I think Kamala Harris is going to win the election this November.
I think this for the same reason that I thought Trump would win in 2016: modern Presidential elections are turn-out elections … they’re not about ‘winning over’ undecided voters but about turning out a supermajority of your core voters in your core districts … and I think Harris is beating Trump pretty handily in this regard, almost as badly as Trump was trouncing Biden a few months ago. There is authentic voter enthusiasm out there for Harris in Team Blue, a relief rally from Biden’s ‘retirement’ that has somehow been transformed into a vibrant campaign. This enthusiasm for Harris is as incomprehensible to me personally as the remaining enthusiasm for Trump in Team Red, but so what? It’s there, it’s growing, and I think it’s enough to get Harris to 270 electoral college votes.
I also think there’s nothing either candidate can do to change the Common Knowledge structures – what everyone knows that everyone knows – to alter voter turn-out at this point. For example, if Donald Trump were caught on a hot mic using the n-word, would that change anything? Ehh. I doubt it. If Kamala Harris were caught on a hot mic … oh, haha! that would require allowing her to be near a mic and speaking human words. Please.
I think both candidates understand the importance of the crowd watching the crowd, meaning that both candidates are focused on audience size and audience energy at their live speeches, and then doing everything possible to broadcast video of those rallies into swing state TV media. Here, though, Harris has a decided advantage over Trump in earned media (free media exposure by news networks) with most of the national media in the bag for her, so I think time works for Harris and against Trump. If the election were held tomorrow I think it’s a toss-up. With the election 40 days away … I think it’s a reasonably close (but maybe not that close) election that Harris wins.
Where the common knowledge game rears its ugly head is the day after the election: Wednesday, November 6th. That’s the day where, if I’m right, Kamala Harris has claimed victory in the early AM hours and where some hours later Donald Trump has … umm … also claimed to be the winner. Or at least has stated publicly that he is not the loser, that there is ‘evidence’ of a terrible fraud perpetrated against him, that the election has been stolen. Again.
Win or lose – and I think it’s lose – that’s what he’s going to say. That he’s the winner. You know it and I know it. We all know it. No one in a position of media prominence for Team Red or Team Blue – what we’d call a Missionary in common knowledge terms – is talking about it, because it’s totally counterproductive for either side to talk about it before it happens, but we all know that it’s going to happen. If he wins, he wins. If he loses … well, he didn’t lose. Donald Trump is not going to concede this election, and he’s going to call for ‘patriotic Americans’ to ‘stand up’ and ‘get to the bottom’ of it.
THIS is our common knowledge about Donald Trump: we all know that we all know that he will not accept the election result if he loses.
On Wednesday morning, the crowd – us – will look around at the crowd, wondering what happens next. Some of us will believe that Trump is right, that the election was ‘stolen’. More of us will believe that Trump is wrong. None of this matters. None of our personal beliefs, individually or in the aggregate, about the validity of the November elections matter. What matters is what a critical mass of Americans believe that a critical mass of Americans believe, and that common knowledge will be determined by the missionaries who step up to tell us how to think about the November elections.
The question is not whether Trump will accept the election result if he loses. He won’t.
The question is whether a missionary with actual power will join him.
I don’t think we will know until January if Georgia is going to hand count votes: What I do know is 49% of people will be happy, 49% will be sad, and 2% will wonder how people could have voted for either of the top 2 vote getters.
I received these two emails within literally 2 minutes of each other. LOL.
I hope you are wrong Ben. I know you dislike Trump. Many intellectuals do. What a terrible future the USA will have if Kamala wins. I live in CA. I understand the Democrat super-majority.
Zenchi( Rafa?) wrote this somewhere on the forum, not sure when but I saved it to remind me what’s important, because I never wanted to lose my self like I did in the 2020.
It is the organizing people by which we are driven to go tribal. By convincing us that there are only two views, and only two options, and if you are not this color, then you must be the other - that is how we are robbed of autonomy of mind.
that is why I am a believer in small scale, small community, small living - where the other is your neighbor and you can see them as a complete being and not some cartoonified enemy that turns us all into useful idiots.
Maybe Thomas Jefferson was correct…
As I was reading this I was just waiting for you to get to Elon.
I hate to even say this, but I think you got one thing wrong.
I think Elon has more to lose than Trump. Yes, sure, Trump probably ends up facing prison time if he loses this election. But he’s an old man and it would be a nightmare to actually jail someone with Secret Service protection. Like in all other cases in his life Trump will (probably) manage to skate by mostly unharmed.
But not Elon. I think a Harris administration is disastrous for Twitter. I think it’s even more disastrous for SpaceX, a company that is probably on balance far more important than anyone is willing to admit. His choice to go all-in on Trump seems both inevitable and also borderline suicidal if Harris wins. The danger for all of us is that he does the post-election math, realizes that he’s cooked either way, and figures he might as well go down with both phasers blazing. THAT is what would keep me up at night were I to think about it for any length of time.
Maybe they will take the next step this time…You know - Democracy must be protected.
Elon is the one guy on any social media platform that supports Trump, are people equally worried that if Trump wins Zuckerberg, Bezo’s and the lot will face a similar fate----of course not.
This quote always gets bandied about, but the emphasis is often lost. It’s “a republic, if YOU can keep it.” Franklin wasn’t worried that Powell was personally going to blow up the republic, but at that moment she was the stand-in for all the citizens of the new nation and he knew that the path from a republic to a monarchy ran through The People
.
“Donald Trump is not going to concede this election, and he’s going to call for ‘patriotic Americans’ to ‘stand up’ and ‘get to the bottom’ of it.”
Resident squirrel-brain and contrarian here; gonna propose a contrary position.
Going off-brand for the first time in my experience, he seems to be reflecting on not-winning.
And it ended with Attkisson asking Trump whether he sees himself running again in 2028 if his current presidential bid — his third in a row — is unsuccessful.
“No, I don’t. No, I don’t,” Trump said. “I think that that will be, that will be it. I don’t see that at all. I think that hopefully we’re gonna be successful.”
It’s a rare admission of possible defeat by the former president, who has spread false claims about voter fraud and election interference to explain his loss in 2020 and preemptively stoke fears about 2024. (from 9/23 NPR interview)
He’s even at the point of assigning blame if it happens.
All’s I’m saying… is that I think there is a weird, contrary signal rising above the noise, the bellicosity, the narcissism that I usually associate with The Donald. Is he trying to set the stage against getting sucked into J6-type incitement arguments? Did he all of a sudden realize that there are real deals in the Philippines, Gaza, Lebanon, Ukraine that he’s just too tired to “Art” his way out of? Is the Emperor reflecting on what he might look like with no clothes, while common knowledge circulates? (Sorry I had to put that out there.)
I’m not sure he’s ready to climb on the bus with Kari; I just think there’s a weird vibe out there.
Anecdotally the very liberal rich white neighborhood that I have occasion to walk miles through a few times a week has a lot of election signs. All Democrat candidates. There’s hundreds of houses with Democrat signs and not a single one with Republican candidate signs. There are only two houses with Kamala signs. There are no Trump signs or flags.
I’m not 100% what to do with that, but that’s the truth. I interpret this as a lack of rich white liberal voter enthusiasm for Kamala in this area anyway.
On the other end of the state I do a lot of driving, it’s suburban and rural there. Lots of Trump flags and Republican candidate signs. Some Democrat signs. Very few Kamala signs. Republican area.
Again not sure what to do with this, but I believe it shows Republican enthusiasm for Trump.