08 Oct Trump Will Win
When all is said and done, and we look back on the 2024 presidential contest, I strongly suspect that the deciding factor – or, at least, one of the most important deciding factors – will be the Democratic Party base’s antisemitism. It’s not that Jewish voters will be swayed in significant numbers to vote for the Republican candidate because of the Democrats’ antisemitism, although some clearly will be. Rather, it’s that antisemitism caused the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, to make an exceptionally poor decision, one that will cost her the race.
What’s that, you say? I buried the lede there?
Well…now that you mention it, I guess I did. Three weeks from election day, I am going on record forecasting a Trump victory. The race is fluid, of course, and, as James Carville noted the other day, three weeks can be an eternity in electoral politics. Additionally, Donald Trump is Donald Trump, which means that until the votes are all counted, there is a non-zero chance that he will do or say something that will change the dynamics of the race and thoroughly repel voters.
All of that said, I still think this is Trump’s race to lose.
It’s funny. Back in the early 2000s, when I was working for Lehman Brothers, my boss – Kim Wallace, who would go on to serve in the Obama Treasury Department – walked in on me perusing Drudge Report. I was visibly embarrassed. I was a bigshot (LOL) Wall Street analyst, after all. Kim waved his hand and said, “No, no. I get it. He does a great job of organizing the voices on the Right in one place. It’s invaluable.” Today, “Drudge” is invaluable for exactly the same reason, although from the opposite perspective. Whoever runs the site these days does a great job of organizing all the voices on the Left in one place. It’s still invaluable. And lately, it’s starting to sound a bit out of sorts.
The other day, for example, Drudge ran, as one of his top, above-the-logo stories, a forecast warning that Trump is done, that all one has to do is “count the numbers,” and Trump’s doom becomes obvious. The author of this purportedly damning bit of augury was Michael Moore. Yeah, that Michael Moore, the aggressively partisan, ideologically demented filmmaker who hasn’t been right about anything in his entire career and who actually believed that he could be the difference maker in the 2004 presidential campaign – which his guy lost, not coincidentally.
Drudge is filled with this kind of garbage: all sorts of articles and stories about the doom and gloom surrounding the Trump campaign and the inevitability of Trump’s imminent meltdown. It’s whacky. And it’s all pure faith-driven wishcasting. There are no numbers, no reliable polls, no data of any sort. Just a bunch of articles by and for people who hate Donald Trump and therefore expect him to lose.
Out in the real world, the polling tends to show a different story. It tends, more or less, to show that the race is actually pretty close but that, if anything, Trump has a small advantage. Add in the fact that the generic ballot question shows Republicans outnumbering Democrats for the first time in the history of ever, and the race is, as I say, probably Trump’s to lose. Nothing is guaranteed, of course, but all things considered, you’d rather be Trump today than Harris.
Ok…so…now, where was I?
Right. Antisemitism.
I know that the conventional wisdom has it that running mates don’t matter, that people vote for the name at the top of the ticket, regardless of the name at the bottom of the ticket. I get that, and, for the most part, I agree. The people whose articles are linked to on Drudge aren’t running around with their hair on fire screeching about how JD Vance is a “tHrEaT tO dEmOcRaCy!” They’re screeching about Trump.
Nevertheless, I think this election is a little out of the ordinary. In this case, more than any case in recent history, people are looking for reassurance from the entire ticket. They saw what happened with the current semi-coherent President, and they want to be certain that the next guy (or gal) is backed up by someone who is ready, willing, and able to step in at any moment. This is especially true of the Republican ticket, where Trump is now the old and sometimes out-of-sorts candidate, but it’s also true of the Democratic ticket, where Harris is a wholly unproven commodity. In last week’s debate, JD Vance provided the reassurance voters need. Tim Walz, by contrast, provided nothing of the sort.
As I have noted before in these pages, Walz is a strange guy, the likes of which anybody who grew up in the Midwest (or any rural setting) knows. He is and always has been embarrassed to be the kind of person that the coastal elites think of as “one of them.” Last week – and in interviews ever since – Walz was called out for saying that he was in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen massacre, when, in truth, he was in Nebraska. This is but one of a dozen lies of a similar nature that Walz has been caught in since he was tabbed as Kamala Harris’s running mate. His excuse is that he is a “knucklehead,” which while true, doesn’t really explain his dishonesty.
Walz is a liar, but he’s a specific type of liar. He’s the guy who tells his buddies that he has a girlfriend, but she goes to a different school. You wouldn’t know her. He’s the guy who tells his pals that he once scored 40 points in a pickup game against Michael Jordan, but he hurt his leg and doesn’t play anymore. He’s the guy who tells his friends that he once played a round of golf that he finished at 38 under and in which he hit 11 holes-in-one. In short, he’s the guy who lies constantly because he’s embarrassed about who he really is, because he doesn’t think that people would like him if they knew the real him. This is a direct consequence of his self-loathing oikophobia. He is not only embarrassed of himself and his own perceived inadequacies, but is also embarrassed of where he’s from and the fact that he’s just an average guy. The whole business is just sad, but it’s also incredibly off-putting. And he is making things worse for his running mate.
It is important to remember that when Harris chose her running mate, the decision came down to Walz, who has proven himself to be a clown and a genuine liability, and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who is competent and reassuring. Had Harris selected Shapiro, she’d likely be ahead in Pennsylvania, and she’d likely be the favorite at this point in the contest. But she didn’t select Shapiro – because his name is Shapiro. She couldn’t select Shapiro because certain elements in her party wouldn’t have stood for it and because it would have meant conceding Michigan to Trump. Josh Shapiro is a different kind of “one of them,” a kind the Democratic base won’t tolerate at the moment.
In other words, when Donald Trump wins, the Democrats will have no one but themselves to blame – not that they will.
