Last Call

 

It seems obvious that God is helping Donald Trump. There is his miraculous survival of an assassination attempt, obviously. But we have just seen something else miraculous.

Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally should have been a powerful ending to his campaign. It seemed to me to make the point that all the coolest and smartest people were supporting Trump: Musk, Carlson, Ramaswamy, Vance, Gabbard, Kennedy, Hogan, Melania Trump, Dr. Phil. People with a lot of charisma and with independent followings.

This it seemed to me was an important message. The left has been able to run for some time on the premise that they were the cool kids, the club you wanted to join, with the parties you wanted to be invited to. The glamorous red carpet crowd.

MSG seemed well calculated to end that. Now there was a cooler group of kids.

An essential part of that was to have a good comedian to warm up the crowd; show “we” are the ones who have fun at our parties. Comedians have been in the forefront of the culture war, for this reason, all along.

Unfortunately, the chosen comedian, Tony Hinchcliffe, a fine comedian, made a serious misstep. He referred to Puerto Rico, jokingly, as “an island of garbage floating in the Atlantic.” It did not matter that the joke obviously fell flat with his audience—he was not expressing the opinion of the room, let alone of Trump, who was not present. This was a gift to the opposition that looked about to overshadow the entire affair, and end Trump’s campaign on a bad note. To kill all the good of the rally.

But then God intervened. Harris held her own closing rally, at the Ellipse in Washington. As she was speaking, Joe Biden was on a video call responding to Hinchcliffe’s joke by calling Trump supporters the real garbage.

Now any harm caused by Hinchcliffe’s ill-advised joke was miraculously turned instead on the Democrats. Not fair to blame Harris for what Biden said? Surely more reasonable than to blame Trump for what some comedian said. Hinchcliffe was joking; comedians have license to say outrageous things. Biden was not joking. Biden obviously meant the people themselves—and Hinchcliffe probably did not. The most reasonable interpretation of what Hinchcliffe said is that he was referring to actual garbage. Which is a recognized problem in Puerto Rico. If he did mean the people, Hinchcliffe was calling 3 million people garbage. Biden was calling 150 million people garbage. Hinchcliffe can be forgiven for saying something politically unwise; he’s a comic, not a politician. Biden is an experienced politician and president of the US. His words matter far more, and must be taken far more seriously. 

Levels of magnitude worse.

Now both Hinchcliffe’s joke and Harris’s closing message are totally eclipsed by Biden’s remark. What looked like a blow to the Trump campaign has become a serious blow to Harris’s, in the dying days of the campaign.

I now predict Trump will not only win all the “seeing states”: Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada. He will also win Virginia and New Hampshire.

Not because the polls are wrong. It has long made me nervous that Republicans have casually assumed the polls will undercount Trump supporters. First, being a Trump supporter is more acceptable now than it was; we should see fewer “shy Tories.” This needs to be taken into account. Second, this assumes the polls have not been able to correct for previous undercounts. Surely they are trying to do so; how can we just assume they have failed? Third, the concept of “push polls,” partisan Democratic pollsters faking their results to make Harris look stronger, makes no sense. The political polls are done primarily as advertising by the pollsters to attract corporate clients. Publicizing a poll that turns out to be inaccurate is obviously against their interests. At least close to the voting date, their polls are bound to be as accurate as they can make them.

But I predict a stronger than expected Trump showing because, as they say, polls are just a snapshot. You need to look at trends. Trump has the momentum, and that momentum should continue up to polling day, pushing his numbers higher than they look now. The Biden comment ensures the momentum for Trump continues, perhaps grows. Second, any voters undecided this late in an election cycle tend to break against the incumbent party. They are almost by definition unsatisfied with the most obvious choice, which would be the incumbents. They are looking for alternatives.