Iowa, my native state, has six electoral votes. Let's hope they are denied to Trump and Shady Vance. It would make their path to 270 that much more difficult.
I saw the head of the Des Moines Register polling interviewed this morning. She said their methodology does not include weighting and manipulating the data according to previous elections or polling. It is the same as the 2 previous presidential elections.
She noted - although she doesn’t have data to show causation - movement toward Dems / Harris after abortion became an issue. Some difference in the makeup of “likely voters”.
To me the BIG NEWS was that women 65 and over are breaking for Harris 2:1 and Dems are favored in 2 Congressional districts.
Women 65 and older, which includes me, are breaking for Harris because we remember. We remember life without access to abortion and contraception and are appalled at the current state of reproductive rights. Harris says we won't go back, but we have, and we'd like to see that fixed.
I’m well past 65. Seniors including women have been reliable votes for the GOP until Roe was decimated. We’ve lost a lot of ground. I think Harris is referring to a national ban. But with the right Congress she would sign a bill to reinstate Roe. Certainly there would be no anti-contraception bill on her watch.
No one is happy about fighting battles for decades only to find ourselves doing it again. We should tell a large group of voters electing a clown has consequences.
I hang on your current optimism, Steven, because where I live the trump train rages. Just yesterday I noticed that Saturday night somebody trespassed deeply onto my yard to steal the Harris and Casey signs. They also removed the Harris sign from my son's yard. And, of course, my Sunday was further ruined by the damn pervasion of gunshots, anarchists no doubt practicing for the big showdown to come later this week. But my rural area is like that, so it is not really an indication of national trending. I am not sure that I will be psychologically able to watch the live election results. Go Kamala, Go America!
It is like that around where I live too...big guns every weekend, and flags flapping from every jacked up truck and flying in yards with all sorts of other maga flags. Ugh. I still need to see if the deeply planted signs are still there this morning too, I have been making the rounds checking...
This is perhaps the best of all columns written by Steven Beschloss. It captures the most vivid reasons we should elect Kamala Harris as our next President. My fear of a Trump victory is waning, even with the specter of a Vance Presidency should Trump not be able to serve his full term. Thank you, Steven, for your ongoing wisdom and positivity. It’s been a most welcome oasis during these past years and especially now as we reach the end of a political season we’d like to forget.
Thanks so much for this and all your posts, Steven. This virtual community has afforded me much hope and courage. I will vote tomorrow at my little township hall.
I just read Heather Cox Richardson's piece on the parallels to the Civil War times. It too brings hope. And so here is Abe with a last word:
"that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
I agree with your thought and had just listened to Heather Cox Richardson's same piece. Between HCR and Steven's piece I feel like we have great hope for the future of this democratic republican experiment.
Tomorrow will be a historically fateful day for America, as was Pearl Harbor, D-Day, and 911. This time it will be the people's vote that will direct the outcome. I'm voting for character, decency and the return to the rule of law. Buckle up, we will need our strength and courage to face the turbulent days and weeks ahead.
Harris’s election will be an historic moment, a Pearl Harbor or D Day moment which will release the press from their road to perdition, to return to their noble responsibility to thoroughly and fairly report the news. Cannot wait to see the headlines.
Thank you for your profound and hopefully, prophetic words, Steven.
My expectation is that this will be much closer than any of us would like, and that TFG will come on TV somewhere around 10:30 pm and simply announce that he won. It sets the stage for everything that will follow by him, Vance, MAGA, as well as all of their acolytes and sycophants. The groundwork has been laid for election denialism, doubt, and violence. It won't stop tomorrow. Hell, they're still whining about 2020 even though he KNOWS he lost.
Let the orange crush huff and puff til he’s blue in the face! He will NOT blow down our house of Democracy. We, the people, are voting! Take heart, be courageous, we have Marc Elias with his merry band of election lawyers, and the rule of law to sustain us. 🎉🇺🇸
Mike, I have no doubt that at some point Trump will claim an early victory (unless somebody around him with some sense finds a way to block him- granted, a stretch). But I don't think this is going to be as close as some folks fear. And if a few of the stars line up just right, it won't be very close at all. I also look at Trump's "events" and they aren't at all the kind of thing we saw four years ago. The guy has to *pay* people to attend. Some of them have been disasters. The best he can do is lack-luster. I am not naive: I grew up around people who could put on a real duster. Trump's aren't. Maybe, like me, what you are saying is maybe a little like superstition. I still am afraid to say out loud that I think we're going to pull this off, for fear of jinxing it.
But what I've been watching for a long while now is not Trump winning. It's one wipe-out after another. His followers are not wired up the way they were because he's starting to sound like a loser, and that's not what they want to see. One of the things that gets in the way is the over-emphasis placed on polling by the media, and an extremely poor sense of what exactly polls are and their limitations. They don't know what they are talking about.
Maybe I'm whistling into the wind. But I sure hope not. For a while I was holding my breath. I'm letting it out now, because nothing has happened to make me believe that Trump is going to come out anywhere close to where he wants to be. It is almost as if he knows it, and is doing a long dive at the finish. May he leave a nice splat.
We won't know tomorrow and we probably won't for several days, especially as some of Trump's lackeys (and supporters) are going to do their best to gum up the count with bogus law suits. The first one the other day, in Georgia, set a fine example of what they should expect.
Great article, Steven. I too am optimistic Kamala/Walz will win. I just hope it’s a large enough margin & with large victories in the House & Senate, as well.
This one sentence sums his campaign & sychophants up succinctly, ‘We have endured—and seek the closing of—the repetitive playbook of this felonious, fascistic, increasingly incoherent and whining demagogue who suffers from malignant narcissism, lacks impulse control, prefers dictators, cannot tolerate criticism, promises retribution, despises democracy, abhors the people’s will and yearns to be a dictator.’ We have a long road ahead to get them ALL removed from public office. But after these past eight years, I hope we’re up to the task. Because once the healing begins, it will become easy for some to forget just how horribly awful they are/were.
This is one of your best, if not THE best, posts. It gives us hope yet steels our spines for the fight that will remain. Trump may be gone but Trumpism will still need to be defeated. So, everyone, take a well deserved breath but don’t go to sleep for too long.
Next steps: state legislators, national popular vote compact (neutralizes the electoral college) and judges. In my area, 7 of the 8 judges running as Republicans were uncontested. We’ve got to eat this elephant one bite at a time.
The one thing that will make a difference after Kamala wins with a mandate, is that no one else in the GOP can take the place of tfg. JD just has no charisma, and he cannot command the loyalty. There is no one else who is a leader, the depth of political talent that we enjoy as Democrats doesn’t exist in the almost defunct Republican Party.
First, thank you Steve, for your optimism and wisdom shown in today’s column. I hope and pray you are right.
But when you are, it doesn’t just sound like a hard slog, it will be a very hard, often discouraging, effort to bring tens of millions of our fellow citizens to their senses.
While my evidence is personal, anecdotal, I believe a vast majority of trumpers have been swimming in the cesspool of Fox and its spin-off fellow propaganda outlets for so many years they have no idea of the truth about trumpism and fail to remember the horrors of fascism.
A modest suggestion: Let’s revive the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine and apply it to all forms of electronic media, not just the over-the-air broadcasters.
Would this run afoul of the First Amendment, which forbids the “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press”? Since you’re not restricting speech but mandating that it be expanded perhaps not.
This would prevent Fox, X-Twitter, and their ilk from spreading their unadulterated propaganda without balancing points of view. Not equal time, but a fair representation of opposing ideas and opinions.
While I’m now retired, as I remember from my days in radio and television news, including ownership of a news-talk radio station, complying with the Fairness Doctrine never broke a sweat.
Without something like its return, Fox and the Foxilk will never reform – has Fox really reformed despite losing its massive libel suit? -- and tens of millions of Americans, who never leave their silos, will become even further ensnared in right-wing lies.
Your optimism is what I need every day. Trump and his toxic movement has worn so many of us down and we're exhausted. We thought Joe Biden's victory in 2020 signaled the end of Trump, and in a normal world it would have been. But I recognize that's one of his goals...to wear us down so much that we simply give up. WE simply cannot let that happen because it means that he has won. My fantasy is that Harris wins big with Obama-like numbers.
Though I am cautiously optimistic that tomorrow's vote will result in a tremendous Harris victory, I remain concerned about the overall body politic. I'm 65, and I wonder if the damage caused by Trump and his followers can be repaired in my lifetime.
Thank you for this column, Steven. It gives me hope.
I agree with these points. Make sure we also personally refute lies which are given to us in emails, conversations, and presentations, etc.. Too many of us sit quietly and then refute/dispute in private. Public lies need to be publicly called out for what they are. They are based on feelings and beliefs.
Listen closely, find (any) values, principles (that can be found), work from there to build possible alternatives to the violence, disrespect and hatred. It takes a lot of work, but this is needed if we are to help heal the rifts that have grown into epic proportions. Most of the folks spewing out this garbage are repeaters not thinkers. If we can get them to be still long enough to hear that their (supposed) values are, and (if) what they say and do lines up with those...perhaps they will start thinking, caring and living again. Actually, that is a good thing for all of us to do.
Well done. I join all the others who enjoyed this today. And I agree with Steve that we’ll “be dealing for a long time with the poison he’s injected into the bloodstream of our body politic.”
Iowa, my native state, has six electoral votes. Let's hope they are denied to Trump and Shady Vance. It would make their path to 270 that much more difficult.
I saw the head of the Des Moines Register polling interviewed this morning. She said their methodology does not include weighting and manipulating the data according to previous elections or polling. It is the same as the 2 previous presidential elections.
She noted - although she doesn’t have data to show causation - movement toward Dems / Harris after abortion became an issue. Some difference in the makeup of “likely voters”.
To me the BIG NEWS was that women 65 and over are breaking for Harris 2:1 and Dems are favored in 2 Congressional districts.
https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/politics/iowa-poll/2024/11/03/iowa-poll-democrats-preferred-over-republicans-congress-nunn-baccam-miller-meeks-bohannan-hinson/75988058007/
Women 65 and older, which includes me, are breaking for Harris because we remember. We remember life without access to abortion and contraception and are appalled at the current state of reproductive rights. Harris says we won't go back, but we have, and we'd like to see that fixed.
I’m well past 65. Seniors including women have been reliable votes for the GOP until Roe was decimated. We’ve lost a lot of ground. I think Harris is referring to a national ban. But with the right Congress she would sign a bill to reinstate Roe. Certainly there would be no anti-contraception bill on her watch.
No one is happy about fighting battles for decades only to find ourselves doing it again. We should tell a large group of voters electing a clown has consequences.
"Shady Vance" -- love it! Wish I'd heard it a long time back, because I would have immediately "borrowed it"! :-)
I hang on your current optimism, Steven, because where I live the trump train rages. Just yesterday I noticed that Saturday night somebody trespassed deeply onto my yard to steal the Harris and Casey signs. They also removed the Harris sign from my son's yard. And, of course, my Sunday was further ruined by the damn pervasion of gunshots, anarchists no doubt practicing for the big showdown to come later this week. But my rural area is like that, so it is not really an indication of national trending. I am not sure that I will be psychologically able to watch the live election results. Go Kamala, Go America!
It is like that around where I live too...big guns every weekend, and flags flapping from every jacked up truck and flying in yards with all sorts of other maga flags. Ugh. I still need to see if the deeply planted signs are still there this morning too, I have been making the rounds checking...
I commiserate. Regards. JS
((( )))
Let the Orange Crush begin (it already has!)
This is perhaps the best of all columns written by Steven Beschloss. It captures the most vivid reasons we should elect Kamala Harris as our next President. My fear of a Trump victory is waning, even with the specter of a Vance Presidency should Trump not be able to serve his full term. Thank you, Steven, for your ongoing wisdom and positivity. It’s been a most welcome oasis during these past years and especially now as we reach the end of a political season we’d like to forget.
Thank you kindly for this thoughtful note, Richard. I do see this piece as a summing up.
Thanks so much for this and all your posts, Steven. This virtual community has afforded me much hope and courage. I will vote tomorrow at my little township hall.
I just read Heather Cox Richardson's piece on the parallels to the Civil War times. It too brings hope. And so here is Abe with a last word:
"that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
Thank you, Beth. We all need hope and courage in these tumultuous times.
I agree with your thought and had just listened to Heather Cox Richardson's same piece. Between HCR and Steven's piece I feel like we have great hope for the future of this democratic republican experiment.
Thank you for the wise words & encouragement. Looking forward to be lead by a true leader.
Tomorrow will be a historically fateful day for America, as was Pearl Harbor, D-Day, and 911. This time it will be the people's vote that will direct the outcome. I'm voting for character, decency and the return to the rule of law. Buckle up, we will need our strength and courage to face the turbulent days and weeks ahead.
Harris’s election will be an historic moment, a Pearl Harbor or D Day moment which will release the press from their road to perdition, to return to their noble responsibility to thoroughly and fairly report the news. Cannot wait to see the headlines.
Your optimism gives me strength to get through these next few days. America, America God shed your grace on US(A)
Thank you for your profound and hopefully, prophetic words, Steven.
My expectation is that this will be much closer than any of us would like, and that TFG will come on TV somewhere around 10:30 pm and simply announce that he won. It sets the stage for everything that will follow by him, Vance, MAGA, as well as all of their acolytes and sycophants. The groundwork has been laid for election denialism, doubt, and violence. It won't stop tomorrow. Hell, they're still whining about 2020 even though he KNOWS he lost.
Let the orange crush huff and puff til he’s blue in the face! He will NOT blow down our house of Democracy. We, the people, are voting! Take heart, be courageous, we have Marc Elias with his merry band of election lawyers, and the rule of law to sustain us. 🎉🇺🇸
Mike, I have no doubt that at some point Trump will claim an early victory (unless somebody around him with some sense finds a way to block him- granted, a stretch). But I don't think this is going to be as close as some folks fear. And if a few of the stars line up just right, it won't be very close at all. I also look at Trump's "events" and they aren't at all the kind of thing we saw four years ago. The guy has to *pay* people to attend. Some of them have been disasters. The best he can do is lack-luster. I am not naive: I grew up around people who could put on a real duster. Trump's aren't. Maybe, like me, what you are saying is maybe a little like superstition. I still am afraid to say out loud that I think we're going to pull this off, for fear of jinxing it.
But what I've been watching for a long while now is not Trump winning. It's one wipe-out after another. His followers are not wired up the way they were because he's starting to sound like a loser, and that's not what they want to see. One of the things that gets in the way is the over-emphasis placed on polling by the media, and an extremely poor sense of what exactly polls are and their limitations. They don't know what they are talking about.
Maybe I'm whistling into the wind. But I sure hope not. For a while I was holding my breath. I'm letting it out now, because nothing has happened to make me believe that Trump is going to come out anywhere close to where he wants to be. It is almost as if he knows it, and is doing a long dive at the finish. May he leave a nice splat.
We won't know tomorrow and we probably won't for several days, especially as some of Trump's lackeys (and supporters) are going to do their best to gum up the count with bogus law suits. The first one the other day, in Georgia, set a fine example of what they should expect.
Great article, Steven. I too am optimistic Kamala/Walz will win. I just hope it’s a large enough margin & with large victories in the House & Senate, as well.
This one sentence sums his campaign & sychophants up succinctly, ‘We have endured—and seek the closing of—the repetitive playbook of this felonious, fascistic, increasingly incoherent and whining demagogue who suffers from malignant narcissism, lacks impulse control, prefers dictators, cannot tolerate criticism, promises retribution, despises democracy, abhors the people’s will and yearns to be a dictator.’ We have a long road ahead to get them ALL removed from public office. But after these past eight years, I hope we’re up to the task. Because once the healing begins, it will become easy for some to forget just how horribly awful they are/were.
Thank you, Susan. Let’s hope we get to the amnesia phase.
This is one of your best, if not THE best, posts. It gives us hope yet steels our spines for the fight that will remain. Trump may be gone but Trumpism will still need to be defeated. So, everyone, take a well deserved breath but don’t go to sleep for too long.
Next steps: state legislators, national popular vote compact (neutralizes the electoral college) and judges. In my area, 7 of the 8 judges running as Republicans were uncontested. We’ve got to eat this elephant one bite at a time.
Thank you, Annette.
The one thing that will make a difference after Kamala wins with a mandate, is that no one else in the GOP can take the place of tfg. JD just has no charisma, and he cannot command the loyalty. There is no one else who is a leader, the depth of political talent that we enjoy as Democrats doesn’t exist in the almost defunct Republican Party.
First, thank you Steve, for your optimism and wisdom shown in today’s column. I hope and pray you are right.
But when you are, it doesn’t just sound like a hard slog, it will be a very hard, often discouraging, effort to bring tens of millions of our fellow citizens to their senses.
While my evidence is personal, anecdotal, I believe a vast majority of trumpers have been swimming in the cesspool of Fox and its spin-off fellow propaganda outlets for so many years they have no idea of the truth about trumpism and fail to remember the horrors of fascism.
A modest suggestion: Let’s revive the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine and apply it to all forms of electronic media, not just the over-the-air broadcasters.
Would this run afoul of the First Amendment, which forbids the “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press”? Since you’re not restricting speech but mandating that it be expanded perhaps not.
This would prevent Fox, X-Twitter, and their ilk from spreading their unadulterated propaganda without balancing points of view. Not equal time, but a fair representation of opposing ideas and opinions.
While I’m now retired, as I remember from my days in radio and television news, including ownership of a news-talk radio station, complying with the Fairness Doctrine never broke a sweat.
Without something like its return, Fox and the Foxilk will never reform – has Fox really reformed despite losing its massive libel suit? -- and tens of millions of Americans, who never leave their silos, will become even further ensnared in right-wing lies.
Your optimism is what I need every day. Trump and his toxic movement has worn so many of us down and we're exhausted. We thought Joe Biden's victory in 2020 signaled the end of Trump, and in a normal world it would have been. But I recognize that's one of his goals...to wear us down so much that we simply give up. WE simply cannot let that happen because it means that he has won. My fantasy is that Harris wins big with Obama-like numbers.
Though I am cautiously optimistic that tomorrow's vote will result in a tremendous Harris victory, I remain concerned about the overall body politic. I'm 65, and I wonder if the damage caused by Trump and his followers can be repaired in my lifetime.
Thank you for this column, Steven. It gives me hope.
I agree with these points. Make sure we also personally refute lies which are given to us in emails, conversations, and presentations, etc.. Too many of us sit quietly and then refute/dispute in private. Public lies need to be publicly called out for what they are. They are based on feelings and beliefs.
Listen closely, find (any) values, principles (that can be found), work from there to build possible alternatives to the violence, disrespect and hatred. It takes a lot of work, but this is needed if we are to help heal the rifts that have grown into epic proportions. Most of the folks spewing out this garbage are repeaters not thinkers. If we can get them to be still long enough to hear that their (supposed) values are, and (if) what they say and do lines up with those...perhaps they will start thinking, caring and living again. Actually, that is a good thing for all of us to do.
Well done. I join all the others who enjoyed this today. And I agree with Steve that we’ll “be dealing for a long time with the poison he’s injected into the bloodstream of our body politic.”