There are 11 days to go for this election season, and we are entering what Sir Alex Ferguson called “squeaky bum time”. For those who haven’t watched Ted Lasso or think football is played with something shaped like a rugby ball, “squeaky bum time” is a popular term used by the legendary football manager Sir Alex Ferguson to describe the last few games of the season that would decide the fate of the championship. For American readers who don’t follow football, the title is decided by who finishes at the top of the table, and Sir Alex Ferguson is like a Scottish Vince Lombardi.
But we digress.
With 11 days to go, there was no reason for this to be such a close election. While the election outcome looked certain when Joe Biden was struggling to stay awake, an errant bullet that nipped Donald Trump’s ear forced the Democrats to cut the former President loose and instead pick his running mate.
It was an almighty gamble with only four months to go for several reasons.
For starters, America has elected only one black president in its history, which caused such a spasm in the kulturkampf that it created the Donald Trump phenomenon, the most unpresidential president in America’s history. Now, they have bet their future on a candidate who is starting to look like what the MAGA crowd disparage as a DEI pick.
With the benefit of hindsight, Pelosi and Co. might wonder if they could go back in time, drop Biden earlier, and have a proper primary. After all, even Hillary Clinton went through two gruelling primaries before she became the nominee in 2016, while Harris, who failed to win a single vote in the 2020 primaries, was virtually picked unelected. As comedian Jim Gaffigan, who plays Tim Walz on SNL, joked during the Al Smith Dinner that the Democrats were so “worried about a threat to democracy that they staged a coup and ousted their democratically-elected incumbent, and elected Kamala Harris.”
Despite Harris’s short preparation time and being stuck with Biden’s campaign team, a charismatic leader like Bill Clinton or even Barack Obama could have stemmed the tide, but Harris’s ratings have plummeted with every interview, giving life to David Sacks’s “doom loop” theory: the more interviews Harris does, the more her ratings plummet, the more her ratings plummet.
All polls are saying it’s a dead heat, which is very bad news given Democrats always have the edge in the popular vote. Al Gore won the popular vote against George Bush in 2000 despite losing the presidency, as did Clinton against Trump in 2016.
More worrying is that the narrow margin comes after many Americans have already voted – a post-Covid behavioural trait change – that has raised the hackles and creased the furrows of Democratic elites.
In FiveThirtyEight’s poll of polls, Harris’s lead of 3.7 points from August has fallen to 1.7, and in the seven swing states, it’s even closer. Despite the fact that Democrats have outspent Republicans, the polling figures are either largely static or have moved in favour of Donald Trump. And keep in mind that the Orange Man stigma still exists, and many Americans are afraid to vocally say they support Trump for president.
The last few rounds have seen Dem elites, Republican mids, and Hollywood celebrities turn up to campaign for Harris. It’s gotten so desperate that Obama has started mouthing Eminem lyrics to appeal to the brothers, and Liz Cheney is turning up to support Harris. And Harris is counting on Beyoncé to flip Texas.
Meanwhile, the last NYT-Sienna College poll shows that Trump is now virtually tied with Harris and has considerably gained traction on immigration. Anecdotally, one has heard of numerous cases where even migrants who have fiducial independence are choosing to move to a Red state rather than a Blue state, scared of the new Blue education system. There are various reasons for this, where there’s a widening chasm between traditional Dem voters and the tenets that the new Blue party holds dear. Dems have made these beliefs so central to their identity that they are alienating average American Dem voters.
Another group that is abandoning Democrats is Muslim-American voters thanks to the conflict in Gaza. Many are gravitating towards the Green Party’s Jill Stein, not unlike the recent UK elections where a lot of Muslim voters abandoned their traditional support for the UK’s Liberal Party, leading to gains for independent candidates and others. There’s a worry that such a showing in a state like Michigan could seriously hamper Kamala Harris’s campaign.
And to add insult to injury, Trump has also made significant gains with non-traditional Republican voters despite a non-stop mainstream media agenda over the last eight years that has painted him as a bigoted racist/fascist/misogynist.
According to recent Reuters/Ipsos polling, Trump now trails Harris by two narrow points among Hispanic men (44% to 46%), a significant improvement from his 19-point lag against Joe Biden at this stage in 2020. This shift, based on data from over 15,000 respondents, reflects an uptick in Trump’s popularity in this demographic, while Harris has strengthened her support among white women, who leaned Republican in 2020 but now favour her by a slight margin.
Overall, Hispanic voter support for Trump has risen to 37%, the highest for a Republican since George W. Bush’s 44% in 2004, while Harris holds 51%, down slightly from Biden’s 54% in 2020. Black voters also show varied support, with 18% of Black men and 8% of Black women backing Trump.
Many years ago, Malcolm X argued that the difference between white liberals and conservatives was that the former would pose as Black people’s friend and benefactor and then treat them as a pawn or tool in their political “football game.”
He had said: “The white conservatives aren’t friends of the Negro either, but they at least don’t try to hide it. They are like wolves; they show their teeth in a snarl that keeps the Negro always aware of where he stands with them. But the white liberals are foxes, who also show their teeth to the Negro but pretend that they are smiling. The white liberals are more dangerous than the conservatives; they lure the Negro, and as the Negro runs from the growling wolf, he flees into the open jaws of the ‘smiling’ fox.”
And it’s not just the White House.
Republicans need a net gain of two Senate seats to secure control if Harris wins; however, with a Trump-Vance victory, they will require just one seat due to the Vice President’s tie-breaking role. In the House, Republicans are defending a slim majority, while Democrats need five seats to flip control. Together, these dynamics present a real possibility that Republicans could gain control of the presidency, House, and Senate in 2024.
And Dems might be tempted to wonder if the mistake was picking a DEI candidate who launches into a word salad with a side of laughter every time she is asked a difficult question and who has failed to articulate, despite being asked multiple times, how her presidency would differ from Joe Biden’s.
And it must be even more galling to think that they could lose another election to a septuagenarian who isn’t that much more coherent than Joe Biden. One who happens to be a former New York socialite and reality TV host, who goes on bizarre rants, sways to music for forty minutes, and spent a major chunk of one of his last rallies talking about a legendary golfer’s junk. And, even more gallingly, their last-ditch attempt to win the election appears to be based on arguing that anything is better than the septuagenarian former New York socialite who spent a rally talking about a former golfer’s manhood.
Trump dances to music for 40 minutes at town hall after cutting Q&A short #shorts
Normally, in what Manchester United fans call the Fergie Years, more often than not, “squeaky bum” time would end with the team winning the title, preferably with a few last-minute goals. Time will tell who emerges victorious after the “squeaky bum” time in US elections.
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