I think you need some ashwaganda and therapy.
Several Sahra Wagenknecht speeches have caught favorable attention among US Greens. Characterize her as you will, but I haven’t yet found disagreement with her.
favorable attention among US Greens
Lash wrote:
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..You just aren't even worth the effort to respond to.
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It's a dimly remembered lecture from when I was a student in the 80s.
Donald Trump’s freakshow continues unabated
Sidney Blumenthal
Trump insists on posing as the salient question of the election: are you crazier today than you were four years ago?
Donald Trump’s threat to execute Liz Cheney, “with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her”, is the apogee so far of his Hitlerian rhetoric. By his own words, Trump has proved her point that he is a “danger” to the constitution and defied his apologists who insist he can be contained or that he doesn’t really mean what he says. “And let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face,” he said. “Shoot Liz Cheney” has replaced “Hang Mike Pence.”
Hours after Trump declared his wish to kill Cheney, the Wall Street Journal editorial board, his reliable excuse maker for the executive collaborator class, published an editorial stating, “We don’t buy the fascism fears, and we doubt Democrats really do either.”
Trump is hellbent to break through any “sane-washing” of the media smoothing over his viciousness and vulgarity. His call for an elaborate execution of a pre-eminent political opponent, a conservative Republican of the most partisan pedigree, is his definitive and final answer to those who quibble about his intentions and his unmooring from all traditional politics.
His fascist-themed freakshow in Madison Square Garden followed by his firing squad fantasy are an augury of a second administration. His closing act has overwhelmed any media reflex for euphemism and both-siderism. He contemptuously stomps on every effort at normalization.
Time and again, day after day, event after event, Trump insists on posing as the salient question of the election, certainly about the candidate himself: are you crazier today than you were four years ago?
Many of Trump’s former White House staffers, cabinet secretaries and commanding generals are frantically attempting to warn against his madness, that he is “a fascist to the core”, as former chairman of the joint chiefs Gen Mark Milley has unequivocally stated. In private conversation, former staffers and others with intimate knowledge of Trump, all reliable people, talk about the real man as far viler than those who haven’t seen him behind closed doors could possibly know.
Knowledge of Trump’s vileness is widespread among top-level Republicans. “They all hate him,” a former senior Trump adviser told me categorically. And they all have stories, some exhibiting his narcissism, others his malice: how, for example, the time two senators from one state were summoned to the Oval Office to listen to Trump say he would travel there to have a mountain named after him. As a rule, they agree with Senator Mitch McConnell that he is “despicable”. Unlike those former Trump staffers waving their arms, they are silent and complicit.
Now, former staffers speculate about the hazy fine line between Trump’s infantilism and his dementia. There is no responsible person left around Trump. He has learned the lesson, sealed by January 6, not to trust the “normies”.
Trump’s night in the Garden on 27 October was early Hitler in style, not middle Hitler. The bellowing obscenities, racist sneers and violent threats were more reminiscent of the Munich beer hall phase of Hitler rousing the street gangs of Brownshirts than the Nuremberg rallies of disciplined ranks of storm troopers massed before his reviewing stand.
“An immense wave of eccentric barbarism … A primitive fairground brutality,” wrote the great German novelist Thomas Mann in 1930 about the Nazi rallies he observed. “This fantastic state of mind, of a humanity that has outrun its ideas, is matched by a political scene in the grotesque style … hallelujahs and bell-ringing and dervish-like repetition of monotonous catchwords, until everybody foams at the mouth. Fanaticism turns into a means of salvation, enthusiasm into epileptic ecstasy, politics becomes an opiate for the masses, a proletarian eschatology; and reason veils her face.”
“A quarter-of-an-hour before the opening time I walked through the chief hall of the Hofbräuhaus on the Platz in Munich and my heart was nearly bursting with joy,” wrote Hitler in Mein Kampf.
“The love in that room,” said Trump after his rally at Madison Square Garden. “It was breathtaking. It was like a love fest, an absolute love fest.”
Trump’s festival at the Garden was a fascist foreshadowing masquerading as a farce. As a screwball flying circus, it was a version of the Marx Brothers’ Night at the Opera. Everything was turned upside down in a pandemonium. Trump’s comedians, however, were no Groucho. It would have been better for Trump if his speakers had been equipped like the mute Harpo with a honking horn.
Trump’s master race of misfits found an authentic voice in the comic relief of Tony Hinchcliffe, who amid his slurs about Black people (“We carved watermelons together”), Latinos, Jews and Palestinians, said, “There’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. Yeah, I think it’s called Puerto Rico.”
Hinchcliffe is the host of a podcast aptly called Kill Tony. With a dubious laugh line, as if on cue, the stage swiveled. Triumph of the Will turned into West Side Story. His performance fatally died like the character Tony in West Side Story, only this Tony died by suicide.
Life is all right in America
If you’re all white in America
With his assent, Trump’s night at the Garden was orchestrated by a malevolent crew of eternally stunted pranksters and gangsters who took control of his campaign’s closing argument. They were brought together principally by Trump’s son Don Jr, a pitiable figure who engages in abominable displays to gain his father’s approbation, and who has become central to the organization of the entourage floating around the campaign.
“Poor Don, he really got the brunt of everything,” said Ivanka. Abandoned and abused, he was shipped off to Czechoslovakia after the divorce of his parents to be raised during the summers by his mother’s grandparents – “the most memorable time in my life”, he said. He learned to speak fluent Czech. Back home, his new stepfather tried to choke him. His college roommates at the University of Pennsylvania recalled Trump coming to visit and smashing Don Jr in the face in front of his friends, knocking him to the ground. When Trump was invited to give a formal speech at Penn, Don Jr refused to attend. He wouldn’t speak with his brutal father for years. He drank heavily, “a fall-down drunk”, said a college friend. His first wife, Vanessa, once said to him, “You’re the one with the retarded father.” Now, Don Jr does anything he can to win Trump’s distracted attention and alienated affection. On the podium, he called out to his dad as “the king of New York”.
Tony Hinchcliffe rose to the level of insult comedian as an opening club act for Joe Rogan. They both live in Austin. Rogan devoted three hours on his podcast on 26 October to a limp interview with Trump in which he failed to challenge Trump’s dozens of flagrant lies. Rogan traffics in being conspiracy theory curious and science hostile to explain the world, which he punctuates with guffaws of jocular misogyny, the occasional racial inference, some gay bashing and tough-guy posturing. He is the faux regular bros’ Alex Jones, the incels’ Hugh Hefner.
Both Rogan and Hinchcliffe are pals of Tucker Carlson. Tucker lately warmed up a Trump rally in Georgia with his sexual fantasy of a “hormone-addled 15-year-old daughter”, when “Dad comes home and he’s pissed … You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now. And no, it’s not going to hurt me more than it hurts you. No, it’s not. I’m not going to lie. It’s going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me. And you earned this.” A former colleague of Carlson’s says he has been talking intently about his spanking obsession for years, though this was the first time in public.
Tucker would appear as the interviewer of Trump on 31 October at an Arizona rally, where he brought up “Dick Cheney’s repulsive little daughter”, which triggered Trump to call her “deranged” and then call for her execution.
Tucker, Don Jr’s buddy, was instrumental in the selection of JD Vance as Trump’s running mate. JD, with his deep thoughts on “childless cat ladies” and “the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female”, is a new addition to the boys’ club. Except for Rogan, all of them, from comic to billionaire to VP candidate, appeared on the podium at the Garden. Tucker Carlson, taking his turn at standup, distinguished himself by slagging the woman who’s been a bad girl: “As the first Samoan-Malaysian, low-IQ, former California prosecutor ever to be elected president …”
Then, Elon Musk, relocated to Austin. He has launched himself like one of his spaceships into Trump’s orbit. The aspiring oligarch has donated tens of millions to a political action committee to support Trump, produced misleading TV spots to smear Harris, and used X to promote disinformation for Trump. He offers a million-dollar giveaway to register voters, cheap money, which has landed him in a Philadelphia court. He speaks secretly to Putin. Whenever Musk strays from his skill at hardware and software into the realm of human interaction, however, he falls flat on his face. His robo-taxi crashes through a shop window.
Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and its transformation into X was doomed to fail because it is about his greatest weakness: human expression. He treats human relationships as a horror show. He is the father of 12 children, some of whom he’s given the names of software programs and he has savagely disowned his trans daughter. He bought an enclosed compound in Texas to contain former wives and children. “He has even offered his own sperm to friends and acquaintances,” the New York Times has reported. He seeks life on Mars because he’s an alien on Earth. Techno authoritarianism is the only comfortable spot on his political spectrum. He calls himself “Techno-King”. Trump has promised him that he will be put in charge of the federal workforce “to start from scratch”. Musk was sanctioned by the Securities and Exchange Commission in September. His regulatory troubles will all go away with Trump. The Nasa and defense contracts will flow. If anything might befall Trump, Musk and his fellow techno authoritarians have Vance positioned a heartbeat away. At the rally, Musk introduced himself, “I am dark Gothic Maga.”
Among the other speakers in the Garden, David Rem, a 60-year-old New York sanitation worker, mounted the podium to hex Harris as “the antichrist” and “the devil”. He claimed to be a childhood friend of Trump’s from his Queens neighborhood, but, in fact, had only recently met him. In 1991, he pleaded guilty to acting as a courier to distribute cocaine and was sentenced to 151 months’ imprisonment.
Grant Cardone, a real estate operator from Florida, is a longtime Scientologist and major donor to its slush fund used to harass critics. He told the Maga faithful that Harris and “her pimp handlers will destroy our country”. To great applause, he flipped his middle finger.
A local New York radio broadcaster, Sid Rosenberg, who had called Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, “a crappy Jew”, to Trump’s approval in April, told the crowd, “She is some sick bastard, that Hillary Clinton, huh? What a sick son of a bitch. The whole ******* party, a bunch of degenerates, lowlives, Jew haters and lowlives. Every one of them. Every one of them.”
The obscenities echoing in the Garden embroidered the vulgar vision of the great replacement theory. “America is for Americans and Americans only,” declared Stephen Miller, a former Trump aide. If Trump were to be elected, Miller would play a large role in implementing what Trump boasted would be “the largest deportation program in American history”.
Trump came on stage to shout threats to the rafters. “The United States is now an occupied country, but it will soon be an occupied country no longer,” he said. “We don’t have the same country any more.” He stated he would restore the country to what it was by reaching backwards in history. “I will invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. Think of that. That’s how far back. That’s when they had law and order. They had some tough ones. Think of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.”
Undoubtedly, Trump had no clue he was referring to the political period that Thomas Jefferson described as “the reign of witches”. President John Adams enacted the Alien and Sedition Acts to harass and imprison his critics and opponents, the Democratic-Republicans organized by Jefferson and James Madison, a grouping that was the origin of the Democratic party. Adams lost the election of 1800 to Jefferson. Adams was bitter, but freely and peacefully gave up the presidency, and transferred power in the first election after Washington. The acts expired, except for the Alien Enemies Act, which is invoked now by Trump. Yet, that act is only operative during wartime.
“And when I say the enemy from within, the other side goes crazy, becomes a sound hole,” Trump barked. “How can he say now they’ve done very bad things to this country? They are indeed the enemy from within. But this is who we’re fighting.”
Trump’s vision of America was also Hitler’s understanding of the country. Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and chief of war production, became his confidant. He participated in hundreds of dinner table conversations with Hitler. “In general, no such thing as an American people existed as a unit,” Speer wrote in his memoir of Hitler’s view. “They were nothing but a mass of immigrants from many nations and races.”
After the disastrous show at the Garden, Rogan, keen on his commercial viability, separated himself from his sinking sidekick, Hinchcliffe, while at the same time winking at his bro base with a couple of little racially tinged asides. “I’ve gotta tell you, that joke kills at comedy clubs. I don’t like the joke, [but] it kills,” Rogan said on his podcast. “It’s just like, if you’re Puerto Rican and you hear that in the audience, you’re like [groans]. But it’s a funny joke. The joke does well. But I said to him, I go, ‘Dude, that’s the one that’s gonna get you stabbed.’ And he used to talk about it on stage, saying, ‘Joe Rogan always says that’s the one that’s gonna get me stabbed.’” After creating some distance between himself and Hinchcliffe, he singled out Barack Obama for criticizing the “joke” as “really fucked up. You know that’s a joke. That’s like going to a Quentin Tarantino movie [and saying], ‘And then the man killed that woman.’ Like, he didn’t really kill that woman … this is a movie.” But “Kill Tony” really did make himself roadkill and in the process “stabbed” Trump in what was not a movie or a comedy club.
Dancing around having Harris as a guest, Rogan decided that if she would not drop her schedule to see him he would not deign to travel to interview her. Instead, he hosted JD Vance for three hours on Halloween, in which Vance held forth on how young men with more testosterone are more conservative, liberal women are “celebrating” their abortions with “birthday cakes”, and that the surefire way to gain admission to an Ivy League university “is to be trans”. Then, after confidently predicting Trump would win “the normal gay guy”, Vance pronounced the Emily In Paris Netflix series a “masterpiece”.
Conspicuously missing from the cabal that staged the Garden fiasco was the most diligent student of Hitler of all the minions swirling around Trump. Steve Bannon, imprisoned for defying a congressional subpoena to testify on his role on January 6, was still behind bars.
When Bannon saw Trump descend down the Trump Tower escalator to launch his campaign in 2015, he thought, “That’s Hitler!” Bannon was ecstatic, he told New York Times correspondent Jeremy Peters in his book Insurgency: How Republicans Lost Their Party and Got Everything They Ever Wanted. Trump was the demagogue he was waiting for.
After a career on Wall Street, Bannon spent years failing as a film producer; then, radicalized as a rightwinger, he announced his ambition to become “the Leni Riefenstahl of the GOP”. Promoting his dreadful documentary in 2011 on Sarah Palin, The Undefeated, he said, “People have said I’m like Leni Riefenstahl.” Riefenstahl was the leading film-maker of the Third Reich, mistress of Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, and auteur of Triumph of the Will, a brilliant, innovative account of Hitler’s 1935 Nazi rally in Nuremberg. Bannon, who became Trump’s campaign manager in 2016 and White House senior adviser, saw himself staging Trump as Riefenstahl filmed Hitler. He boasted that he asked himself, “What would Leni Riefenstahl do?”
Bannon walked out of federal prison on 29 October. He still faces New York state charges of financial fraud in a scheme to fleece donors to build Trump’s wall along the Mexican border. He declared that he would resume where he left off. He was on to the coup of 2024. He picked up once again on the big lie of “election integrity”, that the 2024 election might be stolen from Trump just like in 2020. “If people think American politics have been divisive before,” said Bannon, “you haven’t seen anything.”
Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth
Maia Sandu wins second term in Moldovan election in rebuke to Kremlin
Incumbent wins presidential runoff with 97% of votes counted, defeating Russia-leaning rival
The pro-western incumbent Maia Sandu has won a second term in office in the Moldovan presidential election, preliminary results have shown, marking a significant boost for the country’s EU aspirations and a clear rebuke to Moscow.
Moldovans voted on Sunday in a runoff election seen as a crucial indicator of whether the country’s long-term geopolitical alignment will be with Russia or Europe.
The pro-western incumbent, Sandu, who has intensified the nation’s efforts to break away from Moscow’s influence, was facing the Kremlin-friendly political newcomer, Alexandr Stoianoglo, from the Socialist party, in the second round of voting on Sunday.
With 97% of the votes counted, Sandu was leading by a margin of 8%. With only parts of the country’s diaspora vote still outstanding, analysts said that Sandu was all but guaranteed to win re-election.
Early results indicated that the large Moldovan diaspora, accounting for about 20% of the electorate, had overwhelmingly voted for Sandu.
The result will be a significant boost for Sandu and her long-term EU agenda.
In her victory speech, delivered after nearly all votes were tallied, Sandu said that she had listened to the voices of her supporters and those of her opponent, Stoianoglo. She said that her primary goal for the coming years would be to serve as a president for all citizens.
Writing on X, Sandu also said: “Moldova, today you are victorious. Together, we’ve shown the strength of our unity, democracy, and commitment to a dignified future.”
Sandu’s position was weakened after a referendum she initiated, asking Moldovans whether they supported EU integration, that was passed by only the tiniest of margins on 20 October. The referendum was held alongside the first round of the presidential elections where Sandu received 42% of the ballot but failed to win an outright majority.
The election outcome will be welcomed in Brussels a week after Georgia, another ex-Soviet state hoping to join the EU, re-elected a party viewed by most countries as increasingly Moscow-friendly and authoritarian.
The EU has promised a €1.8bn multiyear package for Moldova to help it on the accession path which the country officially began in June. Sandu has pledged to “work night and day” to take Moldova into the EU by 2030.
Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, Moldova has gravitated between pro-western and pro-Russian courses. But under Sandu, a former World Bank adviser, the impoverished country has accelerated its push to escape Moscow’s orbit as the war in neighbouring Ukraine continues.
Both presidential election rounds as well as the EU referendum vote were marred by accusations of Russian interference.
For months, Sandu and her allies have accused Russia and its proxies of leading a large-scale campaign involving vote-buying and misinformation to sway the election.
Officials in the capital of Chișinău believe that Moscow invested approximately $100m (£77.2m) before the first vote and had reportedly smuggled in some of the funds by “money mules” detained by police at the main airport while carrying bundles of €10,000 (£8,390) in cash.
Sandu’s team said it intensified efforts to prevent a repeat of what they described as a large-scale vote-buying scheme orchestrated by the Russian-backed fugitive oligarch Ilan Shor during the first round.
“Moldova has had a monumental task before it: just two weeks to stop a sprawling Kremlin-backed vote-buying scheme that proved effective in the twin vote on 20 October,” said Olga Rosca, a foreign policy adviser to Sandu.
Still, on Sunday, Sandu’s national security adviser, Stanislav Secrieru, wrote on X that they were “seeing massive interference by Russia in our electoral process … an effort with high potential to distort the outcome”.
“Cybersecurity agency reports the Central Election Commission’s voter education site was temporarily down this morning due to a DDoS attack,” Secrieru added.
The Kremlin has denied interfering in the vote.
“We resolutely reject any accusations that we are somehow interfering in this. We are not doing this,” the Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said.
The tight result of the EU referendum has weakened Sandu’s standing, placing her in direct opposition to Stoianoglo, a former prosecutor general who exceeded expectations with 26% of the vote on the Party of Socialists’ ticket.
In last weekend’s presidential debate, Sandu accused Stoianoglo of being a “Trojan horse” candidate for outside interests bent on seizing control of Moldova.
Stoianoglo has denied working on behalf of Russia. In an interview with the Guardian in October, he claimed that he was in favour of joining the EU but boycotted the vote, calling it a parody.
He has also declined to criticise the Kremlin for its invasion of Ukraine and called for improved relations with Moscow. “The level of Russian interference in Moldova is highly exaggerated,” he said, adding that he would seek a “reset of relations” with Moscow.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shocked many in Chișinău, which is just a few hours’ drive from Ukraine’s Black Sea port city of Odesa, and the Kremlin’s shadow looms large. Moscow has 1,500 troops stationed in Transnistria, a region run by pro-Russian separatists who broke away from Moldova’s government in a brief war in the 1990s.
Ukraine, whose president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has repeatedly praised Sandu, will breathe a sigh of relief, as many in Kyiv had been anxious about the prospect of a Russia-friendly president leading the country that borders them.
Put your phone down, and back slowly away from those election forecasts. In a presidential race that has remained stubbornly close for weeks, nothing short of a campaign-shattering seismic event is likely to budge the polls much in the next few days.
But the polls have much to offer beyond the horse race. Throughout this campaign, pollsters have been asking voters a broad range of questions, and the answers will help tell the story of this election and provide valuable context in the weeks to come.
Who represents ‘change’?
Consider this: For more than a decade, most Americans have been saying that the country is on the wrong track, and this election cycle is no different. On average, about two-thirds of Americans are saying it right now. Former President Donald J. Trump has broadly campaigned by promising a return to a prosperous past, and Vice President Kamala Harris on moving toward a brighter future. The question is, which direction do voters think they want to go?
Mr. Trump has highlighted Ms. Harris’s role in President Biden’s administration, while she has made the promise of “not going back” to Mr. Trump’s era and brand of politics. These are strategic decisions when considered in terms of other common polling metrics: job approval and favorability. Job approval measures how many voters approve or disapprove of how a candidate is doing their job (or did their job, in Mr. Trump’s case). Favorability, obviously, measures whether voters express a favorable or unfavorable view of them.
Currently, Mr. Biden has a favorability rating of 40 percent on average and a 38 percent approval rating, according to a tracker from FiveThirtyEight. When Mr. Trump left office, his average was 39 percent, but in recent polls Americans have been more generous (as they’ve tended to be after presidents have left office), giving his performance a 48 percent approval rating in an October NBC News poll. While the Trump campaign aims to tie Ms. Harris’s fortunes to those of President Biden and his low ratings, the Harris campaign hopes to remind voters of how they felt about Mr. Trump when he was in office.
“When you have an incumbent president whose job approval nationally is in the high 30s, that’s just got to be a huge burden on the party trying to retain the White House,” said Charles Franklin, the director of the Marquette Law School Poll.
That said, Ms. Harris’s numbers have been much more positive than Mr. Biden’s. On July 21, the day Ms. Harris began her campaign, her average favorability rating was 38 percent; by Oct. 31, it had climbed to 46 percent. Over the same period, her job approval rating also improved, to 44 percent now from 38 percent on July 21.
But while voters may have a warmer view of Ms. Harris, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they believe she would offer a meaningful change from the current administration, and that could be a problem for her.
“The American public has been telling us for two decades that they want ‘change,’” said Chris Jackson, who heads U.S. public opinion research for Ipsos Public Polling. “This election cycle it’s sort of an open question which one of these two candidates actually represents ‘change.’”
Both candidates could reasonably make the argument that they are the “change” candidate. In fact, both of them have. But it’s also easy to see them as representing familiar philosophies, and voters have been split. When asked in separate questions in a New York Times/Siena College poll whether they thought each candidate represented change, likely voters were more inclined to say it of Mr. Trump: 59 percent said so, while 45 percent said the same of Ms. Harris.
But when asked in a later survey whether “represents change” better describes Mr. Trump or Ms. Harris, likely voters said it was Ms. Harris, 46 percent to 44 percent.
What’s on our minds?
The economy has consistently been voters’ No. 1 priority this election, and in every New York Times/Siena College poll this year, more voters chose it as their top issue than any other. And more likely voters say they trust Mr. Trump on the economy than Ms. Harris, though that edge may be shrinking.
“We may look back and say, ‘well, this all makes sense,’ if Trump wins,” said David Paleologos, the director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center. “The two most important issues to all voters were the economy and immigration and Trump has the edge on both of those.”
However, in the most recent Times/Siena poll of battleground states, those priorities weren’t as stark. The economy was still the most-cited answer for the top issue, by 24 percent of likely voters, compared with 27 percent in the last national poll. Abortion was listed as the top issue by 18 percent of likely voters in the battleground states, compared with 15 percent nationally, while immigration was named as the top issue by the same share as had named it nationally, 15 percent.
Cross-tabs, the breakdown of polling results by subpopulations such as age and gender, are tricky to parse. Because they represent smaller samples, their margin of error is higher than that of the overall poll. That said, general themes across multiple polls show gaps emerging between voting groups.
When it comes to their top issues, in the national poll, Republicans were more likely (41 percent) than Democrats (12 percent) to list the economy, while a higher share of Democrats (28 percent) said it was abortion. The economy and abortion were cited as the top issue by an equal share of women, but abortion was not even among the top three issues for men. And men were more likely than women to list immigration as their top issue, as were Republicans compared with Democrats.
We’re also seeing stark gaps in candidate choice by sex. On average, Ms. Harris leads Mr. Trump among women by 10 percentage points, while Mr. Trump leads Ms. Harris by eight, according to an aggregation of poll results from the last two weeks collected by a former Democratic pollster, Adam Carlson. There’s an even starker sex divide among young people; across three Times/Siena polls this fall, Mr. Trump led Ms. Harris among young men by 21 percentage points, while Ms. Harris led him among young women by nearly 40.
Voters are not always one-dimensional
All of this data is painting a complex picture of voters as we head into Election Day. It could even result in some surprising results, such as split-ticket voting across some states.
In Arizona, for instance, voters will be deciding on a ballot measure to codify “the fundamental right to an abortion” in the State Constitution, which a majority of likely voters there support (54 percent in the latest Times/Siena poll). At the same time, more of those voters cited immigration as their top issue than abortion, and they’ll also be voting on a ballot measure on that issue, to decide if illegal border crossings should be a state crime. In the presidential race, Mr. Trump has pulled ahead in the polls, but in the Senate contest, the Democratic candidate, Representative Rubén Gallego, is leading by four points.
“There’s 10 states with abortion on the ballot, does that impact female turnout in the state?” said Camille Mumford, the director of communications for Emerson College Polling. “Immigration, too, is on the ballot in Arizona, so will one of those have more of an impact?”
While these patterns can’t necessarily help predict who is going to win on Tuesday, they provide valuable context that, in retrospect, may help explain why exactly voters made the choices that they did.
You’re a funny character.
You just start yelling ridiculous random hyperbole when you are revealed.
Like clockwork.
Even if Trump can’t really mobilize large numbers of people to the streets, just prolonging a sense of chaos might be enough
Whatever happens next, one day historians will have to explain why a candidate who earlier this year had been presented as disciplined started to veer off into unrestrained racist rhetoric and dancing for 40 minutes to his own playlist. Was it age, as plenty of commentators have speculated? Was it a brilliant attempt to balance dehumanizing attacks on minorities with an effort to make himself look human?
A much more sinister explanation must be taken seriously. We still assume that we are witnessing two campaigns for the presidency. But what if we are witnessing one campaign and one slow-motion coup, whose organizers need to go through the motion of campaigning for the plan to work? Since winning at the ballot box does not matter, taking a break to listen to Pavarotti isn’t a problem; conversely, a festival of racism and conspiracy theories, as at Madison Square Garden, is not about convincing any undecided voter, but motivating committed Trumpists to go along with another coup attempt.
To be sure, this can also sound like conspiracy theory. The point is not prediction, but to call for preparedness. After all, there is an overwhelming number of reasons why, should Trump lose, he will once more try to take power anyway. His followers have long been primed to assume that evil Democrats will steal the election. The unchecked racism fits into a logic of far-right populism more generally: far-right populists claim that they, and they alone, represent what they call “the silent majority” or “the real people” (the very expression Trump used on January 6 to address his supporters).
If far-right populists do not win elections, the reason can only be that the majority of the electorate was silenced by someone (liberal elites, of course). Or, for that matter, people who are not “real people” – fake Americans – must have participated in the election to bring about an illegitimate outcome. This explains the Republican obsession with finding proof of “non-citizen” voting.
Dozens of lawsuits have already been launched to put election results into doubt. As in 2020 and early 2021, Trump is likely to make sharing his lies a test of loyalty.
"Maga members have been primed to resort to violence. Trump and his allies have framed the election as an apocalyptic battle
Here analogies with other far-right populists are again illuminating: it is doubtful that all followers of the far-right Law and Justice Party (PiS) in Poland truly believe that relatively liberal prime minister Donald Tusk had colluded with Russians to have the country’s president, a member of PiS, killed in a plane crash in Smolensk in 2010. But professing the Smolensk conspiracy theory was not about making an empirical statement; it became a means to signal membership of a political tribe.
In theory, Republicans could seize the chance at last to break with Trump, who, after all, has only delivered defeats to the party. He has stated that he will not run again (though it would of course be naive to take any of his promises at face value). Yet there were already plenty of incentives to get rid of Trump in early 2021, and still Republicans did not disown, let alone impeach, him.
Most worryingly, Maga members have been primed to resort to violence. Trump and his allies – including the world’s richest man, who just happens to be a rightwing extremist – have framed the election as an apocalyptic battle. If Democrats win, Musk has claimed, there will not be any proper elections ever after; they will bring in more foreigners to secure a permanent majority. It is already half forgotten that Trump held his first major rally this election cycle in Waco, Texas.
Who knows whether Trump can really mobilize large numbers of people on the streets; it might be enough to prolong a sense of chaos. Vance has claimed that the 2020 election was problematic, because so many citizens had doubts about its “integrity” and Democrats prevented a “debate” which the country needed to have (never mind that Republicans had created the doubts in the first place). How long a debate would Vance like, exactly? Incidents like the infamous Brooks Brothers riot, where rightwingers in fancy suits stopped a recount in Florida in 2000, might accompany this debate. After all, as Jack Smith has claimed, Trump campaign operatives in 2020 already issued the order: “Make them riot.”
The hope may well be that, if decisions are kicked to the correct court, things could still go Republicans’ way. Trumpists know from the US supreme court’s decisions about ballot access and immunity earlier that some parts of the judiciary have given up on any conventional legal logic; they are likely simply to deliver whatever benefits Trump. The conservative justices’ decision this past week allowing the removal of voters from the rolls in Virginia so close to the election – a clear break with precedent – might well have been a preview of what a court captured by Trumpists is willing to do.
To be sure, the system as a whole is less vulnerable than in 2020. What is officially known as the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act of 2022 makes it harder to challenge results in Congress; the theory that legislatures could overturn the outcome – popular among Trumpists in 2020 – has not found much legal support. But since Trump has everything to lose (including his freedom, given the charges still pending), there’s every reason to think that he’ll try everything.
