Salem Political Snark

Political scientist explains why Trump won at City Club talk

After a national election, I look forward to Ed Dover explaining the results at a Salem City Club presentation. Dover is a retired political science professor at Western Oregon University. Dover's talk last Friday was his 13th City Club appearance.

Dover began by saying that asking the right questions is key to understanding election results. Adapting the opening song from Hamilton, he said, how could a liar, conman, narcissist, sex with a porn star candidate become president for the second time?

Three factors: (1) Entrenched partisanship, (2) Retrospective voting, (3) Democratic constituencies. 

Entrenched partisanship. Other countries have more variation in their political parties. Sometimes there are 10-12 in a parliamentary system. They come and go, while our Republican and Democratic parties are very old, dating from the late 1700s and mid 1800s. This makes them highly entrenched.

Dover likened this to trench warfare in World War I. At the battle of Verdun, where 800,000 soldiers were killed, the most ground gained by the Germans was 200 yards.

In like fashion, the Democratic and Republican parties are almost equal in strength. Over the last four presidential elections, the Democratic candidates got 49% of the vote and the Republican candidates 48%. With 435 seats in the House of Representatives, it looks like the Democrats will gain 1-2 seats via the recent election. 

Not long ago, parties adapted to their state. In Oregon, at one time we had a Republican Governor, Tom McCall, and two Republican Senators, Bob Packwood and Mark Hatfield. They were more liberal than almost every GOP elected official today. 

Now the parties are national. Every statewide office is held by a Democrat, and the 2024 election gave Democrats a supermajority in both the state House and Senate. But only two seats switched parties in the 60-member House and 30-member Senate, one in the House and one in the Senate.

In the Northwest states (Oregon, Washington, Alaska, Idaho, Montana), of 24 House seats, 22 stayed with the same party. Republicans picked up a seat in Alaska; Democrats picked up a seat in Oregon.

Nationally, Trump outpaced Harris in the popular vote by just 1.6%, which could be 1.5% after all the votes are counted. In Polk County, out of 16 precincts Harris won six, the same number won by the Democratic candidate since 2000. 

Retrospective voting. This occurs when voters don't look ahead, but to the past, in this case 2019-24. About 1/3 of voters said the economy was their most important issue. They were bothered by higher prices and higher interest rates on mortgages and other debt. 

Dover said that a president doesn't have control of the economy. However, a president is the face of the economy, and that hurt Harris. In 1976 gasoline went from 50 cents a gallon to $1 a gallon after OPEC restricted oil production. Prices for other goods adjusted accordingly. If Reagan had become president in 1976 rather than Carter, likely he wouldn't have been reelected. 

Harris suffered from inflation taking off in the post-covid period. People switched jobs. The United States had a worker shortage, so wages were increased. The average working person was more affected by inflation than the rich. Wealth inequality bothered voters.

Structural problems will continue during the Trump administration, but now Trump will be blamed for economic issues. Inflation may increase again, after a recent decline, if Trump imposes widespread tariffs, which are paid by the purchaser of imported goods, who will pass on the cost to consumers. 

Democratic constituencies. Trump got 2 1/2 million more votes than he did in 2020. Harris got 4 1/2 million fewer votes than Biden did. Why? Many Democrats didn't vote in 2024 after voting in 2020. But likely this isn't a permanent feature of presidential politics. 

In 1992 Democrats controlled the presidency and both the House and Senate. Then in 1994 Democrats didn't vote. In 2000 many Democrats voted for Ralph Nader. If Gore had gotten 1% of the 100,000 votes cast for Nader in Florida, Gore would have become president rather than George W. Bush. In 2008 Obama won the presidency, and Democrats won the House and Senate. In 2010 Democrats lost control of Congress. In 2016 Clinton got money from Wall Street, and 20% of Sanders supporters didn't vote in the general election. 

These days a victorious political party only has 18 months to deal with problems of the past fifty years. Dover said that we may be in an era of one-term presidents. 

During the question and answer period, Dover said:

-- The effect of Biden not campaigning for Harris wasn't evident.
-- Third parties had a minimal effect in 2024.
-- Ranked choice voting failed in Oregon because the pro ads weren't effective.
-- We're #88! Since 87 other countries have elected a woman leader before the U.S.
-- The Wyoming GOP, which heavily controls the state, is the most bitterly divided.
-- Democratic lack of turnout made the difference in the swing states. 
-- In 2028 the Democrats will nominate a similar person, but the economy will work for them next time.

Harris didn't lose by a landslide. She lost by a trickle of electoral sand.

I never expect Trump to speak the truth. When he does, perhaps by accident, it's a shock.

But I haven't been at all shocked to hear Trump spout a lie: that he defeated Harris in a landslide victory that gives him a powerful mandate from the American people to do whatever he damn well wants, no matter how odious, unlawful, or unconstitutional.

Here's a screenshot by someone I follow on Blue Sky and X (I'm weaning myself from X after Elon Musk became a shameless promoter of MAGA falsehoods) which shows a graphic that was on Chris Hayes' MSNBC show today.

You can see that Trump's popular vote margin of victory was smaller than every presidential election since 2000, aside from Al Gore's very narrow margin of 0.5% in 2000. And California has many more votes to count, so Trump's 2024 margin likely will shrink to 1.6% or 1.5% (currently it is 1.65%, which rounds to 1.7%).

Notably, Trump's popular vote margin in his 2024 presidential win is lower than Hillary Clinton's popular vote margin in her 2016 presidential loss. And it likely will end up being about a third of the popular vote margin enjoyed by Joe Biden in 2020. 

Regarding how many votes enabled Trump to win the Blue Wall states in 2024, another person I follow on Blue Sky has the answer: 230,000. Which is 00.15% of the approximate 153 million votes cast in the election. So a shift from Trump to Harris in the Blue Wall states of about 1/7 of a percent would have meant that Kamala Harris would be announcing her cabinet picks, not Donald Trump.

Of course, in 2000 George Bush won the presidency on the basis of just 537 votes in Florida, aided by an extremely contentious and legally dubious ruling by the conservatives on the Supreme Court. But that was enough for him to become the undisputed president of the United States after Al Gore conceded to Bush.

Likewise, Trump was the legitimate victor in the 2024 election. All I'm saying is that Trump's margin of victory in both the popular vote and the electoral college wasn't hugely impressive by historical standards. Here's how CNN described Trump's mediocre electoral college margin.

In terms of the Electoral College, Trump won 312 electoral votes. It’s a solid win, but in the lower half of US presidential elections.

It was a better showing than either his or Joe Biden’s 306 electoral votes in 2016 and 2020, respectively. It also outperformed both of George W. Bush’s electoral victories in 2000 and 2004. But it was far short of Barack Obama’s 365 electoral votes in 2008 and 332 in 2012.

Bill Clinton never reached 50% in the popular vote because both of his presidential elections featured a strong third-party candidate in Ross Perot. But Clinton did run away with the Electoral College vote, winning 370 electoral votes in 1992 and 379 in 1996.

Even those strong victories are dwarfed by Ronald Reagan’s 1984 win, a true landslide. Reagan lost only Washington, DC, and Minnesota, the home state of his Democratic rival, Walter Mondale, thereby securing 525 electoral votes and more than 58% of the popular vote.

Fellow Trump opponents, here's what gives me hope

Election day was really depressing for me. While I knew that the race between Harris and Trump was a toss-up, I expected that Harris would pull out a victory. Heck, maybe even a fairly easy one. At the least, I thought the election would come down to narrow margins in a few swing states.

So when it became evident that Trump was the victor before I went to bed around midnight out here in Oregon, my sleep was fitful. I couldn't stop thinking about the disasters that await our country and the world with another four years of Trump in the White House. 

But with the passage of a few days, my mood has markedly improved. Here's what gives me hope after Harris' disappointing loss.

(1) Let's start with the magnitude of the loss. Nationally, in the 43 non-swing states plus the District of Columbia, Trump gained about 6.7 points from his 2020 performance. However, in the seven swing states, Trump only gained about 3.1 points. So seemingly in the states focused on by the Harris campaign, Harris managed to cut Trump's 2024 over-performance by almost half of what he enjoyed elsewhere.

(2) So what happened on November 5 wasn't the overwhelming mandate from voters Trump is claiming. It was a fairly typical win for a candidate challenging a member of an unpopular president's party. This isn't the beginning of a never-ending upswing for Republicans. The United States frequently bounces back and forth between presidents with a D or R after their name.

(3) While Republicans will control the presidency and Senate, the House is still up for grabs. However the uncalled House races turn out, likely the balance of power will be just a few seats, as it is now. If Republicans control the House, probably they will continue to find passing major legislation to be difficult. This will be a check on Trump even if Johnson remains the Speaker of the House.

(4) If the Republican Party ends up with unified control -- President, Senate, House -- they will unequivocally own what happens to our country and our foreign policy. Given the wacko proposals put forward by Trump, such as deporting 20 million undocumented immigrants and putting a 20% or larger tariff (which amounts to a sales tax) on all imported goods, Americans are going to blame the Trump administration for all kinds of nasty problems that will arise in the next four years.

(5) This assumes that Trump will go down the crazier of two paths, the other being a more moderate presidency. If that restrained version of Trumpism comes to be, this will both be good for the United States and good for Trump (and the Republican Party). But I'm betting that the crazy path comes to be, because that's how Trump rolls.

(6) Sure, 2028 seems far away. That's when our country definitely will be done with Trump as president. So I focus on 2026, the midterms that are a bit under two years away. It seems very likely that Trump's extreme actions will turn off a large share of the American electorate by that time. He believes that his victory over Harris proved that a majority of voters have gone full-on MAGA. Actually, all it proved is that the vice-president to an unpopular president failed to beat an opponent who was saddled with all that people didn't like about the Biden years. In 2026 Trump will learn that now he's the unpopular president.

(7) The party out of power almost always does well in midterm elections. Democrats will be favored to win a majority of House seats, assuming this doesn't happen in the 2024 general election. In the Senate, Republicans will be defending 20 seats and Democrats 13 seats. So the Democratic Party has a good chance of taking control of either the House or Senate, and conceivably both. That would make Trump's last two years in office considerably more difficult.

(8) Public opinion counts. Opponents of Trump already make up about half of the country. Our number probably will grow, not shrink. We have the ability to engage in massive demonstrations if Trump pursues some of his most far-out anti-democracy autocratic schemes. Politicians of both parties are acutely conscious of what's bothering the electorate. Republican officials will stick with Trump so long as they think he is an asset to their re-election chances. When he becomes a detriment, they will begin to desert him.

I realize that things seem politically dark right now. But this won't last. Sunrise follows a sunset. Republicans are gleeful now after Trump's victory. Soon they will discover what many of them already know: embracing Trump means being tied to his erratic authoritarian behavior. When he goes off the rails, the whole Republican Party train will follow. 

Win or (probably) lose, I'm thankful for how Kamala Harris campaigned

It's turning out to be a sad night. I started watching the election returns on MSNBC around 5 pm with a lot of optimism. After all, a couple of days ago I wrote a blog post called "Why I expect Harris will beat Trump fairly easily."

For sure, that's not going to happen. I was wrong.

At the moment the New York Times Live Presidential Forecast gives Trump more than a 95% chance of victory. Harris' only option is to win Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Currently Trump is leading by 3 points in Pennsylvania, 6 points in Michigan, and 4 points in Wisconsin.

The Blue Wall is crumbling. When I wake up tomorrow, likely it will have fallen, and Trump will have been declared the victor.

Which is so depressing, I had trouble writing that last sentence. My daughter is depressed. Friends are depressed. My wife is watching something on TV that isn't the election results. I read an update from a New York Times reporter that said:

The Harris campaign just shut off the sound on the TVs at her watch party and replaced it with music after a guest on CNN said tonight felt "more like 2016 than 2020."

I feel the same way. Once again, a competent, highly qualified woman is poised to be defeated by one of the worst presidents our country has ever suffered under. And Trump has vowed to make his next term in office even nastier. 

Unless Harris pulls off a near-miracle in the Blue Wall states, get ready for Robert Kennedy Jr. to ban vaccines and fluoride in the water supply, for Elon Musk to make the federal government into a MAGA playground, for millions of hard-working undocumented immigrants to be rounded up in detention camps before being thrown out of the country, for the abortion pill to be banned nationwide along with possibly other forms of abortion due to the Trump administration putting a hitherto unenforced law from the 1800s into effect, for all U.S. aid to Ukraine being withdrawn thereby handing a victory to Putin, for giving unfettered free rein to Netanyahu to kill as many Palestinians as he wants with no consequences, for Trump tariffs devastating our economy via a huge sales tax on all imported goods.

That's what it appears American voters have said they want.

If a Harris defeat is disturbing, equally bothersome will be the realization among those of us who supported her that half of the people in this country are absolutely fine with having an authoritarian, who has been termed a fascist by his Chief of Staff, becoming president again. Well, almost certainly they're going to get what they asked for: a fascist authoritarian president. 

I'm afraid for the United States, and the world. From what I know of the prelude to Hitler taking full control of a Nazi'fied Germany, Trump's plans for his second term in office are disturbingly similar. German leaders thought Hitler wouldn't be as bad as those who warned about him thought he would be. Until, the worst happened. 

Understand: I'm not saying that we will become a 21st century version of Nazi Germany. But the fact that I can even think that we're heading in that direction is beyond disturbing. It's terrifying. 

Obviously voters bought into Trump's incessant lies. They are fine with his stated desire to be a "dictator on Day 1." They can accept all of the things happening that I included in the lengthy paragraph above. In short, they have given a thumbs up to the first truly authoritarian presidency in our nation's history.

I want to end this post on a positive note. And that is, my deep gratitude to Kamala Harris for stepping up after Biden withdrew from the race. She ran a virtually flawless campaign. I found little to criticize in how she presented herself to the American public. Harris gave those of us who supported her hope, joy, and laughter when we needed it in the dark times after Biden's disastrous debate performance.

I don't blame Harris for her impending loss to Trump. I blame the voters who failed to see Trump for who he is: a mortal danger to our country and the world. Say goodbye to federal efforts to combat climate change, young people. Say goodbye to any chance of a two-state solution to the conflict between Israel and Palestinians, American Muslims. Enough of you voted for Trump to help him return to power.

Soon you'll see how wrong you were to dismiss Harris. 

I'm not sure if I'll be able to watch an expected concession speech from Harris tomorrow. I'm sad enough now. I don't need more tears. But if I were able to speak to Kamala, I'd tell her that she ran a great campaign. As her running mate Walz likes to say, she left everything on the field. If she loses, as I expect she will, it won't be due to a lack of effort or competence.

It will be due to the inability of the American public to recognize that they could have chosen a gem to become president. Instead, it looks like they've chosen a piece of shit. 

Why I expect Harris will beat Trump fairly easily

As I told a friend today, when I consider how I feel about the almost-upon-us presidential election, it's difficult for me to separate out my strong desire to see Harris win from factual indicators of how her campaign is going.

Nonetheless, below are reasons for why I'm confident that the election is going to turn out surprisingly well for Harris.

I say "surprisingly," because the general attitude among political pundits is that this is a very tight 50-50 toss-up election. Indeed, that's how the three prediction models that I follow basically are rating the electoral college race: Nate Silver's Silver Bulletin favors Trump 53-47, FiveThirtyEight favors Trump 53-46, and the Economist favors Trump 51-49. 

Each of the models gives Trump a slightly higher probability of winning. But these models try to be a reflection of some aspects of reality and obviously aren't reality itself. They are largely, but not entirely, based on polls. 

So here's some other factors that lead me to believe that not only will Harris defeat Trump, she'll do so by winning more than the 270 electoral votes she'd get by holding on to the usually safe blue states, beating Trump in the Blue Wall of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, and gaining the single electoral vote in Nebraska's 2nd District.

(I'm expecting that Harris will win all of the above, plus North Carolina and Nevada. If I'm horribly wrong, gleeful Trump supporters can tell me how stupid I was in post-election comments on this post.)

(1) Turnout is key in every election, but especially this one, given the very tight polling results. Trump has farmed out the Republican turnout effort in swing states to Elon Musk and a super PAC he controls. Harris is doing it the usual way, through the Democratic organizations in those states which rely heavily on an army of volunteers. Musk is a smart guy, but he is in over his head in this effort. So better Democratic turnout will be a big reason why Harris wins.

(2) Women strongly favor Harris. Men strongly favor Trump. This doesn't balance out because women are more likely to vote than men are, a plus for Harris.

(3) The Iowa Selzer poll that was released today sent shockwaves through political observers, since it showed Harris leading Trump 47-44 in the red state. As noted above, Iowa women broke strongly for Harris, seemingly motivated in part by the six-week abortion ban that went into effect in Iowa after a previous Selzer poll that showed Trump with a fairly comfortable lead. Ann Selzer is a highly respected pollster, so there's a good chance what the new poll found points to Harris leading in other mid-west states also.

(4) Trump's closing message to voters is incoherent, unfocused, negative, and hateful. Harris' closing message is much more appealing to independent and undecided voters. This is why a poll found that people who have recently decided between Harris and Trump are breaking for Harris by a significant margin.

(5) Latinos in general, and Puerto Ricans specifically, appear to be returning to the Democratic fold. This was spurred by a speaker at Trump's Madison Square Garden rally referring to Puerto Rico as a floating island of garbage. Black men also seem to be favoring Harris in greater numbers, helping to reduce Democratic anxiety about them defecting to Trump.

(6) Trump is making very little effort to appeal to voters outside of his MAGA base. He is putting more emphasis on challenging the results of the 2024 presidential election than on winning the election. This indicates that Trump isn't confident that he's going to get the most electoral votes, since he is hoping that a second try at overturning the results of an election he lost will be successful this time. It won't be, thankfully.

(7) Kamala Harris did great in her appearance on Saturday Night Live last night. She looked happy and relaxed. People are tired of Trump's habitual nastiness. I'm confident this will lead to Harris getting an unexpectedly large number of "I'm fed up with Trump's antics" voters. 

Climate is best reason to vote for Harris, and nobody's talking about it

There are many strange things about the current presidential campaign, including: how Harris suddenly became the Democratic nominee after Biden withdrew; how the Republican Party could happily get behind Trump, a convicted felon who lost the last election; how neither campaign is speaking much about the climate crisis, even though it is by far the most important long-term issue. 

I've watched all of Harris' debates and major speeches. Her silence on global warming is deafening. So is Trump's, but that's to be expected.

Based on his first term in office, and what he's saying now, if Trump is elected it's a certainty that he will try to undo all of the Biden/Harris accomplishments aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, once again withdraw the United States from international efforts to combat human-caused climate change, and give free rein to the oil and gas industry to, as he puts it, "Drill, drill, drill."

Yet long after the current furors over securing our southern border, protecting our democracy, and reducing inflation have been forgotten, the climate crisis will still be the most important long-term issue affecting the United States and the world.

So how is it that Kamala Harris has made this such an insignificant part of her campaign?

I expect this from Trump, not from Harris. I've been thinking that because fracking supposedly is a big deal to Pennsylvania voters, an important swing state, and Harris was attacked by Trump for saying in the 2020 presidential primary that she wanted to ban fracking, Harris is avoiding talking about climate change because it runs the risk of bringing back fracking as a campaign issue.

(Currently Harris says that she's OK with fracking, because she's learned that greenhouse gas emissions can be reduced even if fracking continues -- a pretty weak explanation of why she's changed her mind.)

However, an essay by climate activist Bill McKibben in the October 28 issue of The New Yorker casts the climate change silence of the Harris campaign in a rosier light. Here's an excerpt:

This month, in the journal BioScience, a group of the world’s leading climate experts warned, “We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt.”

Not that you’d know it from this year’s Presidential campaign. Vice-President Kamala Harris, since becoming the Democratic nominee, has spoken very little about climate change. To the degree that a transition from fossil fuel has been discussed at all, it’s been in the form of her assuring Pennsylvanians that she won’t interfere with fracking. She has spoken about creating green jobs, but not much else.

The reasons are fairly clear. First, the Democratic Party essentially had no primary season. Biden faced only token challenge, and when he stepped down Harris was nominated by acclamation, so activists had no chance to elevate climate change to a crucial electoral issue, as they had done in 2020.

Remember the backdrop: Greta Thunberg’s movement had crested in the fall of 2019, with some six million people marching in protests around the world. In this country, the Sunrise Movement was pushing a Green New Deal. The governor of Washington, Jay Inslee, who was also briefly a Presidential candidate, called that time a “magic moment” for climate politics.

NBC reported, “Climate change has recently shot to the top of polls of issues that Democratic voters care about in the presidential primary, rivaling for the first time longstanding bread-and-butter topics like health care.” Harris, in her primary bid, said that global warming “represents an existential threat to who we are as a species.” Biden, after winning the nomination, secured Senator Bernie Sanders’s support by committing to work with him on climate initiatives.

The second reason for the relative silence this year is that Biden, in fact, largely kept to his commitment. He somehow persuaded the Senate to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, which finally devoted serious federal money to an energy transition. His need for Senator Joe Manchin’s vote meant that the bill included gifts to the fossil-fuel industry, but it has nonetheless unleashed hundreds of billions of dollars on everything from heat pumps and E.V. chargers to battery factories.

The basic stance of mainstream environmentalists now is that the country is more or less on the right track. They assume that, if Harris wins, many of the people driving policy in the White House will remain in place and that, in four more years, the momentum behind clean energy will be unstoppable. The fossil-fuel industry apparently assumes the same thing: it has been raising money at Spindletop rates for Trump, who has promised to “drill, drill, drill” and has noted, “I hate wind.” The choice is so obvious that Harris doesn’t really need to say much. But, if she’s elected, she’s going to have to do a lot.

That's for sure. I found an article by Elizabeth Colbert in the October 14 issue of The New Yorker to be super-scary. Here's passages about tipping points in "When the Arctic Melts: What the fate of Greenland means for the rest of the Earth."

Most scientists believe that ice ages—there have been at least ten of them over the past two and half million years—are initiated and terminated by periodic shifts in the Earth’s orbit, caused by, among other factors, the tug of Jupiter and Saturn. But orbital shifts produce only slight changes in the amount of sunlight that reaches different parts of the globe at different times of the year.

Such slight variations are insufficient to explain the growth and subsequent retreat of massive ice sheets. Rather, it seems, the orbital shifts act like a trigger, setting off other processes—feedbacks—that greatly amplify their effect.

One relatively straightforward feedback features albedo, from the Latin word for “whiteness.” Ice and especially snow have a high albedo. They reflect lots of sunlight back to space. Thus, as an ice sheet grows, the planet absorbs less energy. This has a cooling effect, which encourages the buildup of more snow and ice, which results in more reflectivity, and so on. Start to melt an ice sheet and the same cycle spins in reverse.

Today, feedbacks are, to put it mildly, a growing concern. A report published last year by more than two hundred researchers from around the world noted that many of the systems that determine the climate exhibit nonlinear behavior. Such systems may “shift to a very different state, often abruptly or irreversibly, as a result of self-sustaining feedbacks.” The researchers identified two dozen potential “tipping systems,” among them the Greenland ice sheet.

At a certain point, the report warned, feedbacks could become so powerful that, even if CO2 emissions were cut dramatically and temperatures stabilized, the ice sheet would continue to shrink, possibly until it collapsed. The “best estimate” of when this critical threshold will be reached is when average global temperatures rise 1.5 degrees Celsius—roughly three degrees Fahrenheit—above preindustrial levels. Even after that line is crossed, it will take many centuries for the changes set in motion to play out.

Still, as a practical matter, there will be no going back. When it comes to tipping systems, the future is in our hands until it isn’t.

...Climate change is not like other problems, and that is part of the problem. What it lacks in vividness and immediacy it makes up for in reach. Once the world’s remaining mountain glaciers disappear, they won’t be coming back. Nor will the coral reefs or the Amazon rain forest. If we cross the tipping point for the Greenland ice sheet, we may not even notice. And yet the world as we know it will be gone.

My tips about preserving sanity in the runup to presidential election

It takes one to know one, goes the familiar saying. Applying that to the current political situation, I know  the stress lots of people are under right now, because I'm feeling really stressed myself. 

Today I mentioned in my Tai Chi class that I was going to try to use the Tai Chi principle of relaxed softness on November 5, election day, because I'm going to need all the help I can get in staying calm as the votes are counted and announced.

That led to an interesting mid-class discussion among the half dozen or so students in attendance. It turned out that everybody was feeling pretty much the same way. 

We were all supporters of Harris. But given that each of the three election prediction models that I follow -- Nate Silver's Silver Bulletin (you can't see the actual forecast without subscribing to Silver, which I do), FiveThirtyEight, and the Economist -- are basically showing a 50-50 race, both Harris and Trump supporters have good reasons to be nervous.

So here's some tips from my own frazzled brain about how to preserve your sanity as much as possible in the six days until November 5.

(1) Ponder the wisdom of the lyrics to the Doris Day song from the 1950s, Que Sera Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be). Here's a sample:

When I was just a little girl
I asked my mother, "What will I be?"
"Will I be pretty? Will I be rich?"
Here's what she said to me

"Que será, será
Whatever will be, will be
The future's not ours to see
Que será, será
What will be, will be"

(2) In line with the above, read a recent article in The Atlantic by Brian Klaas, "The Truth About Polling: We Don't Know What We Think We Know About How Americans Will Vote." If you're worried about how your favored candidate is faring in the polls, Klaas shows why that worry is misplaced, since polls are pretty bad at capturing what is going to happen in an election. 

Here's how the article starts out. 

Well, it’s that time again: Millions of Americans are stress-eating while clicking “Refresh” on 538’s presidential forecast, hoping beyond hope that the little red or blue line will have made a tiny tick upward. Some may be clutching themselves in the fetal position, chanting under their breath: “There’s a good new poll out of Pennsylvania.”

The stakes of this election are sky-high, and its outcome is not knowable in advance—a combination that most of us find deeply discomfiting. People crave certainty, and there’s just one place to look for it: in the data. Earlier humans might have turned to oracles or soothsayers; we have Nate Silver. But the truth is that polling—and the models that rely primarily on polling to forecast the election result—cannot confidently predict what will happen on November 5.

(3) Keep in mind that in the lifetime of geezers like me (I'm 76), the criteria for what it means to be a good citizen has changed a lot, and not necessarily for the better. When I was in high school, 1962-66, I recall being taught that a good citizen's main duty was to vote.

If you've done that, or plan to do that, congratulations, you're a good citizen. Now relax and wait for your vote and that of your fellow Americans to be counted.

Unless you live in a swing state -- Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada -- there's little you can do at this point to encourage other people who share your political view to vote. 

And despite the large number of texts and emails I've gotten every day for many weeks, asking me to send more money to the Harris campaign (I've already donated twice), I feel fine ignoring those pleas. I haven't read a single one, since the email subject lines alone tell me what B.S. they are. For example, from today's emails: Lots and lots of people are donating today, and now they are hoping you'll do the same.

No they aren't. Most of them are hoping they will never get another donation request from the Harris campaign (I'm sure Trump supporters feel the same way). Plus, it's too late for more money to make a difference.

Of course, I'm expecting that after November 5, I'm going to get many more texts and emails asking me to contribute so the Harris campaign can defend against Trump's attempt to overturn the results -- assuming Harris is victorious.

(4) No matter the outcome of the election, know that your life will go on pretty much as it always has. You'll have the same family, the same friends, the same co-workers, the same acquaintances. You'll eat the same food, exercise in the same way, go to the same places. The main difference is that once the outcome is known, you won't be worrying about that any more, since it will be a fact rather than an anxiety. 

Sure, new worries will pop up. You'll fret over how the newly elected president is doing, whether or not you voted for him/her. That's the nature of our minds. Instead of saying "I think, therefore I am," Descartes could have said, "I worry, therefore I am." 

But in line with the Two Arrows adage of Buddhism, when you worry, try not to worry about your worrying. 

Trump campaign is self-destructing. Great news for Harris.

Like lots of Democrats, I worry incessantly about how well the Harris campaign is doing. Even though the presidential race is essentially a toss-up, us Democrats fret that Harris isn't doing better, while Trump supporters look at the same toss-up and think, "We're going to win for sure."

But today I'm feeling a lot more optimistic. 

Right on schedule, with just over a week to go before the election, the Trump campaign is self-destructing in plain view of voters. The clearest sign of this is the disastrous Trump rally in Madison Square Garden Sunday night. 

Trump and other speakers were their usual racist, hateful, misogynistic, insulting selves.

That would have made headlines by itself, since this is when presidential campaigns make their closing arguments to the American public, and the Trump campaign is getting darker and more negative as November 5 nears. 

However, the icing on the cake for those of us strongly opposed to Trump ever inhabiting the White House again was a supposed comic (he wasn't at all funny) making a lame joke about Puerto Rico.

In his joke, Hinchcliffe, known for his comedy podcast Kill Tony, said: "There’s a lot going on. I don’t know if you know this but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico."

There was little reaction from the attendees at the Trump rally, other than shock that someone would go on stage, stand at a podium displaying a Trump - Vance sign, and say something so stupid. I can only imagine that the reaction from Harris campaign staff was much stronger, since this was a gift to them.

It spurred Bad Bunny, a highly popular Puerto Rico singer, to endorse Harris. And the Harris campaign is publicizing the "floating island of garbage" statement to Puerto Rico immigrants in swing states, notably including hundreds of thousands in Pennsylvania. 

Given how close polls show the race is between Harris and Trump, small shifts in voter preferences can have a big impact. The fallout over the Hinchcliffe's remark is impacting the campaigns.

One day after the rally, the fallout over the vulgar and racist comments made by some guests in the pre-program continue to reverberate across the campaign. Republican allies of the former president have had to publicly defend Puerto Rico and denounce the comments. Puerto Ricans in the crucial battleground state of Pennsylvania are planning to protest Trump’s rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Tuesday. And Harris’ campaign has cut a new digital ad over the rally comments and held events with Latino surrogates in Philadelphia.

There's more good news for Harris. Worries about Black men deserting Harris appear to be overblown.

A new NAACP survey found Republican Donald Trump’s support among young Black men has dwindled with a little more than a week to go before Election Day.

The poll found Black men under 50 years old decreased their likelihood of voting for the former president, dropping from 27 percent to 21 percent since a previous survey asking the same question was released last month.

Researchers involved with the survey say Vice President Kamala Harris’ support among this bloc jumped from 51 percent to 59 percent over that same time frame.

“What we know from these data is that the voter apathy is being concentrated among folks who already had a plan to vote for Donald Trump, and so that’s really the big takeaway here,” said Joshua Doss of HIT Strategies, which conducted the survey.

...While the overall support among all Black voters for Trump is down slightly in the new NAACP survey — 11 percent compared to last month’s 13 percent — it’s roughly the same percentage of the Black vote Trump received in 2020. Another 9 percent said they were undecided.

I ditched my Washington Post subscription after Bezos tanked a Harris endorsement

After Trump won the presidency in 2016, I subscribed to the digital versions of the New York Times and Washington Post. For about $15 a month each, I figured this was money well spent to support some of the best journalists in the country.

You know, those who Trump calls "the enemy of the people." Or more recently, "the enemy within." (That category includes many others as well, including Democratic politicians and liberal activists.)

For almost eight years I've enjoyed both newspapers. But today I went to the Subscriptions section of my iPhone settings and unsubscribed from the digital Washington Post. I'm paid up until the middle of next month, so the Post won't notice I'm missing until they fail to get $16.99 from me on November 15.

My reason? A story in yesterday's edition, "The Washington Post says it will not endorse a candidate for president," tells the annoying tale.

The Washington Post’s publisher said Friday that the paper will not make an endorsement in this year’s presidential contest, for the first time in 36 years, or in future presidential races.

The decision, announced 11 days before an election that most polls show as too close to call, drew immediate and heated condemnation from a wide swath of subscribers, political figures and media commentators. Robert Kagan, a longtime Post columnist and editor-at-large in the opinion department, resigned in protest, and a group of 11 Washington Post columnists co-signed an article condemning the decision. Angry readers and sources flooded the email inboxes of numerous staffers with complaints.

...An endorsement of Harris had been drafted by Post editorial page staffers but had yet to be published, according to two people who were briefed on the sequence of events and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The decision to no longer publish presidential endorsements was made by The Post’s owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, according to four people who were briefed on the decision.

So the Post's billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, followed in the footsteps of the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, who also ordered that his newspaper not make a presidential endorsement this year, which also would have been Kamala Harris. The Post story says:

The Post decision marks the second time this week that a major media organization has declined to issue an endorsement in the race between the Republican nominee, former president Donald Trump, and his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, after years of making such endorsements. Earlier this week, Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, blocked a planned endorsement of Harris, prompting the resignation of the newspaper’s editorials editor.

I can't stand billionaires who acquire a media company (Elon Musk is another example, with Twitter) and then turn it into a vehicle for their right-wing views. It would be bad enough if this was based on their sincerely-held conservative political beliefs, but worse is what seems to have happened with the tankings of a Harris endorsement by the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times.

Namely, that Bezos and Soon-Shiong wanted to avoid making Trump angry at them and their newspapers if he defeats Harris for the presidency and then embarks on his promised revenge tour against those who opposed his campaign. To me this is the most likely reason for the non-endorsements of Harris. 

If Bezos and Soon-Shiong had merely wanted to stop the practice of making presidential endorsements, which other papers have done for decent reasons, they could have done this months ago, well before the November election.

Instead, they ordered a stop to a Harris endorsement just a few days before November 5, which makes the decisions reek of narrow self-interest, given the stakes involved in who succeeds Biden as president. That's why I sent this message to the Washington Post after cancelling my digital subscription. I used a Contact feature that offered help with subscription problems. 

I don't need any help, as I just cancelled my digital subscription. I did this because Bezos squashing the paper's endorsement of Harris showed me that I can no longer trust that the Post is neutral when reporting on politics. You guys apparently want to rely on subscriptions from Trump supporters. Good luck with that. Trump calls journalists the enemy of the people. It saddens me that the Post cares more about sucking up to Trump than being a factual reporter of the news and fearless when it comes to endorsements. 

My prediction is that Kamala Harris will be a great president

Last night I watched the CNN town hall featuring Kamala Harris and a group of undecided Pennsylvania voters. No Donald Trump, because he was afraid of an invitation to debate Harris on CNN that she accepted, and when CNN offered Trump his own town hall, he chickened out of that also.

So much for the fake-macho Republican presidential candidate that world leaders supposedly fear. Trump doesn't even have the courage to go head-to-head with Harris again, undoubtedly because she kicked his ass badly in their previous debate.

Watching Harris answer questions from the undecided voters, occasionally side-stepping a pointed question but always giving a good response, made me think, "She's going to be a wonderful president."

Sure, I realize that Harris first has to win the November election. That's by no means a foregone conclusion, given how the polls have the presidential race as a 50-50 proposition. Way too close for comfort. 

But I'm predicting that Harris is going to come out on top in the election.

I don't have a magic ball, or even any unique insights into the state of the race. However, I follow politics closely, and Harris seems to have the edge over Trump when it comes to voter turnout -- which is going to be the factor that determines who wins.

The Trump campaign seems to be placing more emphasis on challenging the results of the election than on winning it. That's a sign of weakness. The Harris campaign strikes me as much more organized when it comes to turning out its base. 

I readily admit, though, that part of my confidence in a Harris victory stems from a strong reluctance to believe that a majority of voters are okay with electing a candidate as flawed as Trump: convicted criminal, incoherent speaker, habitual liar, a fascist according to his chief of staff, consumed with a desire for retribution against his enemies.

When independents and Republicans who don't like Trump vote, I want to believe that enough of them will cast their ballot for Harris to preserve my confidence in the wisdom of the American public. It's just so damn obvious that Harris would be a hugely better president than Trump. 

She's intelligent, caring, strong, competent, a good leader. This is evident to Republicans also, since they are much less fearful of Harris becoming president than Democrats are of Trump becoming president. Even Trump voters know that Harris will be a solid president who won't abuse her power for selfish ends -- something that can't be said about Trump. 

Next week Harris will be holding a rally in Washington, D.C. at the spot where Trump spoke before a mob of his followers staged an insurrection at the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the 2020 Biden victory. 

Great decision. This will remind the American people that Trump sat on his fat butt for three hours, sipping Diet Coke and watching Fox News, doing nothing to stop the violence at the Capitol that he incited. 

After Harris wins on November 5, I'll be looking forward to the trial of Trump on the charges of attempting to overturn the election results moving forward. He deserves to go to jail for what he did. But even if that doesn't happen, a Harris victory will mean that Jack Smith is able to continue his prosecution of Trump.

The nation deserves a jury trial where evidence of Trump's wrongdoing is presented in a court of law, not just the January 6 committee. We also deserve a Kamala Harris presidency, and I'm looking forward to that coming to pass.