Freedom

First, they dropped this banger of an ad:

At first glance, it’s just a normal ad, other than the unusually powerful backing track Freedom from the popular Beyoncé — a good choice because Beyoncé is one of those black people who exudes a racism-negation field (RNF) that makes self-unaware moderately-racist white people temporarily more comfortable with black people. RNF is an audio/visual perceptual memetic phenomenon; therefore it works via video, photo, or even just audio.

But what’s genius about this ad is that it stakes claim to — and convincingly, I think — the word “freedom”. Usually, the Republicans win that word, and all those words. But with the song, the repetition of the word, and the broad definition they give it, they establish it as their slogan.

What that does is let them keep this constant reminder out there that Trump and the Republicans overturned the right for a woman to have an abortion. That is one of the “freedoms”, obviously. But rolling back that fundamental human right of reproductive freedom is one of the most unpopular things the Trump Republicans have done. The fundamentalist Christian base people are thrilled, but for the Republican party, it’s like the dog finally catching the car, and realizing oh shit, this thing is made out of metal. It’s deeply unpopular with voters, but also the issue is important to a lot of voters.

This choice of “Freedom” as the core slogan keeps a reminder of the reproductive freedom issue out there all the time, without actually having to directly mention it over and over.

The ad also subtly reframes the job of the presidency to make it more womanly. Protect the children. Take care of them when they are sick. The “fight” part is delegated to the viewing audience themselves. This is correct, because America won’t elect a scolding, angry woman. Especially not an angry black woman. This ad keeps Harris well on the opposite end of that spectrum, while still managing to be a reasonably hard-hitting ad.

Playing the Trump card

The second impressive thing they’ve been doing is forcing Trump to have more airtime by just putting clips of Trump himself out there. That sounds like a weird strategy, but this is a very weird election. The Trump campaign does not want swing voters to see Trump talking, and rightly so — he sounds fucking nuts, and is repulsive. The debate against Joe Biden was a dream come true for them, because Biden was so bad, it distracted from how out-of-his-fucking-mind Trump is.

Team Trump wants him talking to his MAGA people at rallies, and only to his MAGA people at rallies — because those rallies no longer get covered in the news. They’re basically reruns, and generate no news. (I mean, except you know, that recent one… 😬). It’s safe for Trump to talk to the people that voluntarily show up at his rallies. They’re well-addled, probably no longer capable of changing their ossified minds, even. But Team Trump does not want the swing voters to hear Trump talking. Much better to leave them with whatever vague impression they already have.

So, Kamala HQ has been posting a barrage of videos that are… literally just Trump talking. (Of course, usually accompanied by a mild snarky comment. But they’ve been artfully restrained, making Trump himself do the work of showing that he’s an idiot/misogynist/weirdo. Work he reliably does, for free.)

They did it to J.D. Vance, too, and the way they did it served as a kind of counter-meme to "awkward laugher Kamala":

So the early signs are that this is a campaign that can move fast, hit hard, and — so far — walk the tightrope a female black candidate has to walk. Which, by the way, is totally different tightrope than the one they were walking before, with the candidate so old and diminished that they were in the same position as the Trump campaign, of not wanting people to see too much of their candidate. So this campaign can pivot quickly.

And they raised a metric fuckton of money. That’s not too impressive, because the money had been basically turned off as donors realized Biden couldn’t make it. So there was pent-up energy and money ready to go. But Harris for President didn’t fail to capitalize on it.

The not-Biden boost

Early polling shows that Harris has closed the gap that Trump had opened up over Biden in the national polls to make it a tie — but that kind of poll is meaningless, aside from being a general indicator. The US electoral system, as we all know, gives rural voters more power. In the presidential election, a voter in Wyoming has more power than three California voters.

That specific comparison is meaningless, too, though: Harris will definitely win California, and Trump will definitely win Wyoming. The states that matter are the ones which could, in theory at least, go either way:

• Arizona (Trump leading BIG)
• Georgia (Trump leading SLIGHTLY)
• Michigan (Trump leading SLIGHTLY)
• Nevada (Trump leading BIG)
• Pennsylvania (Trump leading SLIGHTLY)
• Wisconsin (TIED)

If the election was suddenly held today, Trump would probably win most of those, and therefore the election. But it is very close. Trump’s “lead” is 2% and the margin of error is 3% in many of these, so its statistically tied. Moreover, in most states, Trump’s lead is less than the reported “undecided” percentage.

If Harris can win Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Georgia (that last one is a tall order — it’s a racist state with a racist, vote-suppressing state government, and Trump bootlickers and election-deniers holding local offices), then she could eke out this victory:

But Michigan is close, too. If she won that, then she could lose Georgia and still win the election.

The point is, the victory above is highly possible. She is very close right now. It doesn’t require any magical thinking or implausibly huge shifts in the polls. It’s definitely too close to predict anything with any accuracy, a hundred days out from the election.

And if you hate fascism, or just fat fake-hair sex-offender dotards in general, that’s some good-ass motherfuckin’ news.

Because two weeks ago, there was no reasonable chance of a map like that above. Biden was going to lose to Trump, and there was nothing anybody could do about it. There was no path to victory.

Should you still be worried? Fuck yeah. The above is a theoretically possible outcome, not a reflection of how it is today, and, as things stand right now, is still probably not the most likely outcome.

But there are 100 days to go.