The 'Thing with Feathers' Makes a Comeback

But with political and legal storms on the horizon, it's going to take a lot more than hope to win the 2024 presidential election.

Photo of feathers via PickPic

When Emily Dickinson described hope as the thing with feathers, she could not have known how important that word would become to American politics in the 21st century.

As its standard bearer in 2008, Barack Obama carried hope all the way to the Oval Office. But when he left the White House in 2016, hope was no longer operative. Backlash was.

Obama’s successor Donald Trump began his presidency with a vision of American carnage. His inaugural address conjured an image of despair: inner cities afflicted with crime, factories rusted like tombstones, a political elite blind to the needs of ordinary people, European allies that did not pay their way.

These ills could only be cured, Trump said, if America abandoned its global commitments and looked to itself first. Mother Nature seemed to comply with this cheerless vision. Or perhaps what happened next was merely her comment on the new president’s departure from uplifting, unifying inaugural norms. It rained.

The downpour that day matched the mood of many Americans. For the second time in 16 years, the occupant of the nation’s highest office had not won the popular vote. To ascend to the presidency, all you had to do was win the electoral college. Which is why the outcome of the 2024 presidential election will likely rest in the hands of independent voters in six or seven swing states. And possibly—horribly—in Congress or the courts.

In some ways, it is a dispiriting reality

In order for the electoral-college calculus to work, voters in every state must hold the line for the candidate of their choice. Then hold their breaths come November till a handful of votes in these swing states decides the outcome.

Will the United States continue to support Ukraine, honor its commitment to NATO, play a key role in the Middle East? Will America lead the way in the battle against climate change? Will the federal government replace all civil servants with loyalists for whom allegiance to party outweighs fidelity to the Constitution? Will the very wealthy receive another $2 trillion tax cut or be required to pay their fair share?

It is laughable that the fate of these existential concerns will depend on a handful of voters who mainly care about two domestic issues: immigration and inflation. But it’s no joking matter that many of these hardworking citizens will rely on paid political advertising funded by dark money to inform their decision at the polls.

None of this looks like a recipe for hope. And yet, within the span of a few weeks, Emily Dickinson’s “thing with feathers” has begun to make a comeback. During the recent Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago, hope was invoked by Bill Clinton as well as Michelle and Barack Obama. But it found its current embodiment in Kamala Harris.

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Hope and ‘The Seagull’

On the last day of the DNC, several news outlets reported that Oscar-winner Cate Blanchett and Tom Burke of The Three Musketeers & the CB Strike Detective Series will share the stage next February in a new production of The Seagull, by Anton Chekhov.

With thoughts of hope and American politics dominating my thoughts, I remembered that Chekhov thought of this work as a comedy. But the seagull in his play is a depressing metaphor. This particular “thing with feathers” is killed mid-flight to symbolize the death and destruction wrought by unrequited love. It is a symbol that reverberates throughout the play as its fate echoes in the lives of the characters.

That is the trouble with hope

Unfulfilled, it can lead to pessimism and despair. To avoid this pitfall, Kamala Harris seems to be attempting a high-wire act. Her historic presence as the first woman of color to lead the presidential campaign of a major American political party is the very embodiment of hope.

But that’s not what she’s campaigning on. We have been there and done that with Barack Obama. It worked in 2008 but not in 2012, though Obama captured the White House that year too. Instead, Kamala Harris promises unity and two things that don’t usually go together. Hard work and joyful enthusiasm.

My family is no stranger to these things

During convention-week, I spoke with my centenarian uncle who lives in Chicago, and it came as no surprise that he’s excited to be alive at this moment. We'd have both been happy if his sister, my mother, could still be alive for it too.

I recognized her portrait, as well as my grandmothers’ in the many stories of working-class Americans who struggled all their lives to create a better future for their children. For women like my mother—though she’s not here to see it—the ascent of Kamala Harris is the realization of hopes going back generations.

For the GOP, a troubling ascent

If you watched the last night of the DNC on commercial television as I did, you couldn’t help but notice that the GOP spent a good chunk of its advertising capital on negative ads blaming Harris for the nation’s inflation and immigration woes.

Never mind that Donald Trump tanked the bipartisan immigration deal before it could even get off the ground. Or that inflation has been been declining for the past several months. Or that the Federal Reserve has signaled that it will cut interest rates in September, lowering the cost of mortgages, cars, gas, and groceries. But then, truth has never been the purpose of paid political advertising.

With Chekhov in mind

I saw these commercials as shots fired at a metaphorical seagull rising in the sky, as Democrats made their uplifting case to a massive audience, which exceeded that of the Republican Convention— night for night— during its entire run.

But these negative ads were nothing compared to Trump’s personal attempts to shoot down the feathery thing that has turned Kamala Harris into a political juggernaut overnight. After dropping a series of 47 false and disparaging posts on Truth Social during Harris’s acceptance speech, Trump called into Fox News to denounce Harris in a nonstop torrent. The co-anchors were finally able to cut him off after 10 minutes.

When the balloons dropped

at the end of Harris’s 38-minute acceptance speech at the United Center in Chicago, the joy in the stadium was an undeniable contrast to Trump’s negative campaign ads, his bleak posts on Truth Social, his pessimistic comments to Fox News, and his own gloomy, rambling 92-minute acceptance speech during the RNC.

Maybe this mudslinging worked within the right-wing echo chamber. But I doubt that it carried much weight beyond it. Because in the end people will forget you say, they will forget what you do, but they will never forget how you made them feel. ¹

If the feathery thing that’s keeping Kamala Harris aloft these days takes her all the way to the Oval Office this November, it will not be because most Americans have had enough of Donald Trump’s American carnage. We knew that in 2016 and in 2020 when he failed to win the popular vote.

A Harris victory in November will require two things

The first is for independent voters in those all-important swing states to say they’ve had enough too. That it’s time for America to take another step forward into a future of possibility.

The second requirement is this. Trump’s nefarious effort to claim victory by winning neither the popular vote nor the electoral college must be stopped.

He has already succeeded in packing State Election Boards in eight swing states with election deniers and MAGA loyalists. One of those states is Georgia, whose election board recently passed rules that will make it easier to delay certification of the vote count, potentially throwing the entire election into chaos.

If enough states fail to certify results, it’s possible that neither Trump nor Harris would win the required 270 electoral votes to become President. If that happens, the 12th Amendment requires the newly elected House of Representatives to choose the next president.

In that scenario, each state receives one vote. At present, more states in the House are represented by Republicans than Democrats. That could change if Democrats flip the House in November. But if Republicans hold onto the House, who do you think those GOP congressmen would select?

But there’s another troubling legal scenario, too

Vote-count confusion at the state level could send election results to individual state legislatures. It would then be up to partisan legislators to determine the outcome of that state’s vote— and choose which party’s electors to send to the electoral college.

Although the current Supreme Court rejected the so-called Independent State Legislature theory in 2023, it left the door open to decide future cases. So it’s conceivable that Trump will use the high court’s decision in a previous case to launch a legal effort to overturn election results in individual swing states.

In Bush v. Gore (2000), the Supreme Court appeared to endorse the power of state legislatures to reject the popular vote and appoint its own electors—thus “denying that citizens have a constitutional right to vote in presidential elections.” As the majority put it:

The individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for Electors for the President of the United States. . .” 

In other words, when it comes to presidential elections, the voters are at the mercy of the state legislatures.²

Vote-count certification at the state level is supposed to be purely ministerial

Like Mike Pence’s job on January 6, 2021. Any new rules intended to turn it into something else are unconstitutional.

Efforts to deny certification have not worked in the past. But the Brennan Center for Justice reports that election-denier threats have never been deployed on such a large and coordinated scale as this year. Trump’s state-by-state effort to prevent certification will surely be contested in court.

This means that in addition to winning the popular and electoral-college vote, the Harris team will need to navigate a litigation-minefield between now and November.

Against a backdrop like this, it’s good to know “the thing with feathers” is making a comeback this year. We’re going to need a lot of it to get through this extremely consequential election. We’re also going to need grit, vigilance, and determination. Harris voters will need to turn out in extremely large numbers to counter voter-suppression efforts in several GOP-led states.

We’ve already seen what Donald Trump will do to get back in power. So a storm may very well be coming between now and November.

But as Emily Dickinson reminds us: Hope is sweetest in the Gale. And sore must be the storm - That could abash the little bird - That kept so many warm.

©2024 Andrew Jazprose Hill

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1. Although often attributed to Maya Angelou, this quote did not originate with the legendary poet, author, and activist. See this item from the Quote Investigator.

2. The current Supreme Court’s 2023 rejection of the Independent State Legislature theory (ISL) was not absolute. Although there is disagreement among legal scholars, NYU law professor Richard Pildes called it "highly significant" that the court rejected the extreme view of the ISL theory. But he said that "at the same time, [the court] endorsed a weaker version of this independent state legislature doctrine, and this is going to sort of hang over the 2024 election."

It is worth noting that Chief Justice John Roberts, who initially disagreed with Bush v. Gore (2000) reaffirmed it in the 2023 ISL case.