Donald Trump and the Common Knowledge Game

I think Kamala Harris is going to win the election this November.

I think this for the same reason that I thought Trump would win in 2016: modern Presidential elections are turn-out elections … they’re not about ‘winning over’ undecided voters but about turning out a supermajority of your core voters in your core districts … and I think Harris is beating Trump pretty handily in this regard, almost as badly as Trump was trouncing Biden a few months ago. There is authentic voter enthusiasm out there for Harris in Team Blue, a relief rally from Biden’s ‘retirement’ that has somehow been transformed into a vibrant campaign. This enthusiasm for Harris is as incomprehensible to me personally as the remaining enthusiasm for Trump in Team Red, but so what? It’s there, it’s growing, and I think it’s enough to get Harris to 270 electoral college votes.

I also think there’s nothing either candidate can do to change the Common Knowledge structures – what everyone knows that everyone knows – to alter voter turn-out at this point. For example, if Donald Trump were caught on a hot mic using the n-word, would that change anything? Ehh. I doubt it. If Kamala Harris were caught on a hot mic … oh, haha! that would require allowing her to be near a mic and speaking human words. Please.

I think both candidates understand the importance of the crowd watching the crowd, meaning that both candidates are focused on audience size and audience energy at their live speeches, and then doing everything possible to broadcast video of those rallies into swing state TV media. Here, though, Harris has a decided advantage over Trump in earned media (free media exposure by news networks) with most of the national media in the bag for her, so I think time works for Harris and against Trump. If the election were held tomorrow I think it’s a toss-up. With the election 40 days away … I think it’s a reasonably close (but maybe not that close) election that Harris wins.

Where the common knowledge game rears its ugly head is the day after the election: Wednesday, November 6th. That’s the day where, if I’m right, Kamala Harris has claimed victory in the early AM hours and where some hours later Donald Trump has … umm … also claimed to be the winner. Or at least has stated publicly that he is not the loser, that there is ‘evidence’ of a terrible fraud perpetrated against him, that the election has been stolen. Again.

Win or lose – and I think it’s lose – that’s what he’s going to say. That he’s the winner. You know it and I know it. We all know it. No one in a position of media prominence for Team Red or Team Blue – what we’d call a Missionary in common knowledge terms – is talking about it, because it’s totally counterproductive for either side to talk about it before it happens, but we all know that it’s going to happen. If he wins, he wins. If he loses … well, he didn’t lose. Donald Trump is not going to concede this election, and he’s going to call for ‘patriotic Americans’ to ‘stand up’ and ‘get to the bottom’ of it.

THIS is our common knowledge about Donald Trump: we all know that we all know that he will not accept the election result if he loses.

On Wednesday morning, the crowd – us – will look around at the crowd, wondering what happens next. Some of us will believe that Trump is right, that the election was ‘stolen’. More of us will believe that Trump is wrong. None of this matters. None of our personal beliefs, individually or in the aggregate, about the validity of the November elections matter. What matters is what a critical mass of Americans believe that a critical mass of Americans believe, and that common knowledge will be determined by the missionaries who step up to tell us how to think about the November elections.

The question is not whether Trump will accept the election result if he loses. He won’t.

The question is whether a missionary with actual power will join him.