October Surprise: Who Becomes America's Next President Will Be Determined By the So-Called "Ball-Licking Factor"

Seven states are still too close to call, including North Carolina, where the Ball-Licking Factor could be decisive. But whether it puts Harris or Trump in the White House remains to be seen.

When Mark Robinson became the 2024 GOP gubernatorial nominee in North Carolina thanks to the Ball-Licking Factor, few could have foreseen that would potentially decide the outcome of this year’s presidential race. That changed after it emerged that he told his friends on a porn website he was a “Black Nazi” and fan of “tranny on girl porn.” Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Donald Trump is Now the Clear Favorite in the 2024 Presidential Race, ran the headline above a story here on July 13, eight days before Joe Biden withdrew as the Democratic nominee.

Kamala Harris’s Path to the White House is Now Irreversible, declared the banner atop an article published on August 14.

The new Deep Dive 2024 Presidential Campaign Pinpoint Sitrep Analysis™ – which is being unveiled just a month and a day before US voters are set to go to the polls – introduces an unexpected wildcard into the equation: the “Ball-Licking Factor.”

Why has it been so hard for experts such as myself to get a handle on the 2024 presidential race? And, you may also be wondering, what the fuck is the Ball-Licking Factor?

Let’s take those two questions in order and hence to begin I’ll explain why even top pundits like me have been humbled due to the complexities presented by this year’s race. The primary one is that it’s simply baffling that Trump could win the November election when his chief campaign promises to voters are that the best investment they’ll ever make are spending $100 of their hard earned savings on a “limited edition” silver coin that contains a fraction of its retail price in precious metal, and paying $100,000 for a gold watch he’s hawking for three times more than the equivalent Rolex.

Image from “Trump Watches” website.

Then again, who could have foreseen that after running Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020, the Democratic Party would go with Kamala Harris, who’s so hideously unlikeable to most of the electorate that it’s possible even a fascist-friendly grifter like Trump could go two-for-free in running for the nation’s highest office?

So here we are on October 4 and, to cite the words of Charles Cook in yesterday’s Cook Political Report, “We have a presidential election with seven states so close that they may go days past the official November 5 balloting before officially being called.” 

That leads to the second key question posed above — what the fuck is the Ball-Licking Factor? — which I’ll turn to now. The term Ball-Licking Factor, as it’s generally referred to in insider circles, first arose in 2016 during Trump’s first run for the presidency against Clinton.

In more colloquial terms, it refers to GOP political figures who win Trump’s favor by shamelessly degrading themselves by publicly blowing him longest and most lovingly after being humiliated by him before the astonished eyes of the entire nation. Past examples include Ted Cruz, who deep-throated Trump months after calling him a "sniveling coward" for mocking his wife or, in a more recent example, JD Vance, who derided him as a Nazi before subsequently rolling up his sleeves and going to work on the job with such ardor and conviction that he emerged as his 2024 running mate.

The Ball-Licking Factor also applies to Republican candidates further out on the lunatic fringe who successfully win Trump’s endorsement for lower-level office and unhinged activists who worm their way into his heart with ritual performances of public fellatio. Prominent examples in the latter group include conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer while one in the former category is Mark Robinson, the current Republican nominee for governor in North Carolina, who was recently reported to have informed fellow users of a porn website called “Nude Africa” that he calls himself a “black Nazi,” is a connoisseur of “tranny on girl porn,” and periodically enjoys peeping on teenaged girls.

And that leads to a third and ultimately more important question that’s closely related to the two above interrogatories: how the fuck could the Ball-Licking Factor determine the outcome of the November presidential election? 

North Carolina is one of the seven states Charles Cook was referring to as being too close to call and that as a result would likely mean it will be awhile after November 5 before we know if Harris or Trump won the presidential election. The reason behind that, of course, is the Electoral College means most voters have no genuine input into picking the nation’s leader, which is a privilege reserved only to those in swing states.

In North Carolina, which has 16 Electoral votes, Harris and Trump are in a statistical dead heat at 49 percent each. In five of the other six swing states — Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — Harris has a razor thing advantage, and in Georgia Trump is clinging to a narrow edge. Other polls put the GOP candidate in a better position than the Democratic nominee on balance, and Trump’s numbers appear to be moving higher, but Cook’s numbers roughly jibe with most everyone else’s at the moment.

Thanks to the Electoral College, “democracy” in the United States is such a preposterously unfunny joke that accurately predicting the winner of the presidential election can’t be done with any more scientific precision than forecasting the outcome of a game of Monopoly. The only time in the last 52 years North Carolina’s potentially decisive 16 Electoral votes went to a Democrat was in 2008, when Barack Obama defeated John McCain.

In recent years there’s been a large influx of more liberal, generally pro-Democratic voters into Charlotte and other rapidly growing urban areas of North Carolina, but Trump was expected to win the state until recently. However, Harris caught a break when after rolling the dice she picked up a “Chance Card” that indirectly led to Trump endorsing Robinson in North Carolina’s GOP gubernatorial primary, which all but assured him of winning the party nomination in the state.

How? The Chance Card gave Harris the power that compelled Robinson — who Trump has referred to as “Martin Luther King on steroids,” in contrast to Robinson’s own less flattering depiction of MLK as a “fucking commie bastard” on Nude Africa — to higher levels of self-abasement than any other 2024 GOP gubernatorial hopeful could come close to in figuratively servicing Trump with what may go down as the best goddamn blow job ever performed before a live political audience anywhere in US history.

That put the Ball-Licking Factor into play because while I’m told it was no secret Robinson had a lot of gigantic skeletons in the closet, in today’s GOP what Trump wants, Trump gets, and when it comes to picking a candidate to endorse among a group of otherwise indistinguishable deranged contenders, what he wants most of all is to have his balls licked exactly the way he wants his balls licked. Robinson won out in the competition and hence led Trump to endorse him in March, skeletons or no skeletons, and eventually led to the revelations last month, which were first reported by CNN.

During the weeks since then, the network and other news outlets have also reported other damaging remarks by Robinson on Nude Africa, such as “slavery is not bad…[and] I would certainly buy a few,” and “I’m a perv too!” The revelations tanked Robinson’s support in the governor’s race, with recent polls showing his Democratic opponent Josh Stein ahead of him by 17 points. The impact on the presidential race in the state has been less dramatic and is harder to measure, but it has surely hurt Trump’s chances of winning the Tar Heel state and its Electoral votes.

Meanwhile, Trump had some desperately needed good luck when he picked up the Chance Card that had Hurricane Helene recently roar through North Carolina and kill at least 200 people, destroy entire communities, and leave vast numbers of state residents without food, water and power. Of course, the unprecedented destruction could work to Harris’ benefit if she responds to the disaster rapidly with an effective relief plan that alleviates human suffering.

That’s highly unlikely, though, because Harris’ political instincts are more likely to lead her to call a press conference and announce her relief plan will be means-tested and apply only to limited numbers of people, such as college graduates who were bankrupted by President Joe Biden's failure to implement the reforms he promised on student loan policy, who will now receive the “Democratic Party Hurricane Tax Credit of 2037” worth between $50 and $500.

Few have licked Trump’s balls more furiously or to better effect than Kari Lake. But can Harris capitalize on the outcome? Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Nor is North Carolina the only state where the Ball-Licking Factor is likely to hurt Trump only to watch as Harris squanders to exploit what would normally be slam dunk opportunities if she hadn’t offered her full-throated endorsement of Israeli war crimes and ethnic cleansing, and her party weren’t as powerless to resist corporate money as Trump is to hold firm against the tug of a well-administered blow job. Hence, it looks like Trump’s presidential chances could take a hit if ball-licking extraordinaire Kari Lake goes down in flames in her Arizona senate race as now appears likely, or her fellow GOP senatorial hopeful and Trump ball-licker Bernie Moreno loses in Ohio.

Will the upshot put Trump back into the White House come January of next year? Or will the way Harris inevitably bungles every gift she gets not trump the damage caused to the GOP candidate. It won’t be long before we know the answer to that question, but it’s all but certain that this is the last presidential election in US history that the Ball-Licking Factor isn’t widely discussed on cable news or any reasonably informed voter doesn’t know how to define the term.