State of Play, November 3, 2024 We keep hearing that the race will be close. I think it will be like Patton’s Third Army racing across France in 1944. By Roger Kimball
https://amgreatness.com/2024/11/03/state-of-play-november-3-2024/
Historians have often noted the tendency of generals to embark on a new war with assumptions more pertinent to the last one. This is what the enemy did last time; ergo, he’ll do something similar this time. That worked for us last time; ergo we should do it again. Fighting the last war is always a dangerous temptation.
The conduct of political warfare is not unlike the conduct of the wars that deploy armies rather than candidates, navies rather than the media, aircraft rather than pollsters. There is always the temptation to think that the assumptions and tactics of the last war are relevant to the current campaign.
This is especially the case, I believe, in the 2024 presidential race. The principals are the same: Donald Trump vs. what Vivek Ramaswamy has dubbed “the System.” The Dems changed out their primary avatar in July, shoehorning in Kamala Harris, where Joe Biden had been standing. But that maneuver, though profoundly anti-democratic, was merely a cosmetic expedient. The public face of the campaign was changed. The organizing soul remained the same.
In essence, the Dems are waging the same campaign now that they waged in 2016, in 2020, and beyond. Counting once again on their huge advantages in money (almost 3 to 1) and near total control of the media, they believe—or at least have acted as if they believe—that they can play the same game this time and win. They have not yet noticed—or at least have not yet effectively recalibrated their campaign to account for the fact—that many things “on the ground” have changed radically.
The Dems are fighting the last war. Trump is not.
For one thing, the day-to-day running of the Trump campaign, overseen from on high by Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, is superb. Both are geniuses. Unlike in 2016 or 2020, this year the Trump juggernaut is a well-oiled, multi-chambered, highly adaptive machine.
Now, on the veritable eve of the election, Trump’s forces are like Hannibal’s army gathered on the plains at Cannae in 216 BC. The Roman army vastly outnumbered Hannibal’s. But the Carthaginians’ superior strategy crushed the Romans, whose losses were fully ten times what Hannibal’s were. Will the Democrats resort to human sacrifice, as did the Romans, after their catastrophic loss? Not literally, perhaps. But expect a lot of blame-gaming and ritual humiliation.
There are various technical indications that Trump is poised for victory. Three days before the 2020 election, Joe Biden was almost eight points ahead of Trump. As I write, Trump is almost half a point ahead of Harris nationwide and leads comfortably in 5 out of 7 battleground states. Where he is behind—Wisconsin and Michigan—it is by a fraction of a point. Moreover, this time Virginia, New Hampshire, and even Minnesota, Tampon Tim Walz’s home state, have been declared “in play.” The polls have always underestimated Trump’s electoral potency. As of Saturday afternoon, Rasmussen is predicting Trump wins “comfortably.” Expect his lead to swell on election night.
Many people have said that absent COVID in 2020, Trump would have won. There is no COVID to stymie voters this time.
I understand that the Democrats will endeavor to cheat. But so far, Trump’s team has been markedly successful in heading off some of the more obvious feints. A judge in Virginia orders Glenn Youngkin to restore some 1600 non-citizen voters to the rolls; SCOTUS reverses the decision. In Pennsylvania, the state Supreme Court ruled that ballots arriving without the correct date may not be counted—a big win for the GOP. In Arizona, a judge ruled that the (Democratic) Secretary of State release the list of some 98,000 voters who had marked as U.S. citizens without documentary proof.
It is also worth noting that the GOP’s efforts to encourage early voting have “virtually erased the Democrat voter-registration lead, on top of historic early-voting numbers for Republicans.”
Trump has capitalized brilliantly on several unforced errors by Harris and her team. In an effort to connect with ordinary workers, Harris claimed to have worked the fry station at McDonald’s. No one has been able to find any proof that she ever worked at McDonald’s. True, someone uploaded an image of a young Harris in a McDonald’s uniform to the internet. It was viewed by millions and circulated as proof that Harris did indeed work at the fast food emporium. The image was quickly determined to have been photoshopped—a fake.
Meanwhile, Trump actually showed up at a McDonald’s franchise in Pennsylvania, where he made french fries and served customers at a drive-through window. That bit of theatre drove the left nuts but everyone knew it was a masterly PR triumph. As one commentator noted, “President Trump is a marketing genius. He turned Kamala Harris’s lie about working at McDonald’s into millions of dollars in free advertising.”
Then there is the still unfolding garbage gambit. Last week, Joe Biden called Trump supporters “garbage.” In response, Trump arranged for a garbage truck to meet his plane in Green Bay, Wisconsin, before a rally. He emerged from the plane clad in a neon orange and yellow maintenance vest, clambered into the cab of the truck, and conducted a brief interview. He was then driven off to his rally, where he performed wearing the vest. The crowd loved it. So did the fellow who drove him around.
Back in 2016, Hillary Clinton’s claim that half of Trump’s supporters belonged in a “basket of deplorables” helped lose her the election. The Harris campaign must be worried that calling Trump supporters “garbage” might have the same effect. The White House attempted to edit Biden’s remark, slyly converting “supporters,” plural, into a single supporter by means of an apostrophe, “supporter’s.” The potentially illegal change in the official transcript was noticed, however, sparking a certain quota of hilarity along the way.
My point is that Trump and his team have been orchestrating a masterly campaign. Harris’s campaign, on the contrary, has been one disaster after the next: the horrible 60 Minutes interview, Tim Walz’s embarrassing faux-pheasant hunting embarrassment, Bret Baier’s quiet but annihilating interview, some of the most cringe-inducing ads in political history, her decision to skip the Al Smith dinner in New York, and on and on.
The media and Harris herself froth at the mouth. They scream that Trump is a “Nazi,” a “fascist,” “literally Hitler.” No one pays any attention because everyone knows it is not true. They lived under Trump for four years. They liked the experience. Somehow, the increasingly hysterical vituperation of the Harris campaign lacks traction. It is like a lumbering semi on a steep, oiled incline.
The latest meme skidding out of control has the media skirling that “Trump escalates violent rhetoric, calling for Liz Cheney to be shot.” Did he? No. But the propaganda press went wild over a snippet of a remark from Tucker Carlson’s interview with Trump a few days ago. Trump was criticizing Cheney as a “war hawk” like her father, former VP Dick Cheney, who would blithely send thousands of Americans to their deaths while sitting back in her comfortable liar in Washington, D.C.
I understand even now the Democrats are plotting, planning, and conspiring to continue their assault of lawfare against Donald Trump. Andrew McCarthy has recently published four lengthy columns outlining their probable strategy on several fronts. I have no doubt that his scenarios are plausible. McCarthy knows and can describe the habits of the legal beast better than anyone. But I doubt that in the end, they will be much more than ambient static. People are waking up. Trump is supported by some of the most vibrant and talented people in public life: his running mate J. D. Vance, who is himself an extraordinary political talent, as well as RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and business leaders like Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Bill Ackman. We keep hearing that the race will be close. As I have noted elsewhere, I think it will be like Patton’s Third Army racing across France in 1944.
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