‘Whether the women like it or not’ could become the famous last words of Donald Trump’s political career.
Most polls still show that Tuesday’s US election is too close to call, but the vibes are once again swinging in favour of the Democratic candidate Kamala Harris.
And there’s one reason for that: women.
With nearly 75 million Americans already voting, women are turning out in huge numbers, outnumbering men by 56% to 44% in many states.
While women usually lean more Democratic, the gender gap this year is wider than ever, both for women supporting Harris and for men supporting Donald Trump.
And the evidence seems to be that the late deciders are breaking for Harris.
Some confirmation of this came on Saturday night from the Des Moines Register Selzer poll, the gold standard of polls, which found Harris three points ahead of Trump in Iowa, a midwestern state that Trump won by eight points in 2020.
Seldom has one poll had so much impact. This is not only because many professional reputations in the polling and pundit industry are on the line, but if she even misses by five points, it will indicate a Harris landslide.
Shockingly, Selzer found that not only are independent women going for Harris by a 28-point margin, but senior women are breaking for her by 35 points.
Republican women crossing over
This captures the trend of Republican women crossing over for Harris. Their willingness to do it behind their husband’s backs has become a national talking point. Fox host Jesse Waters quipped that if his wife voted for Harris, it would be tantamount to her having an affair.
If there was one thing that is going to swing this election it is not inflation or the economy; not immigration – Donald Trump’s fake alarm that Haitians are eating the cats and dogs of the residents of Springfield, Ohio; not the fake claim that your child can go to school as a boy and come home as a girl; not even Trump’s threat to jail his enemies or his rancid character and Tourette Syndrome tendency to blurt out rubbish.
It’s a man called Samuel Alito, the Supreme Court justice who wrote the infamous Dobbs decision in June 2022 that removed a woman’s constitutional right to a say in the healthcare of her own body.
This epochal moment, which was followed by abortion restrictions in 41 states and total abortion bans in 13, was made possible by the three Supreme Court justices appointed by Trump.
Dobbs changed the US political landscape in ways that we might only become fully aware of when the results start coming in on Tuesday night, but the Iowa poll is clearly a response to a six-week abortion ban that came into effect in July. Anecdotally many women are angry and ready to see the end of Trump.
One woman’s 94-year-old Christian fundamentalist mother in Saginaw, Michigan, hadn’t voted for a Democrat since John F Kennedy in 1960, but voted on Saturday for Harris.
This is why the worst of Trump’s fumbles in his horrible final week of campaigning was his pledge to “protect” the women of the country “whether the women like it or not”.
Trump knows a thing or two about women liking it or not. In May last year, he was found guilty in a civil case of defaming a woman who he was found to have sexually assaulted in the changing rooms of a New York department store.
The famous Access Hollywood tape of him bragging about grabbing women by the pussy – “and if you’re a star, they let you do it” – has gone viral on Tik Tok in recent days to the horror of a younger generation of women who were not of voting age when it first aired in 2016.
‘Campaign panic’
But there are deeper problems for Trump – and some reports of panic in a campaign that until just a few days ago was supremely confident.
Throughout these final months, Republicans have boasted about their chances, while the Democrats have played theirs down, even as excitement has mounted among younger voters, women and voters of colour who have been registering to vote in record numbers.
On Friday, the usually understated David Plouffe, a strategist in the Harris campaign who was instrumental in Barack Obama’s two presidential victories, claimed that the late deciding voters were breaking by double digits for Harris.
This would not be surprising if one considers Trump’s closing message, starting with the hate fest at Madison Square Gardens where the unfunny comic Tony Hinchcliffe joked that Puerto Rico, a US territory, was a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean.
Trump has mused on the size of Arnold Palmer’s penis, called for the execution of Liz Cheney (who was driven from the Republican Party for demanding accountability for the January 6 insurrection) and apparently simulated oral sex on a microphone.
The most telling self-own was Trump stumbling and struggling to pull himself into a garbage truck.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCxyj2XDxwA
He was trying to make a thing out of Joe Biden’s muffled gaffe, where he appeared to call Trump’s supporters garbage. This spawned much fainting and faux outrage by campaign operatives who hoped to blow it up into a repeat of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 “basket of deplorables” remark about Trump’s followers.
It flopped because Biden is not the candidate and as Trump’s one-time Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci pointed out, he looked like an 80-year-old man stumbling into a garbage truck.
Harris contrast
Kamala Harris has continued to offer a contrast, which she did by offering a plea for national unity at the Ellipse in Washington DC last Tuesday from the same spot from where Trump had riled up his supporters before they attacked the Capitol on 6 January 2020.
Harris has run a near-flawless campaign, jumping through the extra hoops required of a woman – and a woman of colour.
She concluded her speech with these stirring lines: “And those who came before us, the patriots at Normandy, and Selma, Seneca Falls, and Stonewall, on farmlands, and factory floors, they did not struggle, sacrifice and lay down their lives only to see us cede our fundamental freedoms.
“They didn’t do that only to see us submit to the will of another petty tyrant.”
A petty tyrant indeed, but one who has empowered and unleashed the ugliest and most malignant tendencies within the underbelly of the United States.
The stumbling case for Trump
Against this, it has been hard to make the case for a second Trump presidency. The Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal bravely tried, dismissing fear of what the “petty tyrant” could accomplish because “Mr Trump was too undisciplined, and his attention span too short, to stay on one message much less stage a coup”.
Anyone feeling relieved that Trump’s own boosters believe he is too ADD to pull off a coup should examine the coterie of conspiracy theorists he wants to bring with him to the Oval Office.
Stephen Miller, the anti-immigrant extremist who raved at Madison Square Garden that America is for Americans, will be in charge of rounding up, locking up and deporting millions of immigrants.
Anti-vaxxer Robert F Kennedy Junior is slated to head the country’s public health services, including women’s health, while Elon Musk will be empowered to “fix” the economy by creating what he calls a “necessary” economic collapse. Everyday Americans must embrace the pain.
Muskonomics would lay waste to the federal government and induce a recession in an economy that The Economist described last week as the “envy of the world”.
In a special report, the magazine wrote: “On a per-person basis, American economic output is now about 40% higher than in western Europe and Canada, and 60% higher than in Japan – roughly twice as large as the gaps between them in 1990. Average wages in America’s poorest state, Mississippi, are higher than the averages in Britain, Canada and Germany.”
But why should it matter to the rest of us if a cartel of crypto billionaires and religious crazies want to take over the United States?
Global conflicts
Europeans for a start are extremely worried that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s buddies like Trump, Musk and Tucker Carlson are already cooking up a “peace in our time” deal that will force Ukraine to surrender to Russia.
And while Biden has failed to rein in Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu in Gaza and the broader Middle East, does anyone believe that Trump – who gave Netanyahu everything he wanted last time – would prove a blessing for the Palestinians?
Israel has now restored its military supremacy in the region, Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition is pushing for annexation of the West Bank and for settlements in Gaza and the Prime Minister has advocated regime change in Iran.
That is why it matters who is in the Oval Office, and why even Democrats who oppose Biden’s support for Israel in Gaza like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez strongly support Harris and hope for a change in Washington.
The world is treading dangerously close to a larger war, one that could have nuclear consequences. Who does one trust to navigate through the complicated competition with China, to fight climate change, to defend and expand the liberal democratic order, to build partnerships with Africa and to help negotiate a new global security system from the ruins of the post-World War 2 order?
Post-election battles
If he loses, Trump will not go without a fight. He has said that the only way he can be defeated is if the election is rigged and has already started undermining the elections.
He is likely to declare victory irrespective of the result and then we could be dragged back through a sequel of 2020 with every possible legal trick being deployed, including a few new ones.
Who knows what the millions of Maga supporters, who will be told that the election has been stolen again, will do? Who knows what Trump, who will never concede that he lost, will ask them to do on his behalf?
This time, hopefully, the Democrats will be ready. A vast army of lawyers is waiting for Tuesday night when the lawfare begins.
The miraculous thing is that despite the archaic electoral college system, Elon Musk and his screaming dollars, the disinformation and social media manipulation, the cultish worship of a politician as divinely ordained, the US could elect its first female president in 250 years. And a woman of colour at that.
We now have to live through these final nerve-wracking hours to see whether Trump is truly ready to be kicked into the garbage. DM