DOUGLAS KENNEDY ON THE ELECTION - LA TRIBUNE DIMANCHE - CHRONIQUE 9

3 November 2024

WHO WILL WIN?

I have several friends who, during this unnervingly close election (where there is truly so much on the line), have become election poll obsessives. They scour the web daily, trying to assuage their fears, attempting to remain sanguine as Trump gains a point or two in certain crucial battleground states (Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina). Just as the slightest hint of a Harris resurgence is greeted with the nervous relief of someone who, having just undergone a PET scan, has been told that their metastatic cancer is in remission… the subtext behind which being: will the virulent malignancy that is Trump be beaten back… as was the case in 2020? Or will be the man whom his chief-of-staff (a former military man, as conservative as they get) called ‘a dictator in waiting’ break through again in a repeat of his shock 2016 victory?

I so remember that night in 2016 – when nobody except me at the early evening election party to which I’d been invited believed that Trump could actually do the unspeakable and win. The trauma of his victory was even more harrowing because it was so unexpected – and because the educated progressive class of Americans so misjudged the political temperature back then.

Now we all know what kind of President a re-elected Trump will be – especially with a Vice President (JD Vance) whose misogyny and Catholic fundamentalism make him a force for social regression. And given Trump’s increased erraticism – alongside his vow to punish enemies and even express recent admiration for a certain Adolf Hitler – makes this election even creepier. But should Trump win, he will be an elected authoritarian… unlike Hitler who, after the 1932 election, had the second biggest majority in the Reichstag . But he quickly convinced the then-ailing President von Hindenburg to appoint him Chancellor then moved quickly to consolidate power and become an absolute dictator, having his Nazi set fire to the Reichstag the following year.

Are we about to see the voted into office return of a tyrant-in-waiting this Tuesday? Could a criminal – found guilty of thirty-four federal charges, not to mention a rape, and rightfully accused (but never banned from public office) for encouraging a virtual coup d’etat when his MAGA supporters stormed the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 (‘Our Reichstag moment”, as a journalist friend noted) – truly regain The White House? 

The answer to that question is: alas, yes. As someone who has been consistently  following – (with professional interest and personal concern) everything to do with this election’s polls and punditry) - I must say this: I have a terrible feeling that Trump is, in the campaign’s final week, beginning to pull ahead.

Trust me I wish I wasn’t writing such words. I would rather embrace the canny optimism of James Carville – the brilliant Democratic political strategist who masterminded Bill Clinton’s presidential campaigns in 1992 and 1996, and who is considered one of the shrewdest, forceful political operatives out there. Writing recently in the New York Times Carville laid out three reasons why Harris will triumph:

"Mr. Trump is a repeat electoral loser. This time will be no different…. Money matters, and Ms. Harris has it in droves…. It’s just a feeling."

This last comment is a telling one. Though Carville argues that politicians from the left (like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) and the right (the former Vice President Dick Cheney and his former congresswoman daughter Liz… who lost her Arzona seat after Trump targeted her for voting for his impeachment) are all backing Harris… and ergo, the country is not so insane to re-elect a Fuhrer in Waiting,.. his analysis is just an intuitive one. Carville is super smart and a genuine force for progressive good. But the very fact that he is ultimately talking instinct is a reminder: this race is a nail-biter, because there is so much uncertainty hovering around the ultimate result. Consider the so-called ‘Election Nostradamus’, the academic Alan Lichtman – who has correctly called nine of the last ten presidential elections. He still stands by his September prediction (at the time of writing this chronique) that Kamala Harris will triumph on Tuesday… though he also noted last week that (according to The Independent in the UK) that ‘he has “never experienced” so much “hate” in an election cycle’.

But then there is the opinion of Nate Silver – one of the most venerated election statisticians in America today (whose blog, 538 -named after the number of electoral votes needed to win The White House - has become an ongoing must-read during this vertiginous campaign). Writing in The New York Times last week he gave his result forecast:

“So OK, I’ll tell you. My gut says Donald Trump. And my guess is that it is true for many anxious Democrats… But I don’t think you should put any value whatsoever on anyone’s gut — including mine. Instead, you should resign yourself to the fact that a 50-50 forecast really does mean 50-50. And you should be open to the possibility that those forecasts are wrong, and that could be the case equally in the direction of Mr. Trump or Ms. Harris”.

But as Silver also pointed out in his column pollsters often canvas citizens who don’t want to admit that they are voting for Trump. As such his support could well be underestimated. 

More tellingly, all the indicators right now show a building Trump momentum – to the point where the majority of polls that, for weeks were showing a three percent Harris lead nationally, have now indicated a dead-heat… with certain polls now showing him marginally ahead… and with high early voter turnout for the Republicans. 

And then there are those professional gamblers who bet on everything from football games  to greyhound races to elections. And (according to an article in The Daily Beast) all the smart money in the online betting markets is now on Trump.

The shock of 2016 was rooted in the fact that few out there discerned just how well Trump was connecting with ‘Amerique Profonde’… something that was not discerned by the progressive elites on both coasts. The truth of the matter is a bleak one – almost half of the American electorate is willing to throw their support behind a man who is as personally vile and felonious as he is borderline deranged. And given that, in his earlier term as President, he gave the evangelists all that they demanded (most specifically the end to federally mandated abortion), this important bloc will continue to vote for him, despite his porn star associations, his rape conviction, and the fact that he lacks one of the key components of Christianity: empathy.

Like most moderates in the United States – and many conservatives who simply can’t abide what Trump represents – there is still a degree of hope that, given how razor-thin the margins are, Harris could still pull it off. It would mean her winning Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania – all of which are within the realm of possibility. 

A reader recently asked me if I was a pessimist. ‘On the contrary’ I replied. ‘I remain an optimistic – albeit a lucid one who refuses to be sentimental about things realpolitik’.

Being lucid – especially about potential bad stuff – made me tell everyone who would listen back in 2016: the monster is going to win. This year, I will hope for an upset on Tuesday night (if, that is, the election is decided then. Do remember that, in 2020, it took five more days of counting postal ballots for Biden to be declared the winner). But hope and reality are two separate planets. Ergo, not being someone who likes melodrama I will nonetheless end on a dark note:

My instinct tells me: the monster is going to win again.  And this time the end of American constitutional democracy could be nigh.