No Matter What, the Work Is Not Done
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Now Is No Time for a Break
by William Kristol
After months of poring over every bit of polling data, of pressing friends and colleagues for insights, of closely watching debate performances and television interviews, the last piece of wisdom I was given about this election came from a fortune cookie.
Yesterday, I stumbled upon one on my kitchen counter—sitting alone, neglected, and unopened. I opened it, only to find the most inviting of advice: “It’s time to take a break.”
A break! How wonderful the thought. How appropriate a message for Election Day—the moment where our exhaustion turns to anxiety as we wait for results to come in.
But this is no time for a break.
First of all, everyone needs to vote, if they haven’t yet. And everyone needs to get as many like-minded voters to the polls as you can. So no break until this evening.
And after that? Time for a break?
Sorry, the answer’s still no.
Let’s consider the two possible outcomes.
If Donald Trump wins tonight, I’ll be tempted to follow Abraham Lincoln’s counsel from his 1855 letter to Joshua Speed: “When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”
Fear not. I’m not heading off to Russia! Still, back here at home, we’ll face a major, even daunting, task. For the next four years, we’ll have to re-constitute a loyal opposition—loyal to the Declaration and the Constitution, loyal to what America has been and should be. We’ll have to organize to try to limit the damage Trump can do in a second term, and lay the groundwork for future recovery.
So it’s clear that if Trump wins, it will be no time to give up, no time to take more than a short (okay, maybe medium-length) break for a few stiff drinks. We’ll have to fortify ourselves by recalling the wonderful admonition of the great John McCain: It’s always darkest before it turns pitch black . Then back into the fray!
But what if Kamala Harris wins? O happy day! But even then, it won’t really be time for a break. Doing so would be like landing successfully on D-Day and then deciding to take few days off. It doesn’t work that way.
There’s too much work ahead. There is too much uncertainty in front of us. There are too many questions in need of answers.
Will Harris be a successful president? Will the Democratic party become a truly responsible governing party, centrist or liberal in the broad sense of the term? Can the Republican party begin to find its way back from the fetid swamp into which it has plunged? Can our political institutions be strengthened? Can our civic mores be restored? Can conspiracy theories be relegated to the fringe of our national life? Can we once again learn to distinguish lies from truth? More concretely and immediately, can Ukraine win and Putin lose?
One could go on. There will be much to be done. None of it will be easy. So even if we emerge victorious tonight from the low, dishonest decade dominated by Donald Trump, we have a massive task of construction and reconstruction before us.
Not much time for a break, I’m afraid.
Meanwhile, as we watch the returns come in tonight, I recommend keeping in mind Churchill’s epigraph to his history of the Second World War, which he calls “the moral of the work:”
In War: Resolution
In Defeat: Defiance
In Victory: Magnanimity
In Peace: Good Will.
I’ve got to say that resolution, defiance, and good will all seem fine. I’m not so sure I can personally achieve magnanimity. But you, dear reader, can show the way, and I suppose it’s something for me to aspire to.
But first: Victory.
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The Sheer Volume of It
by Andrew Egger
If Donald Trump loses tonight, it will be due in large part to a staggering display of hubris.
We voters have remarkably short memories. Trump’s outrages wash out of the news cycle quickly. So when the dust settles, the vast majority of his tirades and indulgences simply won’t have had an impact.
Stuff from the beginning of the cycle may just as well have taken place back before humans discovered fire. There may not be a voter in America still angry that Trump suggested Ron DeSantis was a pedophile early last year. But even quite recent stuff is hard to hold in the mind. Back in August, a Trump staffer physically shoved a worker at Arlington National Cemetery who was trying to bar them from using a particularly hallowed section of the grounds to shoot campaign footage. Even the Army’s report on that incident, released late last month , made barely a blip.
As Jonathan Martin put it : The sheer volume is the superpower. We don’t have time to harp on things like Jeffrey Epstein being recorded saying Trump is his friend, because we’re already on to the next. Nothing has time to go to long-term storage.
In turn, we start to grade him on a scale. All Trump had to do to maximize his chances in the close of this election was merely keep his nose clean for a few weeks. Instead, he’s crash-landing into Election Day on the heels of some truly indefensible utterances. There’s reason to believe late-breaking independents are drifting toward Kamala Harris ; it’s not hard to see why.
Harris came into this contest—just three months ago!—with major structural disadvantages. She needed to pick up the pieces from a seriously unpopular incumbent who hung onto the delusion he could win again for far too long. She needed to overcome perceptions borne of her own previous abortive presidential run that she was captured by the radical left and a political lightweight. She needed to convince America it was ready at last for a woman to be president, and a black woman at that.
We can nitpick (and have nitpicked!) about this or that strategic or tactical decision she’s made since. Maybe she should have moved more quickly to distance herself from Biden’s record, or found a more creative way to spin her previous attempts to woo the Bernie Bros. Certainly she should have gone on Joe Rogan. But that’s what these are: nitpicks. In a few short months, Harris has accomplished a remarkable thing: She’s united the anti-Trump coalition, kept the Democratic party from fractiousness, and put herself in a position to win.
Around the world recently, this just hasn’t happened. The economic pain and escalations of conflict that have rattled the globe in the wake of the pandemic have been unkind to whichever party happens to be in power to hold the bag, left or right. Harris is trying to break that mold tonight.
If Trump wins tonight, it’ll be in large part due to the inexorable weight of that structural pressure. They’re kicking the bums out around the world; maybe they’ll do it here too.
If Harris wins, it will be different. Her behavior on the trail will have made a meaningful difference. And so will have Trump’s.
Quick Hits
UNSATISFYING, BUT CORRECT: There’s not much that’s fun about a tied election with this much on the line. One thing that has been a guilty pleasure, though: Watching election modelers seethe as they try to convince the public to accept that, well, the models show a tied election. What do you want them to do??
“I don’t know what else we can tell you,” said Sean Trende of RealClearPolitics last night. The modelers are effectively 50-50. . . . Everything beyond that is a vibe, or, arguably worse, anecdata. No one should have any confidence. Sorry. Believe me, as someone whose job it is to predict elections for a living, that hurt me more than it hurt you.”
Meanwhile, the unearned-confidence crystal-ball types on both sides are already practicing for their victory laps. “Nate Silver’s compilation of polls is so unreliable that he now says that who will win the presidency is down to luck,” Allan Lichtman mocked, shortly after tweeting AI art of himself as a Star Trek Vulcan: “Mark my words . . . The Keys will be right again!”
Silver, for what it’s worth, ran his model late last night . Out of the 80,000 simulations, Harris won 40,012. You know what? We like those odds.
ALWAYS THE ONES YOU MOST EXPECT: Well, knock us over with a feather. Amanda Moore writes in Politico today that “a white nationalist worked on the Trump campaign in an important position in Pennsylvania for five months—until Friday, when the Pennsylvania GOP fired him after learning about his views from my reporting.”
The staffer in question, Luke Meyer, hosts a podcast called Alexandria with the noxious Richard Spencer, where he has made some small suggestions for tweaks he’d like to see to American public life: “Why can’t we make New York, for example, white again? Why can’t we clear out and reclaim Miami? I’m not saying we need to be 100 percent homogenous. I’m not saying we need to be North Korea or Japan or anything like that. A return to 80 percent, 90 percent white would probably be the best we could hope for, to some degree.”
Meyer may be fired, but he’s confident he’ll be back. “Like the hydra, you can cut off my head and hold it up for the world to see, but two more will quietly appear and be working in the shadows,” he told Moore in an email.
We wish we were more confident he’s wrong!
‘IT WON’T BE EASY FOR THEM’: On our Bulwark+ livestream last night, our bud Will Saletan made a bit of fun of us all for stressing too much about how Trump might seek to overturn the election when we don’t have any reason to believe he’s even lost it yet. Let’s go win first and cross that bridge when we come to it, was his point.
You know what: Fair! But we’ll still take a moment to take a bit of comfort from extremism researcher Jared Holt: “As much planning as has happened on the political right to contest this election, there’s been so much work by everybody from civil society to lawmakers to anticipate and prepare for this threat,” he told Raw Story yesterday. “Even though they might be more organized and steadfast to contest this election, I don’t think it’s going to be a cakewalk for them. There have been a lot of people working to defend the process.”
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What a load of hyperbolic nonsense.
It's amazing the Democrats have become the party of William Kristol and Dick Cheney. Imagine saying that in 2005 when they were the Nazis de jour. .
It is more amazing that the Republicans have become the party of a sociopathic candidate, racist comedians, and weirdo grifters.