By Jeffrey Blehar
Sunday, September 08, 2024
I’m told that nobody likes a smugly self-congratulatory
“I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so” column. They always read like
obnoxious self-praise, and often premature at that. Which is why this morning
I’m instead writing an obnoxiously premature, smugly self-congratulatory “I
hate to say I told you so, but I told you so” Corner post instead. (Some
sins of commentary are more forgivable when compressed to four or five dense
paragraphs.)
For the most recent New York Times/Siena national
poll of the election is out this Sunday morning, and Donald Trump now leads
Kamala Harris nationally among likely voters — not registered voters, likely
voters — by a 48–47 margin. (Forty-eight percent, incidentally, would if true
represent a higher share of the vote than Trump received at the ballot box in
either 2016 or 2020.) To rehearse a series of presumptions that I assume most
readers have long internalized, this is a terrible place for Harris to be in a
nationwide poll; the margins are expected to be so close in so many swing
states (Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, etc.) that
she is thought to need something more like a 3 percent lead in the polls
heading into election day for her to triumph.
Maybe this one poll is a blip. But there have been
multiple ominous signs in the polling recently for Harris, and I’ve not been
alone in noticing and gesturing ominously at them in one endless column after
another over the last few weeks. The inexplicably controversial Nate Silver is
taking an admirably dignified victory
lap on X this morning, running a gentle circle around everyone once
again accusing him of pro-Republican (?) hackery by having a model that has
persistently suggested a narrow advantage for Trump. That’s nice enough for
him, but since relative to Nate I’m a grimy hustler forever on the make, I just
want to point out — while this bright fresh breeze of vindication blows — that
this has more or less forever been my theory of the case, from July 21 onward. Could media hype sell Kamala Harris
forever? Could she truly “hide” her way to the White House? A lot of Democrats
sure seemed pleased to try and find out. Even as the unreality of the Harris
campaign and media coverage of it hit the height of derangement during the
run-up to the DNC — you’ll notice how much “bad drug trip” imagery seeps into
my columns from that period, uncoincidentally — I had my ever-persistent
doubts, and they have been borne out.
The most interesting number in the poll — the one that
may tell the tale in November — came from NYT/Siena’s questions to
likely voters: (1) Do you want a “major change” in this election? (2) Between
Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, which candidate “represented a major change”
from Biden? On the first, over 60 percent said yes — a staggering number. And
then in answer to question 2, only 25 percent of likely voters said
Kamala Harris represented that change. Fifty-three percent said Trump did.
The ruse isn’t working. The media can try to continue
selling Harris as a “fresh start,” but voters are smart enough not to buy it
for a second — if for no other reason than that she utterly refuses to tell
voters what she actually is for in any way they are allowed to query.
Voters want change, and if the race remains where it is now, they are about get
it in the strangest way possible: heading back to the future with Donald Trump.
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