Men Are Hopeless, but Don’t Worry: Women Will Save America. As Usual.

At closing argument time, it turns out that Donald Trump is making Kamala Harris’s closing argument. What is it? That women should not vote for him. He is making the case better than she ever could. And it looks like it may be sticking.

Let’s start with what Trump said to Tucker Carlson about Liz Cheney at a forum Thursday night. It is, straight up, a very strong contender for the most shocking and vile thing he’s ever said. I know that’s saying something, but judge for yourself: “She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face.”

Cheney is a war hawk. I disagree with her about all that. But that’s neither here nor there. A candidate for president of the United States just called for a fellow American to face a firing squad. A firing squad! Who’s the last presidential candidate to do that? Maybe someone like 1820 also-ran William Crawford? More likely no one, ever.

Some might argue that Trump was merely noting that Cheney had never been in the literal line of fire in combat, because he went on to talk about the swagger of Beltway interventionists like Cheney and John Bolton: “They’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building.” I’ve opposed most U.S. wars of my lifetime (I thought we were morally and legally justified in responding to September 11 in Afghanistan but worried that we’d overdo it, which of course we did), but I’ve always found that to be a real cheap-seats line—if you’re so crazy about war, why don’t you go fight it? No. If you oppose a war, oppose it on serious grounds, not on the basis of peanut-gallery arguments like that.

But Trump knew exactly what he was saying here—intentionally suggesting that Cheney should face a firing squad, but doing so in such a way that he could plausibly deny it. No prominent candidate for office has ever taken the next step of saying let’s put such a person in front of a firing squad. It’s a literal and specific sentence of death for a literal and specific human being, and that’s what makes it so outrageous.

And it’s not an accident that he said it about a woman. Trump has contempt for all of humanity, but his contempt for women is special, because women aren’t full human beings with intellect and agency in the same way men are. They’re there for sex, and if they’re not hot enough for sex, why are they hanging around taking up space, food, and water?

Which brings us to Trump’s second hideous comment of the week about women, that he’s going to protect them “whether the women like it or not.” Again, he pulled his usual trick of using plausible deniability language; what he meant, he continued, was that he’s going to protect them from migrants and foreign attacks (and I guess his rhetoric has become so offensive on so many levels that the clearly fascist nature of this pledge—that Dear Leader personally will protect them—is now worth only a parenthetical).

Whatever he meant, whatever was sludging through that sewer in his brain when he spoke the words, lots of people (not just women) took the remark as Trump reminding women of the power he has already exercised over their lives and will exercise again if he’s returned to the White House. And that properly freaks a lot of women out.

A month ago in Georgia, Candi Miller, a married mother of three who had lupus and diabetes, found that she was pregnant. She’d been warned by doctors that another baby could dramatically endanger her health. She ordered abortion pills online. They didn’t quite work. She was in need of a procedure that is fairly common—but that the state of Georgia had recently made illegal. She died. She didn’t want to visit a doctor, her family told the coroner, “due to the current legislation on pregnancies and abortions.”

That’s just one of many stories we now know about in which women and their doctors have been forced into impossible conversations and decisions because of the hideous laws passed after Trump’s Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. These stories are abstract to men. I very much doubt they’re abstract to women.

And finally: Trump really said Thursday that he’s going to put Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in charge of women’s health? Does he think women don’t hear this, and they don’t understand that Kennedy (before he ended his presidential campaign) said he’d sign a national abortion ban and that he might deny their children vaccines?

They do. And it seems they’re paying attention. The early voters so far are 54 percent women and 44 percent men. That seems an encouraging sign.

People are writing a lot of articles about the gender gap. Supposedly, it’s lower than expected. Supposedly, men are breaking for Trump by larger percentages than women are breaking for Harris.

Of course, this could end up being true. But two points: One, the margin of error on subgroups within polls is high. So say there’s a poll that shows Trump leads among men by 14 but Harris leads among women by only 11. But if the margin of error on those numbers is, say, five points, Trump could be winning men by as little as nine, and Harris could be leading among women by as much as 16. Such polls are not useless, but they’re also nothing to freak out about.

But second and more important: What matters more than the gender gap per se is what percentage of the overall electorate is female and male. In 2020, according to exit polls, the electorate was 52 percent women and 48 percent men. Isn’t it reasonable to think the female percentage might be a little higher? Might women not be a wee bit more motivated to turn out for Harris than they were for Joe Biden? Pollsters generally will not make that assumption; they tend to base their polls on past electorates. But let’s say women are, oh, just 53 percent of the electorate. If 180 million people vote, that’s 1.8 million voters. If Harris carries them with 55 or 56 percent (which I think is conservative), that’s one million more Harris votes. It depends on where they’re distributed, of course. But in a close election, that’s a lot of votes.

The media have obsessed over Black people and Latinos turned off by Harris and various other #Demsindisarray narratives. The enthusiasm of women for Harris is a storyline that has been entirely unexplored. Women, and Black women in particular, are invisible in the media, as I wrote two weeks ago. But they exist. And their votes count just as much as the votes of white working-class men in Wilkes-Barre.

It’s a close election. But Trump is getting weirder and more unhinged every day. Every hour. Who knows what he’ll be saying by Sunday? The true nature of the man is finally becoming unavoidable. And Harris is getting sturdier. A lot of men are too blinded by their prejudices or assumptions to notice this. I suspect women are noticing, in big numbers.

What the hell is this “debate” about whether Kamala Harris should call Donald Trump a fascist? It’s too … what? Too aggressive? Too in your face? It risks backlash?

Sorry, but that’s the advice of the people who’ve been advising Democrats to lose elections for years. The bottom line is this, and it’s really simple. In the last 10 days of a campaign, you’re either playing offense or defense. And if you’re playing defense, you’re going to lose.

The fascism charge is offense. Period. End of debate. Now, within that debate, there are more subtle conversations to be entertained. Should it be the main line of attack, or should it be a side attack? Should she bank everything on it? Fine, let’s discuss those things. But the big question ought to be settled. She should call Trump a fascist. She should do it because it’s playing offense, and she should do it because it’s true.

Trump is playing offense. It’s all lies as usual, but for some people, his just standing up there and saying things confuses and convinces them. At his rally Thursday night, Trump claimed he was “leading by a lot” in the polls. He ticked off a number of states where he claimed to be leading by “a lot.” He’s leading in none of them. He may be +2 in the occasional poll in Arizona, but that’s still margin-of-error territory. Most reputable polls have Arizona dead even. The only recent one where Trump is +3 is from a conservative pollster. And +3 is still within the margin of error.

But he says this stuff, and some people buy it. He also went on some riff about how Harris is weak and Xi Jinping can’t wait to steamroll her. This is obvious sexist garbage, to which her immediate response, if she deigns to give one, ought to be, “Well, Donald Trump and I went face to face. Who kicked whose ass across the stage and back? I hope Xi was watching that!” But still: Some people will see that Trump riff and just believe it.

It’s so important, in these closing days, to exude confidence, to look like a winner, to be on offense. A close election like this one might come down to this question of what’s on swing voters’ minds in these final days. Trump wants them thinking Harris is an incompetent failure. She wants them thinking he’s too dangerous and risky. Ergo—fascism and democracy.

Trump himself flung this door wide open when he said in an interview that he’d use the military to go after his political opponents. That’s what prompted John Kelly to speak to The New York Times. It may prove to be a key moment in this campaign if others follow, particularly James Mattis.

Harris has worked all that into her stump speech. Thursday night in Atlanta, she invoked Kelly’s remarks, and she quoted him quoting Trump to the effect that Hitler “did some good things.” I’d love to see her play with that a little. “Let’s see … what good things did Hitler do? He loved his dog. He didn’t smoke or drink …” Get some laughs at Trump’s expense.

I love the fact that she’s speaking next week from the same spot on the Ellipse where Trump gave his January 6 address. Her speech really needs to be blunt and direct. And here’s a crucial point: She needs to say something new in that speech. She needs to make news—to level some charge at Trump that she hasn’t leveled. That’s playing offense, and it will put him on defense.

Another advantage to all this is that it could goad Trump. Karl Rove was on Fox this week criticizing Trump for going off script. Harris can force more of this. If she needles him about Hitler, for example, she can goad him into talking about Hitler. Who knows what he’d say? He might actually list a few of those good things Hitler did. That’d be news.

She still needs to talk about the economy. And she is. That’s actually still her main message, and it should remain so. In talking-head land, they too often assume that if Harris starts talking about X, that means she’s stopped talking about Y. It’s ridiculous. If you look at the ads the Harris campaign is running the most in the swing states, they’re practically all economy-based.

And the ones that aren’t about the economy are about the other issue that needs to be central in the home stretch: abortion. Some say she’s wasting her time in Houston tonight because she has no chance of winning Texas. But that isn’t the point. The point is to highlight the cruelty of Texas’s anti-abortion law. And to share a stage with a Houston native named Beyoncé. And with Willie Nelson too!

So she’s sticking to the core messages. But fascism and democracy—and Adolf Hitler, specifically, because more people know who Hitler was than know what fascism is, and because she might get Trump to talk about Hitler—absolutely have to be part of the closing mix. Play offense. Look strong. Step on his neck. It’s time.

Polls, polls, polls. Way too many polls, way too much media coverage and obsession with polls. Right? Well … it depends on which ones. Because there is one set of polls that isn’t driving much press coverage at all, and I find it interesting and telling.

Since the day Kamala Harris got in the race, she has consistently led Donald Trump on the question of voter enthusiasm. She led by a lot when she first entered the race in late July because Democratic enthusiasm for Joe Biden was at a serious low, and because the mere fact that the Democrats made a change—and that she came out of gate with such swagger—made rank-and-file Democrats feel such a burst of relief.

That carried on through the Democratic convention. A Gallup poll from late August (right after the convention) showed Democratic enthusiasm at 79 percent—one point short of the all-time high, which was during the 2008 Barack Obama–Hillary Clinton primary—and Republican enthusiasm at just 64 percent.

Since then, Republican enthusiasm has gotten closer to Democratic levels, but in the several recent polls I looked over this week, Democratic enthusiasm was still higher. This Gallup result from October 6 was representative. When asked if they were more enthusiastic this time around than in previous elections, 80 percent of Democrats said yes, as did 75 percent of Republicans.

So Democratic voters are in fact enthusiastic about Harris—a shade more enthusiastic than Republican voters are about Trump. But ask yourself: Is that reality reflected in the media coverage you see? My own answer to that question is a thundering no.

This is admittedly unscientific, and undoubtedly, I’ve missed some stuff. But what I mostly see and hear and read is this: Trump voters love their man (and many do, of course). Black and Hispanic voters are tepid on Harris. She hasn’t “made the sale.” Black men in particular are skeptical. She’s in a danger zone.

Some of this is true and borne out by polling, and of course it’s necessary to report on it. But meanwhile, where, in the media narrative, is the Democratic enthusiasm? Where are the voters who admire and even adore Harris and can’t wait to go pull the lever for her?

They’re mostly invisible.

They’re mostly invisible because they are chiefly based in two groups, neither of whom is of the remotest interest to the press. The first is college-educated people, mostly white but of all races. These people’s votes count just like anybody else’s, but to political journalism, they don’t count because they’re not real Americans. Real Americans eat carb-heavy breakfasts in diners in Altoona and Saginaw. They don’t eat tofu scrambles in Bucks County or Buckhead. They didn’t attend private colleges, they don’t go to gyms, they don’t drive hybrids, they don’t drink lattes.

So as far as political journalism is concerned, these voters don’t exist. It’s all a bit paradoxical and frankly a little twisted, since virtually all journalists are members of the tofu-scramble class, but that only accentuates the matter, because journalists feel a collective guilt about all the above that makes them dismiss voters like them as uninteresting.

And sure, there’s a dog-bites-man element to those voters backing a candidate such as Harris. But I submit there are still stories there. Are these voters as enthusiastic as they were in 2020? Are they out there door knocking and phone banking? Are donations coming in at high levels or low from those zip codes?

The other invisible group—and this is a far worse error—is Black women. If you Google something like “Black women Harris enthusiasm,” you’ll see a bushelful of articles from late July, when she first got in the race, when the #WinWithBlackWomen network famously enlisted 400,000 Black women to join a Zoom meeting the very night that Harris became the presumptive nominee. I saw a number of stories from that period.

But since the heat of the campaign post–Labor Day? I don’t see much. In fact, the first page of search results for the search term mentioned above includes a bunch of articles from July, a couple from August—and exactly one from September. Was it in The New York Times? The Washington Post? Was it an Associated Press or Reuters piece?

No. It was in The Atlanta Voice, the Black community newspaper in Atlanta.

Black women, as usual, are invisible to the political media. Oh, Oprah’s town hall made news. But generally speaking, if you’re a Black woman in this country and you want a bunch of microphones shoved in front of your face at election time, you’ll be way ahead of the game if you’re willing to say that Kamala Harris just doesn’t speak to you for some reason and Donald Trump is a savvy businessman.

Yes, again, there’s a dog-bites-man aspect to stories about Black women backing Harris. But isn’t there also a dog-bites-man quality to white rural voters backing Trump? Of course there is. And yet, I’m still seeing those stories, still seeing those people interviewed on cable news. Why? Because the political media (reporters, but I think mostly editors at mainstream outlets) are terrified of being seen as liberal. Of missing the Trump story, of opening themselves up to accusations of out-of-touch elitism.

The right is so effective at lobbing this grenade that mainstream outlets have collectively come to sense that there is a professional price to be paid for ignoring Trump voters. But there is no professional price to be paid for ignoring Black women. They’re ignored all the time anyway.

Is Harris in real trouble among Black voters? Maybe. Maybe not. This week’s NBC poll has her beating Trump 84–8 among Black respondents in battleground states. That’s up from 82–12 a month ago (Trump lost a third of his Black support! Isn’t that a story?), and it’s on par with Biden’s 2020 national margin among Black voters over Trump of 87–12, or indeed will be better than Biden’s margin, if Trump stays in single digits.

It’s a close race. There’s a lot to worry about. I worry every day, and you should too. But you should also remember this: Democratic voter enthusiasm is high—higher than Republican enthusiasm, according to numerous polls. From the way this race is being covered, you’d never know that. Harris’s enthusiastic voters, especially Black women, aren’t “real Americans.” They’re being erased from the narrative. By the “liberal” media.

Donald Trump announced Wednesday during a speech in Scranton, Pennsylvania, that he’ll be playing Madison Square Garden. His campaign has rented the self-proclaimed “World’s Most Famous Arena” for Sunday, October 27, and Trump said it means that “we’re going to make a play for New York.”

Trump is not going to win New York. Harris is 14 points ahead in the Empire State in the current FiveThirtyEight averages. That’s closer than the 2020 result of 23 points, but it still isn’t spitting distance. So we can say it’s a waste of his time and money, and that’s a good thing. But it’s not entirely stupid either, and there’s a lesson in this for Kamala Harris and her campaign as we wind toward the home stretch.

But before we get to that, let’s just pause to note the creepy historical echo of a neofascist rally taking place at Madison Square Garden, because there was one of those before, and it’s the first thing I (and I’m sure many other people) thought of when I heard this news. I mean the famous rally held in the Garden (then a completely different building, but still named Madison Square Garden) on February 20, 1939, by the German American Bund and its leader, Fritz Kuhn.

This was a pro-Nazi rally. The stage was adorned with a gigantic image of George Washington surrounded by stars and stripes. There were also swastikas and Hitler salutes galore among the 22,000 attendees. No, I’m not saying there will be swastikas this time around, although one can’t help but wonder if the various white supremacist groups backing Trump will send contingents. The guy plays to semi-empty houses that are half the Garden’s size, so something’s going to need to be done to paper the room. If he hews to the custom of, say, GOP conventions, he’ll invite as many Black supporters as he can up on the stage with him.

So no, he’s not going to win New York, and yes, there are disturbing historical resonances at work here. But here’s the one way in which this rally isn’t stupid or offensive.

At this point in a presidential campaign, establishing momentum becomes important—having the look of a winner. As I’ve often said, the swing voters who’ll decide the election don’t have strong political allegiances; these are people who view politics, as Wisconsin Democratic chairman Ben Wikler recently said, the way we political-junkie types view Olympic sports—we know they exist, and we pay attention for a brief period every four years, and that’s it. We choose to root for non-American Olympic athletes based on a bunch of emotional and nonrational factors—whether we have warm or cool feelings toward their country, whether we like the way they carry themselves, the way they smile—and maybe most of all, whether they have a shot at winning. In the 100-meter dash, we’re more likely to cheer for the Jamaican who has a real chance of medaling than the guy from Norway or whatever; nothing against Norway.

So campaigns need to do things in the closing weeks to communicate momentum and exude winner-ness. Having an unexpected rally at an unexpected and famous place qualifies. It shakes things up a little. It dominates, or at least figures prominently into, the cable news menu for probably four days—two before, the day of, and one day after. And if Trump can actually fill the place, or come close, that too communicates energy.

Harris came out of the blocks with a massive burst of energy, which has certainly stalled to some extent. Heading into these final three weeks, she needs to create some new buzz. Simply doing more events will help. She just hasn’t been on the trail enough. She needs to show that she can still draw the thousands she was drawing in August. A new proposal or two will help. It’s hard to say how much policy matters at this point, especially against an opponent who has contempt for policy, but it can’t hurt. Her proposal on long-term home care this week was actually pretty important—it’s a huge hole in Medicare and would make a difference in millions of people’s lives. Surely that got through to some voters.

But at this point a campaign is mostly about gestures and stagecraft. The Harris campaign could use some events that create mojo. A surprise endorsement from a prominent Republican or some other unexpected person from the corporate world or the military or some such. An event that tops Trump’s on the same day—in a stadium, maybe, if she can fill it—and totally steals his thunder. That could take the form of a concert featuring some of her celebrity supporters if they can all be pulled together on the same date—Beyoncé, Bruce, Billie Eilish, John Legend, and most of all, you know who.

And just campaign, campaign, campaign. Look hungry. Look like you want it. I remember in 2000, Al Gore campaigned nonstop for the last 48 or maybe even 72 hours. I recall it making a difference. He was generally behind in the polls, and while yes, he did end up losing that race, he lost it on First Street Northeast (i.e., the Supreme Court) on December 12. He won it on November 7.

The Harris campaign has received criticisms, many of them deserved, in these recent weeks. But the campaign has also done a lot of things right. The polls say she has become the candidate of change, which is an extraordinarily hard thing for a sitting vice president to pull off. She has narrowed or, according to some polls, eliminated Trump’s advantage on the economy. She’s catching up among working-class voters, as Timothy Noah noted this week. So some of those ideas that the press finds boring, the small-business tax credit and so on, must be getting through to somebody.

But this is the time to win news cycles and be seen as being on offense, not defense. I sure hope the campaign has a few surprises up its sleeve.

If you know anything about the founding and history of the Republican Party, the symbolism of Thursday’s event where Liz Cheney appeared with Kamala Harris had to get your attention. This party that has descended into antidemocratic neofascism was founded in 1854 as a progressive beacon. The Whig Party was dissolving and split into anti- and pro-slavery factions. The Free Soil Party was well intentioned but small. But when the antislavery Whigs and the Free Soilers got together, then they had some numbers and some power. Within six years, they elected not just a president but the most courageous and consequential president in American history (yes, FDR is a close second in my book).

It all started in a schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin, which sits less than a mile away from where Cheney appeared with Harris. Is Cheney a “Lincoln Republican”? In one sense, she’s not even close. Lincoln was a liberal. In addition to ending slavery, he made public universities possible and created the national railroad system. He levied the country’s first income tax, to pay for the Civil War. He was way too big-government for Liz.

But in another sense, yes, she is, because at least she believes in the union, the republic, and the Constitution. By the benighted current standards of her party, that earns her a gold star.

Do liberals love Liz Cheney? Of course not. Nor should we. She’s a super-hawkish neocon. She defended torture. There’s a reason she was ascending the ladder of GOP House leadership in the 2010s. Yes, she had a pedigree, but also, she was totally fine with everything the GOP stood for.

But then Trump happened, and she stood up to say no. That did take some guts, in that authoritarian party. It unambiguously cost her her career, as she surely knew it would. And now she’s talking about the “depraved cruelty” of Donald Trump and endorsing a Democrat. And it’s not as if Harris promised her anything—that she’d bomb Iran or whatever. Cheney did this because Harris “will be a president who will defend the rule of law.”

Will it matter? I think so, and so does Ben Wikler, the chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party and one of the best state party chairs in the country. On MSNBC Thursday night, Wikler identified two groups of voters who might be influenced by this endorsement.

The first group is low-information uncommitted voters. He used a great analogy to describe these people. “These are people,” he told Jen Psaki, “who think about politics the way you and I think about the javelin at the Olympics, which is something that we’re vaguely aware happens every four years, but it’s not something we’re seeking out.” Yes, there are such people. For these voters, Wikler said, “just hearing that Democrats and Republicans are all agreeing that Kamala Harris is the person” might matter.

His second group was more interesting. It consists of “highly engaged” Republicans whose first loyalty is not to Trump but to “the flag and the Constitution.” Cheney’s move shows these people that “you can be yourself with your conservative commitments” and vote for a Democrat.

How many such people are there? A lot. Let’s start with the fact that Nikki Haley got nearly 4.4 million votes in the primaries. That was 20 percent of the total number of votes cast. Now let’s extrapolate that out to a November electorate. In 2020, around 155 million people voted. According to CNN exit polls, 36 percent were Republican, or around 56 million.

And 20 percent of 56 million—that is, the extrapolated Haley vote—makes for a potential pool of anti-Trump Republicans of around 11 million. Now, most of them may not bother to vote, or will write in Ronald Reagan or whomever. But surely Cheney’s backing will help convince some of them that voting for Harris is all right. And if you throw in Republican-leaning independents, that pool grows by maybe another 20 million.

If Harris can harvest votes from these people while promising nothing more than that she isn’t Donald Trump and will defend the Constitution, why shouldn’t she? I’m for as many Republican endorsements of Harris as possible. Aside from signaling a green light to Republican voters, it’ll drive Trump up a wall.

The list of Harris’s GOP endorsers is growing. Former Arizona Senator Jeff Flake joined the band earlier this week. Flake is respected by independent voters in his state. If he campaigns with Harris, he too could move votes.

Meanwhile, the big questions in this arena: What’s up with Mitt Romney and George W. Bush? There are others, like former Trump chief of staff John Kelly. But Romney and Bush are the big fish. What in the world does either man have to lose? Romney is retiring. Bush paints and golfs. Both are richer than Croesus. I assume both want desperately to save their party from Trumpism. Isn’t the obvious best way to do that by encouraging their fellow Republicans to vote for Harris so they can end the scourge of Trumpism and get back to being a normal, warmongering, poor-people-penalizing, planet-scorching party again?

But seriously. If they were to back Harris, and Harris wins semi-convincingly with something like 15 percent of the Republican vote (around half that is normal), Trump will be finished. Not Trumpism. That will take a lot longer.

People like Romney and Bush should consider their place in history. In these next few years, the Republican Party will either corrupt itself beyond repair and crumble into out-and-out fascism, becoming the vehicle that ended the human race’s longest-lasting democratic experiment, or it will finally cast that off and begin to resurrect itself. Do they want to be among those who sat by and let the former happen or those who helped the latter take place? There’s a little schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin, they might visit for inspiration.