By Jim Geraghty
Tuesday, July 30, 2024
The most recent New York Times/Siena poll found that 87 percent of
registered voters approved of President Biden’s decision to drop out of the
2024 race, and only 9 percent disapproved.
You’ll notice that the right-of-center “poll truthers”
didn’t come out to question that one. Nobody’s arguing that the poll had too
many landline and not enough cellphone users, or that the sample had too many
old people or too many young people or wasn’t correctly balanced in terms of
race, sex, or ideology.
No one’s questioning that poll result because it makes
sense based on what we know. Joe Biden is really old; almost all Republicans
were happy to see the old man bow out, and almost all Democrats were happy not
to be stuck with him as their nominee anymore.
When it comes to polling, a lot of “unskewing” commentary
amounts to “I don’t like that poll result; therefore, I will insist that it is
illegitimate.”
That same Times/Siena poll found Donald Trump just barely
ahead of Kamala Harris nationally, 48 percent to 47 percent among likely voters
and 48 percent to 46 percent among registered voters.
A whole bunch of recent polling is finding results in the
same ballpark — mostly Trump ahead by one to three percentage points, and every
once in a while, Harris ahead by one or two percentage points. It’s a close
race. Harris is performing considerably better than Biden was, but you wouldn’t
want to bet your mortgage payment on her winning. Nor would you want to bet
your mortgage payment on Trump’s winning, given his narrow and shrinking lead.
(No, we don’t select our president based on a national
popular vote, but recent history tells us that, if a Republican wins the
popular vote, he’s just about assured to get considerably more than the 270
electoral votes needed to win the presidency. Hillary Clinton won the national
popular vote by two percentage points and finished with just 227 electoral
votes. So, if you’re Harris, you really want to be ahead by more than two
percentage points.)
Can the polls be wrong and consistently overestimate
Democratic support while consistently underestimating Republican support? Yes —
Susan Collins’s 2020 Senate race in Maine is probably the most
vivid example of this. But if you’re part of a Republican campaign, you
wouldn’t want to count on performing ten or more percentage points better than
your final polling numbers.
One of the quiet stories of this past insane four weeks
or so is what the polls showed after Joe Biden had just about the worst month
possible. He botched the debate and looked like a decrepit, forgetful, mumbling
geriatric in his subsequent appearances; Trump survived being shot in an
assassination attempt and looked fearless and defiant doing it; the Republicans
enjoyed a successful national convention; the initial rollout of J. D. Vance as Trump’s running mate went
just fine; and the first 20 minutes of Trump’s acceptance speech may well have
been the apex of his campaign. (Alas, Trump talked for another hour and ten
minutes.)
And yet, when the RealClearPolitics average for the Trump vs.
Biden matchup ended July 21, Trump was ahead 47.9 percent to 44.8 percent
in a two-way race. With Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Jill Stein, and Cornel West thrown
in, Trump was ahead of Biden 43.4 percent to 39.2 percent.
In other words, after Biden had been metaphorically
dragged across concrete for a month, and just about everything had gone right
for the Republican nominee, Trump led by three to four points. That’s a 3.6
roentgens of a result — “not great, not terrible.”
What this past month has taught us is that Donald Trump
has a hard ceiling.
There are a lot of Americans who love Trump, and a lot of
Americans who hate Trump, and a small sliver in the middle who don’t
particularly like him but who are at least theoretically open to voting for
him. But even in the near-best-case scenario of 2016, Trump won 49 percent of
the vote in Florida, 47.5 percent of the vote in Michigan, 49.8 percent of the
vote in North Carolina, 48.8 percent of the vote in Pennsylvania, and 47.2
percent of the vote in Wisconsin.
Trump really needs the non-Trump vote split in a fashion
that keeps Kamala Harris’s 40-some percent below his 40-some percent.
A lot of Trump fans walk around believing that a large
majority of the country loves their man as passionately and intensely as they
do — and it’s just not true. On a really good day for Trump, about 47 or 48 percent of poll respondents will say they feel
favorably toward Trump. On the bad days, it’s in the mid 30s. Just about
every day, well over 50 percent of poll respondents say they feel unfavorably
toward him.
It’s not that Harris is, to use one of my favorite
phrases, a whirling dervish of raw political charisma. But an enthusiastic
Democratic party and a full-throated cheerleading effort from the mainstream
media are a potent combination.
Trump has a much smaller margin of error running against
Harris than against Biden. Name-calling, winging it, and riffing the way he
does at his rallies probably isn’t going to get it done.
J. D. Vance’s Political Anti-Charisma
J. D. Vance, in that 2021 interview with Charlie Kirk:
We need to reward the things that
we think are good and punish the things that we think are bad. So, you talk
about tax policy, let’s tax the things that are bad and not tax the things that
are good. If you are making $100,000, $400,000 a year and you’ve got three
kids, you should pay a different, lower tax rate than if you are making the
same amount of money and you don’t have any kids. It’s that simple.
The liberal super PAC American Bridge took that clip and
declared it “unreal.”
ABC News ran the headline, “Vance argued for higher tax
rate on childless Americans in 2021 interview.” Newsweek warned, “JD Vance Wanted Higher Taxes for
Childless People, Video Shows.” Barstool
Sports’ Dave Portnoy fumed, “This is . . . idiotic. You want me to pay more
taxes to take care of other people’s kids? We sure this dude is a Republican?
Sounds like a moron. If you can’t afford a big family don’t have a ton of
kids.”
What all of this demonstrates is that a lot of people
jumping into the debate about tax policy have no idea what is in the current
tax code — not some obscure fine-print provision but a tax credit claimed by roughly 40 million American families each year.
It’s called the Child Tax Credit, and it didn’t just
sneak up on us. The CTC was introduced by John Kasich, then a Republican
representative from Ohio, and passed into law as part of the Taxpayer Relief
Act of 1997, which was signed by Democratic president Bill Clinton. The bill
passed the House with 226 Republican votes and 27 Democratic votes. It passed
the Senate with 80 votes.
For each dependent claimed, a tax filer gets up to a
$2,000 credit — with up to $1,400 of that total being refundable, meaning that
it gets paid out even if the person filing doesn’t owe any taxes.
J. D. Vance has the remarkable ability to take a
long-standing part of the tax code that enjoys broad bipartisan support and
make it sound scary and unfair.
A big part of a politician’s job is
trying to make policy ideas sound good to voters. There are any number of
different ways to describe a policy idea. For example, a politician could
communicate to voters about inflation and interest rates with articles from
economics journals, mathematical equations, and lectures about the money supply
and the market for loanable funds. Or, like the Reagan campaign did in 1984, he could talk about
inflation and interest rates by showing people getting married and young
families buying houses. I think we all know which of those approaches would be
more successful.
Vance here essentially does the
opposite of what politicians are supposed to do. He is describing a policy idea
in the least palatable way possible.
Reportedly, Trump was leaning toward selecting North Dakota
governor Doug Burgum as his running mate, but Donald Trump Jr. and Eric
Trump vehemently disagreed and convinced their father that Vance was the
best possible pick.
Finally . . . once you see the eyeliner, you can’t unsee
it. It’s as if Vance is auditioning for The Cure.
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