The Gist: The New US Election

A few weeks ago the contours of the US election seemed set- Donald Trump would challenge Joe Biden and one or other old white guy would win. It mattered which old white guy it was, but the old white guy outcome was still the only option on the table.

Between Biden visibly being an old guy on TV and Trump not being killed while being shot at, you could hear the soft hissing of air going out of the punctured Democratic Party campaign. 

But His Letter!

Suddenly the entire presidential campaign has changed. After years of preparing to stand against the old white guy- building up attack lines in the media, picking a human appendix as a running mate to please billionaire donors- Donald Trump is suddenly the Old Guy candidate facing a multi-racial, Gen X woman opponent.

And behind her, he now faces something we probably haven’t seen since Obama’s first election campaign. The Trump Republican Party unexpectedly faces not just a new candidate but an activated electorate- an electorate that represents the majority of voters, and suddenly feels as if it can have an impact on who gets elected.

And they are absolutely losing it.

Obviously, faced with a black woman, Trump and his followers have a whole set of insults they are just desperate to reach for. But someone somewhere has told them that dog whistles are only meant to be audible to your dog. Just blowing a whistle isn’t the same thing, even if it brings the curs running.

Behind the wall of Democrat donor money and the surge in enthusiasm the most striking change has been one in tone. The Kamala Harris for President campaign voice speaks like a normal human. This is critical, because if you sound normal, it suddenly allows you to point out that the other lot, well, don’t. Here is the campaign response to some usual mad, rambling Trump rant;

"Tonight, Donald Trump couldn't pronounce words, insulted the faith of Jewish and Catholic Americans, lied about the election (again), lied about other stuff, bragged about repealing Roe, proposed cutting billions in education funding, announced he would appoint more extremist judges, revealed he planned to fill a second Trump term with more criminals like himself, attacked lawful voting, went on and on and on, and generally sounded like someone you wouldn't want to sit near at a restaurant - let alone be President of the United States.

In the original, each claim is linked to the video of him saying it. But it is the last line that is the killer. He “generally sounded like someone you wouldn’t want to sit near at a restaurant”.

1 weird trick to madden your opponents

The idea of grown adults being compelled to listen to older bloviating men rant tiresomely has increasingly become a cultural trope in the US. Think of all the not-quite-joking references to having to listen to racist Uncles at Thanksgiving. That last Harris campaign line doesn’t play like a single note. It is a thrumming, resonating chord played in the secret hearts of every voter who has ever thought “OK, Boomer.” At last count, per Pew Research, that’s 71% of them.

And those voters have heard that chord and started to play variations on it. 

”I’m a creep…”

Enter, please, terminally online beardy-weirdy, and Trump’s running mate, JD Vance. A man who absolutely did not write about the time he had sex with a couch, but whose personal brand will now always be just one furniture-intimacy gag away from collapse. 

The Republican Party has spent decades evolving electoral representatives in a particular environment. Their electorates at local and state levels have been rigorously gerrymandered, so their only challenges are from party colleagues willing to be more extreme in their positions. And, at the same time, their donor class has got more and more peculiar as wealth was concentrated up into fewer, richer, odder hands.

Trump, being the embodiment of both tendencies, has accelerated this trend. As a result, the entire party’s elected and pundit class is a gang of absolute fruitcakes. They are madder than a box of frogs, if cybertrucks came boxed, and made of frogs. They gibber in public about Jewish space lasers, and literally stand screaming outside children’s libraries.

This is a party that Louis Theroux would make excuses not to spend a weekend with. Ripley himself wouldn’t believe it. Bizarre magazine would shun them as Too Much.

They are a bunch of creepy weirdos.

And, suddenly, the Democratic party’s found a new voice to just say it out loud.

And, deliciously, the slithy toves and borogoves of the Republican Party, bred in isolation in the only possible petri dish of cruelty and stupidity which could have sustained them, are raging mad about it.

I don’t know if this is a sufficient tactic to win an election. But it is a jolt of fresh energy to fill a listless, despairing party’s supporters with fizzing enthusiasm.

This is a new election, with a dramatic new trajectory. It’s suddenly a bad week to be offering the electorate some weird old creeps. That’s bad news for the Republican Party, who have only had weirdos and creeps on hand for years.

Whatever else it may turn out to be, this is not their Grandfather’s Election any more.