By Jim Geraghty
Monday,
October 28, 2024
Every
cycle, we get presidential candidates pledging that despite the stark divisions
in the country, they will be “a president for all Americans.”
In
his convention speech, Trump pledged, “I am running to be president for all of
America, not half of America.” In her convention speech, Harris made the same
pledge: “I promise to be a president for all Americans.”
If
you want to be a president for all Americans, and if you want to win votes
among Latinos, you should not have one of the opening speakers at your Madison
Square Garden rally — a “comedian” named Tony Hinchcliffe — tell a so-called
joke like, “These Latinos, they love making babies, too, just know that. They
do. They do. There’s no pulling out. They don’t do that. They come inside, just
like they did to our country.”
Watch it for
yourself, if you don’t believe me.
Residents
of Puerto Rico are U.S. citizens, and roughly 6 million Americans living in the U.S. have Puerto
Rican heritage, including quite a few in Pennsylvania. If you want to be a
president for all Americans, and if you want to win votes among Puerto-Rican
Americans, you should not feature a speaker who “jokes,” “I don’t know if you
guys know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the
middle of the ocean right now. Yeah, I think it’s called Puerto Rico.”
The
Trump campaign made the bare-minimum effort to distance itself from that particular
joke. “Late Sunday, senior Trump advisor Danielle Alvarez issued a
statement saying, ‘This joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or
the campaign,’ in apparent reference to Hinchcliffe’s comment about Puerto
Rico.” If only Trump himself could denounce that joke with one-quarter of the
emotion he denounces, say, Taylor Swift.
If
you want to be a president for all Americans, and in particular, if you want to
win votes among African Americans, you should not feature a speaker who
“jokes,” while pointing to someone in the crowd, “It’s cool, black guy with a
thing on his head. What the hell is that, a lampshade? Look at this guy! Oh, my
goodness, wow. I’m just kidding, that’s one of my buddies, he had a Halloween
party last night. We had fun, we carved watermelons together.”
Watermelons,
get it?
There
are quite a few Americans who care about the Russian invasion of Ukraine and
the Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthi, and Iranian attacks against Israel.
“Ukraine
versus Russia, Israel versus Pal — it’s like bad soccer games. Who even cares?”
Hinchcliffe “joked.”
“We’re
all thinking the same thing,” he said. “Settle your stuff already. Best out of
three, rock, paper, scissors. You know the Palestinians are going to throw rock
every time. You also know the Jews have a hard time throwing that paper, you
know what I’m saying?”
Note
that while the crowd wasn’t exactly loving Hinchcliffe’s routine, they didn’t
boo him off the stage, either.
Those
of us who object to these “jokes” will be told that we have no sense of humor,
that we’re all just a bunch of dour scolds. Or we’ll be told that we just don’t
get Hinchcliffe’s edgy comedy, and that we’re stodgy snobs. Or someone will
point to some other comedian who supports Democrats and makes ugly, unfunny
“jokes” and say that because those other jokes didn’t get a sufficient level of
denunciation, anyone who denounces Hinchcliffe’s routine is a hypocrite.
We’ll
be told that declaring, “These jokes are unfunny and offensive and belonged
nowhere near the stage of Madison Square Garden” is a form of “cancel culture.”
But
we all have our own internal sense of what’s over the line. And I don’t think
you should joke in any circumstance that Latinos “come inside, just like they
did to our country” (note that two-thirds of Hispanic Americans were born in the United
States), or that Puerto Rico is an island of garbage or that blacks like
watermelons or that Jews love money, and even if you are dense on the level of osmium and can’t grasp why those jokes are offensive, you really
shouldn’t do this at a political rally for the candidate you want to elect.
Naturally,
the Republican
nominee who wants a televised military tribunal for Liz Cheney for treason just
can’t bring himself to object to Hinchcliffe’s routine.
Harris
Is Doing a Little Worse Than Biden in the Uncompetitive Big States
On
Friday, Josh Barro laid out the theory that will keep Democrats hopes alive
until Election Day: Sure, Trump is doing better than he did in 2020, but not in
places where it will do him much good; Trump’s neck-and-neck national numbers
are the result of him shaving a few percentage points off Harris’s lead in
deep-blue and deep-red states, but not in the “blue wall” states that will be
decisive in the Electoral College.
Remember, in 2020, Joe Biden won the national
popular vote by 4 points, but he won the tipping point state of Wisconsin by
less than a point, and Pennsylvania by just over a point. The fact that Biden
(and Clinton) ran worse than they did nationally in those key swing states led
to a widespread assumption that Harris must win the popular vote by several
points in order to actually win the election. But the Times-Siena poll
has been finding big shifts that counter that theory: when it simultaneously
polled Pennsylvania and the country last month, Times-Siena found Harris
running very slightly better there than nationally. Meanwhile, Times-Siena has found Harris
running much worse than Biden did four years ago in states that are not
competitive, including a poll that found her trailing by an eye-popping 13 points in Florida.
In other words, the Times-Siena
polling suggests that Trump has been making gains compared to four years ago,
but those gains are very electorally inefficient: his inroads with younger
minority voters are helping him run up the score in Florida and lose by less in
New York, and are likely to help him reclaim Sun Belt states like Georgia and
Arizona, but the Times-Siena polls don’t show him making the gains he
needs in disproportionately white Rust Belt states in order to get to 270
electoral votes. In fact, Harris may be running slightly better than Biden did
with white voters four years ago.
We
all agree Harris is going to win California and New York, and Trump is going to
win Florida and Texas, right? Let’s test out that theory: Is Trump improving on
his numbers from last time in each of these four uncompetitive but vote-heavy
states?
California
2020
results: Biden 63.4 percent, Trump 34.3 percent
Turnout:
17.5 million votes, so one percentage point is roughly 175,000 votes.
Current
RealClearPolitics average: Harris 58.7, Trump 35
percent
Current
FiveThirtyEight average: Harris 58.7, Trump 35.1
percent
The
current averages suggest Trump is performing a percentage point or so better
than last time in the Golden State, and I note that Harris, the home-state
senator, is running about five percentage points behind Biden’s final share of
the vote there last cycle. If 2024 turnout is roughly equivalent to 2020
turnout, and Harris finishes in the high 50s rather than the low 60s in the
state, that shaves four or five percentage points off her total, which adds up
to about 700,000 to 875,000 fewer votes for the Democratic nominee.
I
can hear Democrats scoffing already: “Big deal. She wins California by 4
million votes instead of 5 million votes.”
Florida
2020
results: Trump 51.2 percent, Biden 47.8 percent
Turnout:
A bit more than 11 million votes, so 1 percent is roughly 110,000 votes.
Current
RealClearPolitics average: Trump 52 percent,
Harris 43.6 percent
Current
FiveThirtyEight average: Trump 50.9 percent, Harris
44.7 percent.
This
is another state where the outcome already looks clear, but Harris is running
three or four percentage points behind where Biden finished. Assuming turnout
is about the same as last cycle, that adds up to 330,000 to 440,000 fewer votes
in the Democratic pile.
New
York
2020
results: Biden 60.8 percent, Trump 37.7 percent
Turnout:
8.6 million votes, so 1 percent is roughly 86,000 votes
Current
RealClearPolitics average: Harris 56 percent, Trump
39.5 percent
Current
FiveThirtyEight average: Harris 54 percent, Trump
39.5 percent
Trump
is running two percentage points ahead of his finish in 2020, and Harris is
running anywhere from five to seven (!) percentage points behind Biden’s share
of the vote last cycle. If turnout is about the same, five to seven percentage
points is 430,000 to 602,000 votes fewer than Biden’s total last cycle.
Texas
2020:
Trump 52, Biden 46.4
11.3
million votes, so each percentage point is about 110,000 people
Current
RealClearPolitics average: Trump 51.6 percent,
Harris 45.6 percent
Current
FiveThirtyEight average: Trump 51 percent, Harris
44.1 percent.
Trump
is actually a tiny bit behind his share of the Texas vote in 2020, while Harris
is a percentage point or two behind Biden — which is 110,000 to 220,000 votes.
Biden
won the popular vote in 2020 by 4.5 percentage points, or about 7 million
votes.
So,
assuming this back-of-the-envelope math is correct, by running a few percentage
points behind Biden, Harris is on track to finish with 1.5 million to 2.1
million fewer votes than Biden, just in these four states.
Now,
some fair objections to the math above: Those RCP and 538 averages
have Trump and Harris accounting for 93.5 percent to 97.2 percent of the vote.
This is because “undecided” is an option when a pollster calls, but not at the
ballot box. I will be surprised if the non-major-party options — the Green
Party’s Jill Stein, the Libertarian Chase Oliver, independent Cornel West —
amount to much more than the 1.85 percentage points more nationally than the
non-major-party candidates added up to in 2020. Maybe they collectively
add up to 2 percent; they’re negligible in the national polling so far. So you can argue
that the final vote percentages for Harris and Trump will be a smidge higher,
and the percentage going to some other option will be smaller than the
2.7-to-6.5-percentage-point range in the examples above.
And
as I wrote late last week, turnout increases most cycles;
of the 19 presidential elections since 1945, 16 have seen higher turnout than
the previous cycle. So we would expect turnout in most states, if not all of
them, to be at least a little higher than in 2020 — maybe a big enough jump to
throw off comparisons to last cycle, maybe not.
I
also wrote late last week, “There’s a decent chance that, next month, more
Americans will cast a ballot for Kamala Harris than anyone else in U.S.
history.” If Harris is indeed running a few percentage points behind Biden’s
share of the vote in 2020, that will be much harder to accomplish.
Other
interesting wrinkles in recent polling . . .
The
Washington Post poll of Virginia finds, “Harris
leads Trump 49 percent to 43 percent in the presidential race, and with a
3.5-point margin of error their ranges of possible support overlap slightly.
That is narrower than Harris’s 10-point advantage in a Washington Post average
of recent high-quality polls.”
Note
that four years ago, Biden beat Trump here, 54 percent to 44 percent.
There
have been only two polls of the presidential race in New Jersey this autumn — a Cygnal poll
putting Harris ahead, 52 percent to 40 percent, and an ActiVote survey putting
Harris ahead 56 percent to 44 percent.
Again,
this looks like Harris running a bit behind where Biden did; four years ago,
Biden beat Trump here, 57 percent to 41 percent.
In
Maryland, there have been a decent number of polls this autumn, likely driven
by curiosity about the Senate race between Angela Alsobrooks and Larry Hogan.
Right now in the FiveThirtyEight average, Harris leads Trump in
Maryland, 61.7 percent to 33.2 percent. Four years ago, Biden won, 65.3 percent
to 32.1 percent.
ADDENDUM: Finally, as I requested last week, we have an independent poll of
Nebraska’s Senate race(s), and the New York Times/Siena survey finds a result between
the results of the polls commissioned by the campaigns of
Bernie-Sanders-supporting “independent” Dan Osborn and Republican incumbent Deb
Fischer:
The Nebraska poll has found that Mr. Osborn,
an industrial mechanic who is running as an independent voice for the working
class, is trailing Ms. Fischer, a Republican who has kept a relatively low
profile since taking office in 2013, by two percentage points, 46 percent to 48
percent, with 5 percent of likely voters in Nebraska either undecided or
refusing to answer.
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