Grousing with my similarly minded sister about the grim prospect of another Trump administration, I mentioned my theory about why he has done better on Election Day than in the polls leading up to it: a segment of the population comprehends that voting for him is shameful, so won’t tell a stranger on the phone that they’re going to do it, but for damn sure they are going to do it. (This is a corollary to the Bradley effect, unless it’s more like the same thing.) My sister, more optimistic than I, replied that quiet Trump voters might be out numbered by quiet Harris voters who, she speculated, are women weary of their husbands’ voluble bullshit, and know its source. I hope she’s right. When we disagree, she usually is right, but this is political “science,” not actual science, or family history, or the names of all the kids in the Catholic family who lived in Columbia Heights, Minnesota, around the corner and down the street from us, circa 1970.
Speaking of our hometown, I read recently, in The New York Times,
In a dead-heat race, both Trump and Harris have made direct appeals to [Eastern European ethnic groups], which happen to be well represented in the so-called blue wall states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. While Polish Americans are often seen as fairly conservative because of their Catholic roots, Democrats are hoping to gain the support of those who are concerned about Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and apprehensive about Trump’s ties to the Russian president. Harris’s campaign is working to reach to those voters on the ground, while her allies say they have spent $1 million on digital advertisements micro-targeted at Polish and Ukrainian Americans in Pennsylvania.
Five percent of Pennsylvanians have Polish ancestry, and they are concentrated most densely in parts of northeastern Pennsylvania like Lucerne County, where Polish immigrants were drawn to jobs in coal mines and steel mills in the late 19th century and the early 20th century.
which made me think of the Columbia Heights phone book of 55 years ago—the longest alphabetical section might have been “K,” and each listing included, in parentheses, the names of the family’s kids together with the year they were born, an exercise that frequently required a few lines of text. No sawmills, no coal mines, but lots of Slavs and Catholics and kids and modest houses. In their debate—the one that pretty clearly persuaded Trump not to subject himself to another one—the former president said if elected he’d end the war in Ukraine in a day. Harris said he’d be able to do that because a day is how long it would take him to sell out Ukraine.
The neighborhoods have changed, but driving home through northeast Minneapolis from the school I work at in Columbia Heights, I see what seems like a disproportionate number of Ukrainian flags and yard signs imploring “Stand with Ukraine.” So maybe the issue does have some electoral potency. On the other hand, maybe I’m just trying to cheer myself up. It would be odd if Ukraine made a difference, considering what hasn’t disqualified Trump in the minds of more than half the voters: the attempted coup and J6 insurrection, the opinion of his own top military advisors that he’s a fascist, his interest in Arnold Palmer’s junk, his felony convictions, his manifest narcissism, his sexual assaults, his riffs on the life and times of Hannibal Lecter (a fictional character, one of many facts about the world that have not dented the impressive facade of his ignorance), etc., etc., etc.