Image Credits: ANDREW HARNIK / AP.
I’m back from my annual Cape Cod vacation. We go up there every year to visit old friends and it’s a nice break from politics. The weather wasn’t great but it was truly terrible here in Pennsylvania while we were gone. Our yard and driveway are strewn with debris, so fixing that is now how on my to-do list. Doesn’t seem like we lost power though, although I know my mother-in-law did for a period of time. It now looks like the Democrats are less likely to loser power than when we left.
The polls seem to be moving in the correct direction. The overall shift may be modest, but some subgroups and survey answers have shifted dramatically. Kamala Harris’s approval numbers have taken a big leap, and she’s consolidated the youth vote and shored up some slippage Biden was experiencing with Blacks and Hispanics. The Democrats are now more interested and more enthusiastic about the election, and they sure are more optimistic. After more than a year of looking at Trump in the lead, Democrats have seen Harris ahead in 11 of the last 13 national polls, and tied in the other two.
One of the big mysteries right now is why Trump isn’t actively campaigning. He did a rally in Montana last week but that’s not considered a swing state. It appeared to be an effort to aid in the defeat of Democratic U.S. Senator Jon Tester, but that won’t move the needle in places that will decide the presidential election like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada and Arizona. Harris and her running mate Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota have visited all of those states, drawing large and raucous crowds.
Now, if Trump is freaked out about almost being murdered at the rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, I can certainly understand. It would freak me out. I kind of doubt he’s eager to do rallies at the moment. I read somewhere that the Secret Service has requested that he not do outdoor rallies because they’re much harder to secure on short notice than indoor events. Assuming he’s inclined to honor that request, he may be running into another problem which is that he’s built quite a history of not paying bills associated with his rallies. For example, it came out when he went to Billings, Montana that he still owes Missoula County $12,922.82 for an appearance he made in 2018. The city of Billings has not been reimbursed $45,900 is spent for a bulked-up police presence that day.
He completely shafted El Paso, Texas for a February 2019 campaign rally at the El Paso County Coliseum “that cost the city $470,000 in security and other related expenses.” It’s a criminal fraud that he’s conducted all over the country from South Carolina to Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New Mexico, Arizona, Washington and elsewhere. At a certain point, the large indoor arenas may simply not want to do business with him.
Another factor that could explain his lack of activity is his well-known crowd size anxiety. Half empty arenas are embarrassing, and doubly so when his opponents are pulling over 16,000 like Harris and Walz just did in Nevada (4,000 people were turned away). Trump has telegraphed his concern about this. At his press conference last week at Mar-a-Lago, he falsely claimed his January 6, 2021 crowd was bigger than the August 28, 1963 crowd at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom that witnessed Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech. Then he went on his shitty Truth Social site and made the deranged claim that the crowd for Harris and Walz’s appearance in Detroit was faked using artificial intelligence.
I’m actually not sure it’s helpful to cause of freedom that Trump is hiding from his own crowds. Whenever he speaks these days, he seems to do more self-harm than anything else. But the rallies are good organizing tools that should pay off in voter contact, volunteers, networking and enthusiasm. That’s why Harris and Walz will probably keep doing them on a near-constant basis between now and Election Day.
I’m just relieved to have some reason to hope, because I haven’t been very hopeful over the last two years, and it was wearing on me. How about you?
