What's Left to Know?
What's Left to Know?
The conundrum of the undecided voter. Tom Nichols actually makes a point that I agree with.
In today’s “The Atlantic Daily” (gift link), Tom Nichols, a man that I often can’t stand to read, his neo-con attitudes just overburdening any cogent argument he makes, actually hits a fat fastball over the deepest part of the outfield.
He posits — correctly to me — that all the hand wringing by the so-called independents and the cohort of those who are “undecided” is just bullshit.
At this point, voters have everything they need to know about this election. (Tomorrow, the vice-presidential candidates will debate each other, which might not have much of an impact beyond providing another opportunity for J. D. Vance to drive down his already-low likability numbers.) Here are some realities that will likely shape the next four weeks.
Yep, that is true. He backs that up with some remarkably coherent points.
Trump is going to get worse.
I’m not quite sure what happened to Trump in Erie, but he seems to be in some sort of emotional tailspin. The race is currently tied; Trump, however, is acting as if he’s losing badly and he’s struggling to process the loss. Other candidates, when faced with such a close election, might hitch up their pants, take a deep breath, and think about changing their approach, but that’s never been Trump’s style. Instead, Trump gave us a preview of the next month: He is going to ratchet up the racism, incoherence, lies, and calls for violence. If the polls get worse, Trump’s mental state will likely follow them.
This is not really news per se, but it is an observation that is essential. As bad as Trump has been, he can and will get far fucking worse. As the campaign’s internal polling must be showing, he isn’t faring well against Harris and Walz. All the shit they’ve flung at Walz has failed to stick, and Vance is a walking shithead.
Then there’s the cohort of “intelligentsia” that whilst sitting in the exclusive clubs they inhabit, sipping rare scotches and puffing on Cuban cigars insist that they can’t quite get there on Harris because her policies are opaque1.
Policy is not suddenly going to matter.
Earlier this month, the New York Times columnist Bret Stephens wrote about very specific policy questions that Kamala Harris must answer to earn his vote. Harris has issued plenty of policy statements, and Stephens surely knows it. Such demands are a dodge: Policy is important, but Stephens and others, apparently unable to overcome their reticence to vote for a Democratic candidate, are using a focus on it as a way to rationalize their role as bystanders in an existentially important election.
MAGA Republicans, for their part, claim that policy is so important to them that they’re willing to overlook the odiousness of a candidate such as North Carolina’s gubernatorial contender Mark Robinson. But neither Trump nor other MAGA candidates, including Robinson, have any interest in policy. Instead, they create cycles of rage: They gin up fake controversies, thunder that no one is doing anything about these ostensibly explosive issues, and then promise to fix them all by punishing other Americans.
Doubly nice that he references Bretbug Stephens, the alpha male in this group. He just isn’t sure that the shit sandwich of Trump is worse than the Tuna on Rye of Harris.
Imma gonna go out on a limb that there is NO policy that Harris can elucidate that will ever please Stephens. That is his fucking brand.
No, those holdouts who argue that it is the policies are like the dirtbag racists that claim they can’t be racist because they have a Black friend.
Now, it is time for what really pisses me off. The fact that the media claims that they want to tell the truth about Trump and his policies, but then whitewash the rhetoric, downplaying the insanity, a term of art that has been called “Sanewashing.” All the corporate media has been doing this all along, what it does is make the election a referendum on two candidates that are “equal” in their reporting.
Major news outlets are not likely to start covering Trump differently.
Spotting headlines in national news sources in which Trump’s ravings are “sanewashed” to sound as if they are coherent policy has become something of a sport on social media. After Trump went on yet another unhinged tirade in Wisconsin this past weekend, Bloomberg posted on X: “Donald Trump sharpened his criticism on border security in a swing-state visit, playing up a political vulnerability for Kamala Harris.” Well, yes, that’s one way to put it. Another would be to say: The GOP candidate seemed unstable and made several bizarre remarks during a campaign speech. Fortunately, Trump’s performances create a lot of videos where people can see his emotional state for themselves.
As long as these fuckers keep normalizing the Trump/Vance batshit insane gibberish, my blood pressure is going to be off the charts.
The final point Mr. Nichols makes is that “C’mon fam, the undecideds already have enough data”:
Undecided voters have everything they need to know right in front of them.
Some voters likely think that sitting out the election won’t change much. As my colleague Ronald Brownstein pointed out in a recent article, many “undecided” voters are not really undecided between the candidates: They’re deciding whether to vote at all. But they should take as a warning Trump’s fantasizing during the Erie event about dealing with crime by doing something that sounds like it’s from the movie The Purge.
The police aren’t allowed to do their job. They’re told: If you do anything, you’re going to lose your pension; you’re going to lose your family, your house, your car … One rough hour, and I mean real rough, the word will get out, and it will end immediately. End immediately. You know? It’ll end immediately.
Really, if at this point about 40 days out, you don’t know enough about Trump and Harris to make an intelligent decision, you must live in a cave, at the top of a remote mesa Monastery, or you’re a fucking moron.
Or all three.
The fact that the election is as close as it is, tells me that there is one other factor that Mr. Nichols is dancing around, and that the level of racism and misogyny in the United States is prevalent enough to return the mango tinged shitgibbon to office.
And that is a fucking shame.
Harris / Walz FTW!
If you took a double take at that, you are not alone. Last week, Stephens wrote a lengthy piece about what he needs to hear from Harris before he can pull the lever for her.
When I read it, I was thinking “this fucking guy” and then I realized that it would be a waste of time to draft a scathing post.
Good article Geoff!
There are some misses from both you and Nichols on this. 1) There really are people whose thinking process is not like us, who do not or cannot process information (or at least political information) independently, logically, rationally. There was one such on a jury with me once. After days of deliberation was still “on the fence”, and we had to report a hung jury at 10.5 to 1.5. (The judge understandably berated the .5, anonymously.) My guess from observation is that the person seemed to be “waiting for a consensus” to emerge before committing, and of course that condition is not met in contentious situations like (some) trials and elections. 2) There are also people like Stephens, who I watched closely on Mahar last week. They have unexamined (and unadmitted) bigoted subconscious attitudes. When they remain adamant, as Stephens does, they can seem to others to be “living in some other world” as Ruhle accused him of (Nirvana). They don’t yet realize they are captives of so-called “systemic bigotry”. 3) The reason “Trump will get worse” is not just out of political desperation but also because he is definitively suffering from dementia, which is a *progressive* disease (always worsens, never improves).