The first debate of the 2024 election season took place on June 28. Biden’s performance was dismal. Republicans believed they had secured the election. Democrats were discouraged and began to loudly demand that Biden drop out. The media focused on the president’s “personality cult,” not the party’s platforms.
However, information about the vast GOP Project 2025 began to attract attention. This radical theocratic-authoritarian plan had been in development for two years, but only one in seven had heard of it, according to Representative Huffman, who is part of a group that works to educate voters.
Wanting to help, on July 14 I wrote the first of four articles on Project 2025, choosing my main topic of interest: the climate crisis. The Republican plan assumes that the climate crisis is a hoax and intends to destroy all efforts to address the climate, instead investing heavily in their billionaire friends in the fossil fuel industry. That same week, the RNC Congress officially nominated Trump for president, and he chose Vance as his compliant “mini-me” for vice president. Democrats were growing increasingly desperate, and calls for Biden to drop out grew louder.
On July 21, I wrote my second article about women in Project 2025. In it, I described how the plan would strip women’s rights and set them back a century, making them the property of men again. The male-dominated GOP assumes that women will simply “get over it.”
That day, Biden announced he was withdrawing from the race and pledged his support to Harris. Enthusiasm exploded in Democratic politics. Donations poured in at unprecedented levels, campaign volunteers increased 100-fold, and new voter registrations soared. Within days, Harris had won enough delegates to the convention to ensure a unified convention, and the energy of the entire campaign changed noticeably. Everything had turned around.
Trump is now the tired old man in the race, facing a fresh young opponent, his worst fear: a mixed-race prosecutor! It took weeks for Trump to even acknowledge that Biden was no longer his opponent, and Vance suddenly became a liability, not an asset.
On July 28, my article “Project 2025” outlined the plan to impose fundamentalist “Christianity” on everyone because they believed “God was on their side,” even though they represented an ever-shrinking minority in the population. The next article described the attack on immigration.
Trump and Vance have yet to adapt their campaign to the new reality. They are increasingly conspicuous for their insults and outbursts of anger at every public appearance. Vance is now associated with couches and angry cat ladies, and Trump was so repulsive at the Black Journalist Conference that his staff pulled him off the stage long before the scheduled end.
A few days ago, Harris chose Minnesota Governor Walz as her running mate. He is down-to-earth and direct, a sharp contrast to Vance. Walz started the meme that the GOP candidates are “weird,” and that meme seems to have stuck. The contrast between the two campaigns is striking: joy, excitement, and enthusiasm versus anger, revenge, and insults.
When Harris/Walz have an event, the venue is packed. When Vance has an event, the cameras have to avoid showing how few people showed up. Trump seems to have given up on the campaign trail entirely and only attends his few scheduled events by phone.
Although polls have been shown to under-predict political reality, the current trend is Harris/Walz. The Democratic National Convention, which traditionally provides additional momentum, begins next week, on August 19.
I find it amazing that this election is still considered a close one. However, many voters are only starting to pay attention to it a few weeks before the election. But the sudden excitement surrounding Harris is anything but traditional. Moreover, the details of Project 2025 are now common knowledge; almost two-thirds of the population is aware of them. Most who have studied the plan are horrified, and Trump is trying in vain to distance himself from it.
Plus, Trump is neither physically nor mentally healthy, so no one knows what might happen in the next three months. We are in a time of rapid change, and yesterday is no longer a reliable indicator of tomorrow. Stay tuned, it will be an interesting election. Make sure you are registered and plan to vote.
Crispin B. Hollinshead lives in Ukiah. This and previous articles can be found at cbhollinshead.blogspot.com.
