(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.
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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.