At Summer’s End, Elections Begin

View From Here
By David Mark Greaves
Vice President Kamala Harris has insisted that the Harris/Walz ticket is the underdog, and we should pay close attention because she is exactly right. The hard fact is that the Democrats can easily lose.

For starters, there is a baseline of 46-47 % of Americans who support Donald Trump. Building on that is the Nation’s Founders’ compromise to give slave states in the South an Electoral College advantage, plus Republicans’ concerted voter suppression and voter roll “cleansing” efforts.

Then there is the insertion of MAGA believers in the vote-certifying system and, most dangerously, domestic and international actors sending propaganda by social media that is both public and tightly targeted to give content curated to the emotional buttons of fear and anger of the user. And finally, there is their fail-safe, a close election decided by the MAGA majority on the Supreme Court.

Survey after survey shows and anecdotal conversations in bodegas concur that a lot of people simply don’t care very much about abortion, immigration, and health care. Or losing something called “democracy.” What they do care about is the money in their pockets.

For too many others, there’s the fantasy of having power, being rich, and being able to throw the finger at those who expect to be bowed down before that wants to be expressed. Able to tell district attorneys and judges what they think of them. For them, it’s not racism or misogyny. It’s a visceral connection with someone who behaves the way they’d like to. They like the name-calling. Trump is their guy. Difficult to reach those folks.

But for most, there is the real world, and they’ll put aside racism and misogyny if it means money in their households. Infrastructure money has to be more widely seen in the neighborhood, in storefronts with large window signs reading, “High-Paying Infrastructure Act Jobs. Apply inside.”

Most low-income people don’t think of themselves as poor; they aspire to be middle-class. Between the poor and the middle class, there is a group that would like to think of themselves and should be called the “soon-to-be middle class.”
By all accounts, the Harris campaign isn’t missing a trick in their aggressive all-hands-on-deck effort toward the election with a message for all classes.

And now all eyes will be on the Great Debate next week between Vice President Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. As long as both reveal who they truly are, you’d think we’d be fine. But we won’t be. Donald Trump has no intention of losing. It would mean he could go to jail, and that is an impossibility that he will go to any lengths to avoid. And there are those who will use him to grab this one last chance to install a White supremacist government at any cost and by any means necessary.

I say last chance, because once the John Lewis Voting Rights Act passes, and voter suppression laws and rulings are reversed, then Republicans know they will be exposed as a very minor political party, an “empty suit” as my mother would say.