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GELFAND’S WORLD - Last week, I was in Chicago for a meeting. It should come as no surprise to Los Angeles readers that the political commercials on Illinois television are just as ugly as they are here. About 3 days into the meeting, I was chatting with somebody from Philadelphia. Without being asked, he wryly mentioned that they are totally burned out on political ads back there. And like so many of you, I am getting flooded with unsolicited political email. On Sunday, I got 28 of them. Coast to coast and in between, those hundreds of millions of donor dollars have been used to throw mud.
Some of it sticks. But there is one huge change in political advertising. For the first time, the Democratic Party is using the word abortion and treating it as a positive. In former campaigns, it was there, but handled by euphemism. I can remember when Barbara Boxer was first elected to the U.S. Senate and in her victory speech introduced these words: "And yes, a woman's right to choose." She didn't say exactly what they were entitled to choose -- that had to be left to the imagination.
One other thing. The almost ecstatic greeting to the Harris candidacy has abated. The polls have improved compared to the dismal numbers Joe Biden was seeing, but they do not show the landslide ("Blue Wave") that some were anticipating. Are the current polls at all accurate? We'll have a better idea long about Wednesday or Thursday.
By now, everybody has heard about the poll showing a 3-point Harris lead in Iowa. That is definitely a surprise, and would ordinarily be thought of as an outlier, except that the pollster is unusually well respected, having called the last couple of elections to within a point. So needless to say, Trump has already attacked the pollster.
Sunday's Meet the Press was full of anticipatory dread over a possible Trump reelection. In another doom-laden bit of analysis, Kevin Drum pointed out that Democrats have seriously underestimated the negative feelings toward illegal immigration by voters left, right, and center.
Still, balancing that is the surging women's movement for reproductive freedom. Maybe we should just call it freedom. And by the way, the skewing towards female votes in the early voting was part of that Iowa prediction and has inspired one pollster to reevaluate his Michigan forecast in favor of Harris.
These are just the bits and pieces of the news media and the polling industry trying to fill airtime in the runup to 8 PM on Tuesday night. That's the moment when west coast polls officially close and the tv networks feel that it is OK to start making predictions. You may recall that the election was called for Obama right at 8 o'clock in his first run.
Obviously, we won't be getting that kind of early call due to the evolution of voting towards mail-in balloting. It takes a lot more time to check each mail-in ballot for the proper signature etc, compared to the system where the checking happens right there at the polling place.
There are a couple of tells, neither of which is overwhelming, but together represent some bit of a counter to the Trump surge:
First, there are a lot of serious, long-time Republicans who have come out publicly against Trump, and for all the obvious reasons. His flightiness, dishonesty, and -- frankly -- his downright stupidity are the first elements, but the unstated fear continues to be his obeisance towards Vladimir Putin. For serious foreign policy types, it is impossible to forget. The question is whether this Republican underground will be enough to whittle three or four percent off the final Trump numbers, which would be enough to doom his election chances.
The other hopeful ray is, of course, the early voting numbers, which have tilted strongly towards women voters in crucial swing states. Whether this will be enough to carry Kamala Harris to victory after Tuesday's in-person voting is the question. But even in traditionally conservative places, there is a skewing towards Harris, or at least against Trump, among women voters.
Over at Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall has been mentioning that the Mar a Lago folks have become shrill, which he attributes to the likelihood of internal polling numbers indicating that Trump is not ahead in Pennsylvania. We can see that in Trump's complaints (already!) about cheating. And the Tuesday, November 5 polling places have not even opened yet.
And finally, there are two clues that Harris supporters might take heart from. Michael Moore, who famously warned of Trump's strength in 2016, is now saying that Trump is toast in this election. Also, Donald Trump is complaining that the election is being stolen. Considering the way that Trump is always making up a new lie whenever he is faced with political stress, this is a good sign.
But there are all those polls saying that this election is tied. The one beneficiary has got to be the pharmaceutical industry, at least the sector which sells blood pressure pills.
So we're in for at least a couple of days of nerves, fretting, worrying, and hopefulness. Whether the hopefulness overpowers the fretting is partly one's own temperament and partly what the early returns tell us.
There is one other truly important element in this year's election. Back in the old days, it was possible to have a sort of gentlemanly contest in which competing parties vied for momentary advantage, but did not threaten each other's very existence. Eisenhower ran against Adlai Stevenson, but they were both fairly centrist for their time, and each had elements of both liberalism and conservatism. Not only that, but each party had liberal and conservative wings. And of course, as so many memoirs have described, the members of the legislature went out drinking together and figured out how to pass budget bills without shutting the government down.
On this, the last day of the old era, I have one complaint about the way the Democrats have campaigned over these past four years. Joe Biden should have blamed all possible economic issues on Trump and explained how it was his struggle to bring inflation and economic downturn under control after Trump's bungling. In point of fact, inflation is well controlled at the moment, and Trump certainly was less than masterful in dealing with the economic downturn of 2020. Why, after all, was Trump defeated so soundly in the 2020 election? Economics were a part of it. But the Democrats have not learned to point the finger quite as effectively as their opponents. They will have to learn.
And whether the Democrats will learn under a Harris presidency and a Democratically controlled House of Representatives is something we will have to wait to find out.
We do live in interesting times.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
