MERE DAYS FROM NOW, OUR NATION VOTES and of course our media are a frenzy of last-minute reporting and analysis — plus inevitably a lot of unsolicited advice for the poor individual voter.
It all has an unmistakable “last-chance” air to it. For those who oppose Trump it’s obviously the last chance to build – in a new United States Congress, perhaps in both chambers of it – serious constraints upon the rampant, self-serving power of this current President. For his supporters, it’s the last opportunity to try shoring up that power for the remainder of his presidency.
Among all the commentators and advisers – and of course many candidates for office, too, — there is a discernible difference from many elections in the past. There is, on both sides of the country’s main political divide, a newly-increasing emphasis on what increasingly gets called “Economic Populism.” And this may well be a significant augury for the longer term future, next year and beyond to a post-Trump world.
Iowa is a vital battleground state for both the US House and the Senate, and among those vying for a House seat is a highly noticeable GOP candidate, Joe Mitchell.
He’s of an interesting age, the politically tender age of 29 years old. He models himself completely on the 80 year old President, down to mimicking the same jerky hand gestures and repeatedly being a verbal copycat of Trump, by for instance calling people and things that displease him “a disgrace!”
Mitchell excelled himself in his fawning at a recent rally, when he ceremonially gave a handmade, hand-framed (and totally fictional) award to Trump as “Man of the Century.” Mitchell’s reasoning he stated to be: “They’ve never given you the Nobel Peace Prize, which by the way is a disgrace.”
Solemn award of the century
He’d likely been inspired by the way Trump himself had expressed disgust about the real winner of this year’s Peace Prize, the South African human rights lawyer and renowned international jurist, Navi Pillay. The President phrased it this way: “I know nothing about this woman and neither does anyone else.”
Just for the record, and in case it might seem relevant … Candidate Mitchell also said to the President during his award-giving ceremony: “We don’t ride bicycles in Iowa.” This was an obvious jibe at supporters of clean air and those concerned about climate-change. He seemed to have forgotten, though, about his state’s Des Moines Register newspaper and its week-long event, famous-for-53 years, called RAGBRAI, in full the Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa, which attracts every year hundreds of thousands of dedicated pedaling bikers.
Anyway, on the economy rather than climate matters, what’s especially significant about Mitchell, the Trump sycophant, is the actual policy message on which he’s been loudly campaigning.
I’ll quote Mitchell directly again:
“Politicians shouldn't get rich while Iowa families struggle to afford groceries, housing and childcare.”
Now, Mitchell’s idol is supposedly a billionaire politician – with only this Fall the business magazine Forbes offering to settle all uncertainty about the matter, and evaluating Trump as sitting among the lower rank of billionaires at just $7 Billion dollars-worth of assets. But candidate Mitchell is nonetheless swinging for political effect by contrasting the villainy of billionaire politicians with the cost-of-living problems of ordinary Iowans. In this he sounds remarkably like a Democrat – perhaps most like the combative egalitarian Bernie Sanders.
And interestingly, Mitchell is far from alone among the current crop of Republican contenders. We don’t have far to look for examples. In Arkansas, an incumbent called French Hill is facing a strong challenge from the Democrat Chris Jones, who would be the state’s first-ever Black US Congressmember if he wins. To ensure a Republican win, French is turning to pithy slogans like. “Keep Wall Street from buying up our neighborhoods.”
SAYED vs ROGERS: who’s the populist?
And in a very tight race for the US Senate in Michigan, the Democrat Abdul El Sayed has been running very effectively (this week he’s several opinion-survey points ahead) against Republican Mike Rogers, and the air is of course thick with slogans on both side. But who is voicing this one? “The pharmaceutical companies are ripping American families off.”
It in fact comes from Rogers, as a flag-bearer of that traditionally business-friendlyparty, the GOP.
So all across the country, Economic Populism is spreading its influence, and it’s not especially constrained by conventional party identities. GOP candidates aplenty have been presenting us with the perhaps unedifying spectacle of straddling — to maintain (in one direction) their appeal to the Trumpian hardcore, while also (in the other direction) trying to attract Republicans who’ve given up on him. They’ll also hope to win over independent-minded voters, which could be a bonus for them, or in many tightly competitive races will be a necessity for such candidates to win at all.
Instagram messaging from Chief Executive
A MAYBE MORE IMMEDIATE CONCERN has emerged from our executive branch of government. While the President has been urging us to make-believe he’s on the ballot, and many people are responding by doing just that, and making the election a simple referendum on Trump, he is doing his best - or worst - to discredit the very balloting process itself.
A key utterance for us to bear in mind from the Discreditor-in-Chief came in one of those press-pool huddles this week, on a Maryland tarmac in the shadow of Air Force One. He was asked directly whether he will respect the election results, regardless of the outcome, and he answered, “I will.”
And then he added the rider: “… if they’re honest elections.”
And in pursuit of his idea of enforcing ‘honest elections’ — or completely destroying trust in their very operation — comes the risk that this election-denying Administration will interfere with the mechanics of the vote, and if not the actual mechanics, then certainly create a climate of anxiety around the vote itself.
Unprecedented numbers of Department of Justice monitors are evidently being assigned to local “Vote Here” sites … a traditional role, of protecting voter’s civil rights, but here it could instead be used to intrude upon those rights. There could also be a big rollout of ICE officers, bringing to new venues – polling places – their all-too-familiar, menacing presence (sometime fatal too) at courthouses and workplaces, and in the streets at large.
America’s states have of course traditionally been in charge of the actual working of elections and one Lieutenant Governor with direct responsibility for polling places, in Utah, Deidre Henderson, has gone on record to publicly address likely interventions by federal agents. Ms Henderson, who by the way is a Republican, said “right now it would be foolish to not at least think through some scenarios.”
That should go for the rest of us, too, as voters ourselves (including journalists and commentators) … as well as all the brave poll-workers who are now so busy with polling preparations throughout the land.
Indications are, though, from the sheer volume of early voting (way bigger than usual for mid-terms) that Americans are simply declining to be intimidated. It is an obvious way of avoiding possible threats: simply express our electoral choices ahead of time, either by mail or in person at early-polling places. All this augurs well for the big (in-person) day itself next Tuesday. All-in-all, the hard-won universal right to suffrage, cannot easily be taken from populations by an Administration bent on returning to the ugliest days of wholesale voter suppression.
Freedom Rider KREDELLE PETWAY PHILLIPS
This year there’s been an emblematic campaign recalling that hard-won fight. It’s 65 years since the historic Freedom Riders, the Black and white activists together, who criss-crossed the southern states in their determined push to end segregation and assert full voting rights for all. Something of a repeat of those rides, certainly a very practical and useful form of commemoration for them, has been roaring through the South again.
Its members have included 85-year-old Kredelle Petway Phillips, who back in 1961 spent time in jail for her “direct action” campaigning. Her “offence” at the time was to drink water from a “whites-only” fountain during the voter registration drive. Speaking from this year’s sleek, modern touring bus she told North Carolina’s public broadcasting station WUNC in Durham that quite simply “It is extremely important today for us to reignite the movement to get people out to vote.”
At the other end of the age scale, Ms Phillips was accompanied by a Greensboro student Naya Taylor, who’s been helping to organize free bus and van rides to the polls … and she said:
“The majority of us are of age, and we have been affected directly by the things that are happening in this country now. You should be embarrassed if you're not using your right to vote.”
There can hardly be a better note on which to end this week’s pre-election episode of The Media Beat.