Final Thoughts: Election 2024

 I have stayed quiet this election, by and large part due to the upcoming release of America: The Obliged, which is based on largely in the timeline that Donald Trump indeed wins the election, and that, indeed Project 2025 comes to fruition, and henceforth the nation languishes in a conservative world until 2044, when things go dire. Bear in mind this next book was written in 2017 and revised in 2020, before hitting revisions in Q1 2024. I digress. 

Aside from that, I have also remained mum compared to the last five or so elections due to the hostility of Trump supporters and the general malaise I have with the political climate in general (the media is discovering this phenomenon, calling us "silent Harris voters"). That said, I am not exactly thrilled to be in this boat. I mean, It's not often that I get to vote for two candidates that I don't really like... three times in a row. Be it so, welcome to American politics in the modern era. 

I do have some thoughts, however. Some of them, for lack of a better venue to vent from, have been aired over at electoral-vote. Dr. Zenger and Votemaster have become, by and large, much more liberal in their biases since I started following their blog in July of 2004. I have always been cautious of such echo chambers because they solicit complacency and further solicit ideologues that can lead us to meme-worthy breakdowns when our candidates lose, a la 2016. 

Anyway, it was over at e-v that I pissed off the canaries singing their sameness song in their chamber when I realized that picking between soured orange juice [Trump] and spoiled milk [Biden] was absolute lunacy, and I took to my soap box to bemoan the situation. My chagrin for my meek comparison was only absolved when the responses from the canaries jilted me as nothing more than a Bernie-bro 3rd-party lover who was best kept out of their echoed bird song. You know the usual repertoire: educate myself, misled Fox nut, uninformed clown, et cetera and so on and so forth. 

Then? Biden dropped out. Because, it turns out, Nancy Pelosi, the Clintons and (very likely) the Obamas also saw what I saw and knew things were about to be ghastly; we were effectively letting Project 2025 just... happen. All in the name of entitlement of a guy who, quite honestly, probably wouldn't live through a second term. 

Without much a fight, Kamala Harris become the de facto nominee overnight. My case rested. I will spare you the rest of history here, as if you're reading this, then you probably are quite aware of the political history of 2024 thus far, right? 

Moving on. 

So now, we are two weeks (!) away from the election. What now? 

Well, some observations. It's hard to reflect on the events of 2020 due to COVID, but I like to analog both 2016 and 2020 as infliction points of the Tea Party movement of 2010 (more America: The Obliged stuff...sorry). This movement is what birthed Donald Trump, by birthing the idea that President Obama wasn't birthed in Hawai'i (that's my lone punned sentence of this post; swear.) So, then it's only fair to assume that, because like a nagging cough, Trump just doesn't seem to want to go away. With this in mind, we can look at my analogs of different situations in 2024. 

2024: Round 3: Donald Trump. Read the Yard Signs.

The first and most immediate thing I have noticed in 2024 that is dynamically different than in 2020 and 2016 is the lack of obnoxious and gaudy signage for Donald Trump. Living in West Virginia in 2016, I was, naturally, well attuned to seeing the crap everywhere. Not just on a neighbors porch, but like, neighbors putting their signs in my yard. Trump stores in every strip mall, people selling Trump merch from the truck bed on the sides of the road. I mean, this was a gah dang revolution.

Well, as fate would have it, I got to visit lots of Trump states this summer and fall (Iowa*, Louisiana, North Carolina*, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia*, South Carolina, Tennessee, West Virginia, and of course, here in good ol' Kentucky). 

Things aren't 2020 or 2016. 

In fact, I see more "brave" Harris-Walz supporters putting up signage than I do Trump regalia... in the deep south. It's not a surprise that in 2016 the polls were embarrassingly wrong because of low-information, disengaged rural voters decided to engage for Trump, the polls not weighting nor anticipating the phenomenon, and then those voters showed up again in 2020 (because, what else was there to do aside from wearing your mask in your own car for fun? May as well vote!). These voters were the people those truck bed Trump merch service vehicles were looking to service. It's onerous to assume none of them are voting, but if even as many as 5% decide to stay home, or do anything other than vote, then the Trump train is gone. Afterall, he only won in 2016 by 100,000 votes spread thinly across three states worth a fortune in electoral college credits (the blue wall thing). 

Political Scientists (the same ones who were no surer of a Clinton victory in 2016 as the sun setting in the west), disregard the sign phenomenon as nothing more than a catalog of general observations with no scientific merit. But I disagree. I think that if you have taken the effort to put up a sign, then you have taken enough effort to go vote. In fact, I bet that the ratio of signage to votes is almost universal. If nothing else, it strongly suggests that, contrary to 2020 and 2016, enthusiasm for Trump has finally waned. The reason why doesn't matter, but it's very real. 

Oh, the Grocery Bandits

I have taken to task on TikTok and occasionally on Facebook to troll (is it still called such? No idea.) Trump supporters and their gaslighting about grocery bills and how President Trump is going to somehow, some way, interfere with capitalism and reduce the costs of food and service by virtue of merely being President again. They love to reference 2020 prices, because, you know, nothing else was happening in the world in 2020 - except President Trump was in office. 

This is, on the whole, literal bullshit and they know it. 

It's true inflation has smacked all of us. In 2022, my grocery bill was marching north of $1000 a month. I got desperate, and joined Hello Fresh (not an endorsement), and tried to reign in the outlandish expenditure, if anything it would reduce my food waste ratio which has always been historically high due to my disdain for leftovers; because listeria. Seriously, just typing that word makes me grab the hand sanitizer. 

Anyway, No such luck. 

Finally, I had to resort to my childhood poverty and buy... generics. Big K (endorsement), especially Dr. K is fine to swig in lieu of Dr. Pepper. Not perfect. But? At half the cost, it pays dividends to make Dr. Pepper a splurge rather than a staple. Rinse and repeat, and before long my grocery bill was back to around $450-$500 a month. 

The obvious problem here is Americans are spoiled. We don't want no Mountain Lighting from Wal-Mart, we want Mountain Dew! But, this is how capitalism works. President Trump and President Biden both wantonly issued out "stimulus" checks during COVID and created a money glut. People like myself, got these checks when they didn't need them (I was making record pay at my work with hazard pay and newly enforced mandatory overtime). This is how inflation works. More money you have, less the money is worth. Simple as that. 

Don't believe me? Watch how you hold onto that last $20 when you're four days shy of payday, then how effortlessly you leave a $20 tip when that tax refund hits in February and you're ten plates deep at the Texas Roadhouse. I rest my case.

So, the financials of the country course-corrected for the new supply glut of Benjamins and everything skyrocketed. How do we fix it? Well, sadly, we don't. Deflation is ghastly for the stock markets and will absolutely lead to layoffs and recessions. That's why they are called recessions. The best we can do is demand better pay to compete, but with AI and automation (America the Obliged-style) coming on the horizon... service droids may be making that $15 Big Mac before long. 

In the interim, as more people switch to Big K over Pepsi, Pepsi's profits fall and someone somewhere in Texas (or Georgia, or whatever), will see that supply is glutting and the best way to fix that? Lower prices to increase demand. Capitalism!

So, what about the grocery bandits? Well, they neverminded mean tweets as their annoying memes suggest in the first place. Betcha that last $20 you got they voted for him. Twice.

The Election is [Not] Rigged

Probably is, actually. But not the way you think it is. This adage is a fallback to defeat, because one of the candidates has a vanity problem. He just can't lose. But really, 2020 was the most secure election in history. Least, that's what them political scientists say. 

In good ol' Appalachia, we have a problem with trusting people. Especially outsiders. Unless they are running for political office, then we love outsiders. No idea why. Just the way it is. That said, we absolutely trust Trump when he says the election is rigged... and then go vote in the rigged election, anyway. This is some type of cognitive dissonance that I cannot attest to, because I have a higher cognitive ability to see bullshit when I see bullshit. So, first projection: Trump will absolutely lose the popular vote for a third time. The electoral college is less clear, but more on that in a second. 

Point is, we love Trump. And when he loses, like a Mountaineers defeat wrestled from the jaws of victory, it was rigged. Someone had to plan it. Because we love Trump, and if we love Trump, then everyone loves Trump. Remember those echo chambers at the e-v blog? Pot, meet kettle. 

The echo chamber has aids by ways of rigged social media presence. Let me give you an example. 

One key rigging comes from this new advent that the billionaires also foretell America needing some Obliged individuals; and have taken up garnering fealty to the new dictator (instead of fight him), Donald Trump. Remember, his vanity? Yeah, turns out, he loves when people financially superior than him like him as a person. It validates him. It manifests in him. So that presents us with my favorite I'd-love-to-smack-him-in-the-mouth South African: Elon Musk. 

This creep, who believes it's his mission from God to reproduce at a higher intensity than my own belated father, bought Twitter. Then, using his weird obsession with x-factors named it X. True story. It happened. Then... well, now he uses it to peddle Trump's latest delusions, thinly veiled as news, rigging the narrative that we are, in fact, eating dogs and cats in Ohio. Or whatever the case may be for any given day. 

This has the potential to reach those people in tangent #1 above, because they probably use Twitter/X for things other than Porn/XXX. Seriously, I don't know who gets information off Twitter, but apparently it's bad enough that pizza parlors in Washington get held up by gunpoint. No joke.

She Didn't Say That

The latest, and potentially the best chance for Trump to nail an October Surprise, is during a rally last week in Pennsylvania, a woman was in the crowd, yelling "liar, liar, liar!" when Kamala Harris finished her rehearsed remarks on Donald Trump championing the overturn of Roe v. Wade. Harris then proceeded to chastise the woman and tell her she's at the wrong venue and to go down the street to the smaller rally [of Donald Trump]. 

Somehow, somewhere in the echo chambers of the magical world of MAGA, someone thought this was a great time to remind the world of how much Kamala hates Christians. Because, now that we live in a world where Christians can't freely persecute people for their sins, they are the ones being persecuted. See how that works? No? Well, if you need or desire some examples of this cute phenomenon, I wrote about them here. 

So, this new lie has gone viral on the Facebook and the TikTok, and has riled up another penchant of the aforementioned folks in item #1. Now that Kamala has renounced Christians, they have to fight, fight, fight... by voting for Donald Trump; the most unchristian (least by my accounts cataloged in that link right yonder) man to ever run for office in the United States. 

I am not sure how much this helps him, since many states are winding down their early voting, and scores have already early voted and there's no take-backs or rainchecks (least if you believe item #3). So we are left to assume that, in the least, if there were any Christians on the fence, they may not be now. 

Nevermind that comment was made directly to an audible "lies!" chant. There's conflicting stories on a man in the back yelling the precious "Jesus is Lord!" that the magical world of MAGA are saying was said. But I haven't seen this unaltered video. Nary have I seen the other claim that this woman said these three precious words as she was being escorted out. Again, does it count if the speaker didn't hear it? Does it count if you say it after the speaker already spoke? 

Time will tell how Christians vote, but I can tell you, most of them already think Trump is the next coming of Jesus Christ. Just ask one. Or fifty. There's some scripture from my childhood I could use that suggest this is the fabled you-know-who from that last book of the Holy Bible, but I won't get into that here. No.

So in the end, absent any Christians who decided over the summer to come to reason and surmise that the Lord would probably not in fact use a fraudster, womanizing, vain, gluttonous, slothing, probably-a-billionaire-but-probably-not old white dude as the second coming of the pristine and flawless Jesus Christ of Nazareth, this likely also didn't change anyone's mind to vote for Donald Trump. 

No, Donald Trump is not the antichrist. 

No, Donald Trump was not sent by the Lord to save us. 

He's just an asshole, man. 

Predictions of the Future

If you listen to the prognosticators you probably believe this is the TIGHTEST ELECTION IN HISTORY. 

It's not. It's the same ol' same ol' since 2000. 

I remember people voting in 2008 anxious and scared that Obama would lose. Ha.

I remember people voting in 2012, anxious and scared that Obama would lose. Oh, Ha. 

I remember people voting in 2020, anxious and scared that Trump would win. Welp. 

You see the pattern, right?

As America becomes ever-more hyper polarized, the electorate becomes static. There's small fluxes afoot, but it's predictable more or less. Trump will get at least 45% of the vote. Kamala Harris, too, will get at least 45% of the vote. It's that other 10% that matter. If you suck at percentages, when consider that when you're in line to vote, count the nine people ahead of you, and then make yourself the tenth.

You matter. They don't. 

That's 10%. 

So what do these people do, exactly? Well, they're me. I have voted Democrat twice, Republican twice, and 3rd Party once (YOLO! Do people still say that? Again, no idea.) 

These people are called "the undecideds". Maybe I should have made America: The Undecideds instead? Oh well. Maybe in another trilogy of works.

Being an undecided is in my pedigree; I am a contrarian, after all. I refused to eat Chic-fil-a for years because everyone loved it. I have since ate it. It's mid. A la Starbucks. Y'all need to calm down. Same applies to politics. We make progress on the two-party system, because we have made progress throughout American history existing on the scales of yes and no. No "maybe's" have ever occupied the White House. So stop voting 3rd party. It's never going to happen.

Aside from that, Democrats and Republicans have a sameness problem. When both are in power they struggle to actually execute their agenda. Trump was supposed to stop illegals from entering the country. Obviously, if you listen to his rallies that obviously didn't happen. Democrats were supposed to fix this inflation thing. Again, we know that didn't happen. So, is it really dire if Trump wins? 

Well yes, and no. 

Trump is, I think, the biggest existential threat to our democracy in 150 years. The sameness problem has led people to stop believing democracy works for them (I won't reference America: The Obliged no more, ever again. In this blog. You know you need to read it). When we stop believing democracy works, we look for new ways to govern. Trump is option #1. The fascist dictator route. 

Be assured, absent a revolutionary leader like Derrick Reddon (I lied), we are stuck in the sameness cycle which means, and I don't think Kamala Harris is remotely close to a revolutionary leader, when Trump fades away a complete failure, a new Trump rises. 

Yup. That's right. Every time a Trump fails, a new one rises in his place, until we learn to fix the sameness problem and fix the issues that ail the American people. 

As an undecided I have to decide which option to take. Option #1 or Option #Staythecourse. As time goes on, I struggle to keep mindlessly pulling the lever for #Staythecourse. Because the course does in fact suck. But Option #1 sucks more. 

The lesser of two evils is exhausting, and sometimes picking between the two, like Clinton and Trump in 2016, can be difficult. Other times it's a safe bet. 

To be a political operative for Harris, I would have ran the campaign differently. I wouldn't be crowing about abortion rights. Women never forget anything when it's personal. They already know. What they may forget, however, is how January 6th went down and why. What exactly is an "enemy within" that Trump goads about? 

Kamala had the unique opportunity to highlight Option #1 and give us a story about how Option #1 plays out. She didn't. When she hit on it, she was vague, and ambiguity doesn't work with voters anymore. Tell us the details. Project 2025 is a beauty. They wrote the story, all you had to do was narrate it. 

Secondly, I would have dumped Biden immediately. He was an off-ramp in 2020, and nothing more. His legacy was foretold to be the President that saved us from Option #1. Instead, we let Trump and Co tie an anchor to Harris' ankle and toss her into Biden's Lake of Failure. 

Too late now. 

2024 Prediction

I steer clear of "toss-ups" and playing the closeness game so I offer two scenarios based on the thousands of words typed above. 

As a preface, especially if you're new here, I had 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020 all on lock with a margin of error of 10 or so electors (2008 I discounted Indiana for Obama, in 2020 I gave Trump Wisconsin). 

Scenario 1: Electorate holds, Kamala is Clinton and Biden wrapped into one and Trump is Trump. 

Option #1 is affirmed.

This scenario is the one Democrats fear most, but it's easy to get to if the undecideds decide they really want that Mountain Dew and the ambiguity, or concepts of plans from Trump don't matter. They just need to Dew the Dew again. Again, Harris' team failed to find the pulse of the race; to their credit they only had 100 days to do that, but that's their problem. This replicates 2016 in that, Harris wins the popular vote.

Scenario 2: Trump's casual base that propelled him in 2016 and 2020, casually doesn't vote. 

Option #Staythecourse is affirmed. 

I debated Texas on this, and I may come regret it and Alaska, and to a lesser degree Florida, Ohio and Iowa. Harris could really swamp Trump if 10-15% of his base stays home and the undecideds decide to give democracy one more chance one more time, again. I think inside the Trump campaign this is the fear they have, and easily explains the cancelled interviews (keep him away from the mics), and the boldfaced lies of Elon Musk on Twitter-X and the lyin' lies over that Kamala clapback at her rally with the heckler. Desperation breeds fraud. Just ask anyone who writes bad checks. Their account was probably overdrawn and they desperately needed to buy something. 

In this scenario, Harris wins the popular vote by around 5%. Georgia (holds) and North Carolina (flips) due to the disasters in Appalachia from Hurricane Helene. Arizona and Nevada continue to gobble up Californians, and it's liberal bend with it. Blue Wall holds on the strength of workers working and not voting like they did in 2016, 2020. Simple. 

Now, out of virtue of my integrity I can't not pick one or the other, I have a track record to uphold, and I said no undecideds. So I have to decide how this thing plays out. I know the pulse on the country is subdued, so with two weeks to go, I pick...

Option #Staythecourse is affirmed.