KINSELLA: US presidential race is tougher than a tick

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Campaigns matter—or so that’s an old political truism.

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Politicians have believed this for a long time. For them, it’s like hockey: the regular season doesn’t matter, only the playoffs matter. You can be a slacker in the regular season, but if you can get your act together in the playoffs, you can end up winning the Stanley Cup.

Either way, it’s an old political chestnut. But that certainly didn’t happen in the 2024 US presidential race, did it?

Kamala Harris of the Democratic Party ran an excellent campaign. She entered the race late, made no major mistakes (though Joe Biden did), and raised more than $1 billion in a very short time, the largest fundraiser in US political history.

Meanwhile, Republicans have made many mistakes. Childless cat ladies, “garbage island”, people eating dogs and cats, and so on and so forth.

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Their candidate, Donald Trump, hasn’t had a very good time either: he’s a convicted sex offender, a twice-impeached president, and a serial denier of election results that have been certified by the courts, Congress, and the U.S. Congress. his former vice president. Yes, and quite a few people who worked for him from 2016 to 2020 are voting for Harris.

But you know what? It didn’t matter. They are connected.

Trump isn’t just competitive with Harris—he’s very competitive. While the vice president ran a solid campaign (and, to be fair, this writer worked for her), and while Trump’s campaign was less than stellar, it hasn’t changed much. The race was tighter than the tick.

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But this writer still thinks Harris will win.

Now put down the pitchforks and torches, Canadian Trump fans. Listen to me. There’s one reason Harris will win. We won’t landslide, mind you. But enough to secure an Electoral College victory – likely within days of E-day.

It’s GOTV: Vote.

Having your voice is always important. But in a race with a large lead, it may not matter as much. In a tight race like Harris and Trump, this is critical. And believe me when I say Kamala Harris has a GOTV organization that is going to crush the Trump organization. In fact, it is already doing this.

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Look at North Carolina, for example, which was devastated by Hurricane Helen a few weeks ago. Democrats have won there only once in the last quarter century—and then only narrowly—with Barack Obama in 2008. Despite this, Harris Democrats were everywhere in the state in 2024: delivering relief supplies, ferrying water and toiletries, checking on the health of residents, setting up help lines for victims and knocking on tens of thousands of doors.

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How could Harris’ team do all this? Because they have a huge GOTV team and more money than God, that’s how it is. The Trump team simply could not compete at this level, either financially or organizationally.

Other signs of Democratic dominance on GOTV:

As early as July, Harris had nearly 300 field offices in every swing state with hundreds of paid staff and volunteers. Just a month ago, this democratic army knocked on hundreds of thousands of doors and made millions of phone calls. In the swing state of Wisconsin alone, Harris’ direct contact with voters numbers in the millions, with a heavy focus on first-time voters.

Volunteers, of which Harris has an abundance, are very interested in GOTV.

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Meanwhile, Trump has been forced to hire paid mercenaries who simply don’t have the GOTV experience or passion for winning. Republicans themselves admit they are getting beat up by GOTV efforts.

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Democrats are working with groups like Indivisible, which specializes in microtargeting voters—mobilizing them where they live, with the help of the people who live there. Their innovation, called Neighbor2Neighbor, is far superior to anything the Republican Party has. This approach works because nothing motivates voters better than neighbor-to-neighbor conversations.

Could I be wrong? Of course I could. I worked for Hillary Clinton and thought she would win too.

But the difference this time is that Democrats learned that painful lesson in 2016. This time they are not underestimating Donald Trump. And they have a lot of money and a huge army to force the vote on Tuesday. I bet it will make a difference.

But we’ll soon see if I’m right!

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