OK, that headline is a bit misleading — I love being a buzzkill. It's my happy place.
At least when it comes to politics. If it's a barbecue or a cocktail party, I am the Number One Fun-Maker.
Now that I've resigned myself to the fact that next year I'll be an expatriate resistance writer after the Kamala Harris nightmare becomes reality, I've been looking around for things that might have triggered me in the past month. There have been quite a few things, but this column's topic is the primary cause of bees in my bonnet as this week begins.
I look horrible in a bonnet, by the way.
There's been a lot of back-and-forth between the Trump and Harris camps about the crowd sizes at their respective rallies. My friends and colleagues in conservative media love writing about the crowds that Donald Trump and J.D. Vance are drawing, especially while all of the nausea-inducing hype about Kamala Harris is at a fever pitch.
Here's the thing though: none of it means a damn thing.
Maybe I can talk myself into a little nuance here. It's worth a try. I'll probably need some new tricks when I'm writing resistance columns from an expat compound in Costa Rica, so I'll start practicing now.
From the moment that Joe Biden was unceremoniously thrown off of the Democratic ticket stepped aside and Kamala Harris giddily began dancing on his political grave, I was plagued by the worst of the 2020 memories. Trump was cruising along, the momentum was his, then he and Republican voters were thrown a big league curveball.
Relevant: Your Friendly Reminder That the Democrats Are Brilliant at Using Chaos to Their Advantage
True, a lot of the specifics are different this year, but the angst that the shakeup has caused reminds me of how I was feeling as the Summer of 2020 was nearing an end.
The COVID restrictions in 2020 did ruin Trump's rally mojo, but I don't think that's how we got here.
While I do think that Trump's rallies are good for morale, I don't think that they move the electoral needle much, if at all. Undecided voters aren't standing in line for three hours to hear Trump speak. The crowds are mostly filled with people who have had to donate clothes to Goodwill to clear out room in their closets for all of their MAGA gear. The thousands of people you see at a Trump rally are about to vote for him for the third election in a row. A good time is had by all, but no new hearts and minds are won over, because everyone in attendance has already purchased a 2024 ticket on the Trump Train.
On the flip side, the Democrats don't need public displays of enthusiasm as much. There was none for Biden this year, of course, so I'm sure they are enjoying any evidence of Kamalamania that they see outside of MSM news and production rooms, however artificial it may be.
The thing that the Dems enjoy more, however, is seeing operatives laying plans to get people out for early voting and getting the ballot harvesting machine ready to hum.
What they are greatly anticipating is the excitement of big blue city election officials in swing states as they count the "unexpected" flood of late mail-in ballots after all of the Republican votes have been tallied. The frustration over low turnouts at Harris-Walz rallies will disappear when whatever lead Trump had when the polls closed evaporates that night or in the following days.
What will excite me is some big ad spending by the Trump-Vance campaign in swing states. A lot of the kinds of the voters Trump needs to reach still watch network television. I live in Arizona and I'm visiting Michigan and the ratio of Harris to Trump ads is appalling. My mom is skipping her nightly viewing regimen because she got sick of the Harris ads. Other people her age might be more impressionable.
I didn't do so well with the nuance, did I?
There's always tomorrow. Until next January, anyway.
I'm starting my "resistance" work early in the hope that it can send Kamala Harris into an unplanned retirement. You can help me avoid international moving costs by becoming a part of our VIP subscriber family during our big DNC Week Special. Subscribe here and use the promo code FIGHT for a huge SIXTY PERCENT discount.
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