Bad Blood

There’s an unfairness at the center of this year’s presidential campaign. Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are nearly even in all of the current polls, although most favor her a bit. The popular vote seems likely to go to Harris, but the Electoral College, an unfairness in and of itself, could easily go either way. Commentator after commentator has posed this simple, unanswerable question: how is this thing even close?

Why bother recounting his crimes and misdeeds here? Why bother illustrating his broken promises and failures as president? You already know them. You already know that he’s an incoherent lunatic, incapable of answering a single, substantive question. You know his broken moral compass. You already know he might win.

It's not enough to say he’s “not a perfect candidate,” or “we’re not electing a pastor-in-chief,” or some other such nonsense. Nobody has ever asked Donald Trump to be perfect. And yet, for Kamala Harris to win, we expect nothing less.

This is us.

To this point, Harris has run a nearly flawless campaign. She’s made no notable errors, committed no egregious flubs, erased the deficit Biden was running against Trump, smacked her opponent around in the debate, articulated policy positions, inspired millions, and raised hundreds of millions. Her vice-presidential choice was inspired. She’s done everything we ask of a presidential candidate and done it well. By any traditional metric, all of that ought to be enough to put her over the top.

And yet…

Nothing good comes from complaining about the game while you’re playing in it, and I’m not making the case here that we need to change this or that in order to make things “more fair.” Both sides work the refs. Both sides try to find every tiny advantage they can; further, I agree with the Trump people that the media favors Harris. But not for the reason they think. The media favors Trump for the attention he brings to them, but they favor Harris as human beings. Not because they’re necessarily biased, but because, objectively speaking, Harris is a better human being.

A better human being is likely to make a better president. We’ve learned that lesson over and over again throughout our history. Even the presidents who might have been shitheels in their previous dealings allowed the weight of the office to moderate them once they assumed it. No longer.

The unfairness at the heart of this campaign isn’t that one candidate is “better” than the other. The unfairness is the fact that one candidate is so manifestly unqualified in temperament, intellect, ethics, and past record – yet the race is, essentially a coin flip – that it begs the question whether we even still have a functional democracy?

I think I read somewhere that something like 94% of voters have made up their minds based entirely on political affiliation, which means that, by the time this election ends, billions of dollars will be spent to persuade 6% to swing one way or the other.

It literally doesn’t appear to matter whether a political party nominates a head of cabbage to run for office. Pre-Trump, it was possible to make the argument that each party nominates qualified presidential candidates who make disagree with each other on policy, but who, ultimately, have the nation’s best interests at heart. I don’t think we can make that argument anymore, at least for the Republican party.

Instead, what we have is a situation in which one of our two political parties has been infected by a virus of white Christian nationalists attempting to use that party’s infected body to bring about fundamental, extraconstitutional change. Trump is the means to an end. The reason the “Christians” in the Republican party are indifferent to Trump’s misdeeds isn’t because they think he’s one of them, but rather that they, correctly, believe he will do whatever they like for as long as he feels it’s in his personal interests. It’s not that the authors of Project 2025 think they are doing his bidding; it’s that they know he is doing theirs.

Do most Americans want this? Do most Americans want to live in a meaner, more regressive nation? Do most Americans actually support the National Guard going door-to-door checking citizenship papers? Do most Americans really support denying women healthcare? Do they really support raising prices on the goods they purchase every day? Do most Americans want to turn their backs on the most vulnerable, including those affected by, say, natural disasters? Do they really want to see Putin being given a free hand in Europe? For all of my cynicism about my own countrymen, I don’t think they do.

Instead, I think they want to feel like they’re being given a fair shot. Isn’t that the only thing Americans have ever asked of their government? Not the promise to succeed, but the opportunity? One political party has managed to convince their supporters that the system is rigged against them, and has done everything in their power to make it so. The other party has tried to lift the lives of those who, historically, actually have been left behind. In doing so, they left themselves open to charges of favoritism, even though those crying foul the loudest are the ones who have, historically, been exactly the ones who were actually favored.

The Republican party has convinced the successful majority they are being oppressed by the struggling minority. Rather than argue that everybody benefits when the least of us benefit, they’ve convinced their supporters that every crumb given to those below them is a meal taken from their own plates. It’s a politics of profound resentment made against those who ought to be the most resentful. It’s disgusting, and it’s unfair to those who are asking for nothing more than a shot to live their lives with security and dignity.

So, yeah, I think it’s unfair. If that’s whiny, I’m going to take these few hundred words to whine. There’s a simple unfairness at the heart of this presidential campaign. Harris has to be perfect while Trump cannot do anything wrong. The unfairness isn’t limited to the candidates, though. The deeper, more rotten problem is the greed and resentment fueling the conservative movement. It’s the festering sickness animating its heart. It’s the politics of a cancer cell convincing the bloodstream to welcome its presence.

How is thing even close?