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The Political Horse Race Two Weeks Out
Apologies to our foreign or American friends who may be bored by the non-stop election coverage, but I just can't get enough.
A couple weeks ago I predicted with 50% confidence (the ultimate in weasly predictions) that we'd see an October surprise timed for maximum damage to the Trump campaign. I think we just saw the attempt. It was dumb as you could expect.
Yesterday, nearly every single media outlet in the country ran the same story. The story? John Kelly, Trump's former chief of staff, supposedly once said that Trump told him "Well, Hitler did a lot of good things". Kelly also said something about Trump praising Hitler's generals. The story was first reported in 2021. It was denied by Trump the next day.
Somehow, three years later, it was front page news in nearly every mainstream outlet. It was an incredible example of media discipline and coordination. See for yourself:
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=trump%20hitler%20comments
So... did it land? No I don't think so. Comparing people to Hitler is the oldest game in the book. Does anyone remember the Lyndon Larouche campaigners with their Obama-as-Hitler posters? Moreover, we've heard everything about Trump. 99% of people have made up their mind already. And Trump is also omnipresent. Today's Hitler story is yesterday's news as Trump appears on Rogan or works at McDonald's or eats a burrito bowl or something.
Harris tried to make the story work. In between cringe videos of her latest town hall appearance, her Twitter account tweeted this:
So how are the betting markets taking it? Well, there were a couple more flash crashes in Trump shares on Polymarket. Around midnight, his odds briefly dipped under 60%. Was it manipulation? I don't think so. To paraphrase Stanley Druckenmiller, sometimes it's better to just buy the rumor and then ask questions later. Maybe it was worth a gamble to see if the attack stuck.
As of right now, Trump is up near 65% again. Interestingly, his chances of winning the popular vote have crept up to about 40%. In polls, according to Real Clear Politics, Harris's nationwide lead has fallen to 0.3%, while Trump maintains a 0.9% edge in the seven swing states.
It really is too close to call at this point. Will we see a "real" October surprise against Trump? It feels unlikely. There just isn't any more unspent ammunition. Will the Trump campaign produce some valuable oppo research against Harris? Again, unlikely, since the media wouldn't report on it anyway.
The election is 12 days out, and many ballots have already been cast.
I guess I'll just use this thread to say: I fucking hate this election.
I hate my choices. I hate having to choose which shitty option might taste slightly less like shit. I hate choosing from two stupid, bumbling mediocre embarrassments and knowing one of them is going to be the fucking President of the United States of America. "Vote for the lesser of two evils" has been a motto representing resigned acceptance of political reality my entire life (I have the Cthulhu for President t-shirt and everything), but never have I felt it so keenly. They're both bad and repulsive, and I honestly don't know which of them will actually be worse for the country because I expect either of them to be terrible. I have said before I probably won't even vote, for the first time since I turned 18. (At least for president; I'll still probably vote for local/state candidates.)
And it's entirely the fault of both parties for putting us here. The Republicans, for letting MAGA cultists take over the party and drive all serious grown-ups out, and the Democrats, for letting bad faith woke identity politics take over everything. And both of them, for turning us into a gerontocracy that very effectively shuts younger candidates out before they can even sniff a primary.
If you held a gun to my head and forced me to choose, I guess it would be Kamala. But I might take the bullet instead.
I think Trump will be more damaging to the economy, and I think he will epically fuck up what's left of America's standing in the world. I think he will be an embarrassment who fails to accomplish any of the things his followers think he will (just like last time) and what he does accomplish he will fuck up. I think Harris will continue our inflationary money-isn't-real spiral into economic doom, hand out more gobs of cash to whatever identity group is most effective at yelling and screaming, and I think Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping will roll her like a floured chicken breast. She's a midwit mediocrity who should never have come within line of sight of the Presidency, and I cannot believe how quickly I watched people in real time shift vibes to Kamala-enthusiasm, Kamalanation, Kamala is brat (W. T. F????) and pretend they had always been enthusiastic about her. Way back in 2019, when she was being floated as a Democratic candidate and I knew little about her, I admit I was tepidly favorable towards her because she seemed like maybe the least bad of a mediocre lot, but nothing she's done since has impressed, and she seems like Generic Extruded Political Product.
But, you know, Trump. I do not have TDS, I do not think he is Literally Hitler, but I do think he's a con, a huckster, an embarrassing buffoon who I believe actually loves America as much as I believe he goes to church on Sunday and has ever read the Bible in his life. I think he totally would become an absolute dictator if he could manage it, but it would require too much effort and political acumen and cunning, which he does not have. He has a huge personality and charisma, and some people think that translates into him being a skilled politician. He's not. He's got performer's instincts and a gift for graft. This doesn't really make him unique among American presidents, but it makes him uniquely bad in this time and place.
This sucks.
So I will repeat what I said a few weeks ago: my only consolation is going to be breaking out the popcorn and watching the wailing and gnashing of teeth post-election night. If Kamala wins, I will read the Motte and other places for the rage, the futile fist-waving, the impotent Internet tough-guy promises to Res1st and Retrn and start a civil war or some shit. If Trump wins, I will read Twitter for the wailing, the gnashing of teeth, and the hordes of smug, self-righteous fucks driven to existential despair, and I will drink their tears.
This is not nice, it is not charitable, it is not noble. It is petty and mean and beneath me. It is my coping mechanism, because this election sucks.
What exactly were the Dems and GOP supposed to do about this? Candidates are selected ~democratically (I suppose it's fair to criticize the Democrats for just...skipping that step this election cycle); Trump developed a huge base in the GOP; "wokeness" has a decent base in the Democrat party. And many GOP "adults in the room" DID criticize Trump, and got ran out of the party for their troubles.
Let me try to answer my own question:
I think the effort to head off Trump needed to happen in the primaries for the 2016, and it needed to take on the form of some of those 1,492 GOP candidates dropping out earlier to consolidate the anti-Trump base of support, and it needed to take on the form of denouncing the foreign policy misadventures of the Bush-Obama years (which were becoming unpopular, but were still often not criticized in the GOP in 2016.) But it's not the fault of "the Republicans" that this happened; they couldn't force candidates to drop out on the optimal timelines any more than they could force Trump not to throw his hat in the ring.
Heading off wokeness, I think, is easier – Democrat elites could have been criticizing wokeness the same way that Republican elites often criticized Trump. But I think this risked seriously weakening the party. We see, now, that the party is critically divided over Israel/Palestine; attacking "wokeness" 4 or 8 years ago (particularly when it was on the ascent) would have run a similar risk, I think.
I guess my point here is that to the extent that it's the fault of "the Republicans" or "the Democrats" it's really just the fault of "the American people" for voting for them. Maybe this is your point.
I'm certainly interested in the potential upsides of RETVRNing to a time when the people didn't have much of a voice in major party's political choices. But until that happens, "the party" will be very much at the mercy of the voters.
What the Dems could have done about it is held their nose and refrained from ratfucking Bernie out of the nomination. But they just couldn’t stand his lukewarm populist vibes so he had to go.
I don't know why this claim keeps coming up, Bernie's path to the nomination required the rest of the pool to cooperate with him to split the vote of the majority position. When it came to having to win one on one he didn't. period. End of story. It's not ratfucking to notice you're splitting a position and stop doing that so someone with minority support who you don't agree with doesn't take the nomination.
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Bernie lost his primaries fair and square. More people simply voted for Hillary, and then Biden. If he couldn’t even win a dem primary he’d been slaughtered in the general anyway.
They were using a mass coordinated media smear campaign against him just like they did with Trump later. And they weaponized the already questionable superdelegate system against him.
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They 'ratfucked' him because they were fully aware a self-identified socialist would get crushed in an American election and stood the chance of poisoning their brand for an extended period of time.
As opposed to:
-The least popular candidate of the last 40 years who was selected entirely due intra-party backstabbing and seniority
-A terminally senile old man who only narrowly won due to a once in century pandemic, and then mentally flamed out so bad he had to drop out of the race
-An incoherent alcoholic apparatchik who somehow manages to be more unpopular than the 2016 candidate, who never won a primary or even placed in the top three, who only has a political career because they are good at giving head.
Gosh, it’s a good thing the Democrats didn’t get Bernie, or their reputation over these last few years might have taken quite a hit!
I would say that Bernie's ideas should have had a chance to be rejected by the electorate and consigned back to the doldrums of obscurity, but now the progressives have a bloody shirt in the form of a stab-in-the back myth that will haunt the Democratic party for generations to come.
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I'm not saying they weren't arrogant about their odds the other way. But Bernie would have gotten whooped by Trump both times, just from airing commercials with him personally identifying as a socialist between the DNC and Election Day.
There's a reason Democrats pretend very hard to be moderates no matter how left wing they are.
Really? I feel like some people on the SSC subreddit said that, had it been Bernie vs. Trump, Bernie would have cleaned it up.
In addition to his general popularity with radical youth, Bernie was a candidate for the very online.
Again, they would have run ads with him calling himself a socialist, all day, every day, for six months before the election and he would have lost by 5+ points.
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There was a very simple way to head Trump off at the pass; say you’re going to do something about illegal immigration, which is wildly unpopular with the body politic, and then fucking do it.
That’s it. That’s the whole game. That would have stopped Trump because he would have never developed his constituency, which wasn’t invented by him but simply ignored by both parties.
There was electoral gold in the streets just waiting to be picked up but a prospiracy driven primarily by rank class hatred blocked it. All it took was one defector.
This comparison may not generalise, but this always makes me think of the first collapse of One Nation over here.
For the unfamiliar, One Nation is/was an anti-immigrant Australian political party. It was founded in the 90s as an expression of protest over immigration, and took some bites out of the ruling centre-right Coalition's right flank. This continued... up until the Coalition adopted a hard-line policy on illegal immigration, communicated that (cf. the Tampa and Children Overboard, both in mid-2001), and by doing so completely smashed One Nation. Without their flagship issue, One Nation's other problems (corruption, incompetence, etc.) became more visible and they declined heavily.
You can defeat the populist/nativist surge - you just have to address the issues that are motivating them.
(One Nation have made a post-2016 comeback, rebranding as a more generic far-right or nationalist party. In the 90s they were basically an anti-immigrant party who worried that Australia was being "swamped by Asians". In the last decade they pivoted to anti-Islam for a bit, and then anti-wokeness, and are generally still flailing boobs. The larger issue remains - One Nation do well when there are issues that large segments of the electorate care about but which the major parties are not responsive to. One Nation are a symptom of political dysfunction. As with most far-right parties, then, it's foolish to try to attack them by attacking the party itself. You have to attack the underlying policy failures that give the party credibility. Once that's done the party's inherent weaknesses tend to come out.)
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