AS ABOVE, SO BELOW
The personal impact of a political win
We’ve been having a lot of talks about anger around my house these days: ones that center around the anger I feel and whether it’s my job to suppress it. Also whether my anger puts our daughter in jeopardy or whether it will, in fact, save her life. I do think that it’s my job to channel anger rather than just to release it but first I have to FEEL it. It’s very new and very true that my access to these feelings has begun to grow more powerful and I think, no, I know, that this has been the result of Kamala Harris running a tight campaign focused on abortion rights.
Urgency is something women are taught to talk themselves out of. Impulsively is something that art depends on and self-doubt will get you in a whole lot of trouble when you’re making anything at all. The audacity that Kamala Harris will believe her own hype (“You’ve got this,” she said into her mirror, SNL’s Maya Rudolph) is exactly why she’s so deeply hated by the Republicans. So much more so than Hillary Clinton, who was deeply hated by lots of people, actually. A lot of people who, it turns out, might just be the people who will turn this thing around.
Ann Selzer released the results of her poll over the weekend that put Harris in the lead by 3 points Iowa: a state that is not even considered a battleground state at this point, given its support of Trump in the last two elections. It’s set against many other polls that have Trump securely winning the state but this does not bother Ann Selzer at all. She’s not claiming that her results mean a specific election result, but simply that she has a well-established method for polling Iowa and she’s sticking to it.
Here’s what that’s meant in the past (stealing this from Matthew Klein’s tweet but it’s been published elsewhere):
Final Selzer poll findings in the past (and the actual result)
2022 Senate: R+12 (R+12)
2020 President: R+7 (R+8)
2020 Senate: R+4 (R+7)
2018 Governor: D+2 (R+3)
2016 President: R+7 (R+9)
2014 Senate: R+7 (R+8)
2012 President: D+5 (D+6)
How does she explain the shift from the expected vote to the one she has captured?
“You need to win with women more than you lose with men,” she says is the mantra for those pollsters who work with contests that are going to be divided by a gender gap. And in this case, there’s a 2:1 margin with women 65+, strongly tilted toward Harris.
Arguments that Harris could flip Iowa to blue might seem far-fetched, but in all these examples Selzer has been between 0-3 points off. So if her methods that have worked for the past decade + with almost 100% accuracy (she’s been off once which has been noted as the 2018 Iowa gubernatorial race) work again this time around then either there’s a recount in Iowa starting tomorrow or Harris wins that state and so many others.
You know what, I like this lady. I like a person who says impossible things, and doesn’t get attached to it, and then it turns out she’s right — and not just because this time the candidate she’s got in the lead is Kamala Harris. It would be about the narrative of the win.
Trump used women and women’s bodies as a political tool and you know who didn’t like that? Women. Women who in turn, voted for Harris. Older women in red states who said: Ok, the buck stops here.
Do I wish they had done so in 2016. Yes. But still, I like the way this reads.
I was not feeling this way 48 hours ago. On Saturday, I had a quick chat with fellow Substacker Lane Anderson (Matriarchy Report) where I admitted that I was filled with dread. I blamed this dread on my own hesitations with the Harris campaign, which I felt dismissed the ambivalence young people feel toward the concept of America. I’m not even sure this is an accurate description of young people, and even if it were I don’t think this point of view would be to blame for Trump winning the election. It was more a deep part of me that felt hopeless; that not even the best woman running president — even an perfect one—would be able to beat Donald Trump.
Her argument was that upholding hope and faith is on its own a political move and that losing it is almost as dangerous as losing the election all together. I didn’t think she was wrong but I couldn’t FEEL the sensation of hope. The prevalence of Trump voters in the country and the polls that reflected them had come to make me feel ashamed of my own desires. I want to be alive to celebrate the day that America finally elected a woman. I want a democratic woman of color to run the white house and I think the candidate the democrats have is qualified to do that. I don’t want to wait for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to do it in a decade, when my daughter’s 18. I want it right now.
It took two whole days before the New York Times gave Selzer notice, but her poll is now the lead of the headlining opinion piece, surveying David Brooks, Ross Douthat, Michelle Goldberg and Tressie McMillan Cottom.
In it Michelle Goldberg starts the discussion off, answering the first question posed by Patrick Healy: Happy Election Day! What do you think will happen?
She replies:
I like the phrase lots of Democrats are using: “nauseously optimistic.” I’d bet on Kamala Harris winning, though I can’t tell how much of that is evidence and intuition and how much wishful thinking. On the evidence side, the J. Ann Selzer poll showing Harris three points ahead in Iowa was picking up something real happening among American women. Many are furious over the end of Roe and revolted by the hypermacho campaign Donald Trump is running.
Something “real” happening among American women: it’s such an evocative phrase. On the evidence side. These words are like haunting echoes in my mind of what it still takes for women to be believed. That there’s a gap between something “real” that’s happening and the “evidence” that proves it. That to believe women is to disbelieve them until they prove themselves worthy of believing. Or maybe I’m just facing the grief that it hasn’t been until this very moment that enough women have had the opportunity to vote for themselves.