Fans of professional sports understand momentum, the unquantifiable sense that a team has taken charge of a game. There are times when we can feel the beginning of a comeback or a sense of inevitability that’s not yet reflected on a scoreboard. The other team often feels it as well, and starts making riskier and more desperate choices in its efforts to break that momentum.
That’s the feeling I’m getting these days as I watch the presidential campaign continue to unfold. This sense is affirmed by bits of panic and acts of weak desperation exhibited on the Left. A plethora of opinion columns are urging Democrats not to panic over Trump’s closing of the polling gap with Clinton, especially in swing states. The Clinton apologia chorus doesn’t know which way to turn or on what issues to focus. And, just recently, President Obama got his knickers twisted over indications that the black community is warming up to Trump. Obama recently scolded blacks for their faltering solidarity with the Democratic candidate:
I will consider it a personal insult and an insult to my legacy if this community lets down its guard and fails to activate itself in this election.
Clinton’s camp is also engaged in pleading for votes, in particular those of millennials who already dislike Trump but may share similar disdain for Clinton:
With 55 days until the election, one thing is certain: the stakes are too high for any voter to stay home.
The liberal media is engaging in a full-court press on voters thinking of going third-party, as are liberal denizens of the blogosphere. As the polling results continue to indicate that Gary Johnson and Jill Stein are hurting Clinton more than they are hurting Trump, the cacophony about wasted votes and a “Vote for X is a Vote for Y” hoohah is increasingly found on the Left. I’ve even come across a report of a fundraising letter pleading for support.
I find it quite funny that it has reached this point. In no rational world does Donald Trump achieve the Republican nomination for the Presidency. But, it’s also absurd that a candidate as deeply flawed and as widely disliked as Clinton achieved the Democratic nomination for the Presidency. Either of them against a normal candidate should lose in a rout, but somehow we ended up with the two of them atop the ballot.
The conventional wisdom has been that the disorganized, loose-cannon wild man that is Trump shouldn’t stand a chance against the mighty and well-oiled Clinton machine, especially with a sycophantic press tipping the scales in her favor. Nevertheless, here we are, today, with Trump and Clinton (today’s RealClearPolitics 4-way average has Clinton ahead of Trump by 1.1%) in a virtual tie in the polls. Democrats are already descending into is this really happening? shell-shock, and the leaders are turning to begging, pleading, threatening and personal affront in their efforts to turn the tide, swing the momentum and stop the voter hemorrhage. They’re panicking, and panic is a contagious thing.
Begging is invariably a sign of weakness, and people can smell weakness from a mile away. If they’re reduced to begging seven weeks before the election, if they’re panicking before the first debate even happened, they are certainly sensing that they’ve lost the momentum they had after the Democratic National Convention, and they are certainly fearing that they’re going to lose this election. Begging is a terrible strategy, especially this far ahead of the election, and it’s a sign that they are running out of ideas. Even though Clinton is still the prohibitive favorite to win the presidency, it is the other side that has the momentum, and everyone knows it.
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Whenever voters look hard at Clinton, they recoil. Happened in 2008 too. She’s a lousy candidate who has a very poor sense of the electorate. Without the media she’d be nothing. If her opponent were anybody other than Trump, she’d be toast too.
Trump, on the other hand, has been pretty deft at suddenly seeming plausible. The media and the Clinton campaign had hoped that Trump would self-destruct, and were expecting to be able to attack him on the kinds of issues he raised during the primaries. But he didn’t and so now they are obviously and lamely trying to generate bad news for Mr. Trump. The American public may not be that sophisticated, but this is likely to be a bridge too far even so.