17 More Days, Y'all. Put On A Kamala T-Shirt And Go Places!

The camo Harris/Walz baseball cap is also fine.

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Hey y’all! Sit on down, let’s talk.

The American presidential election is, if you are reading this on Friday, October 18, when this newsletter comes out, 18 days away. (If you’re reading this a different day, it’s closer. I may change the headline every day between now and November 5.) If you believe the polls — and who knows if we should or not? — the race is absurdly tight. The stakes could not be higher. We could elect a normal, good and smart person named Kamala Harris, who wants to fight for this country and be a president for all Americans, or we could allow a minority of our fellow citizens to let their chosen MAGA Nazi dictator seize power, a man who literally wants to sic the US military against anybody who refuses to worship him, and that could be the end of freedom in the United States as we know it.

No pressure!

Why do I say we’d be allowing a “minority” of our fellow citizens to do this? Because literally nobody is even pretending Donald Trump has a chance in hell of winning the popular vote. If he gets in, it will be once again a fluke of the Electoral College, AKA the United States’s most undemocratic relic, which was created to give slave states an oversized power to veto the will of the actual people. And now that same general list of states is … still doing the same thing, huh weird.

Last week, we talked about former President Barack Obama’s speech in Pittsburgh, and his commenets earlier that day at a Kamala Harris campaign office. He delivered a sharp message to men, and younger Black men in particular, who might be coming up with excuses not to vote for Harris, maybe just because she’s a woman, or because Trump is a conman who uses his powers to convince people he gives a shit about them.

He can do that. He’s Barack Obama.

In response to Obama’s speech, Never-Trumper Bill Kristol — it will never not be weird to approvingly quote Kristol, by the way, but HERE WE ARE — wrote in The Bulwark that yes, well, Obama can say whatever he wants to Black men, but Harris is doing just as well with young Black voters as Joe Biden did, and you want to know who’s REALLY dogshit when it comes to voting against the interests of literally everyone, and instead choosing racist fascists?

Fuckin’ white people!

You want to know why Trump has a decent chance to win the presidency again? Because most white Americans support him. In the latest New York Times/Siena poll, Trump wins white voters by 52 percent to 44 percent.

Kristol said it might be cool if some white dudes like Mittens “Mitt” Romney and Gee-Dubya Bush would get off their asses and endorse/stump for Harris. But regardless, if Trump wins, know whose fault that is? Fuckin’ white people.

Thank you, Woke Bill Kristol!

Point is, we can talk about all kinds of groups and demographic slices where Harris needs to run up the margins, and quite frankly none of us has any idea who that we encounter each day between now and November 5 needs to hear the message, needs a nudge, needs some kind of permission structure to vote for Harris instead of Trump, or to vote for Harris instead of believing their vote doesn’t matter, or whatever their issue is.

So it’s time for all of us to do whatever we can to wear our support for Harris on our sleeves, literally if possible. It’s time to get off our asses, throw on a Harris T-shirt — or the Harris/Walz camo hat — and go to Home Depot.

Or wherever.

Because you don’t know who needs to see that.

After that Obama speech, and after I read what Kristol wrote, I made a decision: that between now and the election, every time I go out in public, I’m wearing a Harris T-shirt. (Or hoodie. I have one of those.)

It’s a minor thing, obviously. I have signs in my yard, but that’s so impersonal. Obviously I do what I do for a living, here and at Wonkette, so I spend a lot of my time telling people how to vote/informing people/rallying the troops/preaching to the choir. But I want to do more, and I want us all to do more of whatever we can.

I live in Memphis, Tennessee. I voted for Kamala Harris the other day, and for Gloria Johnson to be our new senator and replace that human toenail Marsha Blackburn. (And to re-elect Rep. Steve Cohen, and more.) Memphis is a very blue city in a very red voter suppression state. But among all the Harris signs in Memphis, there are also people jones-ing for the old Confederacy — you know, aristocratic country club types.

What I’m saying is that if you go to Whole Foods or Kroger in a predominantly white neighborhood in the predominantly Black city of Memphis — as I did the first night I made that decision — you might run into some Trumpers, even if they’re the kind that don’t love his behavior, but do love his tax cuts and white supremacist immigration policies. You might get some dirty looks from old Boomer white people as you walk around the grocery store in your Harris t-shirt.

And y’all, that’s the fun part. I kept running into this one old white couple at Kroger, they scowled at me every time we ended up in the same aisle, it was hilarious.

After the grocery, I went to Target, due to a desperate need to dick around in the kitchen section for a few minutes and see if there was anything I desperately had to have. (Hello, new cast iron Dutch oven!)

I don’t know why, but I ended up having more random conversations with strangers that night than I ever do in public. I am not usually that type. I’m not mean, but I like to get in and get out when I’m running errands. But that night, all of a sudden, two guys were asking me for advice in the luggage section of Target, two women were conspiring with me in Kroger on which ingredients to use in white chicken chili, I tried to help some old dude figure out if the universal remote he was looking at was actually universal. (Answer: I ain’t fuckin’ know, don’t ask me.)

I don’t know if the fact I was wearing a Harris T-shirt put me in some kind of mood, something that said “Hey, be nicer and more approachable than usual, you’re representing.” I don’t know if the T-shirt made me seem friendlier to other people. And I don’t know who that I saw that night might have paid any attention, or needed to see it, or even cared.

But maybe somebody did.

You. Just. Don’t. Know.

I think that’s kind of the point of any and all of this kind of stuff, you just don’t know. And you don’t know who might benefit from hearing/seeing it from you, as opposed to hearing/seeing it from somebody else. You don’t know if somebody’s random contact with you might be the sixth thing somebody saw that day, the one that makes them go “OK FINE, universe! I’ll vote for her!”

You don’t know if somebody in your church or school or garden club or Prancercise league has been thinking they’re the only one who’s secretly thinking of casting a vote for her instead of him, and seeing/hearing from you opens up that permission structure for them to go for it.

My point is that it’s time for us all to do whatever we are reasonably able to do, even if that involves us getting out of our comfort zones a bit.

Campaigns and state parties need people to knock on doors with them, and phone bank with them, and write postcards for them. They’ll train you, and they’ll show you where you’re needed, they will handle every detail for you.

Check out the page for the Wisconsin Democrats for some ideas. That’s a must-win swing state, but maybe you’re in Michigan or you want to get involved in Pennsylvania or Arizona. All these places need warm bodies doing things.

It also looks like if you go to the Kamala Harris DO SOMETHING page right now, it’s personalized for your location to tell you what they need. (Right now I am in Los Angeles for a few days, and Harris’s page just screamed at me “CALIFORNIA, CAN YOU PLEASE COME HELP KNOCK DOORS WITH US IN ARIZONA AND NEVADA?”)

You might be needed driving people to the polls in your town. There are apps and websites for that, or you can figure out who’s running that kind of thing locally in your town.

You never know who you’re going to reach, and in an election like this, it’s all about who gets more of their people to show up.

Oh yeah, and if you want to help defend democracy at the polls and in general, Anne Applebaum has you covered.

(And if you don’t have any Kamala apparel, find some! Or make it! Halloween is coming, you know.)

By The Way, Did The Vibes Just Shift Again?

Former Obama guy/current Pod Save America guy Dan Pfeiffer persuasively argues that it is time for all of us to stop freaking out about the polls. For one thing, they’ve actually been about the same for weeks now. For another, Trump is the one who has a long-running ceiling around 47 percent, no matter what he seems to do or which election it is. Kamala Harris has more room to grow, arguably more momentum, and I’m pretty sure our side has more enthusiasm.

Hopey changey Hopium guy Simon Rosenberg argues every day that Kamala Harris is strong, she can win, she should win, and it’s time for all of us to do more doing and less worrying.

But for real, did the vibes just shift significantly in our favor, as we barrel into this home stretch? I think they did.

Let’s reflect on what’s happened this week.

Donald Trump literally did a town hall where he appeared to stroke out for 39 solid minutes while bopping back and forth and doing the Jerking Two Cocks At Once dance to his favorite weird old white man music, which includes the cheapest Andrew Lloyd Webber crap that exists in the free market, and also the world’s most famous song about cruising for gay sex.

People are actively talking about the very real possibility that his brain is liquefying before our eyes.

He’s canceling interviews and appearances all over the place, hiding in safe spaces with fellow members of his cult, because when he’s in front of regular voters — as was evident when he humiliated himself at the Univision town hall of undecided Latino voters this week — they see that he’s babbling, rapidly decomposing garbage. They also see that he literally wants to be Hitler/Putin/Pick Your Dictator.

Meanwhile, Kamala Harris is pulling power moves like going on Fox News and smacking Bret Baier up so hard that Politico Playbook’s headline the next morning was “Kamala Harris goes Baier hunting.” (And they are NO friend to Democrats.) Only fully brainwashed MAGA idiots thought Harris looked bad after that interview, and Baier was the only one afterward making the rounds spinning it/whining to reassure everyone he did a great job. But regardless, remember that the display of dominance was Harris doing the interview in the first place.

Point is, people are seeing Kamala Harris. She’s out there. She’s chill, she’s smiling, she’s laughing, she’s fighting, and she’s in it to win it. And, in another boss move, she’s playing clips of Trump at her rallies to make sure people besides Trump’s MAGA faithful see what he’s really like.

She just needs us to do our part in these last two and a half weeks, to actually treat this like we mean it when we say it’s the most important election of our lives, one that will determine what kind of country the United States of America will be for possibly decades to come.

It’s just a turnout game at this point.

And you just don’t know who needs to hear it from you.

Let’s fuckin’ finish this.

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-Evan