🇺🇸 Harris v. Trump, 1 day out

There is only one president in US history who has tried to falsify the results of an election and remain in power unlawfully. But, that doesn’t matter.

TL;DR — Democracy and the rule of law face off against a neofascist criminal cabal in the 2024 US election. With 1 day to go, is is still a dead heat, per all available polling and analysis.

“I like your sticker,” said the white, 50-something lady walking by, referring to the Harris for President bumper sticker on my Mac laptop. I gave her a quick smile and the victory hand sign.

Sitting on a bench at the Burbank airport, on my way to Las Vegas, I was doing my “human billboard” routine. It’s tiring for me, because my default visage has a kind of a scowly furrowed-brow appearance (basically, the male “resting bitch face”), and the human billboard must look friendly and approachable.

But I must have managed that, at least to some extent, because 17 different people struck up conversations with me in airports in California and Nevada. (I don’t start these conversations; I just post up somewhere with my laptop and try to look approachable.)

Airport conversations are a kind of performative exercise. Other people are listening; whether it’s a bench near the gate or an airport bar, there’s a captive audience around you. Sometimes they join in; sometimes they want to rebut the conversation initiator.

I genuinely enjoy those kinds of conversations — unlike in-the-field canvassing, which is this kind of grueling, uncomfortable work (physically and psychologically). But I do that work, too, based on my assumption that the Harris campaign and the party machine knows better than I do what will be effective — she grew up middle class, she fought for housing and families and health care, he will give tax breaks to himself and his rich cronies, he overturned Roe v. Wade and stripped women of their fundamental rights.

So I knocked on hundreds of doors with other volunteers in Las Vegas, Reno (where I also voted in person), and their outlying suburbs, as part of the actual Harris campaign ground game. To get to 17 meaningful conversations (that is, something other than just “Not interested!”) I think it took about 250 doors.

I do that grunt work to avoid wasting my efforts by talking about my own pet issue, and not actually persuading anybody. So I did several days of that for the campaign, using the bullet points they provided.

But at this stage, I’m a single-issue voter. There are actually many things about Trump that are utterly disqualifying, in my own opinion, but the fact that we have inconvtrovertible evidence that he tried to falsify the election results in 2020 is so much bigger than the rest of them. It is manifestly disqualifying, and I think the fact that he isn’t in prison for that crime already is a leading indicator that the United States of America is no longer a high-functioning democracy.

(I laughed out loud as I wrote that last sentence, because somebody will surely write a whole book about that alone.)

That means I have no fucks to give about, say, tax policy. I don’t care if we keep providing Israel with weapons, or cut them off because they are perpetrating a genocide with our weapons. I don’t care if we abolish the Department of Education, or don’t. I don’t care if we keep providing modern weapons so Ukraine can continue to defend itself from its insane neighbor, or if we decide to retreat and cede victory to the vile Russian dictator.

I picked those issues because they are all obviously important, and I do care about them in an objective sense — but fundamentally, politics is about deciding what matters. To me, democracy is what matters, and relative to that, those other issues don’t. Whatever you might think about them, if you don’t have a democracy, then it doesn’t matter what you think.

The personally shocking thing about my own ongoing three-week pro-democracy civil service tour of duty has been learning that what matters to me — democracy itself — doesn’t actually matter to the millions of voters that will be deciding this election based on other stuff.

Obviously, it matters in some objective sense that Trump is a criminal conspirator in a failed coup attempt — and, if Harris wins, that might still be one of the decisive factors. As I write this, a day and a half before the election, I think Harris will win. But I don’t think she would have won without the support of Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, and all the non-famous regular-citizen conservatives who — like me — believe that democracy and the rule of law are the things that matter the most and therefore, fuck Trump.

So if it plays out that way, one valid framing might be “Trump would have won in 2024, if he hadn’t brazenly tried to falsify the 2020 election results, and undermine democracy itself, thereby alienating principled conservatives that might otherwise have voted for him”.

I enjoy that framing because it is aligned with my viewpoint. It feels good to me.

But, 18 days into my 22-day trip, I don’t really believe that framing. It’s arguably true, but not the most true way to look at it.

The awful truth is that democracy doesn’t matter to most voters. It does matter to some of them, but for most, other things matter more. Which is fucking crazy. But only a dumb asshole tries to deny reality because he doesn’t like it. That’s MAGA-hat thinking. So I am coming to grips with that — or more honestly speaking, just preparing to come to grips with it.

(Above is my current understanding, as of Monday, November 4. If all the polling is so wildly wrong that Harris wins in a landslide victory (really unlikely, I think, but not impossible) then you can disregard everything in this article, as it’s all predicated on an incorrect understanding of the present situation.)

What does matter to them, then?

I don’t know! That’s because in these past three weeks, I’ve mainly spoken to people targeted by the Harris campaign’s data operation — registered Nevada voters who’ve somehow exhibited receptiveness to the Democratic message, and who haven’t yet voted — and various randos in airports who came up to me and started a conversation.

That’s not a representative sample of anything, obviously. It’s just my experience. But for the record:

Among people I personally talked to, “the economy” was by far the top concern, meaning dramatically higher rents and housing costs and high grocery prices.

The second one was Roe v. Wade and women’s rights — I met zero men, but several women, who identified this as their most important issue.

That’s true for both likely voters, and people who’d already voted.

I also spoke to a couple hundred people who were also volunteering to canvass for Harris, or attending the Harris rally in Las Vegas with Jennifer Lopez and Mana

Even most of those people, and the Democratic party people for whom I am working, are treating this like a regular election: Republican far-right vs Democrat center-right (aka the “left” in the US parlance). Nothing about the brazen, incontrovertible attempts to illegally and fraudulently change the official election results.

And, after weeks on the ground here, I both understand and agree that this is probably the right slate of things to focus on. I’m just… shocked and surprised that this is so.

So then… what?

No idea! Even if she wins… it buys some time, but the prognosis is basically ugh, fuck, dude.

If he wins, America as a democracy is finished, and we probably passed the point of no return in 2020 or 2016, without knowing it. I don’t even want to litigate that case here, because that wouldn’t be the best use of these precious last hours — instead, I’m driving up to Reno again to drive people to the polls tomorrow.

Suffice it to say that if there’s one thing worse than a corrupt first-term criminal president who tries to falsify elections, weaponize the goverment apparatus against his political enemies, and leverage his position to profit personally, it’s… that guy in a second term.

If you don’t think a second Trump term would be catastrophic than you are probably suffering from normalcy bias and you should go google that on bing.com. (Or maybe you’re just a moron.)

But if Harris wins, I’m afraid we will still have to keep doing this annoying rearguard action against this neofascist movement for years or even decades to come. Once the fasc-cat is out of the bag… well it just shits all over the house until you catch it and kill it.

The actual work of defending democracy itself is going to be unbelievably stupid, exhausting, and go on for far too long — much like this entire 4-year election cycle.

Again, if she slaughters him, and the last-minute Iowa poll that has her winning Iowa isn’t an outlier but a bellweather — then fuck this whole analysis, and maybe things aren’t as dire as I am saying.

I hope that’s right! In which case, sorry to waste your time reading the above — except the part where I am not actually sorry and am actally more delighted than I have ever been to be completely wrong.

But if I’m not wrong, then I hope my fellow citizens are ready. A Harris victory will really be the beginning, not the end. It will be a slog.

If we manage to propel Harris to victory, we’ll still have to worry about neofascism, kleptocratic olilgarchs, and general dumbshittery for years to come. But one thing we won’t have to do is think about this specific dumbshit ever again:

That alone would make it all worth it.

OK! I’m hitting the road. If Harris wins, I’ll see you on the flip side.

🌵    🚗💨