Why I’m optimistic about the election

Source: Wikimedia Commons

A couple of friends have told me recently that they wish they had my optimism about which way this election is going. I make no predictions. But I see many reasons for optimism.

Ever since Kamala Harris became the nominee, it is hard to imagine things going better for the Democratic Party. Harris hit the ground running, reversed the sense of doom that we all felt after President Biden’s debate performance, and inspired a huge wave of enthusiasm and political momentum. The polls started moving our way.

Meanwhile, the Trump campaign has been doing pretty much everything wrong. It has been one stupid move after another. For whatever reason, Trump has chosen to throw out red meat to inflame the people who are going to vote for him anyway, instead of reaching out for votes that he might otherwise not have gotten. He keeps infuriating women voters, and in two days’ work he probably has permanently reversed the defection of Latinos from the Democratic to the Republican party. Best of all, the once-forbidden word “fascist” has been rehabilitated and forcefully injected into the national conversation. Even the New York Times was forced to run pieces (quoting experts, of course) acknowledging that, yes, Trump is a fascist. (That the New York times was the last, rather than the first, to tell us that Trump is a fascist says a lot about how completely useless our political media have become.)

I don’t pay much attention to the polls this close to the election. Again this year, as they did in 2022, Republicans have cranked out a bunch of trash polls to convince MAGA voters that Trump is sure to win, even if he loses, and that therefore that the election was stolen.

A few days ago, Jen O’Malley Dillon, Kamala Harris’ campaign chair, put out a YouTube video about the numbers (see below). Yes, of course, someone in her position has to express optimism at this point and stress the importance of voting. But O’Malley also refers to some numbers from the campaign’s internal polling. You can be sure that the campaign’s internal polling is laser-focused and of higher quality that the public polls. The internal polls are essential to campaign decisions about where to concentrate their efforts. If you’ve been stressing out about the election, then maybe you’ll feel better after watching the video.

But I’ve also been thinking some about the worst-case scenario. It’s an ugly scenario, but in the end we win.

If the American people really are so stupid as to vote for a fascist who intends to destroy the American democracy, turn us into Russia (see Fiona Hill in Politico, October 28), make elections obsolete, loot the country, and put billionaires and whack-jobs in charge of everything (thinking that this will save America!) then obviously the American people are going to have to learn things the hard way. If Trump and company get back into power, then no election will ever get them out. He even told people at his rallies that they won’t have to vote anymore, because he’ll “fix” things.

I told a friend at lunch yesterday that, if Trump gets back into power, that I think it would take Americans four to eight years to get our democracy back. After four years of Trump and a non-election in 2028, it should be clear even to MAGA cultists that they’ve been conned, that the economy has been trashed, and that the rights of everyone except for billionaires have been suspended. Non-MAGA Americans, upon seeing that elections no longer work, would clearly see what must be done. The only recourse would be a revolt, with general strikes and millions of people in the streets.

The history of how tyrants are deposed has been well studied. Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Erica Frantz have written in How Autocracies Fall that autocrats have become increasingly vulnerable to mass revolts. When Putin and his oligarchs took over Russia, the job was made much easier by the fact that the Russian people have no history of democracy. A tyrant in the Kremlin was just the same-old same-old for Russians. But that is not true of Americans. Democracy is in our bones (most of us, anyway). Anybody who takes democracy from us would have hell to pay. Nor would we Americans be in it alone. We have Canada to the north, and we have our NATO allies, who hate Trump just as much as we do. If the MAGA people ever got the civil war that they seem to want, they would lose. And maybe they’d learn a lesson that they’d remember up to a hundred years or so.

So that’s why I’m not panicking. Even if we wake up to a nightmare on November 6 (or however long it takes to count the votes), we’ll get our democracy back, whatever it takes. For decades, farsighted people have warned us about what fascism would look like if it came to America. And now we can see the whites of fascist eyes. Maybe it’s just denial, but I still find it almost impossible to believe that Americans actually would choose such a thing, especially now that we can call it what it is.

Yes, they have a plan for stealing the election. They will try, through legal maneuvers, to get it before the fascist-majority Supreme Court. Or, through dirty tricks in the states, they will try to throw the election to the House of Representatives. We do need to brace ourselves for that. Unless the election is a landslide for Harris, an attempt to steal the election is inevitable. Trump was even foolish enough to refer to a “secret plan” with the Republican speaker of the House. If they lose the election but succeed with a steal, the revolt will start on Day 1.