It’s gonna be a fucking landslide. Perhaps one as big as 1984. (Okay, probably not going to happen, but please allow me this one moment of magical thinking.) It really depends on unlikely voters in red states deciding they can actually make a difference this time. The passionate and intelligent people I talk to all the time who somehow find voting twice a year every two years to be too much of a burden. Sorry. Not sorry. Y’all are pissing me off. I was you. I didn’t start voting until I saw Barack Obama rock the 2004 Democratic National Convention as a young junior state senator from Illinois. Haven’t missed an election since.
I was 34-years-old and found a Navy vet to support in John Kerry, his service being denigrated by the precursors of what would find its disgusting culmination in Drumph. The more humble and sane the democratic party was, the crazier and more conspiracy-driven the republicans became. This continued unabated through the last four years of Bush’s presidency and would really hit a fevered pitch under Barack Obama – a moderate, center-left pragmatist who went out of his way to accommodate his political opponents to the detriment of his relationship with the democratic base as well as those further left on the political spectrum.
Our politics have gone steadily downhill ever since, despite many of us making enormous gains on social issues. The Democratic Party has moved ever more to a majority centrist position in response to a republican party going full on fascist and authoritarian. All the while, the mainstream media played a game of false equivalencies, using specious and spurious polling data to justify their cowardly stance on calling out lies in real time and then stop inviting liars to talk on their broadcasts. Their inability to bring veracity and truth to our political discussions led directly to the monstrous today we’re suffering through as a nation.
Ironically, it’s formally-republican journalists who are actually speaking truth to power. They walked away from the GOP to maintain their own integrity and that of the republic. While the vast majority of that party has doubled-down on their crazy cult, a significant enough percentage of old school republicans were willing to sacrifice their own careers to save our country from the infestation. If not for their courage, we’d likely already have descended into 1930s Germany. Even now, we still sit on that precipice no matter how unhinged or crazy their leader becomes. We are literally living in two different realities.
Which brings me back to the “science” of polling and how it’s been corrupted to provide self-fulfilling prophecies where the nation’s minority party somehow maintains control over vast swaths of the country. Notwithstanding the failure of most polls to capture the reality of our electorate in every single election season since 2016 to varying degrees. At this point, I don’t trust any of the numbers, whether they are saying what I would like them to say or not. I truly believe they are just another tool to obfuscate the truth and manipulate voters into apathy and inaction. A 50-50 race makes people money. Blowouts don’t, though I think they actually do.
I can’t begin to guess what will happen tomorrow. I’m convinced that given the data trends over the last four elections, it should be a pretty good day for democrats nationwide. Especially for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. The key demographics who aren’t being seen by modern polling techniques are “unlikely voters” who rarely vote or who have never voted at all. For that group, they skew much younger and more progressive than the reliable “likely voters’ who provide the most fodder for polls. This group of eligible voters are the ones who will be here for the next fifty years while the rest of us die along the way from here to there.
This group of voters is keenly aware of the climate crisis and social injustice. They have been raised on austerity, on sacrifice, on an inability to dream for a better tomorrow. Pure survival mode for many, if not most, in that demographic. This past Saturday, we voted early here in Minneapolis. Waiting in line for 45 minutes with mostly young, mostly female voters was a revelation of sorts. Granted, Minnesota has a higher average voter turnout than most states and is reliably blue everywhere except the ruby-red rural areas. That said, it was anecdotal confirmation that this year’s electorate is undergoing a massive shift.
So, I remain hopeful that tomorrow when the dust clears, Kamala Harris will be our next president. She’ll enjoy slim majorities in the US House and Senate and a handful of state legislatures will flip to blue. We will have gained a narrow opportunity to steer our country away from the rocky shores of fascism. Unlike Obama in 2010, I’m pretty sure the new administration won’t sleep on the midterms and will use this year’s outcome to drive larger majorities across the board. This pivot will enable us to start charting a course toward the 21st Century and develop the tools we’ll need to combat the existential crises we still face as a species.
Not a moment too soon.