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Perhaps it’s a good omen. Or perhaps it’s an omen of just how tight this presidential election is.
Shortly after midnight every four years, the citizens of Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, cast their first-in-the-nation votes for president. Dixville Notch hasn’t been friendly turf to Republicans in recent years. In 2016, four of the township’s seven votes went to Hillary Clinton, while two went to Donald Trump, and one went to Independent Gary Johnson. In 2020, it was a clean sweep, as all five of the township’s votes went for Joe Biden. But this year, hope springs eternal: Six citizens cast their votes for president, with three voting for Kamala Harris, and three voting for Donald Trump.
A tie is fitting, perhaps, since Trump and Harris are also deadlocked at 48.5 in the RealClearPolitics national average of polls.
So I’m telling you there’s a chance. And, frankly, it’s a really good chance. The numbers beneath the numbers all seem to point to Donald Trump. According to the RealClearPolitics average, he leads in five of the seven battleground states, including Pennsylvania, and trails very narrowly in the other two, Michigan and Wisconsin.
In addition, according to an ABC News/Ipsos poll, an eye-popping 74% of Americans believe the country is on the wrong track. This includes 98% of Republicans and 50% of Democrats. And it’s hard to imagine that a majority of those people think Kamala Harris is the agent of change in this election — especially when we consider Trump’s pithy closing message: “Kamala broke it, and I’ll fix it.”
Another looming problem for the Democrats is the accuracy of the polls themselves. In both 2016 and 2020, pollsters undercounted Donald Trump’s support. This “shy” Trump voter is out there again, but, as New York Times polling guru Nate Cohn notes, non-response bias is a real thing: “Across these final polls,” Cohn writes, “white Democrats were 16 percent likelier to respond than white Republicans. That’s a larger disparity than our earlier polls this year, and it’s not much better than our final polls in 2020 — even with the pandemic over. It raises the possibility that the polls could underestimate Mr. Trump yet again.”
Yes, they could. And if that happens, Kamala Harris is cooked. We say this because Trump is tracking much better against Harris than he was in 2016 against Hillary Clinton and in 2020 against Joe Biden.
Republicans have also learned to embrace early voting, and the numbers bear it out. According to NBC News, the GOP outperformed the Democrats in early voting by 9% in Arizona, 3% in Georgia, 1% in North Carolina, and 4% in Nevada. Whether these encouraging numbers were new voters or simply a cannibalization of traditional voters who’d otherwise show up at the polls on Election Day. In any case, banking votes is a good idea, if only to avoid Election Day attrition. Stuff happens in our daily lives, and even if only one of us would-be Election Day voters out of 100 gets sick, or has car trouble, or stays late at work, or has to leave town unexpectedly, that 1% attrition could be decisive in a state that’s decided by just a few thousand votes — like Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin were four years ago.
Furthermore, after a brief dip in the betting markets on Sunday, after the media fell for a deeply suspicious outlier poll in Iowa, Trump has settled back in with a 57.7 to 40.7 lead.
This, of course, is Trump’s third and final time as the Republican nominee, and his campaign ended this morning after 2 a.m. at a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which was, not coincidentally, his last stop in both 2016 and 2020. Earlier yesterday, Trump held rallies in Raleigh, North Carolina; Reading, Pennsylvania; and Pittsburgh. Harris, for her part, went all-in on the Keystone State yesterday. This makes sense, given the state is a toss-up, 48% to 48% according to the last New York Times/Siena poll, and given that Harris has no plausible path to victory if she can’t secure the state’s 19 electoral votes. Thus, she held four events there with varying degrees of personal participation. She started in Scranton and finished in Philadelphia, where she took the stage at 11:34 p.m. after an evening of entertainment. (This explains one of the major differences between Harris and Trump as campaigners: The former relies on teleprompters and glitterati to entertain at her events, while the latter is himself the entertainment. That’s why Trump can do a three-hour long-form interview with Joe Rogan and why Harris can’t.)
Rogan, incidentally, who’s the nation’s most popular podcaster, made a surprise endorsement of Trump last night. Whether that eleventh-hour show of support will translate into any additional votes for Trump is unclear. But it can’t hurt.
Speaking of endorsements, Megyn Kelly campaigned with Trump in Pittsburgh last night, and she didn’t pull any punches. Clearly, they’ve made up since their 2015 feud. Kelly, speaking of our porous southern border, said of Trump: “He closed it, they opened it. It was an intentional choice, and there’s no reason not to believe they won’t do it again.” She then shifted to the culture wars, adding, “The boys should not be in the girls’ sports. The boys should not be in the girls’ bathrooms. The boy should not be in the girls’ locker rooms. … He got mocked by the left for saying he would be the protector of women. He will be a protector of women. And it’s why I’m voting for him. … I’m not into their version of toxic masculinity or new masculinity. I prefer the old version … And I prefer a president who knows how to be strong and how to fight. I hope all of you do what I did last week: Vote Trump, and get 10 friends to vote Trump, too.”
MUST SEE: President Trump invites Megyn Kelly @megynkelly onstage at HUGE Pittsburgh, PA rally pic.twitter.com/OWTq0lU3zs
— RSBN 🇺🇸 (@RSBNetwork) November 5, 2024
Trump had already put in a dizzyingly long day by the time he said goodbye in Pittsburgh, but he wasn’t even close to calling it a night. Instead, he and his entourage got on a plane, flew to West Michigan, and took to the stage in Grand Rapids shortly after midnight — the site of his last stop in both his 2016 and 2020 campaigns. Blue suit, white shirt, red tie (no garbage-collection vest this time). And the crowd was electric, even at that late hour. Eric Trump captured his dad’s final walkout.
12:12am – “The Final Walkout!”
Grand Rapids, Michigan! pic.twitter.com/IYvXlebSKt— Eric Trump (@EricTrump) November 5, 2024
“We’re gonna bring the car business blazing back,” he began. You’re not gonna remember what it was like. We’re gonna make Detroit greater than it ever was. … So for you, for the autoworkers who have been so incredible … you’re gonna be very happy with the things we’re doing. We killed the plant, as you know, in Mexico. The biggest plant in the world was gonna be built in Mexico, and I absolutely killed it. But I’d like to begin by asking a question: Are you better off now than you were four years ago?“
It was that same question Ronald Reagan posed with such devastating effect on October 28, 1980, in his lone debate with incumbent president Jimmy Carter. Trump continued:
My message to you and to all Americans tonight is very simple. We do not have to live this way. … Four years, what did they do that was good? Can you name one thing? I said to a group of people, ‘What have they done? Everything’s a disaster.’ … Suppose President Xi [Jinping] of China wanted to call to ask a little question about war. Or Taiwan, or anything else. Who the hell does he call? We got a little problem in America. There’s no one to call. You know, they’ll probably end up calling me. …
And remember: They ripped that presidency away from Joe Biden. … And all of a sudden, they picked Kamala, even though she was in last place. She came in number 13. They had 12 plus Kamala. She was considered the 13th. But they wanted to be politically correct, so they picked Kamala. … She never made it to the great state of Iowa. Never made it, and now we’re running against her. But she’s been exposed. She’s a radical left lunatic who destroyed San Francisco. But we don’t have to settle for weakness and incompetence and decline and decay. … When you vote tomorrow, we can fix every single problem our country faces and lead America, indeed the world, to new heights of glory.”
Two hours later, Trump was still weaving away, still going strong, and Fox News was crying “Uncle” from its live coverage.
There’s something providential about Trump’s candidacy. You don’t avoid assassination by half an inch, and only because you happened to turn your head at just the right instant. If you believe in the Almighty, then you believe He spared Donald Trump for a reason. Surely that reason wasn’t to narrowly lose the presidency to Kamala Harris.
In a way, though, Trump has already won. Think about it: He’s endured a 4:1 ad spending onslaught from Harris, and he’s still statistically tied with her. In addition, he’s been hit by the networks with 85% negative press coverage, while Harris has gotten a disgraceful kid-gloves treatment, with 78% positive coverage. They really are the enemy of the people.
Said Newt Gingrich of the Fake News media: They’ve gone way beyond being fake news. They’re now hysterically fake news. … It’s clear that they’re totally trying to prop [Harris] up. And my guess is that if she didn’t have the full weight of the propaganda media, she would be 10 points weaker than she is right now, and Trump would be on the verge of 60 or 62 or 63 percent victory. They have done everything they could to prop her up. And they’ve done everything they could since 2015 … to destroy Trump. Yet he’s still standing. He’s still saying ‘Fight,’ and he’s the most iconic political leader in America, I think, in my lifetime. It’s remarkable to watch what he’s doing.“
“Think about all they’ve done to Donald Trump,” says an ad from Building America’s Future. “First, it was hoaxes, witch hunts, and impeachments. Then it was FBI raids, courtrooms, and mugshots. Finally, it was bullets in a Pennsylvania field. And after all that, this man stood up with blood draining down his face, pumped fist in the air, and told us to Fight! Fight! Fight! We know what they think of us. So if Donald Trump can get through all of that, we can get out to vote.”
Near as we can tell, Donald Trump is the only president in American history whose net worth went down during his time in office. And yet he keeps on. Leftist nutcases and Iranian hit squads want to assassinate him. And yet he keeps on. Seventy-eight years old, and 65 straight days without a day off.
And now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go cast a vote for the great man — in the key swing state of Michigan.
