JV Last at the Bulwark asks the right question:
What will it say about America if Trump’s numbers don’t drop over the next week?
We have had every chance to reject Donald Trump.
We saw him mishandle a crisis, resulting in an economic collapse and hundreds of thousands of excess deaths.
We saw him attempt a violent coup.
When voters said, “I don’t love Trump, but that other candidate is super old . . .” Democrats went and swapped out Joe Biden for Kamala Harris.
Harris has been a good candidate. She has run as a rock-solid moderate. She just curb-stomped Trump in front of tens of millions of voters.
What else do people want?
I’m serious about this: What else could Harris possibly do? Because it looks to me like she’s an above-average candidate, running in a good economic environment, playing near-perfect baseball against a guy who says he wants to be a dictator.
And the response of the American people is: Harris +1.1.
What happens if, a week after last night’s demonstration, this race is still a toss-up? What does that tell us about the long-term viability of American democracy?
It tells us that the battle will not be over on election day. Whatever comes next is not going to be Mitt Romney or even Ronald Reagan. We’re in for a long siege.
Still, we have to win one battle at a time so …