Last Week before Kamala Harris vs Donald Trump

 There are a few troubling signs ahead for the elections. In 2016, I could feel that the movement against Trump was very vociferous. People literally thought that he was going to destroy the US system. He didn't destroy it, but he did a lot of damage to it.

It is reassuring on the surface that some people have called the race for Harris. But they tend to be the old folks, and if there's anything I've learnt recently, old folks are not shy about losing their credibility because when you're old, there are fewer consequences when you lose your credibility.

The polls are starting to turn against Kamala Harris. This looks bad for her. The complaints are that she hasn't articulated a coherent point of view. A respected pollster has repeated that complaint recently. She had a lot of fundraising recently, and she rode a wave of enthusiasm, but that wave is about her not being Donald Trump or Joe Biden.

Kamala has quite a few things working against her: the current government is unpopular, and a lot of elections this year have favoured the "change" candidate. I've just realised that US presidential elections do not favour women, because the US self-image is quite masculine (as opposed to many European countries who have traditionally had female heads of state). She's black, and that was a bigger problem back in the day when US was basically a white country, but it's still some kind of disadvantage, especially in a race where small margins matter.

In a democracy, when you have 2 candidates for president, and people vote for them based on ideological differences, things are already going to be heated, and they'll be bad enough. But when both of them are of different races and the voters are split on racial and gender and geographical lines, then you don't really have a functioning democracy. What you have is tribal war.

What she has going for her is that many former Republicans are really tired of Trump and are turning out for her. But I don't know if that would actually help her. As Michael Sandel pointed out in the epilogue to "Democracy's Discontent", what's going on is not that people necessarily agree with Trump, but they agree that he's against the system, and they hate the system so much that they would destroy it. So for the professional eggheads to turn up for Harris would actually be a reason for them to vote for Trump.

If she loses, then at least she will be a less tragic figure than Hillary Clinton, who wanted her whole life to be president, but lost the election at the last moment. Also, the 2 anti-Trump sentiments are that he's too weak to govern, and that he will be extremely disruptive. It's been pointed out that these two objections contradict each other.

It was a little curious to me at first that both the Democrats and Republicans act like they're supremely confident they're going to win. And after thinking about it, it then occurred to me that this election is very likely to be disputed, and if it is disputed, you didn't want to be the guy who expressed doubt that your side was going to win. You wanted to create the narrative beforehand that you're the winning side, so that if it were become as close as Florida in 2000, you'd be in with a fight.