The View from Right Field

We Need a Landslide in November

We need a landslide in November, but I don’t think we are going to get one.  In August of 2020, I wrote this:

“I hope the election in November is a landslide.  In saying that, I’m not saying who I want to win (you can find that elsewhere).  I’m just saying I just hope it’s not close because I’m not sure we, as a nation, can handle another close election.”

In spite of my hope, 2020 was just as close as 2016, and we only barely got through it.  If we have another election like that, the aftermath could easily be worse than 2020.  If Harris wins, Trump and his supporters will say the election was stolen.  Who knows what they will do, but it won’t be good.

This Election Is All About the 1%

No, not that 1%, not the richest 1%.  I’m talking about the 1% who are going the decide this election: the truly undecided voters in the six or seven battleground states.  Say 7% of people in states with 15% of the electoral votes are honestly undecided.  That’s about 1% of American voters.  And those are the people who are going to decide this election.  And both campaigns know it, so whatever they are doing is aimed at convincing those voters to vote for them,

Some of that 1% are probably suburban women.  Others may be working class minority men.  Whoever they are, these are the people the campaigns, both of them, are targeting.  The rest of us don’t really matter.  So whenever you see one of the campaigns do something that seems silly or off-putting to you, consider how it might look to somebody in that 1%.  Because those people are the targets of those actions or statements – and those are the people who are going to decide this­ election.

Keep Them Hidden; Nominate Them Late

The party that gave us the current system of selecting presidential candidates (through the McGovern Commission, which came up with new processes for nominating presidential candidates after the 1968 election and which the Republicans also), i.e. lots of primaries and, almost always, early nominees for President, has apparently come up with a new idea for presidential elections: Nominate somebody at the last minute who has no clear political program and then hope to get them elected on the excitement of a new, fresh face before anybody has a chance to learn anything about them.

It’s not what the Democrats planned on doing.  Their initial idea was pretty much to keep Joe Biden hidden away for most of the campaign and get him re-elected before the voters realized that he really wasn’t with it anymore.  But the plan didn’t work, so they had to come up with a new one: nominate Kamala Harris and keep her hidden away as  long as possible.  The theory is that enough people would be so happy to get rid Joe Biden and not have to vote for Donald Trump, who has all kinds of issues of his own, that the Democrats could win before anybody realized they didn’t know what Kamala Harris believed or stood for.  And while we still have a long way to go before the election, it’s working so far.  And with much of the media not pursuing her to answer questions or do much more than read speeches off teleprompters, it may work – especially when the alternative is Donald Trump.