Donald Trump believes he’s going to lose

Vice President Kamala Harris at the Ella West Gallery in Durham, North Carolina on March 1 (Creative Commons)
John Stoehr
October 30, 2024

We have a week to go before Election Day, and like many of my comrades in the pundit corps, I’m being asked what I think is going to happen. Here are some thoughts, with others on the side.

Donald Trump believes he’s going to lose
That’s what he’s telling us when he complains about cheating. Yes, he’s eroding public trust in the institutions of government, but first and foremost, he’s saying that he believes Kamala Harris will beat him.

No one in his right mind would triple down on his base of support, knowing such a strategy is not enough to win a presidential contest. But that’s what Trump has done. His campaign looks like he’s talking to the same people, over and over, because he is. He makes no effort to broaden his appeal outside the bubble of white-power politics.

This is lazy and breathtakingly obtuse. And it forces him to do two things. One is complain about cheating in advance. The other is lie.

His rally at Madison Square Garden was widely panned by neutral observers for being racist, sexist and even fascist. A day later, he took to his social media site to falsely allege the discovery of “THOUSANDS of potentially FRAUDULENT” voter documents in Pennsylvania.

This afternoon, he held a presser to respond to the backlash against the MSG rally, especially that a speaker there said Puerto Rico and all of its American citizens were “an island of garbage.” In reality, the rally was a categorical hate-fest, but Trump said he was “like a love-fest.”

Bloomberg’s Timothy O’Brien said that whenever Trump “loses political ground,” he retreats to claims about voter fraud. It’s “like clockwork,” O’Brien said. So is Trump’s lying. We can set our watches to the likelihood of him saying that you didn’t see that thing you actually saw. Who are you going to trust, he says in essence, me or your lying eyes?

This is not what a winner does. A winner believes in his ability to win over a majority of the American people – or at least a majority of the voters in swing states that determine presidential elections. A winner looks forward to being tested and to showing the world what he’s made of. A loser doesn’t do that. He fears the test. He fears seeing all the lies he tells to others and to himself proven conclusively wrong.

In order to conceal the truth about him, he does what losers do.

Trump is bad at politics
You could say, as O’Brien did, that Trump resorts to loser tactics when he “loses political ground,” but you could put that another way.

He resorts to them when he gives ground away.

His campaign evidently felt it was a good idea to insult Puerto Ricans and Latinos generally a couple of days before holding a rally at an arena located in the Puerto Rican neighborhood of a majority-Latino city (Allentown) in the must-win swing state of Pennsylvania. According to Politico, some residents are so enraged by “island of garbage” that they’re planning to protest the rally, thus bringing more attention to a campaign that can’t break out of its bubble of white-power politics.

A party official in Allentown, who said that his Latino family is split evenly between Democrats and Republicans, said of Trump that “it’s not the smartest thing to do, to insult people — a large group of voters here in a swing state — and then go to their home asking for votes.”

That’s a nice way of putting it.

Another way is that he’s bad at politics.

Back in the day, before Trump came along, we used to be able to count on both hands the number of unforced errors a candidate made. Recall that Republican nominee Mitt Romney was well-known for his gaffes.

In between the blunders, Romney ran a serious campaign. We could identify his gaffes, because they were the exception to the norm.

There are such exceptions with Trump. They are the norm. His campaign is nonstop gaffing. He overwhelms us with them. We never talk about them, because we put on the pile of “more of the same.”

Trump could win. If he does, it will be because just enough white people in just enough places were willing to believe his lies and overlook his errors. He could also win by cheating and staging another coup, this one perhaps legal. But let’s also not kid ourselves.

If he loses, and I think he will, no one is going to look back at nine years’ worth of campaigning and say that it’s worth emulating.

Harris believes she’s going to win
My main point is that the vice president is running a masterful campaign. Even if she’d had a year to prepare, I don’t think she could have put together a better operation than the one she has now. And as long as she executes according to plan, she’ll probably beat Trump.

With the help of Joe Biden, Harris orchestrated instantaneous unity within the Democratic Party, despite its factions and infighting. Since the convention, she has done what you expect from a nominee who is trying to win: she has expanded her base of power to include people who are not Democrats, namely Republicans, but also nonvoters.

She has done that with a mix of policy proposals, especially those that target price-gouging and the high cost of living, and basic appeals to reestablishing the regular order in political business. In doing so, Harris is creating a new kind of consensus. Or more precisely, she’s claiming as her own a consensus that has already emerged.

As if to illustrate the point, Barbara Pierce Bush, the daughter of former Republican president George W Bush, came out Monday in support of Harris. She said she hoped that voters would support the vice president toward the goal of protecting women’s rights. She joined the Harris campaign in Pennsylvania over the weekend.

Along with Liz and Dick Cheney, and scores of other prominent Republicans, the addition of a Bush daughter suggests two things.

One is that Kamala Harris is standing at the mid-point in American politics. She represents the new centrism. The other is that Donald Trump is standing outside the mainstream. He’s a partisan candidate. She’s a bipartisan candidate, the first such candidate of my lifetime.

Though the aggregate of quality national polls is showing that Harris has a slight lead over Trump, that’s not the reason I’m hopeful.

I’m hopeful because Trump is bad at politics and acts like a loser.

Meanwhile, Harris is good at politics and acts like a winner.