Today is election day in the United States, the day we choose our elected leaders. In my own community, the North Carolina General Assembly (NCGA)
passed a law last year prohibiting my county – and my county only – from voting for all county commissioners on ballot. Now thanks to the NCGOP super-majority in the state, we can only vote for the commissioner in our district. I think it's weird that the state legislature spends time on the business of one county, but this is North Carolina and I have yet to figure out the state's politics.
That said, there is a national election to be decided today. Former President Donald Trump represents the Republican Party for president; Vice President Kamala Harris represents the Democratic Party. This election, according to polls, promises to be a nail-biter. Here are reasons why I think Kamala Harris will win a significant victory.
1) Abortion is on the ballot - and even in deep-red "pro-life" states, when abortion protections make it onto the ballot, abortion protections tend to win. Trump has made repeated claims bragging about being the man who was able to overturn Roe. He's right that he picked the anti-choice judges that enabled SCOTUS to overturn established precedent. But he's wrong that he is the reason for this - he was a tool in a decades-long campaign waged by Republicans to overturn abortion protections. Republicans have been playing the long game since Reagan.
Democrats have failed to properly engage in this battle. And now women with unviable pregnancies are dying is states with abortion bans. When treating a miscarriage becomes illegal in order to protect an unviable fetus, it shows that "pro-life" advocates have completely forgotten that women have lives that need protection too. According to early voting data, women are voting in significantly bigger numbers than men. That disparity could change today - men could swarm the polls to protect the rights of fetuses. We will see. But since Roe was overturned Republicans have lost badly whenever abortion rights are on the ballot.
Trump's campaign and the national news media made a HUGE deal about Biden's age in the wake of Biden's disastrous debate performance in June. The New York Times posted nearly 200 stories about Biden in the week following the debate - the paper hammered over and over the issues with Biden's age. Jennifer Schulze, a Chicago reporter, counted the stories and wrote
a great story on the hysteria of the paper on the issue of Biden's age.
Because the national news media followed the Trump frame after the debate and made such an enormous issue of Biden's age, it makes sense that the other elderly man in the race, a man prone to rambling endlessly at rallies and making disjointed statements, should also be judged on his age and mental acuity. There has been significantly less will on the part of national news media to talk about Trump's age, a baffling editorial choice, given their lust for stories about Biden's age.
But I don't think that voters will ignore Trump's evident decline in mental acuity and physical capabilities over the last eight years. Trump is the oldest candidate to run for president in American history. He refuses to provide medical records and instead finds doctors who speak glowingly about his perfect health. When his ear was hit during an assassination attempt, the hospital personnel who treated his wound remained silent;
his medical condition was relayed by the controversial Ronnie Jackson, who no longer has a medical license. There are plenty of videos of his verbal stumbles and incoherent ramblings at his rallies and it is indeed alarming to see an elderly man losing his train of thought so frequently on a public stage.
3) A significantly underreported story has been Harris's significant skill at fundraising and at creating a wide tent for the many diverse voices in the Democratic Party and doing so rapidly and with apparent ease. After Biden's worrisome debate performance, Democratic expert
James Carville said in the New York Times:
"I want to see the Democratic Party hold four historic town halls between now and the Democratic National Convention in August — one each in the South, the Northeast, the Midwest and the West. We can recruit the two most obvious and qualified people in the world to facilitate substantive discussions: Barack Obama and Bill Clinton."
Harris did not pay attention. Instead, she focused her efforts on getting support from party leaders - and she did it rapidly and without controversy. By the time the gavel dropped on the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, she had enough support to be the nominee without the need for a brokered convention.
In terms of fundraising, after Biden dropped out in late June, Harris raised a record $1 billion in about three months. During that time, Trump struggled to raise money. According to the New York Times and the insiders they cultivate within the Trump campaign, this story about Harris' exceptional fundraising capabilities was framed as a story about a "frustrated Trump" who "lashes out behind closed doors over money. Focus on Trump's woes aside, Harris' ability to raise signifiant amounts of money for her campaign is an underreported story - but the funds she has raised has enabled a very organized and focused campaign team.
4) Closing arguments by the two candidates are very different and are another reason why Harris will win. Trump's closing arguments are full of hate, threats of violence, misogyny and racism. Harris has focused on optimistic rhetoric that aligns more neatly with our national values.
In recent rallies, Trump has mused about hitting former First Lady Michelle Obama; his Madison Square Garden was roundly condemned for the racism exhibited there, most notably (though not exclusively) by "comedian" Tony Hinchcliffe, who called Puerto Rico an "island of garbage;" he continually expresses a list of grievances (as if everyday is Festivsus!) It is problematic to identify an entire community as "garbage" and win the presidency but this is America and the man who held that rally is Donald Trump and he seems to be serving up the kind of hate that a sector of Americans appreciate and support.
In response to the uproar over the "garbage" comment, JD Vance claimed that "we have to stop getting offended" and then soon after was completely offended when Joe Biden may or may not have called Trump supporters "garbage." The hypocrisy is obvious and I don't think the majority of voters are buying it.
What is clear - a good proportion of the population supports a man who is a convicted felon; who owes significant amounts of money for business fraud and defamation, making him vulnerable to accepting money from foreign nations in exchange for favorable foreign policy; whose becoming increasingly incoherent due to age; who views the presidency as a means to get out of legal challenges left hanging for various different reasons. Trump's base believe his legal challenges are ONLY because he has been falsely attacked by Democrats; that the economy was great when he was president; that Biden shut down schools during Covid (presidents don't shut down schools; local school districts are responsible for that.)
What's also clear - and an ongoing threat to our nation and our democracy - highly profitable disinformation channels that lie to the public are not going away anytime soon. So regardless of the winner, our work to protect our democracy continues.
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