Thank God election day is finally here

A few observations as we await tonight's returns

Photo by Cyrus Crossan on Unsplash

Election day is finally here. Our long national nightmare is almost over.

Or, depending on what happens tonight or over the next 48 hours, our nightmare may only be moving into its next, more terrifying phase.

Whatever the case, hasn’t this been an interminable, bizarre campaign season?

An assassination attempt on Donald Trump, Trump’s criminal convictions and his federal indictments, Joe Biden’s graceful withdrawal, Kamala Harris’ smooth assumption of the Democratic nomination, and her near-flawless campaign over the past three months. All of it was capped by a wild and racist nazi-like Trump rally at Madison Square Garden.

It’s been like three years of events crammed into 12 months.

Starting tonight, the votes will be tallied, and we’ll finally get some clarity about our country’s future.

Will we head down the ruinous road to autocracy, or will we continue the process of restoring our democracy? I’m hopeful it will be the latter, but I’ve learned my lesson about making election predictions. I have my views (and hopes) about who will win, but I’m too superstitious to put them in writing here.

But I do have a few predictions and observations.

But first, let me urge you to vote today if you haven’t already done so. You probably know someone unlikely to vote without a nudge from you. Give them a call or send a text. Tell them why it’s essential to participate in this election.

Now, for some predictions and observations:

Trump seems to be trying to lose this election, but if Harris beats him, it will be partly because Democrats were energized as never before.

I’ve never seen an election with so much activism by average people like you and me. Almost every day, someone tells me how many postcards they wrote to people in swing states. A friend told me at church on Sunday that she wrote 700.

All that activism has made a real difference. By all accounts, Trump’s get-out-the-vote effort is a shambolic operation that pales compared to the juggernaut the Harris campaign assembled and inspired.

To everyone who gave money, wrote postcards, worked a phone bank, or spoke to friends about the stakes of this election, I salute you.

Collectively, we saw how important it was to get involved and do something. And we did it. Win or lose, I believe that you and I did everything we could to keep this criminal away from the White House.

The Dobbs decision will be the defining event of this election.

I’ve been saying this for months, but I believe the pollsters and many pundits (most of them men) missed the powerful, white-hot anger of women whose reproductive rights were ripped away by Trump, his Supreme Court, and Republican state lawmakers.

It’s one reason I was not keen to dump Biden in the summer. I didn’t think then or now that women and their allies required a perfect candidate to prompt them to vote for their freedom. They will continue registering their outrage at the polls until their human rights are restored. I hope tonight’s returns make that clear.

Trump will declare victory tonight, no matter the results. We should all be clear-eyed about this: He will not concede defeat.

If Trump loses the election, taking back the White House through the courts or in the streets won’t be as easy as he and his supporters might think. The margin of Harris’ (I hope) victory will be significant in stopping Trump.

But also important is the fact that hundreds of his disciples are now rotting in prison for their roles in the last insurrection. Trump is under indictment for his role in trying to overturn the 2020 election. Many of his co-conspirators may go to prison for helping him.

I’m not so naïve to believe that Trump won’t try to steal this election if he loses, but for all kinds of reasons too complicated to discuss here, the job will be more challenging and perilous for him in 2024.

When Trump declares victory tonight before the results are in, it will resemble a self-parody — a pathetic, tired comedy act.

Let the lawyers and election officials respond to this as soberly and thoughtfully as they should and will. But I hope the widespread public reaction to Trump’s stunt will be ridicule and laughter.

The damage done to Christianity by Evangelicals’ support of Trump is incalculable.

Even many mainline Christian church leaders do not yet fully comprehend how much damage Evangelicals have done to the larger American church’s reputation over the past eight years.

I was struck reading the passionate, emotional words on this subject by Nathaniel Manderson, a hospice chaplain.

In Salon the other day, Manderson wrote about “the current leadership of the evangelical church in America — which is my own religious background” and how it has “fallen prey to the temptations offered by Donald Trump.” Manderson noted that those “temptations are eerily similar to the temptations the devil offered Jesus in the desert, before Jesus began his ministry.” Manderson concluded:

My recent employment has been as a hospice chaplain, ministering to dying people and their families. It's a job that stays with you on a very deep level. Every day, I am faced with families who are trying to say goodbye to a loved one, and with people who are trying to say goodbye to life. This is not always a peaceful transition, no matter what many of us would like to believe. There is sometimes great anxiety, loss of control and anger.  

What I have learned is a great but simple truth: Death comes for all of us, regardless. People of faith, successful people, people who have failed, people who believe they have done everything right and people who have done almost everything wrong. Their lives before the final stage hardly matter, and those final days are often difficult and sad. The comforts of this world have left them. Power, safety and money are all gone, and revealed as empty pursuits in the end. Those things — the temptations of Trump and the devil — only tend to keep a person from their true path, distorting their relationships, their careers, their family life, their art or their writing, their politics and their faith.

I have reached the inescapable conclusion that the teachings of Christ and the teachings of the evangelical church in America are going in opposite directions. The evangelical church is heading closer to the devil. It has submitted to Donald Trump and moved ever further away from a man who served the poor, healed the sick, loved his neighbors and taught his followers to do the same. Evangelical leaders have stopped listening to Christ. There is only one other alternative.

If the worst happens and Trump wins, we must not lose heart.

The temptation for many will be to give up. We’ll have worked so long and hard to save our country from an authoritarian criminal that it will seem there’s nothing left to do but declare democracy is done.

And I’ll be honest with you: I’ll be tempted to say that myself. What rational person could look at the results of a Trump victory and conclude that the American people are firmly committed to democracy?

Although I pray Harris will win the popular vote decisively, a Trump win in the Electoral College will be a severe blow to democracy. It will be a serious blow to women’s reproductive freedom. Millions of immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and people in other vulnerable groups will be in significant danger. Western Europe will almost instantly be at risk of a wider war, given the expectation that Trump will hand Ukraine to Putin on a silver platter.

In other words, it will look to you and me that the world as we know it has ended and that we should surrender.

But that’s precisely what Trump and his people have been hoping for from the first day of his candidacy. They want us to give up. They want us to quit fighting. They want us to turn the keys of this country over to them and allow them to make it a country of, for, and by white Christian nationalism.

Harris may lose, and Trump may win. We must be prepared for that awful possibility.

So, before the first vote is counted tonight, I hope that each of us will pledge that — win or lose — we will never quit fighting for our freedoms and will never cease doing whatever we can to hold our leaders to account. We will do so at the ballot box or peacefully in the streets.

But, no matter what, we will never end our struggle to make this “a more perfect union.”