🇺🇸 Harris v. Trump, 10 days out

TL;DR — Trump v. Harris is a dead heat, per all available polling and analysis. That means either:

• we’re fucked, or
• we’re totally and utterly fucked

It’s tied — as far as we can tell. Which means we can’t actually tell.

The above national poll shows that America is fucked. Donald Trump is the worst president in the past 100 years. He’s a liar, a cheater, a criminal a racist, and — important! — a fucking moron. I’ve been pointing out that he is also a fascist — not ideologically, but simply by nature, instinctively, in the same way a cockroach is a gross and filthy bug. John Kelly finally came forward to say that on the record, but it’s not news to anybody who paid attention to Trump’s first (and hopefully last, but… 😬) term.

The fact that this manifestly unqualified, infantile, mentally ill man is anywhere close to winning the popular vote says profoundly bad things about America. Those things will remain true even if he loses this election in a landslide.

But: those things are deep, long-term problems.

Of much greater and obvious urgency is the election that will happen in ten fucking days (as of the time I wrote this).

States that matter

The national polling isn’t useful, at this point; we can look at the swing state polling directly. But even those polls aren’t very useful, because they’ve been locked in a statistical tie for weeks. You can see the polls moving about 1% in Trump’s direction over the past month. That’s awful, in the objective sense, but it doesn’t change the situation; it’s a statistical tie, well within the margin of error of all of these polls. And that doesn’t even account for “polling error” which, although always present to some degree, has been significantly larger in the past two presidential elections than it was previously.

But you go to publication with the polling you have, not the polling you wish you had. So here’s what that tie looks like:

What can you do?

Vote. Call your friends, make sure they’ve voted. Offer to drive them to the polls. Make a little patriotic party out of it. Harangue them about it. It’s OK to be a little annoying. This election will very likely be decided by a handful of voters in a few key states.

If you’re in California, or some other non-swing state, volunteer a few hours to help phone bank the get-out-the-vote effort for Nevada, or Arizona. It’s easy to sign up, and you do it all on your laptop. (Just watch out — their website lists times in New York time for some reason.)

If you’re feeling heroic, drive to Reno or Vegas or whatever swing state is closest to you, and put boots on the ground. That’s what I’ve been doing.

Does it suck? Yeah, of course it fucking does. It’s absolutely tedious (and actually pretty horrifying; more on that in a moment). But it’s literally never going to matter more than it does right now. The stakes are so high, and the election outcome so close, that volunteering your time right now will probably have more impact than it would any other time in your life, past or future.

OK. Already voted? Signed up for some volunteer shifts?

🫡 Good job, citizen!

Feel free to stop reading here, then, and go get some shit done. Or, if you’re the type of person that is motivated by existential despair, then read on for my harrowing report from the front lines.

What in the actual fuck

The mechanics of canvassing are simple. It’s literally one foot in front of the other, repeat some words, check some boxes, move on, repeat. Phone banking is even easier: you just sit in front of a computer and talk and click a few buttons.

It’s psychologically exhausting, though. There are various different groups organizing it; through them you’ll meet slightly different potential voters. What the Harris campaign will have you do, if you sign up through their website, it basically just “get out the vote” work, where you aren’t really trying to convince anybody who to vote for, but for the most part just trying to get them to actually cast their vote.

But it’s exhausting, because you will feel viscerally how close the election is. It doesn’t feel close when you’re sitting in Tokyo reading The Economist, or when you’re eating avocado toast in a California cafe. But if you walk around Reno, Nevada, or drive around in Arizona, it’s palpable.

And, as you actually talk to more and more people — strangers you don’t know, not your friend group — you start to understand how it can be so close.

To be honest, this was baffling to me before I started doing this. I literally could not understand how Trump could be this close to winning. Even though I’ve been commentating on the intellectual decline of America for many years, I still couldn’t reconcile the idea that this idiot could become president again with my understanding of the country I grew up in.

In the past couple weeks, though, I’ve factored that equation into simpler constituent parts. It’s become much more understandable, and less horrible along one axis, but more terrifying along another.

The good news

The less-horrifying angle is that Trump’s implausible share of the vote is not a simple function of people being awful, terrible people^[1]. There are a lot of awful people out there, don’t get me wrong; I met a bunch of them.

And the “who I happened to meet” demographic is obviously not representative of the country. But meeting them nevertheless gave me a better understanding.

What I know now, that I didn’t know before, is how little these people actually know. About anything. When (clumsily) baited in her Fox News interview, Kamala Harris competently refused to say they are stupid, transitioning into a verbal judo throw about how Trump is the only candidate in this race who tends to demean Americans like that. Good; obviously what she should do.

But I am not in her position, and I can’t help but suspect that you have to be pretty stupid to manage to know so little. But maybe I’m underestimating something, or missing some pieces. So for now, I’ll set aside the question of “are these fucking people as dumb as a box of rocks?”, and stick to the fact that they are demonstrably ignorant of simple and salient facts, that I’d previously assumed were already known to virtually all normal US citizens planning to vote.

Some snippets of actual conversations I had in Nevada:

Me: “So, what’s your take on J.D. Vance saying that if he were in Mike Pence’s place as Vice President, he would not have certified the 2020 election results? Is that something you support, something you disagree with, or something in between?”

Voter: “Haven’t heard of that. Actually, I don’t really know anything about J.D. Vance, other than that Trump picked him. Haven’t ever seen him speak, on TV or anything.”

Now, I’m not saying I expected everybody to know that Vance said that specific thing. But I kind of expected people intending to vote to know something about him.

Me: “Are you familiar with the first impeachment of Trump, when he was president?”

Voter: “Oh… the porn star business? Yeah, I didn’t pay too much attention to that.”

No, not that…

Me: “Did you follow the news back when there were street protests in DC and Trump asked the military if they couldn’t just shoot the protestors?”

Voter: “Oh my god, he really said that?”

(Yes.)

Some other things people said they didn’t know:

• that a recording exists capturing Trump calling the Secretary of State in Georgia and asking him to “find” enough votes to overturn the election in that state
• that Trump has promised to impose tariffs on foreign goods (at all, let alone that this seems to be the main pillar of his economic policy)
• that Trump asked then-Vice President Mike Pence not to certify the election results in 2020
• that police officers were injured in the Capitol riot of January 6, 2021
• that no child in America has ever gotten a sex change operation at public school without parental consent (🙄)

Now these conversations were with strangers. I don’t know even know for sure who most of them are supporting for president.

But I do know that if you don’t know any of these things, you probably don’t have enough information to make a good decision about who to vote for. I also suspect, although the conversations depicted above were with different people, that many of the people I met were ignorant of most, or even all, of these things.

I cite these specific examples because they’re a precise, if fairly random, selection of facts that I’d assumed were common knowledge among normal voters. I was wrong.

But, there was also a more amorphous, less well-defined haze of ignorance.

“I really don’t like the demonization of immigrants,” said one woman, and I believed she meant it. “I’m actually appalled by that, and I’d even say that I do think Trump is a racist. But, I have to balance that against the economy. Our rent has literally doubled.”

“Sure,” I said. “But if you don’t mind my asking, what makes you think Trump would be better for the economy?”

She gave me a slightly disbelieving look. “Well… I mean, he’s Trump!”

😞

The bad news

It was, in some ways, a relief to find out that at least some of the citizens considering voting for Trump weren’t necessarily as acquiescent to his racism, corruption, or fomenting of political violence as it had seemed like they must be.

But, in equal measure, it was terrifying to stare directly into the yawning maw of their ignorance.

“The educated citizen knows how much more there is to know. He knows that ‘knowledge is power,’ more so today than ever before. He knows that only an educated and informed people will be a free people, that the ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all…” — John F. Kennedy, 1963

Kennedy talked about the ignorance of one voter — how about the stupendous ignorance of tens of millions of voters? 😬

When Benjamin Franklin was asked in 1787 what kind of government the nascent United States had, he famously said, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

236 years later… yeah, that’s really not looking so good lately.