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With the election extremely close in every battleground state including Wisconsin, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Trump are fighting for voters who may not vote for either one of them or at all.
The nightmare scenario was 2016 when Trump shocked America, the world and his own campaign by winning election. Pollsters and political experts had assured us Hillary Clinton was the only serious candidate and Trump was a joke. The joke was on all of us.
It turned out Trump attracted rightwing racist fringe groups and violent militias into the Republican party who hated the federal government and democracy itself. Those were the hard-core rightwing extremists Trump’s sent to attack Congress on Jan.6, 2021, to prevent the certification of President Biden’s election victory over Trump by the largest vote in American history.
Now Trump’s failed insurrection we all watched on live TV and on close-up violent videos has returned as a central issue a month before the election. You’d think Republicans would try to forget about it, but instead Trump is calling attention to it by threatening his violent supporters will create another bloodbath unless a large majority of American voters change their minds and reelect him as president next month.
It's an absurd threat. Trump was at his politically strongest and most dangerous as a candidate eight years ago when few Americans had any idea what he would try to do as president. They know now. That’s why Republicans blindly following Trump lost control of the House, the Senate and the presidency in the following elections.
Desperately Seeking Votes
Eight years later, Republicans nominating Trump again are desperately trying to attract the protest votes from young voters supporting third parties including Jill Stein’s Green party, which is only attracting 1% of the vote currently, or Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the anti-vaccination conspiracy theorist who dropped out of the presidential race to endorse Trump.
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Trump’s encouragement of Kennedy’s candidacy in hopes it would hurt Democrats backfired big time. Because Wisconsin and other states will still include Kennedy on their ballots, polls in those states now show Kennedy’s zombie candidacy is likely to draw more votes from Trump than from Harris.
Marquette University Law School’s monthly poll last week solidified Harris’s four-percentage-point lead of 48-44 over Trump with RFK Jr. taking 3% of the nutty Republican conspiracy theorist vote.
Democratic Senate candidate Tammy Baldwin’s seven-point lead in Marquette’s poll over Republican Eric Hovde, the multimillionaire California banker who returned to Wisconsin to run against Baldwin for a second time, also provides a clear pathway for Harris to add even more Democratic votes to her growing total since they appeal to the same voters.
Democratic Majority in State Assembly?
The other major election change this year that could dramatically tilt voting in favor of Harris is that it will be the first election in 15 years that Democratic voters have a possibility of electing a Democratic majority in the state Assembly.
For a decade and a half, Wisconsin’s legislative elections were among the most corruptly gerrymandered in the nation with voting districts dishonestly drawn by Republican legislators to assure themselves lopsided legislative control that were approved by the extreme rightwing political majority on the state Supreme Court.
Voters had to turn out in record numbers in three separate court elections in recent years to create a new state Supreme Court majority that would restore fair elections and protect reproductive rights for women in Wisconsin.
Trump’s eagerness to throw out millions of legally cast votes by Democrats in America and replace them with fake Republican electoral votes to change the outcome of elections and his opposition to the restoration of a half-century of constitutional rights for women to make their own decisions about their bodies, medical care and lives will be the central issues in this year’s election and every year until democracy is restored.
We haven’t even mentioned yet the most exciting change that occurred in this year’s election. When President Biden realized the media’s obsession with his age made it harder for him to stop Trump’s destruction of democracy, he walked away from power. That had never happened so close to an election before.
It could have led to chaos with multiple ambitious Democrats savaging each other a month before their convention. Instead, they rallied almost instantly around Biden’s endorsement of Harris, whose joyful campaign style and skills as a prosecutor and attorney general prepared her well to take on the most corrupt president in American history.
Where I’ve Been
I realize many wondered about my disappearance during what really can be called one of the most important elections of our lifetimes. Even though I was fully vaccinated, I was hospitalized with Covid that got even more complicated when it led to pneumonia.
But I’m back now and eager to rejoin the political fight for democracy. I know how lucky I was.
