Just three weeks before the election, existential dread is descending on Democrats. As the average of both national and battleground state polls continues to drift in Trump's direction, and as he even retakes a solid lead in the betting markets, progressives are asking plaintively: Why? How? Even their own polls, like the NBC poll just out on Sunday, show the race between Trump and Harris is a dead heat, and the tendency of the polls in 2016 and 2020 to understate Trump's strength suggests that, at this stage, he has to be the favorite. Meanwhile, Saturday Night Live, for whatever reason, has decided to turn on and mock Kamala Harris. Talk about kicking leftists when they're down!
Democrats, not surprisingly, can't wrap their prodigious brains around this information. Harris is...joyful, and inspiring, and competent, and accomplished, and loves "democracy" ever so much, and Trump, by contrast, is...Trump. How can the American people be on the fence when their two choices are as different as night and day, or as good and evil, as the Left surely sees it? Conservatives are baffled too, from the opposite perspective, but a lot less so, because they fully expect that half the country will be deluded by the siren song of the mainstream media. For progressives, Kamala's honeymoon period gave them a false sense of security: it promised them that soon, at long last, they would exorcise the Trump demon once and for all. Now, as the Harris campaign comes crashing down to earth, and as her poll numbers dip, the reality is setting in that all the lawfare, all the hyperbolic invective and anti-Trump propaganda, and even all the “own goals” scored by Trump against himself, haven't fundamentally changed the voters' perspective. Americans still believe that the country is broken, that it's agonizingly hard to make ends meet, and that Biden and Harris blew it. Perceptions of Trump and Trump's first term, meanwhile, have improved, suggesting that frantic efforts to undermine him may be backfiring. Heck, even bullets bounce off the guy!!! As a Democrat or a progressive, you can understand why at this stage you'd be close to losing your mind – assuming, of course, that you ever had a firm grip on reality to begin with.
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It's worth remembering, however, that cornered animals, which is what leftists have become, can be very dangerous. Staring into the abyss of fathomless "fascism", the children of light may be tempted to turn to the darkness. In other words, they might grasp at any straw that promises them deliverance from imminent calamity. This means that Republicans, conservatives, and Trumpers, while they may be tantalizingly close to ending the Biden-Harris train wreck, are also flirting with potential disaster themselves. When the Democrats play their last card – presumably, their strongest but perhaps also their riskiest and most unscrupulous anti-Trump card – who can say that they wouldn't be willing to destroy democracy in order to "save" it? And what might that look like?
Tin-pot dictators in Third World countries, when they want to forestall an election that threatens to unseat them, frequently cancel the contest on some pretext, like constitutional disputes, civil unrest, or the threat of terrorism. Democrats could do the same, but this would require the creation of an elaborate narrative about a clear and present danger to national security from the right. Democrats and progressives have talked obsessively about January 6th, it is true, and in the process have portrayed many Republicans, conservatives, and Trumpers as bloodthirsty insurrectionists, but they have tended to paint this threat as a one-off outrage that imperiled democracy on and around January 6th, 2021. They now treat it mostly as a rhetorical device with which they can bludgeon Trump and his allies. January 6th has become part of leftist mythology and buttresses the Left's heroic self-image, but it doesn't imply, much less prove, the existence of a vast, ongoing right-wing conspiracy to overthrow the government. And, in the absence of such a conspiracy or an active and armed rebel movement, it is hard to imagine that the cancellation of a presidential election could be justified, especially by a party that claims to believe in the sanctity of elections.
That leaves the obvious ploy: interfere in some artful way with the dynamics of this election in its last, crucial stages to blunt Trump's momentum. In other words, mount an October surprise. Are the Democrats and progressives capable of this? Possibly they are. Possibly, as in 2016, they have squirreled away a damaging morsel of information that they can deploy against Trump at whatever moment will convey maximum political advantage to Kamala Harris. In 2016, it was the Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump made crude and sexist statements, which shadowy forces on the Left thought would push Hillary Clinton over the top. The fact that the gambit failed then does not mean that it would necessarily do so now. Whether Harris's allies have any such “dirt” to unleash is a pertinent question, but perhaps not as pertinent as one might think, given the wide vistas opening up for “deepfakes” generated by A.I. The harsh reality is that a smear against Trump need not be true or accurate to be politically decisive, and Democrats must know this. The problem, however, is that the public is fully aware of the potential for deepfakes, and thus they might discount any such concoction as...fake, and they might even do so if it was real!
Absent an October surprise, and given that no further landmark events are pending in this campaign, like debates, it is hard to see why the slow, steady movement towards Trump would not continue, since it reflects the American people's fundamental dissatisfaction with the status quo. To put it another way, it is easy to see how events in the next few weeks could trigger a modest increase in Americans' anxiety or pessimism – say, if the stock market nosedived, or if an international crisis developed – but it is hard to see why voters' basic sense of whether the country is on the right or the wrong track would reverse itself. And this is precisely why Democrats are in the early stages of panic.
If Trump does win, one assumes that Harris herself will be quickly forgotten by the Left, and Democrats, progressives, and Trump haters will pivot immediately to the hatching of schemes either to stop Trump from taking office, or to prevent him from wielding power effectively once he is sworn in. Expect leftists to reach more deeply than ever into their bag of dirty tricks to forestall the Second Age of Trump, which for them is increasingly hard to distinguish from the apocalypse.
Dr. Nicholas L. Waddy is an Associate Professor of History at SUNY Alfred and blogs at: www.waddyisright.com. He appears on the Newsmaker Show on WLEA 1480/106.9.
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