Opinion | Is Something Worrying You?

Gail Collins: Well, Bret, tomorrow’s the day. Have you voted yet?

Bret Stephens: I like voting on Election Day. But a friend voted at the Met museum the other day and said the line was hours long. Mostly women. I’m predicting a blowout Kamala Harris victory — in Manhattan.

How about you?

Gail: I like voting on Election Day even when the lines are ridiculous.

And yeah, what will likely be huge turnout in New York will not have any effect whatsoever on the outcome, since everybody on both sides knew from Day 1 that this was not a state anybody needed to campaign in much. But it would be nice if the margin for Kamala Harris in Donald Trump’s hometown was a super blowout.

Any predictions?

Bret: My spidey sense is telling me that Trump will win. It feels like he has the momentum, which is hard to measure but matters, especially in the final days of a campaign. He’s had the better photo ops. And surveys show only 28 percent of Americans think America is on the right track, which historically means the incumbent party loses. And, as I’ve been saying here, I also think that Trump represents control, and people feel that too many things have spun out of control during the full arc of the Biden-Harris years: migration, prices, rent, financing costs, urban safety, overseas wars.

Gail: Aaaeeeee …

Bret: On the other hand, who knows? The polls were too favorable to Democrats in 2016 and 2020. They were too confident about Republicans in 2012. I have no idea what to make of that Selzer poll in Iowa, which has Harris winning a state Trump won by eight points in 2020 — maybe it’s an outlier, or maybe it’s hinting at a Harris landslide. I wouldn’t be surprised if we have an early night with a clear winner on Tuesday. But I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re stuck in recount and lawsuit hell for days or even weeks on end, either.

Gail: Well, if Trump loses, you know that the recount hell will be fiery indeed. And I could also imagine the Harris people challenging a Trump win if there was good evidence of widespread shenanigans at the polls.

Bret: As with cancer, so with this election: Pray for clear margins.

Gail: On the prediction front, I’m gonna bet on Harris. Early turnout was heavy on women, who tend to support her. Do you have any plans for election night?

Bret: Our editors are putting me to work for part of the night to do some spot commentary. After that, come what may, I’m going to take parts of the coming year to write a book that has absolutely nothing to do with the present.

Gail: History? Novel? Give me a hint.

Bret: History. Exotic vistas. Occasional nudity. Just letting readers know I’ll be writing a little less, and annoying them a little less, at least for a few months.

Gail: Well, I have a memoir due, and it’ll be kinda strange sitting down at the computer without seeing 27 emails from politicians looking for money. May feel a little … lonely.

Bret: I hope “Before It Went Completely Crazy” is a title you’re considering.

Back to the election, Gail: If Trump wins, what will you advise your liberal friends to do? Leave the country? Join the resistance? Write regular letters to the editor? Or, you know, keep calm and carry on?

Gail: A mixture, depending on how crazy it gets. And depending on whether the House or Senate has enough resistance to stop at least some of the terribleness. And of course, there’s always the court system.

Bret: I belong to that small number of Americans who, after Trump won in 2016, actually left the country for Europe. I’m not keen to repeat the experiment. If Trump wins, my advice is to take a deep breath, have faith in the robustness of our democratic traditions and refuse to give Trump the benefit of the liberal rage on which his movement feasts. A competent political opposition is the best antidote.

Gail: Do you have a bet on the congressional outcome? Just tell me so I can feel more or less neurotic.

Bret: Another mystery. I’m guessing the House switches to Democratic control and the Senate switches to Republican control. Which would be fine by me. So long as there’s divided government, we can all rest a little easier.

Gail: A little.

Bret: I need to get back to the presidential vote. Not only are women voting lopsidedly for Harris, men are voting lopsidedly for Trump — and he’s courting them, uh, bigly. Any theories on his “bro” appeal?

Gail: We have to look at the whole saga of American women coming into their own. For a long, long, long time the basic division was between women who married and kept house as a career, and women who were single and pursued work in the outside world. The theory was you couldn’t possibly do both.

Then everything changed, partly because so many women who expected to get married also discovered how rewarding a career could be. Plus, families found it harder to support a middle-class lifestyle on one paycheck. But even when husbands realized the family couldn’t live on just their income, some guys were resentful of the decline in their old image as the family provider.

It’s all sorta coming back — not rationally, but Trumpishly.

Bret: True. Also, a lot of empirical evidence shows that too many men have not been doing well in the past couple of generations. Girls perform better than boys in grade school; women outnumber men as college students, roughly 60-40; more men are essentially locked out of the economy because of past felony convictions; more men are in blue-collar jobs where wages are stagnant. And too many boys grow up in households with either no male role model or a really bad one.

Gail: You’re so good at bad news.

Bret: So it’s not surprising that so many men look to Trump as the ultimate role model — he flouts all the rules of a more feminized society. He’s like a character out of “Mad Men,” albeit more Pete Campbell than Don Draper. How many votes will that net him? We’ll find out.

Can I change the subject to something closer to home, professionally speaking? The Washington Post …

Gail: Well, that’s certainly a change. The Post decided at the last minute not to run the endorsement of Kamala Harris that its opinion staff had been preparing. Pretty much the same thing happened at The Los Angeles Times. Both papers have businessmen owners who came into the journalism world recently, presumably because owning a major publication is a great way to make yourself super influential overnight.

Bret: Perish the thought.

Gail: They apparently didn’t know the amount of pressure having that responsibility entails. Gives me a chance to rejoice that The Times, which has a publisher carrying on a legendary family history, is on the record with a Harris endorsement.

Bret: It won’t surprise you that I thought Jeff Bezos’ reasoning for quashing the endorsement was absolutely right, even if he should have done more to lay the groundwork for the decision. Newspaper endorsements don’t sway votes, except maybe in very local races. The Post is still a terrific newspaper, but the news media has lost the trust of too much of the public — an empirical fact that too many of us inside the business don’t like to acknowledge or refuse to take responsibility for. A newsroom that lost more than half of its audience between 2020 and 2023, as The Post did, while racking up $77 million in losses last year probably should feel grateful that it isn’t being sold by Bezos to someone much less scrupulous or generous. And staffers who care for the reputation of their newspaper might consider that having a public fit over the paper’s non-endorsement merely exposes them as the left-wing partisans half the country already suspects them of being.

I hope the paper recovers. In the meantime, what are your plans if Harris wins?

Gail: You mean sigh in relief and settle down for an evenhanded, responsible, experienced administration? Or lock all the doors in case there’s a Trumpist riot?

Bret: I was mostly wondering about the latter.

Gail: My neighborhood is definitely not a very likely site for a Trumpist rebellion. But I’m of course worried about the country as a whole. Do you think there’ll be serious trouble?

Bret: We are a long way from the time when Richard Nixon refused to challenge some fishy results from the 1960 election because he thought it would be bad for America. I wouldn’t worry too much about rioting on the Upper West Side. But I worry a lot about what Trump could do if the election appears to go against him in a narrow recount. Trump, alas, is no Nixon.

Gail: My plan for the week: Vote, go to a return-watching party, fasten seatbelt.

Bret: And imbibe freely.

Before we go, Gail, be sure not to miss the superb companion photo essays The Times published this weekend for the Harris and Trump campaigns. Photographers like Erin Schaff, Doug Mills, Hiroko Masuike, Haiyun Jiang, John Tully, Kenny Holston and others only get small-print credits under their photographs. But nobody brings home the big picture quite the way they do. My favorite: Max Whittaker’s image of a Trump 2024 flag somewhere in the Nevada desert. Amid magnificent desolation, false hope.

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