What Do You Hear?

Susan Estrich on Nov 2, 2024

Will angry young men who are attracted by Donald Trump's sexist machismo and utter lack of a filter actually turn out to vote? Will latent sexism rear its ugly head, as it did in 2016, leading Trump to perform better than his poll numbers predict?

Will young women, who have every reason to be angry about losing their rights, and every reason to fear for their lives, literally, if they live in a state where their lives are literally on the line if they get pregnant, turn out to vote in record numbers?

Young people are generally low-propensity voters. Will they surprise us and turn out? Are they currently being adequately reflected in the poll numbers, which are keeping the rest of us up at night?

Who knows?

From where I sit, this shouldn't be a close election. But I sit in California, where no one is knocking on doors, where Kamala will win by a big margin that doesn't matter because our Founding Fathers set up a stunningly undemocratic method for electing a president that leaves us with a handful of battleground states deciding an election in which most of us simply don't matter.

I could write a whole column attacking the Electoral College as effectively disenfranchising most of the country, but what does it matter? This is the system we have. It isn't going to change without a literal revolution, which no one really wants.

So what matters is not what we do, we being most of us, but what we hear.

Here is what I hear from Democrats.

I hear optimism about the House. I hear optimism that Democrats will win enough flippable districts to take control of the House and put some kind of check on a Trump presidency. But a president can still do a great deal of harm with his appointments and executive orders without getting anything through Congress.

The Senate? Too close to call. Can Colin Allred in Texas really upset Ted Cruz? Can Jon Tester in Montana hold on against a clearly flawed opponent? Hard to say. This was always a tough challenge for Democrats, given the sheer number of seats they had to defend without Joe Manchin in West Virginia. With a Republican Senate, Trump can appoint whoever he wants to the Cabinet and to the agencies and to the courts. That's a frightening thought that could easily be a reality.

And the real horserace, the one between Trump and Harris? No one seems to know anything. We have seen, painfully enough, that there is nothing that Trump can say or do, no matter how odious, that will shake loose his base. They know him, and I have come to the very sad conclusion that they actually like the unfiltered, undisciplined version that he has shown them. Could he, as he once boasted, commit murder on Fifth Avenue in New York and still hold onto his base? Yes seems to be the only answer, with the only question remaining being how big that base really is.

I hope the pollsters are wrong. I hope this is not a close election. If it is, the results will be hard to accept and ugly to watch unfold. Trump will declare victory if it's a close election. The ugliness will go to the courts. Phony suits will be filed. Uncertainty takes a toll. He will not be gracious. It will not be over.

For my part, I have to believe in women. I've been doing politics for decades. I've lived through many elections that were supposed to be the year of the woman. In 2016, I canceled my class on Election Day because I didn't want to tell my students that my gut told me that Hillary Clinton would lose, notwithstanding the polls to the contrary. Too many men didn't like her. The polls then were still showing that at least 30% of all Americans believed that their friends and neighbors were not ready for a woman president, or at least that woman president. I have to believe that things are changing, that the Dobbs decision was enough to mobilize a new generation, that these young women will indeed recognize that the lives of women like them depend on the outcome of this election. I have long written about the fact that women have the power to change the world if only we choose to use it. This is the time.

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