No Matter What, Our Divisions Are Almost Guaranteed to Continue
One month out from the election, this vaunted most-important-contest in our lifetimes is hanging on three threads: Increasingly wacky, baseless candidate statements, the mechanics of getting people to the polls and an already launched campaign to harass and foul the count.
Whether we elect a president who believed that the oath of office really means upholding democratic values, maintaining health services, supporting allies, working towards lowering consumer prices, expanding individual rights, deporting millions of immigrants is being settled by nonsense claims about withholding hurricane aid and pet-eating and on aggressive tactics to repeat a Stop the Steal effort if the vote doesn’t go right.
It is also the one-year anniversary of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israelis, the start of a year’s hostilities that feel as endless– and beyond easy explanation — as this political campaign.( Last week’s column)
It feels as if the discussion should be more serious than whether to anoint Donald Trump as a singular savior who magically can solve all problems with a single wave of some magic wand or whether an earnest attempt by Kamala Harris to appeal increasingly across party lines in search of those upset by Trump’s personal and criminal record think we deserve a less-egotistical leader.
But by all political accounts, this remains a very close election to be settled not by popular vote nationally, but by tiny margins in up to six or seven states whose Electoral College totals will give one of the two 270 votes. Information, debates, facts, revisionist history of the past two terms have rolled off the candidates’ tongues and backs without sticking, and while there have been some shifts, the basic battle has not changed dramatically. It’s largely being covered as who’s making missteps, about ads and the mechanics of campaigning rather than on who faces up to specific challenges about upholding rights and democracy.
When it all finally ends, and a new president takes over next January, let’s remember that — if the predictions hold true — half the voting public wanted the other candidate. Our divisions are almost guaranteed to continue.
Campaign Noise
In place of reason, we have chaotic messages and worry that whatever birthed and led to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection attempt is starting anew.
Harris is offering herself as a “change” candidate without persuading many that she is changing much about Joe Biden’s programs and policies, which may limit her appeal. Ultimately, her strength is that she isn’t Donald Trump. Harris is joyful and magnetic but is running into the Trump-committed as well as those who would not support a Black woman for president.
Trump is spending his time calling Harris names, suggesting she is mentally incompetent while showing signs of uttering inanities himself, making up allegations that start by being wrong and veer into the insane. Only he could find economic bad news in vibrant job growth numbers, high market performance and eased inflation. Daily he asserts that millions of immigrants are in this country illegally through an “open” border, that violent crime is way up, that he is a victim of a weaponized Justice Department run directly by Biden-Harris, ignoring any of the measures, rules or complexities involved.
And so, we’re told, the election will come down to which campaign executes better, the “ground game” of turning out votes, whether by mail, early voting, or on Election Day at a seriously reduced number of voting places. High turnout at fewer places means more waiting time, something the MAGA forces hope will discourage voting.
Meanwhile, dozens of Republican-sponsored lawsuits around the country aim to limit voting registration, eligibility to vote, and any method other than showing up at physical polls on a single day. CNN reported this week the Trump campaign and Republican Party are suing the state of Michigan to keep local Veteran Affairs offices and other federal outposts from offering voter registration, and following those registering voters in Arizona with cameras, apparently to intimidate new registrations. Texas has dumped millions from its voter rolls. In Nevada and Michigan, the RNC has filed lawsuits alleging that election officials have failed to remove ineligible voters from the rolls. And Trump/Vance keep arguing, without evidence, that non-citizens are being drafted to vote in the election
Harris, meanwhile, has encouraged vast numbers of new voter registrations.
More Stop the Steal
Even before the vote starts, armies of MAGA poll watchers are training to observe and complain about the count. They call it “election integrity” work, with litigation and efforts to recruit poll workers, lawyers and partisan poll watchers willing to monitor voting and ballot counting.
In Georgia, we saw a Republican-majority election board insist on hand-counting five million votes. That decision alone could foul the vote certification process and create issues towards a national Electoral College result to meet legal deadlines. That, in turn, could create a problem that sends the election to the House of Representatives, where each state delegation gets a single vote for president. There are more Republican delegations now than Democratic ones.
The recent failures of vice-presidential candidate JD Vance to acknowledge that Trump lost the 2020 election, the filing of new court documents by Special Counsel Jack Smith about evidence indicating Trump’s direct involvement in overlapping plots to undercut the 2020 vote and the sentencing of Tina Peters, a Colorado clerk who tried to gimmick results in 2020, to a jail term all raise anew the prospects of a 2025 version of the same movie that we’ve already seen.
We are seeing more pundit time being spent on the legal and political prospects of a renewed Stop the Steal effort. By Election Day itself, that will become a major story line, particularly if the voting results are as close as projected.
It’s now a month out. Minds are made up. There may be a small percentage of people who still are trying to decide whether politics and voting matters. We’re inundated with ads and campaigns, but little that ultimately sounds persuasive to change. We’re still expecting the election of a president to solve all things from abortion to xenophobia without considering who will run the Senate or approve Supreme Court justices or be able to affect the cost of milk and eggs.
Our behaviors seem an odd fit for an election that seems to hit at so many fundamental differences.
