Coop Scoop Election Issue #10

Two days before election day, two crucial points are evident:

The Harris campaign is running at full blast with tens of thousands of volunteers driving her forward. She is on the verge of taking North Carolina, a body blow to the Republicans if it comes to pass, and internal polls show her gaining ground and moving ahead in almost all the swing states. Nationally, she will be way ahead in the popular vote.

MAGA and its allies, funded by the super-rich, have been flooding the zone with fake and skewed polls that create the false sensation that Trump is winning. And those hinky polls are often aggregated into more legit national polls, falsely inflating Trump’s numbers.

The Guardian suggests that even legit pollsters are perhaps “risk averse” and acting in a pack rendering the polls pointless.

“This near-monolithic picture, emerging from multiple polls, has triggered suspicions among some analysts of “herding” around state poll averages by pollsters cautious of being proved wrong for the third time running after significantly underestimating Trump’s support in 2016 and 2020.”

“Writing on NBC’s website, Josh Clinton, a politics professor at Vanderbilt University, and John Lapinski, the network’s director of elections, pondered whether the tied race reflected not the sentiments of the voters, but rather risk-averse decision-making by pollsters. Some, they suggested, may be wary of findings indicating unusually large leads for one candidate and introduce corrective weighting.

'Of the last 321 polls in the battlegrounds, 124 - nearly 40% - showed margins of a single point or less,' the pair wrote. Pennsylvania was the most 'troubling' case, with 20 out of 59 polls showing an exact tie, while another 26 showed margins of less than 1%.”

Yep. I would say that is somewhat suspicious. Indeed, The Guardian quotes one political academic as saying it is “impossible” that there be so many ties.

One of the more Democratic optimistic pollster/consultants, Simon Rosenberg, points out that of the four closing rallies Trump is staging, two of them are in North Carolina – more evidence that this state the Dems have not won in three decades might be slipping away.

Rosenberg features the final and respected Marist poll map indicating that Harris might already being very close to having the 270 electoral votes she needs. Just yesterday, the respected Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll run by Ann Selzer of Selzer Associates in Iowa blew apart the notion of a tie, showing Harris at 47 and Trump at 43 in a state where Trump had led Biden by 18 points as recently as June.

While Harris is charging ahead on the ground, Trump has spent the last two weeks publicly stumbling and more unhinged than ever. Be it his Nuremberg-like rally in Madison Square Garden to threatening his opponents with jail and violence, performing simulated oral sex while on the stage, and wasting time by campaigning in New Mexico where he has a 0.0 % chance of winning. These bizarre events might delight his diehard supporters but it can’t be winning him any fence-sitters or the moderate middle. It's a base appeal in every sense.

I am not predicting that these antics will lose the election for Trump, but at this point he looks panicked, politically confused, and with no clear strategy to win, other than resorting to the old standby: racism. If we didn’t know better, we would think he is trying to lose. Or more likely, he knows he is going to lose and is instead counting another Stop the Steal ruckus to block certification of Harris. More about that a few graphs down.

He sure is sounding like someone who’s not very focused on returning to the Oval Office.

Mediaite reports this rambling stretch of a speech this weekend in Michigan where he was weaving from golf courses, to taxes, to beaches to his “beautiful White skin” and sounding somewhat regretful if he has to go back to the White House even if it his only way of maybe staying out of jail:

“Trump criticized Harris and then complained that campaigning has prevented him from hitting the beach. 'She wants to tax companies,' he said. 'You know what happens when you tax them? They leave. A lot of these big companies, you know, they’re run by inter– they live in Switzerland. They have very glamorous lives. They have the life that I could’ve had if I decided not to do this, actually. Somebody said to me, ‘Are you glad you did it?’ I said, ‘Absolutely, but I could’ve been on the best beaches in the world. I own the best beaches in the world.'”

“The former president then bragged about having “beautiful white skin” and griped that the presidential race has prevented him from getting a proper tan:

"I could’ve been at the great Turnberry in Scotland. I could’ve been anywhere I wanted to be. I could’ve had those waves smacking me in the face. That white, beautiful white skin that I have would be nice and tan. I got the whitest skin ’cause I never have time to go out in the sun. But I have that beautiful white, and you know what? It could’ve been beautiful, tanned, beautiful.”

That, my friends, is what’s left in the saucepan after mixing cognitive decline with a confused strategy and more than a sprinkle of racism. He did not explain why he chose orange to cover his “beautiful” natural alabaster skin tone…if he even knows. He is mentally ill and not always on the same planet as the rest of us.

Have no illusions about this election being over on Tuesday night, unless we not only beat Trump, but trounce him. The bigger the margin of victory by Harris, the harder it is going to be for MAGA and its pro-fascist oligarch fellow travelers to block or overturn the legitimate results.

The ground work for another Stop the Steal movement has already been underway for weeks now, questioning not only the honesty [sic] but also revealing an underlying fear that Trump is losing. MAGA has already used the courts to narrow down what kind of absentee ballots should be counted, with not much success. But this is just kindling wood for the blaze that will light up the country in the 76 days between the election and inauguration.

Law enforcement has been preparing for multiple January 6-like events being staged in multiple state capitals instead of just in DC.

On Friday the liberal Governor of the state of Washington, Jay Inslee, ordered the state national guard to be on alert for disorder on and after election day.

Washington is solid blue with the largest population centers west of the Cascades with big Democratic majorities. But the eastern half, mostly rural, is a MAGA stronghold and a state minority.

During the 2020 Stop the Steal protests, a couple of hundred armed MAGA yahoos brandishing long guns rallied in the state capital of Olympia, in liberal territory, but were quickly dispersed and mostly ignored.

In my home city of Vancouver, across the river from Portland, purple territory trending a light blue, two mail-in drop boxes were set afire last week destroying a couple hundred ballots. Security around the multiple boxes has been fortified – albeit a little late.

The New York Times reports on the already growing movement to contest a Harris victory:

“Mr. Trump and his most prominent supporters have pointed to partisan polling and betting markets to claim that he is heading for a “crushing victory,” as his top surrogate Elon Musk recently put it. The expectation helps set the stage for disbelief and outrage among his supporters should he lose.

"And in a direct echo of his failed — and, prosecutors say, illegal — bid to remain in power after the 2020 election, some of his most influential advisers are suggesting he will yet again seek to claim victory before all the votes are counted, a move that ushered in his efforts to deny his defeat four years ago and helped set the stage for the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.”

One thing is for sure, sometime Tuesday night before all the votes are counted, and where Trump might be leading perhaps temporarily in one or two strategic states, he will appear on TV and claim he has won. I would expect this sometime around 10-11 p.m. on the East Coast. And the rest of the bullshit we already know, and we will see a replay of the manufactured claims of fraud, cheating, and so on.

One little wrinkle in this post-election scenario is that Donald J. Trump will face Judge Merchan for sentencing in the New York hush money false records case which resulted in 34 felony convictions of the Maga candidate.

An analysis by the NYTimes of hundreds of similar New York cases found that a near majority of those convicted were sentenced to jail ---usually for about a year. Worse for Trump, the Times found that those who were convicted but evaded incarceration, in almost every case, was the result of the guilty party cooperating with the prosecution in a plea deal.

Trump has done the opposite with Judge Merchan who he has relentlessly attacked and defamed and against whom Trump violated contempt orders 10 times. Expect no leniency in this case exactly three weeks after election day. And as this is a state trial in New York, it is not clear how an elected-but-not-yet-seated president has any legal tools to avoid punishment. It is unlikely that Trump would be jailed per se, but very likely he would be sentenced to home confinement with one of those very cool ankle bracelets tracking his whereabouts. Not great for golfers.

A Trump loss will also expose him to the Mother of All Federal Trials, the charge pending against him from January 6 prosecuted by Jack Smith. Nor has the possible federal trial for the holding of classified documents after he left office completely evaporated. The bumbling Trump lackey judge threw out the case on the most absurd of grounds and it is likely to be re-instated by the circuit appeals court that has already reversed clearly reckless and lawless decisions by the same judge in the same case.

If Trump wins, he might be held under home arrest in the New York case even as he directs whatever bootlicker to head the DOJ to toss the two federal cases. The feds have no jurisdiction over state cases.

If he loses, as I think he will, his fat ass will be up for grabs in those two very serious federal cases and a slew of civil cases that keeping flying toward him.

Trump, then, is not fighting to win the election, he is fighting for his life and that makes him twice as dangerous.

We don’t have a Reichstag to set on fire but who knows what stunt he might pull on the two remaining days.

All this adds up to this conclusion: the bigger the margin of defeat of Trump, the harder for Round Two of Stop the Steal. Not only do we have to make every vote count everywhere, but we most also steel ourselves for the next two months if Trump loses and for God knows how many years if this dangerous lunatic and his gang of fascists and racists and true nutcases rise to power.

Marc Cooper has written for Harper's, The New Yorker, The Nation, and many others. At the University of Southern California he was the founding director of Annenberg Digital News. Read him on Substack at ​The Coop Scoop​.