RANDALL WHITE, NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK, TORONTO . MONDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 2024.: There is much progressive excitement about the results of a regional poll that shows Harris ahead of Trump in Iowa! No one seems to think she will actually take “ruby red” Iowa Tuesday. But if she comes much closer than anyone thought possible in this part of the mom-and-apple-pie Midwest, what does that mean for the big picture?

I’ve also seen arguments on even Elon Musk’s Twitter/X that the polls still showing an extremely close race are overestimating Trump and underestimating Harris. Just to see this kind of thing, however, is to be seized by the thought that it may be quite delusional to imagine the real-world political divide between Trump’s Old America and Kamala’s New America can be so quickly breeched.

The deep question seems to focus on whether Kamala Harris really has started to mobilize the very broad anti-Trump US constitutionalist coalition that stretches from AOC on the left to Liz Cheney on the right — a new America that agrees on the broad parameters of how governments should do what they do, while continuing to disagree on just what they should do.

If this kind of very big-tent governing coalition is what finally does win with surprising electoral strength on November 5 it will make for a less narrowly political kind of government in Washington, DC. Somewhat ironically, a much narrower Harris victory (now the most objectively likely result?) will be more progressively pure .

Then there certainly does seem to remain a quite serious prospect that the American people (as defined by the obsolete and anti-democratic electoral college, etc) will in 2024 just be crazy enough to elect the anti-constitutionalist Donald Trump to a second term in office, by some equally narrow margin.

My feeling right now is let’s not worry much about that prospect until we actually come to it if we do. (Well .. in our particular case here, north of the northern border, the ”we” is strictly symbolic or metaphorical, for the time being at least … until the next Canadian federal election sometime next year!) But this is of course easier advice to give than to follow. And then virtually everyone I’ve talked with over the past few days has urged that it may be quite a while after November 5 before we finally know who won and who lost just what …

Meanwhile, to keep the ball rolling, here is a quotation from the irrepressible Tallulah Bankhead, who started in Huntsville, Alabama in 1902 and ended in New York City in 1968 : “No one can ever be like me… Hell, even I have trouble doing it.”