The Case Against Your Election Heartburn
We’re just shy of a week to go until the election and it feels like everyone’s mental health is rapidly deteriorating. The race is closer than everyone would like for it to be, and that’s causing everyone to develop a very acute case of election heartburn. In the past week I’ve had to give more than a couple friends a pep talk to pull them out of a doom spiral, and I’d like to try to pull you out of one as well.
The reality as we head toward election day is that the race is very close, and anyone who’s telling you anything other than that isn’t properly assessing the the data. The polling shows tight margins in the states that Harris needs to win, and the fact that it isn’t a runaway is the root cause of everyone’s spiral. Would I be super happy if the polling was such that we could ignore this and just watch the World Series? Of course! But it’s not. It’s also not secretly a runaway for Trump, but people keep acting like it is.
Denny Carter wrote a great piece earlier this month called Jimmy Garoppolo, The 2024 Election, And How I Learned To Watch The Game, where he used football to differentiate between the stats and how the game is played in politics, and it stuck with me. You should read it if you haven’t because it gets at something I’ve noticed with the people I know who are panicking about the election — they’re looking at the polls but they aren’t watching how the game is played. In a close race Harris has a huge advantage because she’s the only one who’s playing the game. But what does playing the game mean in an electoral context?
It’s having a message that’s meeting the voters about their concerns.
If you watch a lot of sports like I do, you see a lot of political advertising. Harris is attempting to talk to voters about the important issues, with ads about health care and kitchen table issues like rising costs. Meanwhile, the only Trump ad that’s being run is a disgustingly bigoted one attacking Harris for “taxpayer funded transgender surgeries for illegal immigrants”, which feels like a mad lib done by a guy who got too mad to finish it. I know that after 2016 everyone is a bit gun shy about saying that a message is too bigoted resonate with Americans, but the GOP tried running on trans panic in 2022 and it blew up in their face. The only reason they’re running it again is that it plays well on Twitter, which yeah sure it’s going to play in a conservative echo chamber but that is crucially not real life.
It’s maintaining a fundraising advantage.
The Harris campaign is raising money at an incredible pace, outpacing the Trump campaign three to one. That’s good in a traditional sense, campaigns need money after all, but it’s also a sign of voter enthusiasm. You can say “well, the billionaires will make up this gap” but the dollar value isn’t the important part, it’s about how many people are willing to donate to you. Billionaires only get one vote, same as you and I, and a campaign needs to turn out people before Election Day because of the most important part of playing the game as we go into the final week.
It’s having a ground game.
The Harris campaign has a robust network of volunteers who are energized, the Trump campaign has paid canvassers funded by Elon Musk who are sharing how to fake their voter contacts. If the election is as close as the polls indicate it is, doing the work to get people excited to go out to vote is going to be the difference maker. And that’s really what it comes down to. There is a close race and there are two candidates — one’s running a campaign doing things that we know work to win an election, and the other is doing a kind of electoral free jazz, holding rallies in confusing locations (and with disastrously racist results). I would much rather be Harris right now than Trump.
Of course, there’s the looming specter that Trump is going try to steal the election again, like he did on January 6th. That’s something that the Democrats are preparing for, but there are also a bunch of structural disadvantages for Trump if he does try to do that. For one, now that people have tried and failed, they know that they’re going to be punished for trying to overthrow the results of an election. Sure the Biden administration should have done more, but if you’re paying attention to Trump’s lawyers, they’re worried because people were held accountable for January 6th. It’s also important that Trump isn’t the President anymore because it’s a lot harder to try to seize power than it is to try to maintain it, and it gets a lot harder if the Dems control the House after the election. You also need to keep the election close, and while I’ve written all of this with the assumption that the polls are correct and close, it’s possible that they’re off significantly in Harris’s favor for a bunch of reasons (underestimating the number of women voting, incredibly low response rates, overcorrections from 2016 and 2020). It’s something to keep an eye on and have a plan for, but it’s not a surefire move for Trump and you should adjust your thinking accordingly.
I can keep making logical arguments against real situations and hypotheticals for much longer, but the point I want to make about election heartburn is emotional, and it’s direct. You don’t gain anything by feeling bad about the election, so if you’re doing things that make you feel bad, you should stop doing them and find ways to feel good. You don’t have to seek out news that makes you feel bad and reject news that makes you feel good. You aren’t going to change the results by being convinced that your pessimism makes your opinions correct, you’re just going to make yourself feel bad. If you feel bad or you’re worried, the only thing that you can do is volunteer your time and try to change things. I can’t promise that it’s going to be the thing that wins the election, but I can definitively say it’s a better use of your time than sitting around and feeling bad.
