Two Weeks and Change
This election is starting to feel like that shot at the end of Return of the Jedi where the Falcon and a TIE Fighter are screaming up the Death Star tunnel away from the wall of flame. In just over two weeks we’ll know which ship we’re in.
The last month or so seems to have really borne out my initial impression that there are no undecided voters; the polls have been basically rock solid the whole time, despite an absurd number of plot twists and things that would have blown up any other election. I wouldn’t have thought a three-way race between “harm reduction, “fascism”, and “well, the leopards won’t eat my face” would be this close, but there you go. Everyone decided four years ago.
On the other hand, who knows? Part of being an American is saying things like “I don’t want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but….” and then a decade later finding out everything you suspected was right, and then some. Polling is clearly broken this cycle, but we won’t know how cooked it was until after the fact. Everyone who puts out poll numbers or talks about them has a strong financial incentive to make it sound like a close race no matter what; both so they have something to keep talking about and so that they don’t have to answer questions about why their methodologies were wrong. In retrospect, one of the most consequential political events of the last decade was the NYT website poll tracker meter slamming all the way towards Clinton on election night in 2016; everyone in the business looked at that the next morning and thought “never again.”
On a more positive note, how great is it that Jimmy Carter managed to hit his goal of living long enough to vote for Harris? There have been at least three complete narratives about “Jimmy Carter” since I’ve been an adult, and I’m glad he lived long enough to see it finally land on “Beloved and Respected Elder Statesman.” (And, that his long-term rep has increased in a directly inverse proportion to Reagan. Speaking of consequential political events, it’s also nice to see the 1980 election being more widely acknowledged as the course-of-civilization changing fuckup that it was. Here’s hoping we avoid another one.)
Harris/Walz ’24. Let’s clear the tunnel.