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With less than a fortnight until the US election, the Listener’s Washington DC columnist Jonathan Kronstadt’s weekly column surveys the weighty, the weird and the wonderful from the Harris vs Trump race for the presidency.
Just when I thought the texting assault couldn’t get any weirder, I got one from Tim Walz’s dog. Scout has come a long way from the Oklahoma ravine he and his 10 siblings were rescued from in 2019, as he now lives in the Minnesota governor’s mansion, complete with an assistant who can apparently translate lab-mix into English. And to be fair, Scout’s appeal is wittier than most: it opens with “While I’m not supposed to beg, I’m humbly asking you to chip in…” and closes with “I’m using my puppy dog eyes”.
If you have a cellphone — and a pulse — in the US at present, you get dozens of texts and emails daily from candidates and political interest groups, each more frantic and breathless than the last. The majority come from the big two: Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, and I get both because I had to give Trump’s campaign my digits in May to attend his rally that I’m still trying to understand and forget.
I also get texts from Democratic incumbents and challengers, and groups like ActBlue, TurnoutPAC, and Blue Victory Fund, the last of these among the rare political entities that think spaces between words is okay.
The “carrot” ones offer all-caps excitement, like “YES YES YES! FOR THE NEXT 60 MINUTES WE’RE 600%-MATCHING ALL DONATIONS TO CRUSH TRUMP’S CAMPAIGN”, or a sweepstakes-like promotion offering a chance for one lucky donor to actually meet and snap a selfie with Kamala and her sidekick Tim.
Trump’s offer is, of course, biglier, offering airfare and accommodations along with an invite to a Mar-A-Lago reception, a picture with the Donald himself and two signed MAGA hats — approximate retail value of the prize package, US$8000.
My inbox is stuffed with celebrity supplication; coastal elites from Hollywood to DC vie for my attention, from Taylor Swift and George Clooney to Barack and Michelle Obama, though I’ll admit I’m a bit hurt I haven’t heard from the Obamas’ dog Bo.
While I find it more than a little unseemly that those vying to be leader of the free world are raffling themselves off for dates like members of a boy band in Teen Vogue, I prefer the carrots to the sticks, which often start with such delights as “begging on my hands and knees” and “choking back tears”.
Sometimes they nag: “We asked you at least 10 times this year if you endorse the Harris-Walz ticket.” Then they go to work on my well-developed guilt response: “Nothing left to say. If Kamala loses Pennsylvania, Trump wins”, the implicit but unstated end of the sentence being “and it’ll be all your fault!”
The mind-numbing length of our political campaigns is surely damaging to the process — Trump’s been running for or being president for nine years; it only seems like 40 — but the expense is worse. Timothy Mellon, heir to a banking fortune and someone neither of us has ever heard of, has given Trump $125 million this election cycle.
Harris raised $1 billion in the three months since she ascended to the top spot on the ticket. The money being spent is patently obscene, mostly thanks to the Supreme Court’s 2009 Citizens United decision, which took all limits off corporate and individual campaign contributions, asserting that such limits violated the First Amendment’s freedom of speech clause. Uh, okay.
While it must be worse for those who live in one of the seven swing states, text appeals don’t seem to care about geographical relevance or proximity. Lately, I’ve been getting texts from Mary Peltola, Alaska’s sole member of the House of Representatives, who lives 6864km away from me in Anchorage.
I’m glad she beat Sarah Palin in 2022 with a self-proclaimed “pro-fish, pro-choice” campaign, and I’m very sorry that House Speaker Mike Johnson’s malevolent Super PAC is spending US$8m in attack ads to unseat her, especially because she lives in the 146th biggest media market in the US, which means US$8m buys an ungodly amount of attack ads.
But I find her assertion that “Yes, just $1 makes a difference” tough to believe. I think I’d rather take that dollar and buy Scout Walz one of his beloved “pup cones” from Dairy Queen. Apparently, his motto is “If I can reach it, I can eat it.” Now that’s text I can get behind.
