đșđž Harris for President: a preliminary analysis
TL;DR â Unlike Biden, Kamala Harris CAN WIN THE 2024 ELECTION.
Herein, I detail one plausible path to victory, and summarize the present situation.
"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:
![a chat transcript showing somebody reacting to the botched assassination attempt with a facepalm emoji](/stuff/2024-07-14-he-missed.png)
A US citizen reacting to breaking news 30 seconds after waking up.
While you could plausibly read that comment as âoh, this guy wishes Trump was actually killedâ, an equally plausible[1] interpretation is âfor fuckâs sake, this guy tried to kill Trump and instead gave him a gift that you couldnât buy for a fucking billion dollars â handing him the election on a fake-silver platter, with a side of ketchupâ.
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 hasnât even been two weeks! Then, a few days later Biden⊠was no longer a candidate. Thereâs a lot I could write about that, and about Biden and his presidency, but thatâs not where I can add value, so I wonât.
Instead, I will provide a brief analysis of the state of the election race. TL;DR â Although the situation remains dire, there is a path to victory for Harris.
A week ago, I didnât think so. Even before the fascist dotard got shot in the ear, I was saying things like:
Thereâs 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 wasnât 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.
![two guys who know how to read books, and are also of the same ethnicity](/stuff/pete-nerd-and-mark-kelly.jpg)
Pete Nerd and Mark Astronaut, standing with some lady in Arizona.
But, I was wrong. Harris does have a real chance to beat Trump. This analysis is mainly for the friends and family who donât 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 đ€Šââïž) and had to spend a week alone in a room.
Donât get it twisted: the electoral system is still rigged in Trumpâs favor. And there are a lot of voters in the handful of states that are going to decide this who wonât vote for a woman, much less a black woman. But there is a path to victory for Harris. Itâs possible. They will need to run a near-perfect campaign.
And, happily, thatâs the first surprising piece of new info: the campaign that Harris for President is running so far has been very, very good. Thatâs 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 couldnât make decisions quickly; it couldnât 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 âŠso what? The Biden campaign has been losing â badly â 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 didnât really know if this campaign was any good.
But now we know. Theyâre good. They showed that in the first 48 hours.
Freedom
First, they dropped this banger of an ad:
At first glance, itâs just a normal ad, other than the unusually powerful backing track Freedom from the popular BeyoncĂ© â a good choice because BeyoncĂ© 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 whatâs genius about this ad is that it stakes claim to â and convincingly, I think â the word âfreedomâ. 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 âfreedomsâ, 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, itâs like the dog finally catching the car, and realizing oh shit, this thing is made out of metal. Itâs deeply unpopular with voters, but also the issue is important to a lot of voters.
This choice of âFreedomâ 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 âfightâ part is delegated to the viewing audience themselves. This is correct, because America wonât 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 theyâve 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 â 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 â because those rallies no longer get covered in the news. Theyâre basically reruns, and generate no news. (I mean, except you know, that recent one⊠đŹ). Itâs safe for Trump to talk to the people that voluntarily show up at his rallies. Theyâre 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 theyâve been artfully restrained, making Trump himself do the work of showing that heâs 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 â so far â 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. Thatâs not too impressive, because the money had been basically turned off as donors realized Biden couldnât make it. So there was pent-up energy and money ready to go. But Harris for President didnât 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 â 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. Trumpâs âleadâ is 2% and the margin of error is 3% in many of these, so its statistically tied. Moreover, in most states, Trumpâs lead is less than the reported âundecidedâ percentage.
If Harris can win Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Georgia (that last one is a tall order â itâs 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:
![one possible path to victory for Kamala Harris](/stuff/2024-map.jpg)
20,000,000 baby-boomers have died since Trump beat Clinton in 2016, according to the Mooch.
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 doesnât require any magical thinking or implausibly huge shifts in the polls. Itâs 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, thatâs some good-ass motherfuckinâ 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.
[1]: although not contradictory or mutually exclusive
KEYWORDS: fascist racist rapist dotard makeup-wearing lard-ass moron vs democracy