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Jeez, my mailbox is exploding! Everyone is freaking out over the latest polls, the pessimistic pundits, the sudden (?) rise of Trump, the warnings of doom and gloom! Mike! Mike! Please tell us he’s gonna lose! She’s gonna win! Flowers will bloom in December! Unicorns will ride on the backs of lions! The McRib will return!
Whoa. Everybody please calm down. We’ve all been here before. Exactly 3 weeks til Election Day — so that means it’s official, folks! We’ve entered the fear-mongering, pendulum-swing stage of the election season. We are no longer basking in the glow of Biden’s withdrawal and the adrenaline shot from Kamala’s injection into this race. That’s not surprising. It’s expected. Now, this is back to being a normal election season — the news outlets and pundits are salivating for their polls, and our side is cowering in fear and despair.
My friends, STOP OBSESSING OVER THE POLLS.
Wait, what’s that I hear? “They’re tied at 48-48!!!”
I said, STOP. OBSESSING. OVER. THE POLLS.
On October 16th, 1984 — 40 years ago tomorrow —The New York Times published the results of a breathtaking poll. After a punishing debate performance, Ronald Reagan’s lead over Walter Mondale appeared to be in free fall. In early October, he was up 13 points, but by mid-October, Reagan’s lead was plummeting, now at just 9%, with the election only two weeks away. According to the Times’ report, “the race for President had become closer in the 11 largest states, where Reagan’s lead had been cut from 11 percentage points to 7.” A headline in the same paper two days earlier blared: “DEBATES SHIFT FOCUS AND PERHAPS THE ODDS.”
But when election day rolled around, those polls were all wrong. Reagan won a whopping 49 states. Mondale carried just one state (his home state of Minnesota) in the biggest presidential landslide in American history.
In 1992, right before election day, national polls showed the race between the incumbent Republican president, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton drawing perilously close. Here’s a lede from The Washington Post:
"President Bush, delighted by a narrowing in some polls, said today that supporters of Democratic nominee Bill Clinton 'feel it slipping away from them,' adding, 'I feel sorry for them.'
Bush campaigned with actors Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger in this battleground state, whose 21 electoral votes are critical to his reelection and which he took by 55 percent four years ago, but is trailing now."
Oops.
Despite the headlines and the polls, Bush lost Ohio by 90,000 votes. Not only did Clinton win the national popular vote that year by 6 points, he trounced Bush in the electoral college, 370 to 168.
In the year 2000… The Washington Post reported:
"For one group of political scientists who study U.S. elections, Campaign 2000 is effectively over. And the winner is . . . Vice President Gore, narrowly but clearly. Or so their mathematical formulas conclude.
Seven forecasts by academic analysts will be presented this morning to the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association here. Six of the seven foresee Gore winning between 52.3 and 55.4 percent of the votes cast for the two major-party candidates--Gore and George W. Bush. The seventh says Gore will win 60.3 percent of the major-party vote. All agree that other candidates won't affect the final result."
I probably do not need to remind you of this, but Albert Gore Jr. did not win 60.3% of the vote. In some sense, the Academics were right — Gore won — but in almost every other sense, their expert predictions that told people what was going to happen were absolutely wrong.
Four years later, as many of you will remember, it wasn’t much better. Here’s a news story from twenty years ago, November 4, 2004:
"Even as the presidential campaign ended with a triumph for President Bush on Wednesday, armchair strategists and capital insiders were still scratching their heads over exit poll results on Tuesday that strongly, and erroneously, suggested Democratic Sen. John F. Kerry was going to the White House."
“...Such data caused Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) to become so despondent at one point Tuesday afternoon that she e-mailed her mother: ‘All is lost.’”
“...respected election watchers John Zogby and Frank Luntz declared Bush defeated before the sun had set on Washington. ‘I thought we captured a trend, but apparently that result didn’t materialize,’ Zogby said in a statement posted Wednesday on his website.”
One month before the 2008 Presidential election, NPR released a poll of 14 key states, along with stark headlines, showing that the race between Barack Obama and John McCain was a dead heat, too close to call, coming down to the wire, anyone could win! “In August,” they reported, “Obama led in the 14 states by 3 points. Now McCain leads in those states by 2, and the underlying political landscape has shifted a bit as well.” Just a few weeks later, Barack Obama beat McCain, winning the popular vote by over 7% and the electoral college in a landslide, 365 to 173.
Four years later, in 2012, the same thing happened. That year, an October 8th poll showed that the race wasn’t just a dead heat, but rather Mitt Romney had pulled ahead of Barack Obama! The report read: “Romney has drawn even with Obama in the presidential race among registered voters (46% to 46%) after trailing by nine points (42% to 51%) in September. Among likely voters, Romney holds a slight 49% to 45% edge over Obama. He trailed by eight points among likely voters last month.” Just a few weeks later, Obama defeated Romney by 4% in the popular vote, winning the electoral college 332 to 206.
On October 18th, 2016 — eight long years ago this Friday — The New York Times published this:
In 2022, all the major media outlets were predicting a “red wave” that would sweep across the country and wash away Democratic majorities. Very few people (I don’t have to name names, do I?) predicted the opposite, a Big Blue Tsunami that would expand Democratic victories. When election day came around, the Big Media Talking Head Folks were wrong and so were the polls. Here’s just one headline for you, again, from The New York Times:
All of this is to say that what is happening in the polls is irrelevant. What matters is what’s happening on the ground. This is about what’s happening in your life, right now, today and for the next three weeks. What are YOU going to do to stop Trump?
Yes, he’s ahead! Yes, she’s ahead! Sometimes truth is binary. Two things, many things, can all be true at once. You’ve known this since some kid on the playground taught you to walk and chew gum at the same time.
We can win. By a landslide! But by prognosticating or pontificating a potential outcome through a crystal ball you do not own you are not going to make that result happen. Us winning, and especially winning in a landslide, will take serious effing WORK in the next 21 days to make that happen. And I mean work by all of us AND work by Kamala and by The Coach. If that work doesn’t happen, we will lose. In fact, this is why historically we usually lose — because conservatives are ruthless and have an attack dog mentality. They are relentless because they are on a mission answering the call of a God who will send them to hell if they fail. We don’t have that God, we have Clooney. George may be good for the occasional op-ed that saves America, but in order to actually win, that requires getting up at the crack of dawn. The only time we see the crack of dawn is when we’ve been up partying all night. I’m serious, unless each of us does one thing, every single day, until 8pm on the night of November 5th, the other side is going to grind us out of existence. Think of them as The Terminator — not the softie Terminator that Arnold became, but rather that evil, liquifying monster that Skynet sent to Earth to finish the job that Schwarzenegger couldn’t. Every day we must do at least one thing. Working the Early Voting lines. Knocking on doors. Making phone calls. Volunteering at campaign HQ. Flyering. Shuttling. Voting.
Don’t mistake my hope for that drug that does us in every time – hopium. Stop expecting to be comfortable. The next three weeks are going to be very uncomfortable. Good. They should be. Trump is an evil genius. He’s proven it to us more than once. We don’t need to get it through our thick skulls that it’s possible he’s going to pull off another inexplicable miracle. After all, he only needed to turn his head by a fraction of a millimeter. That’s how good he is.
Morally, for many, November 5th presents a Sophie’s Choice. We made this two-party bed — we never worked to create a multi-party true Democracy — so now we have to lie in it. One side — our side — is funding and arming an ethnic cleansing. The other side, our opponent, is a fascist. That’s our choice? Yup.
It is up to us to stop Trump from taking power again. To get those votes, we need to activate the non-voters. It’s possible that one-third (or more!) of our fellow Americans may not show up to the polls this year, but we only need a few thousand of them to change their minds! HEY! We are going to win! You don’t need to despair — you just need to ACT.
Here’s the one thing you and I must do: Bring 3 or more non-voters with us to the polls. Identify the people you know who may not vote, in part because they’ve just given up “on the whole stinkin’ system.” Tell them why, as a friend, you are asking for this one favor and only for this year. They can go back to being a non-voter on November 6th. But on November 5th (or before), you sincerely need them to vote for Kamala Harris.
Tomorrow, I will send you a Substack that may not be so cheery. But I ask you to please open it and read it. It will be an open letter to Vice President Harris. What I have to say, and what I hope to accomplish, may have an impact on whether we win this election. Or so I hope.
Cheer up. There’s no crying in politics — especially crying over stupid polls. It’s just part of the madness they put us through every 4 years. And for now, we just need to get off the media’s Tilt-A-Whirl. Seriously, turn off the TV. Don’t read stories about the polls in The New York Times. Ignore all the bloviators who are really just depressing the hell out of your day. Half the time, they seem not to realize that we live in a post-landline world.
Nothing is as it was. Nothing is as it seems to be. Except… Trump. He’s toast.
Do something.
https://go.kamalaharris.com/resources/battlegroundstateshelp/