The polls suggest that there is at least a 50–50 chance that the electorate will choose a woman for the first time as president on November 5th.
This history-making possibility is even more significant because the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, is also a black woman.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by close to three million but lost in the Electoral College, a remnant of a past era baked into the American constitution. The United States, alone among the world’s democracies, does not accept the popular vote as determinative of victory in national contests.
Everybody, regardless of gender, is capable of both toughness and tenderness. However, for some people, women are associated with softness and with an aura of weakness in confrontational situations, which raises questions about a female’s ability to confront foreign bullies in a crisis situation in the Oval Office.
The Republicans released a brilliant ad with a clear gender subtext that features actors playing Vladimir Putin and a tea-sipping ayatollah, both deemed alpha males, gleefully watching videos of the aspiring female presidential candidate in Washington.
It ends with a picture of Kamala dancing while Trump is seen walking on the tarmac with a military officer and a Secret Service agent. The tag in this powerful ad ends with the statement: “America doesn’t need another TikTok performer. We need strength that will protect us.”
Trump.
Never mind that Trump is on record as a devotee of Putin’s dictatorial style of leadership and that he speaks about his love for the North Korean despot, Kim Jong-un, and his admiration for the autocratic Chinese leader, Xi Jinping. These preferences confirm his former chief-of-staff John Kelly’s damning judgment that Mr. Trump “admires autocrats and murderous dictators.”
Still, promoting Trump as a swaggering, decisive, strong man deemed readier to face down foreign leaders than a woman seen as inherently weak will bolster Trump’s chances of winning the support of what could be a pivotal slice of independent voters.
Vance.
JD Vance’s wife, Usha, an emigrant from India, who is evidently a crack debater, prepared her husband well for the important verbal clash with Tim Walz. He showed that he had absorbed the techniques of a fine public speaker, and he had his opponent struggling until the final straightforward question asked by Walz about who won the last presidential election in 2020, which led to visible consternation in the Republican’s face.
Would Vance support Trump’s blatant lies about this question, or would he try to dance around it with some excusatory rhetoric? He mentioned some vague focus on the future and left no doubt that he was mouthing the lies of his political boss. His demeanor and verbiage indicated clearly that he had no credible answer for this crucial question.
Donald Trump and his entourage claim that Joe Biden didn’t win the last presidential election. Over sixty judges attested to the results, and Kristopher Krebs, then President Trump’s director of election security, described it as the fairest election in his lifetime. Krebs was fired the day after he expressed this clear and conclusive opinion.
The election victory by the Democrats is not a matter for debate. There is no rational case against the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s victory. Donald Trump’s claims that the results were spurious simply because he lost are preposterous.
In addition, he tried to prevent President Biden’s confirmation in the House of Representatives by encouraging a riot at the Capitol Building. The mayhem and terror of the January 6th events have resulted in prison sentences for 378 rioters. Mr. Trump speaks of them as patriots and has declared that one of his first acts, if elected, will be to give his benediction to thuggery by granting the marauders a full pardon.
Walz.
Readers will remember that the insurrectionists called for the hanging of Vice-president Mike Pence, who, to his great credit, followed his constitutional duty of confirming the winner of the election. He was threatened by the mob, and the Secret Service had to usher him to a safe space in the Capitol Building. On hearing of his perilous predicament in hiding, Trump callously dismissed his vice president’s situation with “So What!” suggesting clearly that he couldn’t care less about the wellbeing of Pence or his family.
Religion plays an important part in every American election. The evangelical community and many traditional Catholics look askance at the liberal ideas that predominate in the Democratic Party. In the last national contest in 2020, with Joe Biden, a practicing Catholic, facing Donald Trump, Biden split the votes of his co-religionists. This was far from a resounding clap in the back.
A clear majority of evangelical Protestants remain a core part of the Trumper movement. However, repeated murmurings from these churches suggest some level of disenchantment with this Republican candidate. Tim Alberta, the son of an evangelical preacher and himself a devout churchgoer, described Trump in his widely read book “The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory” as “a lecherous, impenitent scoundrel.”
Pope Francis surprised everyone by recently declaring that both candidates were in breach of the moral order, the Democrat because of support for abortion rights and the Republican for his extreme rhetoric about immigrants, leaving American Catholics to choose the lesser of two evils
About 70% of the Jewish community vote Democratic, providing many stalwart leaders in the party. Mr. Trump has stated that Jews voting for Kamala should have their heads examined, and even more quizzically claimed that if he loses the election, somehow, “the Jewish people would have a lot to do with it.”
The ongoing events in Gaza, as well as in other Arab and Muslim countries, will impact the vote of that community in the United States. This is especially the case in Michigan, where the Muslim community is strong, and reports from there convey a sense of turmoil and betrayal by the Biden/Harris government in Washington – a bad omen for Democrats.
Pennsylvania presents another major worry for the Harris/Walz team because Republicans have registered many more new voters than Democrats. The polls suggest that this state, even with a popular Democratic governor and Senator Casey likely to hold his seat, remains on a knife edge in the presidential race.
Gerry O'Shea blogs at wemustbetalking.com
