NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN BY HOWARD TULLMAN

 

3 Keys to Building a Corporate Culture in a Hybrid Work World 

Appearance equals attitude. What I learned from running a call center years ago and how that applies to today’s workplace. 

EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @HOWARDTULLMAN1

NOV 5, 2024

Many years ago when they were still viable businesses because consumers still answered their landline phones, I ran an outbound call center for the major American automobile manufacturers. The center made millions of calls each year to collect and measure customer satisfaction with sales and service experiences at car dealerships. I realize that there’s an oxymoronic aspect to that very idea, but there were still plenty of people at the time who were interested in paying us to try to figure out why buying a car or having it serviced at a dealership was such a painful and unpleasant process.

After years of analyzing massive amounts of research and consumer feedback, I’m not sure that the manufacturers learned anything of real value or changed their approach in any meaningful way. Certainly, the dealers themselves were rarely interested in our suggestions and reports on how they could do a better job. This is why we now have firms like Carvana, which are intent upon disintermediating the dealership experience in its entirety.

But we still discovered a great deal about how to successfully run a call center that employed hundreds of people of all ages and from every different kind of background, education level, race, color and creed. This is not an easy business because attrition and employee burnout rates are massive which, in turn, makes it very hard to justify extensive investments in careful training. In addition, it’s a real-time service, which makes it difficult to manage and correct errors made by customer service agents. And finally, it’s almost impossible to assess team attitudes and emotional states because everyone is “a business of one,” locked into a cubicle, insulated with headphones, and basically all on their own.

I spent a fair amount of time every day walking the aisles and listening to one-sided bits and pieces of ongoing conversations my employees were having with pleased, pissed off, and – to a frightening large extent – utterly disinterested customers. As you might imagine, this was a fairly primitive way to monitor the discussions and, in the decades since then, new technologies and tools have emerged to make the task much easier and valuable to all concerned as well. But, to be honest, management by walking around will never work in the WFH world of today.

There are a couple of important lessons that we did learn that I think have immense value in the new post-pandemic work world, where so much happens in an environment that seems equally remote and closed off. Whether it’s a matter of phone contact, etiquette and attitude, or Zoom/Teams behaviors and protocols, so many of the same attributes and work conditions we dealt with are extremely relevant now given the persistence of WFH along with millions of gig employees working anywhere and everywhere.

Posture Matters

One of the most obvious and correctable actions we dealt with in the call centers was posture. That might seem strange in a room full of seated folks. But the fact is that if someone was slouching, hanging off their chair, staring around the room, or otherwise checked out, we knew for sure that they weren’t connecting effectively with the person on the other end of the line. You see this same issue in teleconferences all the time– where team members aren’t leaning in and focused, but instead are half asleep, snacking, texting, or simply not paying attention. It matters and it’s worth calling out if you’re running the session. Sit up straight, lean in, and smile.

Appearance Matters

I realize that the pandemic demonstrated to the world that you could party, pray or participate in virtually any remote activity in your pajamas. And as certain notable columnists and commentators learned – much to their embarrassment and chagrin – you could do a host of other questionable things as well. But it’s very clear that, if you care about your business and you want to send the right message, what you wear shows everyone just how much you care. This is just as true for an underdressed slob who’s driving an Uber, someone handling your groceries that you wouldn’t want near anything perishable, or any delivery moron who’s vaping on your front porch while waiting for you to answer the door. Paying attention to your appearance and how you are seen by others is part of being a professional.  Unfortunately, that’s a message that’s been lost on millions of inbound employees.

Time and Details Matter

The pros know a simple fact – the way you conduct any part of your life and business automatically bleeds into and informs the entire rest of your activities. If you’re an “on time” person who respects other people’s time, those people will respond in kind and appreciate your concern and courtesy. If you’re a slug who shows up late or whenever it suits your schedule, you’ll soon be looking for work elsewhere. If you’re a person who sweats the small stuff, pays attention to the details, prepares for calls and meetings, people quickly get that message as well. It’s important, it’s contagious, and it’s what all great leaders do. You want to be the one who’s everyone’s first choice for tasks, responsibilities, assistance and promotions – not the last resort.

Bottom line: all of these behaviors and attributes point in the same direction to a particular conclusion: that you are present, that you care about the work you do, and that you take pride in how and why you do that work. It’s not going to be easy to remotely build and maintain company cultures, but it starts in every case by paying attention to the small personal details that matter most in the long run.

Trump’s party is not planning on preventing him from disputing a loss

 

Trump’s party is not planning on preventing him from disputing a loss

Republicans would still rather have Trump’s base mad at someone else.

 

 

 

Column by Philip Bump

November 4, 2024 at 12:06 p.m. EST

 

Speaking in front of a crowd of supporters in Pennsylvania on Sunday, Donald Trump offered a wistful assessment of the end of his presidency: What if it had never ended at all?

 

“We had the best border. The safest border,” Trump told the crowd. “I won’t pull down my world’s favorite chart because I don’t want to waste a lot of your time. But my world’s favorite chart, done by the Border Patrol, it said we had the safest border in the history of our country the day that I left.”

 

The chart — Trump’s favorite because he credits it with saving his life when he turned his head to look at it when he was shot in July — was not done by the Border Patrol and does not show that the border was at its safest when he left office. What it shows, instead, is that apprehensions at the border plunged at the outset of the pandemic, a drop that someone on Trump’s team decided to label as the day Trump left office, even though it occurred in early 2020.

 

But that wasn’t really what Trump was getting at.

 

“I shouldn’t have left,” he continued. “I mean, honestly, because we did so — we did so well.”

 

The American public offered its opinion of how Trump did as president on Nov. 3, 2020. He lost the popular vote by more than 7 million votes and lost five states he had won in 2016. Trump very obviously didn’t want to leave, even in the moment, stoking false claims about election fraud and ultimately triggering the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Somewhat sheepishly, he left the White House on Jan. 20 of that year as required by law.

Obviously, though, he didn’t want to.

 

Should he lose on Tuesday, there’s little reason to assume that he won’t once again attempt to stoke the idea that such a loss is invalid. It is possible that he will win or that Vice President Kamala Harris will win by a wide enough margin that claims about fraud will be more obviously ridiculous. If he loses relatively narrowly, though, we can assume that he will once again suggest that the election was stolen from him, despite the extent to which his party is oriented around combating this imaginary threat.

 

The good news for American democracy is that Trump doesn’t have control over the levers of power he attempted to pull to his benefit four years ago. But it’s clear that a renewed effort to dishonestly cast the will of the public as false or illegal may nonetheless trigger negative outcomes. At a minimum, confidence in democracy among Republicans, already wobbly thanks to Trump’s 2020 rhetoric, would erode further. At worst, we could again see incidents of violence that threaten the transfer of power.

 

What’s striking is the extent to which Trump’s party is willing to go along with his explicit efforts to stoke doubt about the election outcome. Not just the party organization itself, now co-chaired by Trump’s daughter-in-law. But elected Republicans continue to divert the threat posed by Trump’s anti-democratic rhetoric to election officials and the Biden administration by refusing to push back on Trump’s rhetoric. They aim to avoid stoking animosity from Trump’s base toward them personally to the detriment of others.

Consider Sen. Tim Scott (R-South Carolina), who appeared Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” where he was interviewed by host Dana Bash.

 

Bash noted that former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon had encouraged Trump to simply declare victory on election night. She asked if Scott would urge Trump to instead allow the process to play out.

 

Scott deflected, saying (among other things) that “the good news is, we will have a fair election, and Donald Trump will be our next president.”

 

This was not Bash’s first interview of a politician. So she noted his optimism and pressed him further: What if he doesn’t win?

 

“He’s setting the stage for his supporters not to believe the results if he loses,” Bash said, pointing to false claims Trump has made about Pennsylvania. “Do you want him to stop doing that?”

 

Scott replied by saying he would “never tell any candidate on the ballot to talk about what happens if they lose.”

 

After a bit of back-and-forth, Bash tried again.

 

“You think it’s okay to spread false rumors about fraud and undermine the integrity of the election regardless of what happens?” she asked.

 

“Dana,” the senator replied, “the liberal media has done a better job of spreading misinformation than any candidate I have seen so far.”

 

The tennis match continued from there.

 

BASH: Oh, come on, Senator.

 

SCOTT: That’s true.

Listen, here’s the fact. We’re not seeing the coverage of two assassination attempts on CNN against Donald Trump.

 

BASH: We did wall-to-wall coverage.

 

SCOTT: We’re not seeing the comments about Kamala Harris talking about fascists, calling Donald Trump a fascist.

 

BASH: John Kelly called him a fascist, his former chief of staff.

In fairness, Harris did also say she believed Trump was a fascist — when she was asked during a town hall that aired on CNN.

 

Scott’s play here, redirecting the criticism from Trump back to the mainstream media, is a familiar one. It allows him to abdicate responsibility for holding Trump to account and, by extension, avoid having Trump or Trump’s base excoriate him now or during any eventual reelection or presidential bid.

 

It’s not as though Scott is acting unusually for a Republican elected official. Despite what unfolded in 2020 and early 2021, there’s been no pressure from the right for Trump to take a different approach to the 2024 election. That’s because there is pressure — if only tacit or potential — from the Republican base not to side with democracy against Trump.

 

Again, this may not be an issue after Tuesday. He may win clearly or lose so clearly that even he decides it’s not worth putting up a fight. But if it is close, as polling suggests it very well may be, his party and his allies have offered no indication that they would object to a renewed effort to subvert the election. And even if there’s little chance that it would be successful, such an effort could inflict a lot of pain (literal or metaphoric) in a lot of places outside Washington.

 

Never mind what happens if Trump actually wins. Come Jan. 20, 2029 — knowing what he knows now and presumably seeing ongoing fealty from his party — would he at that point decide to try to just stay in office, as he says he wished he had done four years ago?

 

VOTE - THIS MEANS YOU

 

MAINSTREAM MEDIA - CLICK WHORES AND SELLOUTS WHO DON'T SERVE OUR COUNTRY OR DEMOCRACY

 

JOYCE VANCE

 In many ways, this campaign has been a form of slow torture. But I have also learned something important in the past few months: We still have what it takes. We are strong. We care deeply about our democracy. We can build community. Of course, that’s not true for everyone. Some people have gone astray and have given in to the allure of easy money, snake oil and a would-be-strongman who gives them permission to blame all of their woes on immigrants and communist-Democrats. But there are enough of us who still care about democracy and about having the ability to live our lives in freedom and with dignity. And we are going to prevail.

DAN RATHER

 

SUSAN GLASSER

 

Even Losing May Not Stop Trump’s Campaign of Vengeance

But on the eve of another razor-thin election, it sure beats the alternative.

 

By Susan B. Glasser

November 4, 2024

 

Barely more than a week ago, it seemed as though the Washington political class and their big-money counterparts in New York had all but written off Kamala Harris, on the basis of what, exactly, I was never sure, given the essentially unmoving polls and the absence of any notable events that might have changed large numbers of minds. Nate Silver’s prediction model had Donald Trump with a lead from mid-October through the end of the month; on October 24th, the Democratic super PAC Future Forward privately projected that Harris’s probability of winning was down to just thirty-seven per cent, according to the Washington Post, before it claimed to see a late shift in her direction in recent days. The point is: forget the noise. Amid all this, it seems best to heed the adage of Jim Messina, the Democratic strategist who managed Barack Obama’s 2012 reëlection campaign: “Don’t pay attention to Washington conventional wisdom, Wall Street conventional wisdom, or Nate Silver.”

This is especially the case given the stakes—2024 is nothing like a repeat of Obama versus Mitt Romney. America would be lucky to have that kind of sane choice. Instead, it is Trump’s possible return to the White House that looms when the polls open on Tuesday morning. In such a situation, it strikes me as almost irresponsible to succumb to the undeniably positive rumblings that have tentatively begun to emerge from Trump’s opponents, no matter how seductive or psychologically soothing we may find the photos of empty seats at the ex-President’s latest campaign rallies. (The lead headline on the Drudge Report as I’m writing this: “Last Days of the Don?”) In truth, we are all survivors of 2016; the shock of Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton casts a long shadow over any predictions today about a woman on the brink of winning the American Presidency.

Bottom of Form

At a minimum, it just seems like a poor strategy of self-care, with so many indicators of a dead-heat race, to read too much certainty into the increasing number of political observers predicting that—the margin of error and Silver be damned—Harris is on track for a historic victory. If that is, in fact, what happens, great—let’s make sure to give those predictors due credit. I’m thinking of you, James Carville, Matthew Dowd, Paul Glastris, Mark McKinnon, and all those #BlueWave tweeters who got on the bandwagon before the past twenty-four hours. If Harris wins Iowa, the legend of Ann Selzer will justifiably be burnished by the decision to publish, on Saturday night, a shocking and unexpected poll for the Des Moines Register giving Harris a three-point lead in the state, which Trump has won twice by large margins. In the meantime, it’s probably best to consider the survey a highly pleasant outlier rather than proof that the senior women of the Midwest are about to deal a crippling blow to Trump’s frat-party-from-hell of a campaign.

Republicans, with their congenitally overconfident candidate and an entire political operation premised on telling the Republican electorate that Trump’s defeat is literally impossible, have a different problem. How do you prepare your team for a loss that, in a dead heat, has a real chance of happening? (Whether the G.O.P., the party of literal election denialism for the past four years, is willing to acknowledge such a defeat is another matter entirely—one that may well consume the seventy-six days between now and the January 20th Inauguration of a new President, but that is not a today problem.) For months, Trump has said variations of “Harris cannot win. It is impossible.” So, it was treated as news on Monday morning when Axios obtained an internal memo from one of the Trump campaign’s managers, Susie Wiles, using phrases like “should we be victorious” and “God willing,” which seemed to leave open the possibility of a Trump loss. And then there was the ambiguous statement from the candidate himself, who, when asked by ABC’s Jonathan Karl about the possibility of not winning, claimed that he had a “substantial lead,” but also replied, “I guess you could lose, can lose. I mean, that happens, right?”

All of which is to say—we still don’t really know what is going to happen. But what we do know is that these are the final hours that Trump will spend as a Presidential candidate, assuming—big asterisk here—that he keeps his word not to run again. Flying across the country, from North Carolina to Pennsylvania, from Georgia to Michigan and back again, Trump has ended his campaign career with such erratic behavior and alarming statements that they should not be overlooked and subsumed by the understandable obsession with trying to figure out what’s going to happen on Tuesday.

The temptation is, with the election so close, simply to forget about whatever he’s threatening and just hope that he loses. But I say losing is not enough; 2020 and Trump’s unequivocal defeat by Joe Biden did not spell the end of his political career. We cannot assume that it would this time, either.

Because Trump, even if he loses, will have proved once again that he holds an entire political party in his thrall. He will have proved that tens of millions of Americans will follow him even past the point of inciting an insurrection against the U.S. Capitol. He will have proved that the most vicious campaign of lies, misogyny, racism, and xenophobia ever waged—and yes, I am including his previous two campaigns—was not enough to stop nearly half the country from supporting him. Even in a best-case scenario of Trump accepting defeat—I will not fantasize about him gracefully conceding, which seems to be a fantastical outcome from a man who still believes he was robbed of proper accolades for his cameo in “Home Alone 2”—there remains the matter of his various pending criminal cases; what more evidence could we need to believe that Trump is prepared to do anything, up to and including torching the American political system, to avoid incarceration?

So take note: as Trump travelled the nation in his final push asking to be the only convicted felon in history to serve as President, he called Democrats “demonic” and repeatedly threatened to go after the “enemies within” and mused openly about inflicting violence on those enemies, whether Liz Cheney or members of the “fake news,” who, as he put it in a particularly vituperative rally speech in Pennsylvania on Sunday morning, might well come into the line of fire if someone were to go after him. “I don’t mind,” Trump said, of a would-be assassin taking a shot at the press. In just the past few days, he has promised a new Administration that will be “nasty.” He has vowed to “protect the women of our country . . . whether the women like it or not.” He has attacked Harris in vile personal terms and apparently agreed to unleash the science-denialism of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., on the entire U.S. health system. Tired Trump is often the most revealing version of Trump, and so perhaps it’s no mistake that at that Pennsylvania rally, Trump finally admitted publicly what he had privately told some of his advisers four years ago—that he did not willingly depart the White House after his 2020 defeat. “I shouldn’t have left,” he said.

Trump’s 2024 campaign of vengeance was born out of that moment. No matter what anyone says, it is not over yet. ♦

WHAT A SHAMELESS FOOL AND COMPLETE EMBARRASSMENT SHE IS...NIKKI HALEY IS A STUPID SUCK-UP

 

SO SORRY TO SEE THESE TERRORIST PIGS SENT STRAIGHT TO HELL

 

Trump Isn’t Playing to Win the Election, He’s Plotting to Steal It – David Rothkopf

 

Trump Isn’t Playing to Win the Election, He’s Plotting to Steal It – David Rothkopf

 

Team Trump know they have lost. They have known for a while. They are not playing to win. They’re playing to steal the election.

During the past week alone, they have released as many fake polls—75 in total, created not to reflect public opinion but to serve a political purpose—as they have during the entire period since Kamala Harris officially became the Democratic candidate..ORE

These polls are not intended to have an effect on the outcome of the election. Rather, their purpose is to tee up Big Lie 2.0, Trump’s argument that he was ahead, the polls showed it and that any Harris victory has to be the result of cheating.

While such polls are costly, estimates suggest that tens of millions have been spent on politically-biased purpose polls during the course of this campaign, and require an enormous amount of coordination, they are by no means the only part of the extensive effort by Trump, his campaign, the MAGA GOP and the enemy governments who are supporting their efforts to lay the groundwork for a massive series of challenges to the 2024 election results.

These challenges have included everything from Trump social media posts this past week suggesting that Pennsylvania election officials are rigging the election against him, to scores of lawsuits across the country seeking to get voters stripped from voting rolls (which will provide important fodder for future claims to delay certification)—or, as in the case of Georgia, to stop the state from processing ballots from drop boxes to the spread of disinformation about the elections (including fictitious stories created, peddled and promoted by Russian intelligence).

Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg has designated the people behind the purpose polls as “red wave” pollsters because some of them were behind the misperception that Republicans would do far better than they did in the 2022 election. He asserts that such pollsters dropped 17 polls on Sunday alone and at least 75 during the past week. His estimate it is that something like 125 such polls have been circulated since August.

He also counts “prediction markets” like Polymarket, funded by Trump supporters like Peter Thiel, as part of this overall effort to create a misperception about the state of the campaign and to “shape the election narrative for Trump.”

Political analyst Rachel Bitecofer tweeted on this phenomenon, “When Republicans lose on Tuesday they‘ll be shocked bc all the polls they paid for promised them they’d win. That‘s a feature, not a bug, you the ’flood the zone’ strategy Rs are using. They need people expect to win to get them to commit felonies for Trump.”

Both The New York Times and The New Republic have reported on aspects of what the right is doing with these polls, but the implications and intent of the GOP initiative has gotten neither the attention nor traction they warrant.

Rosenberg gets specific when he makes the case about these pollsters and the overall effort to pollute and distort the public’s perception of what is happening.

For example, he observes, “TIPP, the pollster who has been doing a daily tracking poll and played a major role in tipping all the averages and forecasters to Trump has as its corporate slogan, “talent on loan from God”—Rush Limbaugh’s tag line.“ He also urges voters to “just look at their website—it is far right fever dream stuff.”

As for the emergence of Polymarket, he says, “This is a very serious issue. It is an off-shore crypto company funded by Thiel and has spent enormous sums of money spreading their pro-Trump betting market as a legit window into the election. They are a very bad new actor in all of this and what most people don’t realize is that not only is the company not American but despite the amount of publicity the market gets, no American can trade the presidential stuff on their platform legally.”

The authorities should be aware of such foreign actors, and the ties some of them—like Elon Musk—have to Vladimir Putin and the Russian government. There should be a similar awareness of the activity of Russian intelligence in the marketplace, and the fact that some of the work done for Trump by entities like Polymarket (or Twitter) may constitute illegally in-kind or foreign campaign contributions. When this election is over, if Trump’s efforts are rebuffed, major investigations by both the intelligence community and the Department of Justice are clearly called for.

Despite such corrupt initiatives and their origins, major polling averages that are used by mainstream media regularly, have incorporated the results from this partisan pollsters into the averages they tout daily. It is intellectually and methodologically dishonest and it is deeply misleading. Those who’ve sold the averages as gospel or even credible are guilty of the worst sort of journalistic malpractice.

“They are desperate. They will do anything to win.”

— David Rothkopf

The recent surge in this activity, of course, has not been enough to counter the reality that the momentum is with the Harris campaign. Independent polls (like the Iowa Selzer poll) are showing this. Turnout among groups that are seen to be trending pro-Harris—notably women—is also showing this. Currently, with over 75 million votes already cast, women represent eight percent more of the electorate than do men.

That is among the hard data reasons that Republicans are already moving on to Plan B. Trump has prefaced every election effort with a face-saving argument that the polls are rigged against him. But as we saw since the election in 2020, Trump and his team have made their post-campaign strategies even more central to their efforts than has been the traditional business of running for president and seeking to win the support of voters the old-fashioned way.

In fact, the GOP plan, like Trump in 2021, views the will of the people as a distraction to be overcome. Knowing they can’t win on Election Day, they are seeking to win in the courts, with the aid of political leaders including those in the Congress, and, if necessary, as on Jan. 6, through acts of violence. They are desperate. They will do anything to win. And if that undoes democracy in America, that’s just fine as that has been their overall goal from the beginning.

HOW LOW CAN THIS CROOKED TRAITOR AND FRAUDULENT LIAR GO??

 

(Dobbs) The October Surprise? That Trump Can Keep Digging Lower.

it is inconceivable that Trump's behavior this past week would actually draw undecideds in.

Greg Dobbs Nov 4

 

Maybe the long-expected “October Surprise” is that Donald Trump is more selfish, more erratic, more provocative, and more vicious than we even knew. And it has bled into November.

Just three days after saying he’d like to see Liz Cheney “standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face,” yesterday he upped the ante yet again. 

From behind the bulletproof glass that now protects him from assassins, he told a crowd in Pennsylvania, “I have this piece of glass here. But all we have really over here is the fake news, right? And to get me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news. And I don’t mind that so much. I don’t mind. I don’t mind.” 

Words have consequences. The consequences of Donald Trump’s words can be violent. Even fatal. We saw that on January 6th. Although he always does this kind of thing with deniability, it is indisputably clear that he knows what he’s doing and just doesn’t care. Nor, alarmingly, do the faithful followers who have abandoned all the decent instincts they might once have had. When he implied that it would be okay if someone shot at the journalists, they just laughed.

What will these people do if their icon comes out on the short end of the election? Because Tuesday is not just about what happens at the polls, but what happens in the streets. He has convinced his acolytes that the only way he can lose this election is if the other side cheats. Some of them are even saying he’ll win all 50 states unless the other side cheats. He has been setting the stage for a redux of January 6th.

This has forced law enforcement officials from coast to coast to install panic buttons for election workers, station more police on the streets, put drones in the air, and position snipers on rooftops around key locations where votes will be counted. Governors in at least two states have activated the National Guard. In Arizona the secretary of state is wearing a bulletproof vest.

Would anyone argue with a straight face that it’s Kamala Harris’s rhetoric that has led to this?

About half of all Americans likely to vote already have voted. But the other half, upwards of 70 to 80 million, will be voting tomorrow, on election day. Plainly almost all have made up their minds, but this whole race seems to come down to the sliver of voters still inexplicably on the fence in those seven battleground states. 

We see from Trump’s rallies as his campaign winds up that his base is firm, that nothing he does— no matter how indecent, how unhinged, how untruthful, how menacing— nothing will make his people waver. But for that small slice of voters who aren’t yet committed to either candidate, it is inconceivable, to me at least, that his behavior— if they’ve been paying attention this past week— would actually draw them in. 

The caveat is, everything about Donald Trump was inconceivable nine years ago. 

However, the signs are good. We all know that polls sometimes are deeply flawed and sometimes get outcomes totally wrong. But the horserace is close enough to the finish line now that they are worth a look, and The Washington Post last night did just that. It took a look at 77 national polls, big ones and small ones, politicized ones and unpoliticized ones. What it found was, although in many cases the difference between Harris and Trump was a single point or two, Harris led in 60 polls, Trump in only nine, and eight were tied.

None of that is decisive, but wouldn’t you rather be the one with three-quarters of the polls showing you ahead? 

 

Another encouraging sign is the poll released on Saturday by the Des Moines Register, which doesn’t have to survey the whole nation, it only has to survey the state of Iowa. Clear back to Iowa caucuses that I covered years ago, the Des Moines Register polls have been reliably steady. They called Trump’s victory in the state in both 2016 and in 2020, and they were right. He won both times.

This time, although Trump had a four point advantage in the last poll back in September, Saturday’s poll showed a huge shift— largely women— giving Harris a three point lead. Maybe it’s wrong…. but maybe it’s right.  

This would mean two things. One is, if there’s such a shift in Iowa, it’s plausible that there are similar shifts elsewhere. The other is, Iowa was supposed to be firmly in Trump’s camp. Its six electoral votes would be unexpected padding for Kamala Harris.

This leads to a second caveat though: you can lose the popular vote but win the Electoral College and therefore the election. That’s how George W. Bush and Donald Trump made it to the White House. 

We know from 2016 that nothing is predictable. Now, we can’t even predict that if Kamala Harris wins the election, she will get to the Oval Office without a fight. Or, if she does, that democracy won’t face the same traumatic tests four years later.