My biennial election season freakout has begun! If scientists could find a way to harness my nervous energy in the days leading up to elections, they’d be able to power a small town for a year—or Rudy Giuliani’s liver for about 20 minutes. (Allegedly!)
But this year, along with my usual hefty slice of wry dread, I’m offering up something a little different: a message of hope.
Instead of obsessively refreshing 538.com, I’m looking at it only occasionally, and with a skeptical eye. Because, let’s be honest, no one really knows what’s going to happen. The polls have been wonky for the past two presidential election cycles—and yet the media seem to be doing their level best lately to convince us that their original prediction (a GOP House, and maybe Senate, sweep) will come true.
Hey, I get the gloom and doom. I was a rock-ribbed defeatist for decades before I got on antidepressants and almost magically transformed into a cautious optimist. But this isn’t just Pollyannish posing. I’ve yet to see any real evidence that pollsters and pundits are fully accounting for this summer’s Dobbs ruling, which viciously stripped away a basic right (and economic lifeline, as some have astutely pointed out) from tens of millions of Americans.
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The so-called “experts” also predicted a close, down-to-the-wire decision in August’s Kansas abortion referendum, and instead, we witnessed an 18-point pro-Roe landslide. And if a true red wave were brewing, why did Democrat Pat Ryan defeat Republican Marcus Molinaro in a purplish swing district in an August special election? And why did Alaska, of all places, elect a Democrat to represent the state in its lone House seat? There are special circumstances surrounding all of these examples, of course. For instance, the conventional wisdom now appears to be that abortion has faded somewhat as a front-and-center issue since the Dobbs ruling came down the pike this summer. Also, inspiring voters may be easier when the vote itself is about abortion (as in Kansas), and Alaska’s ranked-choice voting system makes its special election a, well, special case.
But do these special-election results mean nothing? Well, maybe—but maybe not. And the truth is, we just don’t know. And neither do the nattering nabobs of know-it-all-ism at sclerotic institutions like The New York Times.
If I could time-travel, the first thing I’d do—other than call in sick to my Catholic grade school with a wicked case of the stigmata—is leap ahead to the morning of Nov. 9 so I could avoid all this useless pre-election anxiety. Or leap back from that date to the present to either a) tell myself everything’s going to be all right or b) instruct me to locate a timeline where Ho-Hos were never invented, meaning the Ho-Ho-shaped hole in Donald Trump’s Ho-Ho-hankerin’ soul was never filled—and so he never had the joie de vivre one needs to successfully run for president.
But I can’t time travel. Yet. So here’s what I’m going to do instead: Keep my head down, keep preaching to the choir (because, if nothing else, it might help persuade the choir to vote and GOTV), and assiduously ignore Meet the Press—because all it does at this point is make me angry, and I already scream at Chuck Todd enough during random bath salts hallucinations.
I have mixed feelings about Michael Moore these days—for one thing, it’s hard to ignore his advocacy for Ralph Nader in 2000, which may have been a factor in George W. Bush’s eking out an Electoral College victory. But Moore, who was one of the few progressives to correctly predict Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory, is currently saying not just what we want to hear, but what the mainstream media outlets presumably don’t want to consider—that this will be a blue- and pink-wave election that puts Democrats in the driver’s seat.
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Do I believe him? Again, I just don’t know. Yes, he predicted Trump’s unlikely win, but as any gambler or stock market investor knows, anyone can get lucky once. It doesn’t necessarily make you a genius.
That said, this take of Moore’s is 100% unvarnished truth:
The vast majority of Americans agree with us on ALL the major issues — legal abortion (62%), climate crisis (75%), minimum wage (62%), paid family leave (70%), legal marijuana (91%), unions (71%), Medicare for all (69%), Equal Rights Amendment for women (78%), mass incarceration, tax the rich (80%), free college (58%), free pre-K+ (71%), stopping voter suppression, LGBTQ+ rights (71%), take money out of politics, more gun control (70%), etc.
The people are already with us — by a wide margin. So how can we lose?
By failing to get out the vote — a vote that is ours if we want it.
Do people really care more about temporary hikes in prices (a global problem, for which Republicans have zero solutions) and the supposed scourge of “woke” pronouns (personally, I go by “he”) than they do about bodily autonomy?
We’re about to find out. But we need to keep our eyes on the road in front of us, because we’re still in the race, and too much peeking into the rearview mirror or fretting about what’s over the horizon will not help. Rallying the troops, staying optimistic (but not overconfident, as in 2016), and keeping our eyes on the prize will.
So enough with the malarkey already. Let’s all do our part—because if our clear majority actually gets out and votes, we literally can’t lose.
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