Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.
I haven’t checked, but this may be the shortest Weekly Sift ever. Here’s why: Given how close and how consequential tomorrow’s election looks, it’s hard to think about anything else. And yet, it’s also hard to come up with anything worthwhile to say about it. I could try to predict who’s going to win, but you’d be foolish to believe me, because I don’t know. I could collect a lot of other people’s predictions, but they don’t know either.
We’re down to the point where you can vote, you can encourage your friends to vote, and you can do some election-day volunteering. Beyond that, you can watch the Future arrive at the usual rate of one second per second.
Back in 2008, I started doing election preview posts, predicting how the evening was likely to play out, given poll-closing times and what the opinion polls were saying. The 2008 preview was so accurate that I started thinking I knew something. (I said that California’s outcome would be projected almost immediately after polls closed at 11 EST, putting Obama over the top. That’s exactly what happened.) I got 2016 drastically wrong, but I didn’t learn my lesson and wrote a 2020 preview anyway.
This year has been an ongoing master class in the pointlessness of speculation. Pundits have talked and written endlessly about how the debates would go, whether Biden would or should drop out, what process the Democrats should use to replace him, whether Harris would do any better, who the two VP nominees should be, whether Trump’s endless gaffes would cost him, what the “October surprise” might be, how various voting blocs — women, Blacks, Hispanics, union members — would respond to Harris, and on and on.
If you ignored all of it, you are probably better off than the rest of us, or at least calmer. By tomorrow, we will all have voted, contributed, volunteered — or not. What has mattered is action, not divining the future.
Here’s what I will say: In a typical election, late-deciding voters mostly break the same way. So for better or worse, there’s a good chance we won’t have the kind of photo-finish the polls are predicting.
If this were a typical election, it would be obvious that Trump is blowing it down the stretch: the Puerto Rico insult (and his unwillingness to distance himself from it), simulating oral sex with a microphone, fantasizing about pointing guns at Liz Cheney, and so on. Despite major media continuing to sanewash Trump — CNN posted video of the oral-sex pantomime with the caption “At a rally in Milwaukee, former President Donald Trump became visibly frustrated after dealing with technical problems on stage.” You’d never know he raged for over three minutes about problems any other speaker would shrug off, and then made an inappropriate sexual gesture — the man’s hateful and unhinged nature has been on full display for anyone who cares to look.
But as we all know by now, this isn’t a typical election. No one knows what the late-deciders are thinking. We’ll just have to wait and see.
There are any number of other things you could choose to worry about. But there will be plenty of time to start worrying about them after Wednesday or so.
For example: Trump seems to be gearing up once again to claim power even if the voters reject him. He and Speaker Johnson have some “secret plan”. Elie Mystal has a guess about what it might be. And who knows what the Supreme Court will do? Will they let him lose? Every time the Court has had a question put to it, it has ruled for Trump, often in complete opposition to precedent or even written law. How far will it go? I don’t know and neither does anybody else who isn’t on the Court. But unless you’re on the Harris legal team, you can procrastinate on that bit of worrying until the post-election legal battles actually start — which they won’t if Trump wins legitimately (because Democrats respect the voters’ right to reject them).
If Trump wins and begins assembling a fascist administration, that also would be worth worrying about, and even moreso if Republicans get control one or more houses of the new Congress. But worrying about it now won’t give you any special advantage.
As for the next two days: I voted early and I sent Harris a check months ago. I’ve been trying to make the case for her and against him for months. Now all I can do is watch and wait — and try not to obsess about things that may or may not happen.
If you’re trying to convince some last-minute deciders to vote for Harris, here’s some material to work with.
The NYT writes one paragraph that sums up why you shouldn’t vote for Trump, and backs up each statement with a link to a longer article. Matt Yglesias writes a positive case for Harris, which isn’t flashy because it centers on “normal” things like integrity, the rule of law, and taking a pragmatic approach to helping ordinary people solve typical problems like how to afford a house or send their kids to college.
If you’re talking to someone who thinks voting for Trump is the “Christian” position, point them to this guy.
If you’re talking to a progressive who won’t vote for Harris because of Gaza, show them this.
One final thing: As I explained at some length in August, if you think you’re nostalgic for the “Trump economy”, what you’re actually nostalgic for is the pre-Covid economy, when a lot of things were cheaper. But electing Trump won’t bring those days back.
Around the world, governments took very similar actions to keep their economies going while fighting Covid. And around the world, those actions eventually led to inflation; it’s not a Biden/Harris thing. Our inflation happened to show up after Trump left office (because that’s when the new vaccines allowed the economy to reopen) but his actions had as much to do with it as Biden’s. Once you recognize the hit Covid was on the economy — and would have been even if Trump had been reelected in 2020 — you can appreciate how well the Biden/Harris administration has managed the recovery from Covid.
Here’s a metaphor that might help: Think about how you might feel as you leave the hospital after being treated for a heart attack. Do you feel as carefree and vibrant as you did before the heart attack? Probably not. But you also feel a heck of a lot better than you did when you arrived in the ER, and you should appreciate what the doctors did to pull you through.
Trump is selling nostalgia for 2019, before Covid did its damage. But on that day in 2021 when Biden was inaugurated, the “Trump economy” was a mess. It’s much better now.
The Weekly Sift 
Comments
That NYT paragraph is all about Trump, and it begins with “You already know Donald Trump”. It doesn’t address the reason why some people do know him and will vote for him anyway: what they “know” about Harris and other Democrats is false.
Will anyone be live blogging as the returns come in? I don’t want to listen to endless commentary, but I would like to know which states get called as returns come in.
Electoral-vote.com will be live blogging. Also, most readers of the Sift should find this blog to their liking.
Harris and Trump ran the two worst political campaigns I’ve ever seen at this level of politics. All Harris had to do to lock this up was call the Republicans the gross weirdos that they are and keep pretending that Trump was president. That would have had the votes of America’s normal whites locked up. Instead she aimed her campaign at aging Republican war criminals by beatifying Dick Cheney and his faildaughter. With Harris blowing it like this, Trump could have eked out a win if he had just kept reminding the electorate that Harris is the VP of the Biden administration they all hate. Instead he had his campaign run by and for Don Jr.’s legion of groypers and focused on their most incomprehensible, alienating internet grievances.
Around 6 weeks ago I predicted Harris would win. I said when the Harris campaign was about how Republicans were gross, before it became a neocon trainwreck focused on the glory of Liz Cheney, but Trump’s campaign was a terminally online disaster so I guess I still have to stand by it. So prediction time: I think the election will be a narrow Harris victory. Harris 2024 feels like a losing campaign, but intellectually I think the situation favours her enough to drag her over the finish line.
WELP! I am owned. I assumed that switching out Biden for Harris was a sign that the Democrats as a party had just enough competence to drag her over the finish line against a washed up, senile Trump. I promise all of you that I will NEVER assume the Democrats are capable of ANYTHING ever again!
However, I take solace in the fact that I am not as owned as the American liberal right now. You guys were led into the desert to die by your senile narcissist president and his cackling machine hack VP!
That was uncalled-for.
Kamala Harris couldn’t even face her followers when she blew it on election night. Today she promised to assist in the transfer of power to a man she called a fascist. She doesn’t believe anything she says or care about any of her supporters, and neither does anyone else in the Democratic party. If liberalism is going to have any future in America, there needs to be a reckoning with that reality.
Much of what Alpha 1 posts is uncalled for.
Actually, Anonymous, as I’ve now sworn off social media addiction Wednesday morning, I had a message for Sift readers, and Alpha 1’s message is not far off, as was the opening cartoon of this week’s commentary. The criminals have been running the show and Biden and Harris and the democratic majority in Congress were powerless.
I liken it to Sinaloa, Mexico under El Chapo Guzman. Folks were reportedly happy under his control. He was arrested in 2014 and lost control of the cartel, and amazingly, Sinaloa’s economy did quite a bit better between 2015 and 2019, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence; but Guzman led the cartel through a poor, hopeless, economy between 1988 and 2014, even from prison after two arrests. If you are for laws and have the means to improve your country because it’s rich in natural resources, that doesn’t happen. El Chapo was all about revenge and retribution if anyone made a mistake and crossed his own members. He killed a lot of innocent people. Fools admire that, and seeing that they are not getting law and order through the democratic process, they admire a criminal who will go outside the law to do it himself. I’m calling them the fools that they are for supporting an outlaw, but there’s history there.
The funny thing is, that the economy was up and crime was down except among the very MAGA loyalists who won this election, but they were extremely prominently not going to jail and the corrupt judges and MAGA terrorists were prominently remaining as judges and out there committing more acts of terror. Think George Zimmerman’s verdict followed by him selling the gun that killed Trayvon Martin for nearly $140,000, or Ammon Bundy committing more crimes than you can count, but he runs for Governor of Idaho and embezzles campaign funds. People are looking at a gravy-train-of criminality rather than celebrating that these guys had their civil rights upheld and that they are allowed their first and second amendment rights despite being criminals. El Chapo would have put them in the ground.
And don’t forget to vote in the down ballot races. City council, state legislature, and other races don’t get as much attention as president, but they can still affect your life. And they give candidates experience so that later they can effectively run for higher office if they want to.
For example, Bernie Sanders was in city government before he became a Senator.
The utter inability of the Harris campaign to drive home (or even mention) your point about the post-covid economy drives me bonkers. They are basically conceding to the Trump campaign’s narrative on Biden and inflation.