Dem
48
GOP
52
Yesterday, Kamala Harris continued her uplifting message by going to a Black church in Detroit and channeling the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. by saying the nation was "ready to bend the arc of history toward justice." Meanwhile, Donald Trump held a rally in Lititz, PA where he threw out his prepared speech and adlibbed it, attacking the polls as fake and the Democrats as demonic. He also hinted that he wouldn't mind reporters being shot, although his campaign spokesman, Steven Cheung, later tried to walk that back to undo the damage. It was Trump at his darkest and angriest. The contrast with Harris couldn't have been greater if he tried (and maybe he was trying).
The speech was full of lies, but that's not news, so we won't even bother listing them. He did say that he shouldn't have left the White House on Jan. 20, 2021, despite Congress having finally certified the electoral vote late on Jan. 6, 2021. This kind of language is something new, even for Trump; basically, that elections don't matter anymore and the peaceful transfer of power is for weaklings. According to the Constitution, once Congress has certified the electoral vote, the show is over, even if there was fraud—and over 60 court cases showed that there wasn't any to speak of.
It is hard to know if Trump is going so dark intentionally or he is just losing it due to all the stress of the campaign and likelihood he will go to prison if he loses, given all the criminal cases against him. Does he think that going so dark at the end is going to get him more votes? His base is going to turn out, no matter what. What we are thinking is how is this ending going to affect the Nikki Haley voters who are planning to vote in person tomorrow? Surely some of them are going to say "this is about six bridges too far."
When former Alabama governor George Wallace ran for president in 1968, he famously said: "There's not a dime's worth of difference between the Democratic and Republican parties." Even accounting for inflation since 1968, we think that if Wallace had observed how the two campaigns are ending this year, he might have raised that to $100. (V)