Who Bleeds Less Wins. Hoping It's Harris.

At RealClear Politics is a piece on what Democrat operatives think it will take for Harris to win today.

In this close race between two historically terrible choices, I'd summarize the whole piece and say it's the same thing it will take for Trump to win today, but in the other direction: Who loses less support than the other among voters who would normally vote for that candidate's party?

Well, duh, Gus! you might say. All elections are about winning more support than the other guy.

Sure, except in this election, we have one candidate running a negative, fear-mongering campaign and the other failing to run a convincing positive campaign. This is occurring against a backdrop of each party being controlled by its worst elements and choosing its candidate accordingly: Republicans ran a foreshortened campaign schedule so no one could gain traction against Trump and the Democrats hastily chose Harris when it became clear Biden would lose on fitness grounds alone.

This leaves each party having given short shrift to persuadable voters and taking its usual bases for granted, while seeing votes from those bases migrating. To the operatives, it looks like this:

[T]hough polls show Trump set to make historic inroads with voters of color, several longtime Democratic pollsters are dubious that it will show up on Election Day.

"It could well prove to be a mirage as Black voters rally down the stretch around Harris's historic candidacy," said Roth Smith. "Frankly, I have seen this mirage before in my own polling for campaigns that thought they were making gains among Black voters, only to see those voters coalesce decisively behind a Black candidate on Election Day. Harris could also stymie any improvement Trump was hoping to see among Latino voters, helped by the moronic "island of garbage" comments Tony Hinchcliffe made about Puerto Rico, which activated an entire new set of Latino voters and prominent figures against Trump in the closing week of the election. Holding her ground among those two voting blocs is probably enough to deliver Harris a win, full stop."

And Roth Smith added there was another key demographic, one that has received far less attention that others this election season: college-educated white men. From 2016 to 2020, white college-educated men moved 11 points toward Democrats, with even more dramatic gains in critical swing states. They were the most-improved group for Democrats both nationally, trending 11 points more Democratic between 2016 and 2020, and in key swing states, including jumping eight points into the Democratic column in Nevada, 14 in Michigan, 15 in Pennsylvania and Arizona, and a whopping 43 points in Georgia.

"It is one of the craziest and least-discussed stories of what happened in 2020," Roth Smith said. "Nearly half of the college-educated white men in Georgia switched their vote from Trump to Biden. If she can keep moving in that direction and not lose ground elsewhere, I think she will win. Actually, I take that back. Not 'I think.' She will win."

What's going on was summarized quite well yesterday by Objectivist philosopher Gregory Salmieri, who was commenting on a common meme, pictured below:

The author believes his use of this image to be protected as fair use under U.S. copyright law.

These two memes make the same mistake. They assume that there's some single left-right spectrum along which people (or the country) are moving. There isn't. What's happening is that the loonier elements in each of two opposing tribes are becoming more prominent and alienating others who then turn to the opposite tribe.

So, in addition to the two terrible candidates, we have something like a political realignment going on and making it hard to predict what will happen.

Also worth reading are Salmieri's thoughts about the rioting after the last election. He adds:

More specifically re this election: Harris is beneath contempt. She's attempting to straddle every fence -- including most despicably the question of whether to support or denounce Israel's war of self-defense against the Gazans. She's flirted the worst elements of mainstream leftist politics when she thought it was expedient and drifted away from them (without denouncing them) when it became clear how unpopular they are. But her form of viciousness is (disgustingly) par for the course today. It's just one more small dose of the poison that's been sapping America's vitality for decades.

Trump is something different. The dominant features of his political career have been emotionalistic outbursts against the separation powers and the free press, going weak in the knees over dictators, indulging in arbitrary flights of fancy, and brazenly evading easily established facts. All of this did enduring damage to America during his tenure in office -- damage that can't be measured on the scale of one or two election cycles. And he's only gotten worse since. Such a man's return to the Oval Office is a serious and unique threat to American freedom. [bold added]

May the lesser evil win.

-- CAV