POLLS APART

What was, was already — as Mother used to say.

Still, for weeks before the election, the polls had the Trump-Harris race very close: a toss-up, a hair, a  nose, a wink, whatever. But in the end Trump won handily, winning the popular vote by three million votes and to date the electoral college with 312 votes to Harris’s, 226, an 86 point spread. If that’s not a landslide, it’s a nice downhill run.

Not a single poll I saw came close to the actual result. While down-ballot, the polls did better forecasting, the focus for most of us was on the presidential race. Ladbrokes, the British bookmaker, had projected a Harris win a day or so before the election; previously, they had bet the other way. Even they were wrong; usually they’re right. While canvassing in northeast Philadelphia the weekend before the election, I really believed she’d win the state.On the bus back to New York, I thought she’ll win the election! All the too-close-to-call stuff bruited about by the pollsters gave me the shpilkies but still I believed Harris would win nationally even if she lost Pennsylvania. The election may have been close at one point, just not on election day.

Too many Democratic voters abandoned Harris as Trump gained ground with Latinos and Blacks. The NY Times reported that “many Democrats sat out the election … that voters from  city centers to suburban stretches failed to show up to vote for Harris.”  Sitting it out was a vote for Trump. Harris may not have been the ideal candidate. But in the moment and for the time we had she was the best on offer. Biden, who had described himself in 2020 as “transitional” was instead transactional in 2024; he couldn’t let go of the power of the presidency even as his stumbles, gaffes and mental decline became too visible to ignore. He had waited for the presidency decades. Had he committed to stepping aside immediately after the 2022 elections, had a convention been possible, had the decline of the Democratic party as the party of the working people, had this or that …

The politics of joy turned to “oy”.