The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –

Just two months from now, Americans will go to the polls to vote on Nov. 5 to decide the fate of this experiment in democracy of the people one more time.

If that sounds dramatic, it’s because it is dramatic, or traumatic, depending on your point of view.

For anyone out there who still thinks politics doesn’t matter, both political parties are equally corrupt, or who the president is may be irrelevant, think again. Or sit there and watch what happens to your world after Nov. 5 – if you are in a position to risk it all.

I’m not. It’s quite possible that I will be out of business and dead and gone soon anyway. But if Trump wins this election, I am out of business and dead for sure. As a truth-telling American journalist, I’m a bona fide “enemy of the people” to the MAGA crowd. If they take power, and gain the White House, the Senate and the House, I’m a goner. They already have the Supreme Court – unless Democrats are elected to replace some of them or expand the court.

All I can do is say I tried and hope this archive survives for a little while longer. It may not. Like art, life is ephemeral.

Yes, democracy is messy, confusing, confounding, frustrating and sometimes downright idiotic. The stories I could tell you about that … and have for the past 45 years.

The alternative, however, is horrifying. Ask the people of North Korea, Russia, China or the women who live under Taliban rule in Afghanistan. Go online and read stories about what life is like there.

Before you reach for the pills to kill yourself or move to Portugal, however, there is a way to save this situation, at least this year. Life is going to get harder in this country and around the world for the foreseeable future. But we don’t have to throw it all away in this one election and watch it all crash down at one time in some hot flash of Armageddon.

We have a winning ticket in Kamala Harris and Tim Walz who can keep things going at least for the next four years, and maybe even turn the world around to start building a better future for humanity for the rest of the 21st century.

After that, all bets are off. We can only turn to science fiction to see what that world might look like. We will all be long gone anyway, but it would be nice to leave this planet thinking we made it better.

Just to be clear about where we are and might be going over the next two months, let’s spend a few minutes looking at the latest polls and electoral college map scenarios. Please spare me the comments on Facebook saying “polls don’t matter.” I understand many Democrats came to loath polls after what happened in 2016. But the warning signs were there.

People just didn’t listen and all the famous national pundits on your favorite cable news talk shows got it wrong. The survey research was very close. The polls were not so wrong. It was how the numbers were interpreted on TeeVee and social media that went awry.

Since President Joe Biden made the classy decision to step aside in this presidential race, and Kamala Harris stepped in and consolidated the Democratic machinery to stop Trump, the numbers are actually looking very good.

The Polls

Let’s take it state by state in the battleground states.

The Harris-Walz ticket is now leading by a full 4 percentage points in Wisconsin, and that’s up 3.7 percent since Biden left the stage.

They also lead by 3 points in Pennsylvania, also up by 3.7 percent.

They lead by 2 in Michigan, up 4.7 percent and trending up.

They are tied with Trump and Vance in Nevada, but trending up by 5.1 percent.

Trump still leads in Arizona by only 1 point, clearly too close to call. But Harris and Walz are actually trending up there by 4.3 percent.

Trump is also leading by 1 point in North Carolina, but the Democratic ticket is also trending up there by 4.4 points.

Georgia may be the hardest state of them all. Trump leads by 2. But even there, the Harris-Walz ticket is trending up by 4.6 percent.

* See the Washington Post maps

Popular Vote

Kamala Harris is in a position to win the national popular vote. She’s actually up over 50 percent to 52 percent in the ABC-Ipsos poll. And even in the Quinnipiac University poll, Trump tops out at 48 percent, with Harris winning with 49 percent.

Electoral College

The Kamala Harris-Tim Walz ticket can win this election with just 270 Electoral College votes, even if Trump wins Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and North Carolina. But they must win Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

* You can mess around with the Electoral College map for yourself at 270towin.com

A much better and safter scenario is if they manage to win all the battlegrounds. This is what the landslide scenario would look like.

So there is a lot of hope that we can send Trump packing forever in this election.
That won’t fix all our problems. But it will stop the death song for American democracy, at least for four more years.

Nightmare Scenario

But this is the Nightmare Scenario I fear would look like. Harris wins Minnesota, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Virginia, but Trump pulls out a win in Michigan, Nevada, Arizona and North Carolina. It all comes down to Georgia, where the Republican election commission holds up the election results for weeks or months. It goes to the conservative Supreme Court, which hands the election to Trump like it did in 2000 for George W. Bush over Al Gore.

Election Deniers Secretly Pushed Rule That Would Make It Easier to Delay Certification of Georgia’s Election Results

About the Author

Glynn Wilson is an expert on public opinion as an academic researcher and a journalist. He minored in Political Science with a major in Journalism and Communications at the University of Alabama in an undergraduate BA program back in the early 1980s, where he took every class offered related to this specialty. He also spent some time working with the Capstone Poll in those days, run by Political Science Professor Pat Cotter, and journalism professor Jim Stovall. He covered public opinion for newspapers and the UPI wire service after that for 10 years as part of the beat of covering public affairs and politics, including elections. He then went back to grad school at UA in the mid-1990s. One of his graduate research jobs was to oversee the public opinion lab in the College of Communications, also under the leadership of Stovall and Cotter, who conducted most of the political election polls in Alabama for a couple of decades. Wilson’s academic research specialty was in the area of media effects on public opinion. He later worked toward a Ph.D. in this research, but rather than continue teaching and jump through the final hoop of defending a dissertation at the University of Tennessee, he opted to go back into the news business working for The Dallas Morning News, The New York Times and other publications. He went independent on the web in 2005 in the early blogging era when newspapers were experiencing financial troubles, and has covered public opinion ever since as one of his many specialty beats.

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