RANDALL WHITE, NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK, TORONTO . SATURDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2024. The counterweights editors were wrong when they heard that “Randall White’s first short-short post” will cover BC election results, on Canada’s Pacific coast. (These results are still to come — I’ll return on this front Monday … or Tuesday.)

Meanwhile, I am here a few hundred yards north of the most easterly North American Great Lake, in the anxious autumn of 2024. And I’m trying to understand how I feel about the US elections next door, a week this coming Tuesday.

My understanding of what is going on flows from watching US TV, and then trolling through the election news on the somewhat lefty feed I get from even Elon Musk’s Twitter/X. I may be best able to organize my thoughts around four posts on this news :

(1) Like others I was struck by Beyoncé’s almost radical introduction of Kamala Harris at the vast Democrat rally in Houston, Texas last night. She gave a striking short speech : “Celebrating the one and only Kamala Harris … We are at the precipice of an incredible shift — the brink of history … It’s time for America to sing a new song.”

(2) From a quite different angle, in the Washington Post “Eugene Robinson calls out the media’s double standard in covering Trump and VP Harris. Robinson says Trump gets away with incoherent rambling while Harris is expected to be perfect in every way.” (Van Jones had similar thoughts on CNN a few days ago “Trump gets to be lawless ; Harris has to be flawless.”)

(3) I am a Canadian who does not actually get to vote in American elections. Whatever else I am also with the majority of Canadians recently polled by Leger on the question :”If you could vote in the US election, who would you vote for?” The results here were Kamala Harris: 64% ; Donald Trump: 21% ; and Unsure: 15%.

(4) The US polling results touted on TV last night were unhappily quite different : Harris 48% ; Trump 48%. That I think has something to do with a repost from the American neoconservative writer Bill Kristol yesterday afternoon: “‘We are witnessing the surrender of the American business community to Donald Trump.’ From thebulwark.com.”

In the end I follow James Carville : I can entertain no other firm belief than the ultimate (if far from landslide) victory of Kamala Harris (and enough Democrats in the House and Senate to get a few things done), on Tuesday, November 5, 2024. I also can’t help wondering if America is quite ready to start singing Beyonce’s new song, at the precipice of an incredible shift. But I’m praying every night that it is … in the middle of the 2020s!