“What If It Just Comes Down to Chance?”

October 16, 2024

The title of this post is also the title of an article from today in The Liberal Patriot about the November 2024 American presidential election. Its author, John Halpin, writes:

In a presidential election this close, partisan supporters of both candidates desperately want some indication that things are going to break their way and that their theory of the American electorate is correct. 

Party boosters may be disappointed on November 5 in more ways than one. No hard-core Trump or Harris supporter wants to hear this but the election results may not be that decisive and could ultimately come down to chance—a few shifts here and there that produce a victory for one of the two without reflecting some grand voter theory or genius campaign moves. It’s turtles all the way down.

“Turtles all the way down” refers to a 2014 song by American country music singer Sturgill Simpson about the apparent randomness of things. Halpin continues: 

Yet American politics is increasingly shaped by chance in a nation sharply divided between two political parties with a large chunk of people disgusted by both of them. The search for meaning and explanation after the election will certainly commence, but political cryptographers may not unravel any political Da Vinci Code.

For many women (and men) who have always considered themselves to be on the political Left, this election is agonizing. Many women who care about the sex-based rights of women and girls have announced their support for Trump because of the Democrats’ full-throated embrace of “gender identity” (among other reasons). Many of them have never voted Republican in their lives. Others plan to vote for Harris, notwithstanding her apparently ongoing commitment to sacrificing women and girls at the altar of “trans” because they consider Trump to be an unacceptable alternative. I published an open letter to Harris in August, asking her to say out loud at the DNC that a woman is an adult human female and, to the surprise of no one, she didn’t do it. The rest plan to either sit out the election or write-in someone else.

Comments on my Substack are available only to paid subscribers. I don’t moderate them, though I lurk in them occasionally. On posts that address the election, paid subscribers often have (mostly) respectful conversations about how they plan to vote and why. If you want to join the conversation (while learning more about the movement to protect the sex-based rights of women and girls and to stop the abolition of sex), please consider a paid subscription.