Politico released an analysis this week, after reviewing the cross-tabulation data of almost a dozen polls aiming to find out what key voters are now saying about Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, and the results, they indicated, were “eye-popping.” Whatever that means. Mainly, it pointed to a Kamala Harris surge in popularity.
Honestly, a better subheading would be: “Why the hell is everyone so surprised what voters say about Kamala Harris?” Or maybe: “Why is everyone so surprised that Trump might lose?”
JD Vance had something to say about such unfavorable signs when confronted with the information after an event in Philadelphia: “I don’t believe the polls.” While his response raised some eyebrows and was panned by the left, there was nothing odd about it. Why should he? Why should Trump’s entire team, for that matter? It was just a poll. Right? Why wouldn’t they say that?
Thanks for asking, good reader. Because I’ll tell you why.
Because they actually thought he had a chance at becoming president again.
Now, polls don’t predict elections—any pollster will tell you. The actuality of all this, prior to about a month ago, was that independents and younger Democrats—or those who were leaning Democrat—were either upset about or put off by Biden’s age, and were, consequently, apprehensive about voting for him. And established Democrats were freaking out.
Two things about that. First, young people have no idea what it’s like to be 80—or what it’s like to have been an American politician for fifty years—so their opinions on the matter, like their opinions on most things, really didn’t matter. What were they going to do, vote for Trump? If they were politically savvy enough to be paying that much attention to a presidential race, I’d say the answer was: probably not.
Second, the vagarious minds of independents are truly what keep Democrat strategists (Republicans, too) up at night, and were behind the upper echelon’s efforts to muscle Biden out. But independents are always key to an election, every election. Voters who aren’t America’s binary, card-carrying party members are the ones who vault a candidate up that hill into the presidency, every time. There was something these anxious Democrats really weren’t considering, and that was a big chunk of the math involving the last two presidential elections.
Now would be a good time to bring this up again, because no one seems to remember it: Trump lost the popular vote by over 3,000,000 in 2016. He lost it again by over 7,000,000 in 2020. What has he done, in all the time since, to not just make up for that increasingly negative trend, but to make up for a deficit of 7,000,000 f—king votes, most (if not all) of which came from independent voters?
Nothing. He’s done absolutely nothing. All he did was be younger than Joe Biden at a debate that made the latter look doddering and intolerably senescent. And didn’t look so terrible himself (Trump), in the process. Forget the lies, forget the populist pandering, the dog-whistling everyone can hear, the exclusionism, the idiocy, forget everything Trump has said to make him appear (again and again) as if he’s thoroughly unqualified for the highest office of the United States. That was all he did. And then sit on his behind throughout someone else’s pandemic-and-post-pandemic presidency, from which no one would have come out unscathed by public opinion, and point fingers. But (God bless America), it was working. So said the polls.
Until…
Until someone f—ing competent appeared to catch the baton, one that was almost wrestled out of the current president’s hand like a pair of scissors your senile grandfather was pointing directly at his eyeball, and now thinks you’re Julius and/or Ethel Rosenberg trying to snatch the secrets of the atomic bomb from his fingers. There is much about Kamala Harris that will, of course, be off-putting to independents: her sex, her ethnicity, where she grew up (God bless America again), but the Politico analysis showed, with every demographic that pollsters and politicians care about (or, at least, the with ones Biden had been steadily losing), she was clearly making substantial gains, while leaving Trump in the dust.
Young voters, women, non-whites, the non-college educated, independents—suddenly, they’re shoring up to back Harris. Why? Because they don’t want to see Donald Trump in office again. Because: Guess what, JD Vance and every Republican politician and aide and pundit who thought Trump had a shot? People in America are smarter than that. They remember. They have a moral code, a sense of right and wrong. Enough to not put a guy like Trump back on top.
Trump had his chance, and he royally f—ed it up. At his best, he was unremarkable. For America as a whole, he’s done very little. For Americans themselves, little more. For the history books, he’ll go down as one of the worst presidents of all time.
How Biden will fare remains to be seen. But none of that matters now. He’s out of the picture. And Trump isn’t. Nor is someone only slightly younger and better than his opponent. And f—ing competent. Which is all the opposition needed.
Of course, policy plays a big part in all this, and Republicans, thanks to a few supreme court rulings and red-statehouse / gubernatorial censorship and outright fascist pen strokes, have made sensible, open-minded people openly disgusted with that type of political extremism. Certainly, Democrats aren’t exempt from their share of it. The San Francisco Bay area, where Harris’ political career began, is seen by many as a portal straight to Hell being developed and reverse-gentrified by the Democratic Party, who have allowed much of California and the West to fester and seep with the godlessness and lawlessness of America’s most exemplary and most influential form of degeneracy.
But that level of extremism, if you can even call it that, isn’t tampering with people’s right to bodily autonomy. Their right to be who they are. Their actual personal freedom. Their right to collective bargaining with their employers. Their children’s future. Things, besides “the economy” and “the border” and an isolationist foreign policy, that Republicans don’t seem to get are just as important to many Americans, and have just as much an influence in how people ultimately choose their candidates.
Voter pluralities will always want what they want, regardless. They’ll vote Republican no matter what, they’ll vote Democrat no matter what. But all you need are enough in any one particular state to vote your ticket, and you’ve got the electoral college numbers to gain the presidency. This was, quite possibly, the most historically valuable nugget that emerged from Trump’s political career, and by accident, the most prominent thing he ever accomplished. And his team knows it well.
But what does it matter when the person leading you is, all of a sudden, struggling to make it halfway up that hill?
