Liberals are starting to panic. Donald Trump is going to win in a landslide

It’s becoming increasingly clear that Democrats are getting desperate

Denial is not only a river in Egypt. It is also a seductive expedient for the Democratic Party in the waning days of the 2024 presidential election. You see it everywhere in the official activities of the Democratic campaign. WinBlue donations are soaring! The polls still have Harris ahead! Democracy is on the line!
Escaping from the bluster of denial are worrisome little puffs of pandering, always a sure sign that the denial is at best half-believed by the denier.
This is not surprising. Denial is the reliable product of desperation: the realisation, however imperfectly acknowledged, that the jig is up.
Harris’s numbers among men of all races are in the tank. The only exception is among the brittle ephebes of the media and the academy. They are there with their Chardonnay, list of pronouns, and ageing Covid masks to plant Harris-Walz signs on their front lawns and warn against the dangerous tyrant-in-waiting, Donald Trump.  
But this is a minuscule, psephologically insignificant cohort. Which is why the Harris-Walz campaign has been driven to desperate measures. In the last week or two, they have rolled out a pitiful litany of feints and diversionary tactics.
Some were unforced errors, as when the news programme 60 Minutes ran a preview of its interview with Harris that prominently included one of her signature no-calorie word salad emissions. CBS excised that response when they aired the full interview, substituting an innocuous reply to some other question. But the damage was done. The original response was widely mocked. The bowdlerised substitute sparked fury and contempt for the hapless, in-the-can-for-Harris behaviour of CBS.
My favourite bit of pandering was the truly horrible “I’m-a-man-and-I’m-voting-for-Harris” ad. It was rightly derided as the “cringiest political ad ever.”
Like many people, I at first thought it was a spoof, an anti-Harris production designed to make fun of her and her running mate, Tim Walz. That certainly was the effect. But it turns out that the half dozen men in the ad were not random bearers of XY chromosomes who just happened to support Harris for president. No, they were apparently B-list actors, recruited to deliver their lines.  
And what lines they were. One actor, who pretended to know something about cars, said “You think I’m afraid to rebuild a carburetor? I eat carburetors for breakfast.” I am thinking of offering a reward to anyone who can tell me what that means.
One enterprising commentator discovered who wrote the ad – Jacob Reed, who has written for the late-night talk-show host Jimmy Kimmel – and the real-life biographies of the actors. Let’s just say that none appears to be a poster child for masculinity. The comments have been brutal.  “Zero testosterone was used in the making of this ad”;  “A Real Man instantly realises that there isn’t a single Real Man in this pathetic beta male cringe-fest of a propaganda video”; “From the party that can’t tell you what a woman is”; “As a man, I think I walked away from this ad with a yeast infection.”
Then there was Tim Walz’s “pheasant hunting” wheeze. I deploy the scare quotes because no pheasants were harmed in the production of that farce. Walz and a handful of reporters, accoutered in identical, brand-new hunting gear, are shown traipsing around a field without guns. Were they intending to catch the pheasant by hand and strangle them?  
Eventually Walz is given a shotgun, but it was the wrong sort of gun for a hunt – semi-automatic, not a break-action gun. Not that it mattered. As one commentator noted, Walz’s “gun handling skills make Dick Cheney look like the safest shooter in the world. Perhaps that is why Cheney endorsed him.”
Walz was alternately compared to the cartoon character Elmer Fudd and Governor Mike Dukakis. Readers with long memories will remember how, during the 1988 presidential campaign, Dukakis tried to act tough by riding around in an army tank wearing a too-large helmet. It marked the end of his campaign.
I have been predicting that Donald Trump would win in a landslide since before Joe Biden was pushed out of the race in July and Kamala Harris was suddenly air-lifted into the vacant top spot. At first the Democrats put on a brave show. Harris got a minor bounce from the Democratic convention. Despite emitting a cavalcade of lies, she more or less held her own in her one debate with Trump.
But soon after Labor Day in early September, cracks began to appear. In 2020, just 44,000 votes in a handful of swing states won the presidency for Joe Biden. That was in the midst of the national panic over Covid. The Dems don’t have a Chinese virus to help them this time. They know all this. Hence their panic. It is entirely justified.
Roger Kimball is editor and publisher of The New Criterion and president and publisher of Encounter Books