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On panic and pessimism

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There’s a certain amount of grousing right now — and by a certain amount I mean “a lot” — from various Harris supporters that Democrats are “panicking” for no apparent reasons. Now it’s true that the polls have remarkably stable for the entirety of the race over the three months since Harris officially became the Democratic nominee in the first week of August. Harris has been ahead in the 538 curated average by between 3.7% immediately after the convention and 1.4%, which, unfortunately, is now.

The slight slippage we’ve seen over the past few weeks is one factor in whatever panic may be happening, but I don’t think it’s a big one. Any reputable pollster will tell you that the one thing the polls have been indicating for three months now — ever since Harris became the candidate — is that the polls can’t offer any real insight into whether Harris or Trump is going to win. Everything has been and remains within the margin of error in all of the swing states, and any slight advantage that Harris or Trump may appear to have in this or that model is 100% a product of what is little more than pure guesswork on the pollster’s part about what the precise makeup of the electorate will end up being, demographically speaking. You can make up all sorts of plausible-sounding narratives about why Harris or Trump is going to win, but that’s all they are. Everybody is guessing/wishcasting, and absent some truly bizarre twist over the next ten days (it is 2024 after all) that’s how things are going to remain between now and the official election day. (Nearly 40 million votes have already been cast).

The panic, such as it is, doesn’t seem to me to be based on any kind of empirical shift: it’s purely psychological. And the psychology is this: we’re now at the point where it takes an enormous amount of denial to avoid the fact — and it is a fact — that Trump may well be president again. Given the sheer enormity of that fact, it doesn’t make any sense to tell somebody not to panic because you believe Harris will win. I mean that’s great and everything, and on certain days and at certain hours I share that belief, but the analogy here is that it’s not much comfort to someone who thinks there’s a 50% chance that something absolutely catastrophic is about to happen to tell that person that hey be realistic, it’s probably only 45% or even 40% if you squint just right.

I realize, of course, that panic as an emotion doesn’t help, that fear is the mind killer etc. but under the circumstances panic is a perfectly understandable and even to some extent unavoidable response to the circumstances, not because the circumstances have changed in the last few weeks, but precisely because they haven’t changed: they’ve merely become much more concrete.

I believed in the immediate wake of the convention that Harris’s momentum would continue to build, that she would open up an eight to ten point lead in the national polls, that Trump would continue to sound increasingly unhinged and demented (OK that part did happen), and that by this point the race would look if not a lock, at least something like Harris as the heavy favorite. That turned out to be totally wrong. I couldn’t believe, three months ago, that very close to half the voting public could look at what Donald Trump is and has become, and say to itself we want that person to be president. I honestly thought the final margin was going to be something like 53% to 44%, which would still be disturbing of course, but would count as a landslide under current levels of polarization and pervasive right wing propaganda.

Instead, to the extent it can be predicted, we have what looks every bit like a tossup, with Harris holding perhaps a 2% lead in the national vote tally, which happens to be just about the exact break-even point in terms of Electoral College odds, since the GOP EC advantage appears to have contracted somewhat since 2020.

Now you can say that’s not a good reason to panic, which on one level is tautological, because by definition there’s never a good reason to panic, since panic is bad, unhelpful, to be avoided if possible, and so forth. But under the circumstances, panic is totally understandable, because I mean look at this thing.

Relatedly, something that annoys me a lot is all the polls of whether people think the country is going in the wrong direction, which currently show that people say yes to that question by huge margins — 65% to 25% is typical. I mean under the circumstances how the hell would anyone say it wasn’t? If you’re a Trumper, your whole fascist world view is of course that the country is going in the wrong direction, because the fascists aren’t in power yet, which is why we’ve fallen away from the Golden Age into our current national degeneracy.

If you’re not a fascist, then hell yeah the country is going in the wrong direction because it’s on the verge of going fascist! It’s a dumb question at any time, but most especially right now.

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