you are welcome margin of errorA politics column by Tom Scocca, editor of Indignity NewsletterInvestigating Campaign 2024’s apocalyptic politics and coverage,
I voted. It was the only thing I knew I could do. I couldn’t find the “I Voted” sticker because they were all out of them; It was the last hour of the first day of early voting and the line was out the door of the high school gym when I arrived. It seemed as if they were printing new ballots for each new person to meet the demand, but the person who handed me my ballot was so busy that I couldn’t ask him if the thing that looked like a printer was There was actually a printer, and I didn’t want to break the flow.
Was this poll an indicator? The Trumpiest block in my neighborhood on the 2020 election map was Biden +72. There’s a buzz at the Harris-Walz campaign storefront on Broadway. If everyone lived here, there would be no doubt.
Instead—you already know how it is. Fear clouds everything. The social media feed is a machine tearing down its own conveyor belt. Everyone has a different and hostile coping mechanism to try to move forward, and they are pushing each other closer to breaking point. Tuesday is a horizon stretching far beyond the broken and burning desert of information; Tuesday is a vulture, nothing more than a yard away, fluttering for a feast overhead.
I don’t think Kamala Harris has blown the election. I don’t know whether she will win or not; I don’t see how there would be any real way to convict the Democratic nominee if Donald Trump becomes president again.
Since 2016, people have consoled themselves with stories that Hillary Clinton was Uniquely Unqualified Candidate or that his campaign Didn’t take wisconsin seriously-That she lost to Donald Trump because she basically didn’t deserve to win. A less blind, more righteous candidate would have been able to divert history just a few degrees away from the path of destruction.
Perhaps. sure why not. But this time there is no solid story that Harris is making some terrible, obvious, avoidable mistake. He quickly and decisively took control of Joe Biden’s candidacy and catapulted the Democratic presidential campaign into the stratosphere. She is fighting on the battlefield, mastering the ground game, maintaining message discipline and beating Trump in fundraising. He chose Tim Walz when sticky centrists were demanding Josh Shapiro. Thousands of people are gathering to listen to him.
Its position on Gaza is dire: a willing continuation of the Biden administration’s policy of sadism while throwing the country’s full military-industrial weight behind war crimes. I wish I electorally believed that the vast majority of Americans who want the genocide to stop could be combined into a more powerful force than the organized, fanatical minority currently in power. I wish it had been clearer that the potential political cost of losing Dearborn, Michigan, outweighs the potential political cost of having CNN anchors attack the nominee as an anti-Semite day after day. But it is hard to look at the last year of pro-Netanyahu McCarthyism and conclude that the morally abhorrent approach is strategically wrong.
So I stood in line and voted. I cast my first presidential general election vote for Bill Clinton, knowing full well that he had made the racist human sacrifice of Ricky Ray Rector to get there. Regretting or condemning some of the choices Harris has made in building her coalition is not the same as admitting that she is not running to win. I never wanted to be like Liz Cheney in favor of anything, much less like Dick Cheney, and I’m sure Cheney would feel the same way about me. Unfortunately, one of the live issues in this particular election is “Was it good or bad for Donald Trump to have a mob ransack the Capitol to try to steal the 2020 election?” — and Liz Cheney bet her entire political career on getting on the right side of that otherwise scandalous question. Beating the mob for good means isolating and marginalizing everyone on the other side as much as possible, and in the world of 2024 that means suffering testimonials from the Cheney family.
The alternative is unimaginable, yet somehow plausible. All reporting says the Donald Trump campaign is a logistical disaster. He Robbed the Republican National Committee To pay your own legal fees; he has hardly any staffHis voter turnout campaign appears to have failed human trafficking scheme Elon Musk outsourced the obvious. As a candidate, Trump has been procrastinating and mumbling, canceling events or becoming mysteriously silent on stage or boring his own audience. And polls say he is in a position to win.
In some places, some people have honest and practical reasons for electing Donald Trump. If your job involves degrading the environment — as many American jobs do — your paycheck will be more secure under Trump, even if you have to worry more about flash floods or cancer. If Trump becomes president again, prison guards and police should have more opportunities, and there should be more room for dynamic action and self-expression at work.
However, none of this adds up to the millions of people who pollsters expect to vote for Trump. Unemployment is historically low, gas prices are low and falling, the stock market is at all-time highs, and economic coverage and economic surveys and economic coverage of economic surveys are little more than the public’s fear of inflation. Not there. Large swaths of the country say they believe crime is rampant rather than down, and cities are war zones, and immigrants are driving out citizens, and the Biden-Harris administration has launched a storm surge over the Inland South. Attacked with, or at least left the area to sink, or certainly did something wrong there. Musk has turned Twitter into a maelstrom of warnings about race panic and voter fraud, the voice of a billionaire gang that somehow believes that if they destroy everything, they’ll have even more money than they have now. Will come forward.
When I voted in 2016, I remember Trump catching my eye with the same perverse, attractive force like a cop’s gun on the subway. You can just reach out—you won’t do it, you never will—but a person can do it. It was right there. And then enough people in enough places did it. I don’t remember at all what I thought in 2020. However, in 2024, even after grumbling at Harris-Walz, I continued to stare at the blank Trump-Vance, not quite believing it was even on the page, an open wound that stubbornly wouldn’t heal.