Good morning and welcome to this electorally penultimate, Halloween edition of the Carnival of Fools! Double, double, toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble, we’re all about to get thrown into the stew to discover our fates. (Voting-wise, that is. After November 5, I might need the “Keith Richards Swiss special” to recuperate, but I’m not going anywhere, so please subscribe for even more bespoke gloom in your inbox every Tuesday.)
I’ll be blunt: This is the craziest election of my lifetime, and I was born a few months before Ronald Reagan sent Jimmy Carter into the oblivion where he (with admirable tenacity, to give him his due) still remains. I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain, I’ve seen Brooks Brothers riots and George Floyd riots alike, and I’ve never seen a race as close as this one nor been able to so easily anticipate the apocalyptic reactions from either side should they lose. With that thought in mind, let’s open the show with a real crowd-pleaser.
Donald Trump Could Still Lose
It’s senseless to bicker about the framing of this conversation: Despite the knife’s-edge closeness of the polls, the race now is being cast as Donald Trump’s to lose — and lose it he may yet. The increasing cicada-like thrum of cable and online commentary tells you all you need to know: Right now most everyone at least believes that Trump is a week away from pulling off the full Grover — being reelected to the presidency after a loss and four years out of office.
This is not a belief confined merely to the conservative-leaning world of analysis and commentary. It is written all over the faces of mainstream-media commentators, manifest in the pixels of anonymous, panicked social-media denizens, and empirically evident in the behavior of both campaigns. Kamala Harris recently brought in Michelle Obama to scold male voters with the message that if they didn’t support Harris they were betraying all women, everywhere. Meanwhile Trump is rallying in Democratic strongholds like California and New York to boost the popular vote and juice an anticipated House majority. You can accuse the Trump campaign of folly or falsely projecting confidence, yes — but only if you also acknowledge that, by the same token, the Harris campaign is betraying its self-perception of weakness.
So maybe I am senseless, because I’m reflexively averse to this sort of framing. First of all, nothing has been decided yet; secondarily, unlike most of you young whippersnappers, I’m old enough to remember November 2022. A path to a Harris victory is at least plausible given the current polling numbers and her fading fortunes in the Sun Belt states: There are far fewer minority voters and more educated, white middle-class voters in the blue-wall states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin than in the southern and southwestern states or, for that matter, in California and New York. So even though Trump may make significant strides in the minority vote, those voters live in the wrong places. (The term of art for this sort of scenario is “inefficiently distributed votes,” and any Democrat on the butt end of the rifle stock in 2016 is well familiar with the concept — the Republicans learned about it in 2022.)
That explains the Democratic rhetorical strategy in the closing weeks, which has been a (clumsy) combination of base-motivation — “Why aren’t you voting for Kamala, sexist black males?” — and last-minute persuasion/activation of educated moderates who hate everything sleazy, unmediated, and disgracefully volatile about Trump. Thus it is that wails of “Hitler” once again fill the media town square, as John Kelly’s long-documented hatred of his former boss is re-exhumed, and the missteps of Trump’s surrogates (about which more below) are held against him. Every single news item you see pushed in the media over this final week should be interpreted through the lens of “Jennifer,” an archetypical thirtysomething educated suburban white woman voter with distinct class sensibilities living in Oakland County, Mich.
I want to make sure readers understand that, given the closeness of this race, the unpredictability (and inevitability) of polling error, and the Electoral College geography, a Harris/Walz victory remains plausible. You are permitted here, for a moment, to luxuriate in the irony that minorities are now the “problem” for Democrats — increasingly detached from what progressives arrogantly assumed would be a permanent relationship of political patronage. But MAGA types should save the smugness for now, if for no other reason than that Harris’s victory, should it emerge, will be properly interpreted as a direct rebuke to them.
Kamala Harris Will Probably Lose
I don’t think Harris will win, however. Why have I tried to avoid saying it out loud for so long? Aside from sheer uncertainty, it’s because I’m terrible at electoral predictions, almost to the point where I’m a reliable negative barometer. So what I write should utterly harrow Team MAGA with fear: Donald Trump is probably going to regain the presidency. (This is my prediction, not my vote.) My reasons for thinking so have nothing to do with the bad vibes that I’ve referenced above, or even the comparative behavior of the campaigns. My hunch is predicated solely on the early vote in Nevada specifically and the minority turnout rates in other states more generally.
As for Nevada, seasoned political hands know that it is perhaps the one state in the nation whose electoral outcomes can be, if not determined, then at least calibrated in advance, owing to the fact that the vast majority (80–90 percent) of its electorate votes before Election Day, either by mail or in person, and the ballot returns — not the actual votes themselves, mind you — are publicly tallied in advance by party identification (R./D./Independent) on a rolling basis. (Nevada has several other delightful quirks in its electoral system, including a ballot that by law includes a “none of the above” option I would happily be availing myself of were I a Silver State voter.)
Jon Ralston of the Nevada Independent, the universally hailed guru of Nevada voting trends, has kept a running blog of the early vote, and, with an unprecedented 32,000-vote GOP lead in marked ballot returns, he has all but conceded the state to Trump. (In Nevada, Democrats traditionally build a firewall in the early-vote lead that Republicans have to overcome with day-of voting; the GOP’s current 32,000-ballot lead is good for a 5 percent statewide advantage over the Democrats and swamps their comparably good omens from 2014.) We will see what the final spread is (four days of early voting yet remain), but if that margin holds, the question then becomes how many Nevada Democratic incumbents are going down — perhaps all of them.
But maybe Nevada is anomalous, and Trump is merely taking off among Latinos and service-industry workers, you say? Maybe these results in Nevada — which are going to be echoed state by state across similar demographics — put that state along with Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina out of reach. But what of the Rust Belt, where the black vote also swings the pendulum? The bad news for Harris is that the black vote doesn’t seem to be there in great numbers, not right now at least. (Hence both Barack and Michelle Obama being deputized to shame black men into “doing the right thing.”) I keep looking through all the incoming data and trying to find even a smidgen of good news for the Harris campaign, and there isn’t much of it. With all that said, she remains a mere polling error away from victory.
Against Hack Comedians
Allow me to conclude with a brief plea for better comedy. As you probably know, Trump staged a massive afternoon-long rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City over the weekend. Almost like an extra, off-color day of the Republican National Convention, it was full of all the usual absurdities and travesties (like Tucker Carlson priming the audience to cry fraud should Trump lose, for one thing). But at one point a little-known Texas comedian named Tony Hinchcliffe got up to make an entire series of wildly vulgar and insulting “jokes” about Puerto Ricans. (You can hunt them down yourself; suffice it to say that both garbage and sexual bodily fluids are directly implicated.)
I don’t think his shtick will affect a single vote, though predictably the media are trying now with all their might to shoehorn its crassness into a prefabricated “1939 Nazi rally in New York” narrative, minted the second Trump announced the event. I’m not offended. I’m not even particularly invested in the fate of the Trump campaign – though it would be genuinely hilarious if 3,000 angry puertorriqueños scattered around Pennsylvania ended up deciding this race. Instead, I disapprove of Hinchcliffe’s selfishness and stupidity in making the event about himself. (According to the reporting of the Bulwark’s Marc Caputo, Hinchcliffe improvised his insults after being asked by the Trump campaign to remove an even more offensive line about Kamala Harris, so he was truly freelancing.)
But most of all I disapprove of how bad a comedian he was. I advise you to watch Hinchcliffe just to see what it looks like when a man doesn’t even really understand the mechanics of his own trade — bad word choice, bad stage affect, zero physical presence (even behind a podium, no less). Craftless gorm, even in a friendly room. Mind you, I’m no Norm Macdonald myself. I lack the moxie to, say, go out there and bomb on purpose by insulting the president of the United States and his wife directly to their faces — but Hinchcliffe wasn’t trying to bomb. He was given the friendliest room that God or man will ever hand him in his life, and he got them to start booing him in despair. Perhaps insult comics don’t belong at political rallies; untalented insult comics with stilted delivery have no business being anywhere near a microphone, not even for a drunken roast. Get back to work on your tight five, Tony.
As for the rest of you, we shall meet again next Tuesday, the Day of Judgment. Until then, farewell and good luck.