This is the most abnormal election of your lifetime and mine.
At this moment, a mere eleven days before we go to the polls, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are running neck and neck.
A Wall Street Journal poll issued Wednesday night, October 23, says Trump is leading by two percent. In England, The Economist’s Election Model, which generates over ten thousand computer simulations to produce its results, predicts that Kamala Harris will win only 262 votes in the electoral college, not enough to win. Predicts the Economist, Trump will get 276 electoral college votes, six more then he needs to take the White House. And Real Clear Politics’ average of all the polls puts Kamala Harris at a skinny two hundredths of a percent ahead.
But Fox News begs to disagree with all of these. Points out Fox, those who bet on the presidential race are putting their money down on a resounding Trump win. A win in which Mr. Trump gets a whopping 58.5% of the vote. That figure comes from the two billion dollars gambled on this election so far in the world’s betting markets.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump may be right when he says that this is the “most important election in the history of our country.” In fact, this is an election unlike any America has ever seen.
For one thing, a few days after we go to the polls, we will not know the winner. Why?
Democrats believe that the Trump team has spent three and a half years rigging this election. There have been 141 election laws changed since the last presidential election in 2020. 78 of those changes have come from Republicans trying to make voting harder. 63 have come from Democrats trying to make voting easier.
Democrats have responded to Republican changes in election laws with 40 lawsuits. Meanwhile, Republicans have filed over 100 lawsuits questioning the election’s integrity. Each side sees what the other is doing as cheating.
A lot of this is being done so that after November 5th one candidate, Donald Trump, can declare victory no matter what the vote count is.
And so that if the vote count favors Kamala Harris, Republicans in the Senate and Congress can claim that the voting was manipulated and can back Mr. Trump’s claims to an overwhelming win.
But the most important viewpoint on this election may come from our allies in NATO. They are frightened by what they see as an election that could turn the global order upside down, an election that pits democracy against autocracy.
The media in England, France, and Germany are afraid that if the United States elects Donald Trump, America will join the club of dictators, the dictators who Trump admires—Vladimir Putin in Russia, Kim Jong Un in North Korea, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, and Victor Orbán in Hungary.
Europeans fear that America will cease to be the leader of the Free World, the leader of NATO, and will cozy up to the Axis of Evil: the alliance with Russia, China, and North Korea at its core, with disgust for democracy and human rights in its brain, and with hatred of America at its heart.
What’s more, Trump, the Europeans fear, will force Ukraine to hand over territory to Putin. And when Putin settles his affairs in Ukraine, the Europeans believe, he will attempt to conquer more of Europe, starting with Poland.
But Donald Trump sees a different vision of apocalypse. He says that if Kamala Harris is elected, it is she who will end democracy. She will usher in a conquering army of “the communists, Marxists, fascists and radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” Those thugs and vermin include “demonic” figures like Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff.
What’s more, Trump says, Kamala Harris will open our borders and expand the deep state.
But Democrats are convinced that it’s Trump who will shove the Constitution aside and will rule as a tyrant.
On Wednesday October 23rd, the New York Times and the Atlantic magazine published stories in which Mr. Trump’s longest-lasting chief of staff, General John Kelly, who worked at Mr. Trump’s side for 520 days, says that Donald Trump is a fascist and that in a second term he will rule as a dictator.
Democrats do not believe that Kamala Harris will do anything comparable. In fact, they believe, she may restore the American values of honesty, courage, character, rule of law, and democracy that have almost disappeared over the last nine years.
But in the end both Harris and Trump would likely agree with one final statement from General Kelly, it is “a very dangerous thing to have the wrong person elected to high office.”
References:
Harris v Trump: 2024 presidential election prediction model
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https://preview.realclearpolling.com/elections/president/2024
https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/trump-leads-harris-wsj-poll-779f8516
https://www.newsweek.com/kamala-harris-chances-fall-major-election-forecast-1835472
https://www.oxfordeconomics.com/
https://www.factcheck.org/2020/12/trumps-most-important-speech-was-mostly-false/
https://www.dw.com/en/how-german-leaders-are-preparing-for-a-possible-trump-presidency/a-69705289
https://news.mit.edu/2024/how-world-watching-2024-us-election-1017
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https://www.justsecurity.org/103478/2024-election-litigation-top-10/
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/09/09/issues-and-the-2024-election/
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Howard Bloom of the Howard Bloom Institute has been called the Einstein, Newton, Darwin, and Freud of the 21st century by Britain’s Channel 4 TV. One of his eight books–Global Brain—was the subject of a symposium thrown by the Office of the Secretary of Defense including representatives from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT. Bloom’s work has been published in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Psychology Today, and the Scientific American. He does news commentary at 1:06 am Eastern Time every Wednesday night on 545 radio stations on the highest-rated overnight syndicated talk radio show in North America, Coast to Coast AM. Bloom’s new book, coming out in February, 2025, is The Case of the Sexual Cosmos: Everything You Know About Nature is wrong. For more, see http://howardbloom.net.
