With less than three weeks left in Election 2024, I keep coming back to one question:
How is this election so close?
Credit: handout
Credit: handout
This is not 2016 or 2020. The country now knows exactly who former President Donald Trump is as a leader, as a husband, as a father, as a provocateur and, most important, as a felon. And yet none of it seems to matter to almost half of Americans. In 2020, Trump narrowly lost to President Joe Biden in key states, including Georgia, Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania.
If you believe the current polls, and that is a big “if” then this election between Vice President Kamala Harris and Trump is razor-close. It could go either way. But is that reality, or is it created “fiction” by the news media? This is fiction dating back to the 2004 debut of “The Apprentice” on NBC, whose producer now says he regrets giving the country Trump.
The truth is Trump is not a successful businessman. He went bankrupt six times as a businessman, leaving thousands of workers and contractors unpaid for their work in those businesses. As Harris says, “Trump was handed over 400 million dollars” in inherited wealth from his father and then squandered it. Working-class Americans see a TV-made tabloid billionaire as their savior over a working-class kid, the daughter of immigrants. She is, frankly, the embodiment of the American dream.
Case in point: In the past week, Trump canceled a “60 Minutes” interview, he refused a second CNN debate with Harris, he canceled interviews with NBC, CNBC and the Detroit News, and he canceled events in Georgia and Pennsylvania. Trump appeared incoherent at a big campaign event where he swayed on stage for more than 30 minutes to music (some of which he is now being sued for using), and he was combative in a sit-down interview with Bloomberg in which the economy and his tariff proposals were the subject.
Given this behavior, I am not the only one asking why this race is so close.
The answer isn’t complicated, given the reality of this national moment. The country is deeply divided politically, and Trump speaks to something deeply amiss that has plagued rural and working white voters in America since Bill Clinton was president in the 1990s. Trump speaks to their fears about the changing face of America. He speaks to their worries about being replaced, which comes right out of the great replacement theory and about the browning of America. Trump speaks to what we know is a growing body of evidence that males, especially white males, are falling behind, unable to marry or earn more and feeling stripped of their masculinity. As Kansas City Chief’s kicker Harrison Butker put it recently in a joint event with Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., “It’s more talking about how beautiful it is for women to just ‘step aside’ and prioritize their family and spend time with their children and that’s what I was trying to speak love about.”
A recent Wall Street Journal article addressed the issue of a new generation of young men living with their parents and playing video games as their female counterparts soar. More important is the impact that the internet (and Trump) has on American politics. Young men feel abandoned by the Democratic Party, and it shows in this year’s gender gap, the most lopsided we have witnessed in politics in the past 50 years or more. Women are for Harris. Men for Trump.
We will see if that’s true on Nov. 5.
Here’s the point: When you boil this race down to the standards to which we normally hold presidential nominees, Trump has broken them all. And Harris has walked them all to the letter. But, as you can see from her Fox News interview with Bret Baier this week, she’s still subject to a sexist and racist standard. Fox News host Dana Perino even called Harris, “angry” — an old trope leveled against strong Black women for decades. Harris wasn’t angry, she was pushing back and being strong against a bullish male reporter, who was mansplaining to her without letting her respond.
Trump has walked out of interviews, canceled them or whined that he was being unfairly treated or attacked. Harris did none of that.
Who will win? I do not know, but Harris has superior fundraising and on-the-ground get-out-the-vote strategy. Trump’s team is simply not as prepared on the ground, leaving that work to super PACs and the state parties.
How is this race so close? Whether Trump wins or loses, it is a question we as a nation must answer, because when almost half of the voting public supports such a flawed and grossly unprepared candidate, something far bigger is broken than our body politic.
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