For the past month, Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Michael Moore sent out a daily “Mike’s Midterm Tsunami of Truth” about why he believes Democrats will win big in next month’s midterm elections in America.
Moore calls it “a short honest daily dose of the truth – and the real optimism these truths offer us”. It also – at the moment – goes against the face of most political pundits, who see a Republican victory at stake.
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Making predictions is a risky business in any election cycle, but especially in this round where Democrats are banking, they could tie Republican candidates to an unpopular Supreme Court decision to nullify federal guarantees of a woman’s right to abortion. Republicans, meanwhile, are focused on high inflation rates, economic problems and fear of crime rates.
But political predictions have become Moore’s business since he rightly stated that Donald Trump would win the national election in 2016, against the general judgment of the media and pollsters.
The thrust of his reasoning that this will be “Roe-vember” is reinforced daily in the emails. In Tuesday’s missive #21 (Don’t Believe It), he discussed the issue of political fatalism, specifically the media narrative that the party in power is necessarily underperforming in midterm elections.
“The effect of this kind of coverage can be shocking — it can get in the head of the average American and mix it up,” Moore wrote. “You may start to feel empty. You want to stop. You’re starting to believe that we liberals to be a bunch of losers. And by thinking about ourselves like that, if you’re not careful, you start manifesting the old story into existence.”
Reached by phone last week, Moore, 68, told the Guardian that his goal is basically to break the herd mindset. He points to three recent examples where political norms have been misinterpreted.
“If I said to you six months ago, ‘You know Kansas, right? It’s a huge pro-abortion state and this summer they’re going to legalize abortion by a 60% margin “you’d think I’d made a crazy statement,” he says.
“If I had told you at the same time that in the Alaska Congressional election, a hard red state will be won not just by a Democrat, but an Alaska Native Democrat, you would have to ask yourself again if I wasn’t right with my head.”
Finally, he draws attention to Boise, Idaho, where a sitting Republican candidate for the education board was supported by a far-right group, the Idaho Liberty Dogs, and lost to an 18-year-old high school senior and progressive activist, Shiva Rajbhandari, who also co-founded the Boise branch of climate group Extinction Rebellion.
In any case, says Moore, conventional thinking was challenged.
“I had a high school education, so probably, maybe, you shouldn’t be getting your news from me. If you’d only been paying attention for the past six months in Kansas, Idaho, and Alaska, you’d have had the red flags going up,” she says. he.
Moore likes to go in a different direction. He is from Michigan with his strong ties to anti-government movements — Moore attended the same high school as co-conspirator Terry Nichols, the Oklahoma bombing.
His lecture is not metropolitan oriented. Last year, he wrote that Democrats have “rebellious envy” of the Jan. 6 Capitol riots. “Deep in your soul, as you watched what your eyes could not believe was happening, admit to me that in that horrific moment on January 6, 2021 – how do I say – you were jealous that it was the fascists who had revolted, and not long before that, us,” he wrote.
Moore insists he’s not just being provocative by predicting a Democrat landslide. “I’m sixty-eight and don’t have time to mess around. I’m dead serious.”
Moore predicts that the election will see record turnout of younger voters whose views experts and commentators often miss. “If you spend time with women, Dobbs’ decision has affected them personally and deeply. This was a religious edict based on conservative Catholic principles.”
Moore’s political musings are not limited to critical observations from the right. Missteps by the Democrats are also obvious. “The biggest hurdle to what I’m doing with the series is the Democratic party,” he says. He has followed the election debates about the Democratic governor and the state on the American public broadcaster C-Span.
“It’s very discouraging and it would even make me wonder how we’re going to pull this off. The Democratic Party’s advisers run lines that are so lame and weak. They don’t go for the jugular vein like a Republican would. It doesn’t inspire people at home.”
“We are on the brink of a very important election here and our worst enemy could be the Democratic party itself,” he adds.
But Moore has made another point, often made but not always heeded, that the largest political group in the US is not Republican or Democrat, but non-voters. This non-voter, who may be the most potentially powerful but also the most inaccessible, is who Moore wants to reach.
“The non-voter does not see how politics benefits them, they are disgusted by the hypocrisy, many are disgusted by the crazy fights that are taking place and the madness that Trump has fueled,” Moore said, adding that when he puts the TV on at night he doesn’t necessarily go to a news channel but looks for a comedy.
Moore’s call, then, is to reach out to the non-believers. “Anyone who cares and feels that our democracy can hang by a thread” must now “do something in these last three weeks”.
In his case, he says, it could be as simple as calling a cousin who doesn’t vote to give them reasons why it’s important this time and that “she won’t vote again next.”
But what would he say to them?
‘Aren’t you tired of not doing anything? All that deadlock bullshit. One way to undo this blockage is to give Democrats a chance to pass legislation and see how it plays out. Maybe it won’t work. Maybe they have bad ideas. But no idea and no decision paralyzes and harms the country. If we talk like that, talk normally, it can be a huge help.”
