I just voted. I'm a traditionalist, I love the journey on Election Days to the voting booth, completing the ballot and then sliding it into the rigged Dominion machine.
But revealing my electoral traditionalism is not the point of this short post. The point, rather, is this:
I live in a small, mostly white, largely Christian (so Christian the Dollar General store had to permanently close its self-checkout because of theft), thoroughly Republican town. After submitting my ballot I asked the fellow who shows voters what to do with their ballot how turnout had been.
He paused a while, then said, "Uh, kinda average."
My town may be heavily Republican but its state is blue. So maybe voters here figured their two-cents weren't worth the effort. Or, and this is my hope turned belief, local enthusiasm for Trump even in this red pocket of a blue state has hit a low.
My opinion of this race began shifting toward a Harris win at least a week ago, or a bit earlier. Polling had nothing to do with it and neither did aggregating models like Nate Silver's nor any pro-Harris columns and editorials.
I've written before, perhaps immodestly, that my political instincts have a pretty fair history of sensing a victory — my one enduring shame, 2016. And in this race, as with polls and models and pundits, the Harris campaign also had nothing to do with what I began detecting. It was Trump. All Trump.
He has, of late, made an abnormally oversized ass of himself. With each passing day I could almost smell thousands of Trump ballots being lit on fire, as in, we've enough had, including this town's locals.
It could be my olfactory glands are malfunctioning, but I'm betting instead my instincts are pointing true north — which would mean that Trump is heading straight south.