So election day is less than a week away. I have already written about our need to put and keep our trust in God, and that this spiritual calibration needs to be maintained throughout the whole ordeal. Put not your trust in princes already (Ps. 146:3).
But with that said, and your spirit being all serene the way it ought to be, you still have to live down here starting in the middle of next week, and you will still have to make sense out of all the tumult that will be going on all around you. What I wanted to do here is share with you how I see the lay of the land. Take it for what it is worth. And in the main, I am speaking here as an observer, not as a partisan. But in the aftermath of an election like this one, certain observations will be automatically relegated to the status of partisanship, so be aware of that also.
This will not be a long, sustained argument, but rather a collection of observations about the campaign, the candidates, and what our varied reactions will need to be like. Think like a shortstop. If the ball comes to you, go to second. If the ball goes to left field, then you be the cut-off man. If the ball goes to right field then, as everyone on the team should know, you should run a pick-six.
In short, you should have a range of your options in mind. For example, if Trump wins by the narrowest of margins, those plans should not include an evening stroll with your family in downtown Baltimore.
Okay, mark the beginning of some random observations.
All the mojo appears to be with the Trump campaign, and the Harris campaign is in disarray. She is manifestly out of her league, in over her head, and also under water. Those three are hard to do all at once. When she is asked the most straightforward of questions, you can see the wheel spinning on the screen as her answer starts to buffer.
With one exception. There was a striking moment at one Harris rally, where someone shouted that “Jesus is Lord,” and Harris quickly responded: “I think you’re at the wrong rally.” I took away from this something quite different than what many others did. The standard response was outrage over her backhanding the name of Jesus like that. That was, of course, reprehensible, but I did notice something else about it. I thought it was the most authentic thing I have ever seen her do. She was quick, the comment was funny (although perverse), and it was entirely unscripted. For the very first time, I thought that there might be a real person under all that.
The Trump campaign is acting like they are having fun, and also acting as though they are going to win. The McDonald’s stunt. The Madison Square Garden rally. The Joe Rogan conversation. There are two kinds of “acting like you are going to win,” one of them bad. That one draws forth the admonition “not to get cocky.” That one is no good. The other kind, and what I think I am seeing here, is an awareness that the stars in their courses appear to be ganging up on Sisera.
The Harris campaign is acting like they are going to lose, and all they can come up with is one Hail Mary after another. Perhaps, since Trump was rash enough to hold his rally in Madison Square Garden, we can draw the attention of the American people to the fact that actual Nazis met there also one time, in the exact same spot. For those of you 18-year-olds who are voting for the very first time, this perfidy happened when your great-great grandfather was your age. This is why it is so important to stay caught up with current events.
If it is not close, then cheating won’t matter. And if there are blue states that surprise everyone by becoming overnight swing states, then cheating won’t matter there either. That will be on account of the apparatus for cheating not being in place. Cheating, like everything else, requires a ground game and personnel for it, and you need to be ready.
I interrupt all this in order to put an exhortation in bold. I happen to know that I have a lot of readers in certain key areas—areas where sensible people might be feeling a “what’s the use?” vibe because of all the nonsense they see all around them all the time. But I would encourage them all to turn out and vote just the same. The 2020 election—cheating and all—was decided by about 40,000 votes, out of over 155M cast. The Founders of our country, with astounding foresight, fashioned a constitutional system that would give readers of Blog & Mablog—if they would only get off the couch—the kind of influence that they saw we really ought to have. In return for this legacy gift, the least we can do is get down to the polls and fill in those little ovals.
Progressives like to complain about the Electoral College because it is a system that allows for someone to lose the presidential election while winning the overall popular vote. But this is a bogus objection. It is like wanting the World Series to be decided on the basis of the total runs scored across all seven games. The system we have actually allows for big states and little states to be in a union together, and it continues to work exactly as it was designed to work. Besides, the progressive complaint is not really principled as we would see immediately if it ever goes the other way—if their candidate were to lose the popular vote but garner enough electoral votes. Under those circumstances, they would just zip it and sit there looking positively Madisonian.
The reason the cheating worked in 2020 was that the progressives were united in their desire for it to work, and the conservatives were divided. Those who saw various kinds of election interference not only had to fight with the progressive establishment about it, but also with their fellow conservatives who still wanted to have faith that “the American system works.” To say that there was cheating, and not incidental cheating either, but cheating that swung the course of the election, was to admit that American politics was as corrupt as all get out. And how could a patriot think that?
This time around it is different. The progressives are brazen enough to still try it, and if given the need and the opportunity, try it they will. But consider the differences here in 2024. Harris has been a much lamer candidate than the replaced Biden would have been. He has the infirmities of age to excuse him. She is just as bad, and with nothing to point to for an excuse. There have been these years of unremitting lawfare, on jokeity jokeity charges, trying to hobble a political opponent in the run up to an election. Various investigations since 2020 have uncovered deeds that were, um, unseemly. The media’s collusion on the Russia hoax has been made apparent. And the way they spiked the Hunter’s laptop . . . never mind. Don’t have time to write that book.
The upshot is that there have to be progressive leaders who are shrewd enough to know that—given the scale of cheating that would be necessary to pull Harris across the finish line—cheating this time probably wouldn’t fly. It simply wouldn’t be accepted by the country. Given that, they know how to fall back and regroup when they need to, I expect something like that to happen. There will be riots and the obvious unrest, but I would expect the resistance to take a different shape. I would expect something like crashing the economy in such a way as to blame Trump for it. There are countermeasures that could be taken, but I am getting ahead of myself. One thing at a time. Next Tuesday first.