Crouching Women, Hidden Votes

This is one of those rare, delicious moments in politics. Throw the polls out the window, because they mean nothing except to the political professionals who watch trends and draw only the most cautious conclusions. It’s a moment when your gut tells you more than the numbers, when the giddy enthusiasm says more than the numbers, the policy positions, the “character” questions, and the press releases,

Polling is a difficult job made moreso by disappearing landline telephone service and the selective phone answering that seems to accompany cell service. This is well known, and seems to lead a great many people to conclude that polls have simply become useless. Those people are wrong. Polling is highly useful, which is why universities, news organizations, and campaigns themselves still pay for it. You just need to understand its limitations. One limitation is that, three months out from an election, polls must not be taken as predictive.

At this moment, while the polls are not predictive, they certainly do indicate trends, and the overwhelmingly obvious one is a movement away from Donald Trump and J.D. Vance toward the Democrats. Even more telling is the still-rising level of enthusiasm among Democrats. It is inevitable, I believe, that this be accompanied by some level of dispiritedness on the other side.

These things are hard to measure. Even harder — impossible, I think — is the degree of contagion in this attitudinal shift. My “gut” tells me that both — the sky-high zeal among Democrats, especially — are highly infectious, By “gut,” by the way, I mean a combination of experience, off-the-cuff informal analytics, and whatever intuition is.

Together, these things give me hope for two developments. The first is that Harris and her magnetic running mate, Tim Walz, have the kind of political coattails that can save the Senate and gain the House for the Democrats. The second is that their margin of victory may be sufficient to render any election challenge by Trump completely laughable, even for the MAGA core.

I mentioned off-the-cuff analytics. Principally I refer to two elements. The first has to do with the abortion issue, and the second with Trump himself.

As to Trump, his act has just grown old. His relentless, vindictive anger. His compulsive lying. His naked greed, His tasteless crudity. His increasing looniness. It’s a familiar act, unrelieved by any normal sense of humanity, compassion, empathy, or even humor. How his base puts up with it is hard to say, but there’s a part of his support that may be sick of it. These are people motivated, not by love of Trump, but simply by their hatred of Democrats, planted, cultivated, and fertilized by Fox News. These are people who will never vote for a Democrat, but who need somebody other than the orange felon to move them to the polls.

The other semi-wild card is women voters. Constitutional amendments are on the ballot in several states to protect the right to abortion. This raises the destruction of Roe v. Wade back to a level of prominence not seen since the Supreme Court issued its Dobbs decision, and brings back all of the anger associated with that travesty. Combined with the excitement over Harris herself, I think it means a wave of female voting that may well be unprecedented.

We shall see. I think surprises are in order. Celebration, too, if you’re a Democrat.