By Jim Geraghty
Wednesday, October 09, 2024
To quote one of the most spectacularly overwrought
headlines of all time, “A Vibe Shift Is Coming. Will any of us survive it?”
It’s still a neck-and-neck race, and the polls in the
seven key swing states remain just stunningly close, day after day, week after
week.
As of this writing:
·
In Arizona, Trump leads in the RealClearPolitics average by 1.4 points, and he
leads in the 538 average by 1.3 points.
·
In Georgia, Trump leads in the RealClearPolitics average by 1.5 points, and he
leads in the 538 average by one point.
·
In Michigan, Harris leads in the RealClearPolitics average by half a
percentage point, and she leads in the 538 average by 1.7 points.
·
In Nevada, Harris leads in the RealClearPolitics average by 1.1 points, and she
leads in the 538 average by nine-tenths of a percentage
point.
·
In North Carolina, Trump leads in the RealClearPolitics average by six-tenths of a
percentage point, and he leads in the 538 average by nine-tenths of a
percentage point.
·
In Pennsylvania, Trump leads in the RealClearPolitics average by two-tenths of a
percentage point, and Harris leads in the 538 average by four-tenths of a percentage
point.
·
In Wisconsin, Harris leads in the RealClearPolitics average by eight-tenths of a
percentage point, and she leads in the 538 average by 1.5 percentage point.
(Once again, notice that despite some people’s strong
preference for one site over the other, those averages aren’t all that different.)
One fascinating aspect of this race is that, while those
seven states are extremely tight, no other state is really all that
competitive. Harris is up by 7.4 percentage points in New Hampshire. She’s ahead
in my home state of Virginia by 5.4 percentage points. Almost no one is even bothering to poll Colorado; the poll
conducted this fall by a Democratic firm had Harris up by eleven percentage
points.
The last poll in Maine was conducted in September and put
Harris ahead by nine percentage points; note that in the
state’s second congressional district, that survey put Trump ahead by seven
percentage points. It’s looking like another three-to-one split for Maine’s
Electoral College votes.
Trump is ahead in Ohio by eight percentage points. He’s ahead in Florida by 6.7 points in the RCP average,
although note that the New York Times/Siena poll out this week has
him up by 14 points.
Remember that Des Moines Register poll that had Trump leading in Iowa by just four percentage points? The
only poll conducted since then was for the Iowans for Tax Relief
Foundation, finding Trump ahead 51–44. Four years ago, Trump beat Joe Biden
here, 53–44, so the state appears to be within “normal” parameters.
I’m always skeptical of the notion that Texas is going to
become competitive, but Trump’s lead in Texas, 5.4 percentage points, is the same as Harris’s in Virginia.
(Keep in mind, Texas is a massive state; in the 2020 election, 1 percent of the electorate was more
than 113,000 votes. In Virginia, 1 percent of the electorate was about 44,000
votes, and in New Hampshire, 1 percent of the electorate was a bit more than
8,000 votes.)
This is not a prediction — this is an assessment: The
vibe of the presidential election has shifted toward Trump, or at least against
Harris. There’s just a bit more nervousness in the voices of Democrats these
days. It’s not precisely that they think Harris is a bad candidate or is
running a bad campaign. It’s more that they think she’s running a good campaign
but that it isn’t generating the results it should be.
Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal:
Democrats have privately grown
worried about Kamala Harris’s standing among working-class voters in the
crucial “blue-wall” states—particularly in Michigan.
Donald Trump has assiduously
courted union members and noncollege-educated white voters with a message
focused on high costs, manufacturing and the threat of China to the U.S.
economy. Senior Democrats, including Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, want a sharper
economic appeal from Harris and have conveyed those concerns to her campaign,
according to people familiar with the conversations. They also would like the
vice president to spend more time campaigning in the state.
The refusal of the International Association of Fire Fighters to endorse Harris
when it had endorsed every Democrat since Walter Mondale, with the exception of
Hillary Clinton, feels like a canary in the coal mine when you line it up
alongside the Teamsters’ refusal to endorse her, doesn’t it?
But that WSJ article doesn’t just
discuss Michigan; it moves on to Wisconsin:
An internal poll done by Democrat
Tammy Baldwin’s Senate campaign last week showed Harris down by 3 percentage
points in Wisconsin, while Baldwin was up by two points, according to a person
familiar with the poll. The person said much of the narrowing is due to
Republicans’ strength with noncollege-educated men. Public polling has shown
Harris with a slight lead in the state.
And then NOTUS offers this grim assessment for the Harris campaign in Arizona:
In Arizona, reaching across the
aisle is not merely an exercise in virtue but a necessity. Since 2020,
Democrats have lost nearly 100,000 voters registered to their party.
According to data compiled by Arizona-based strategist Stacy Pearson from state
registration reports, Republicans now have more than 250,000 more registered
voters than Democrats. And independents now have more than 100,000 more
registered voters than Democrats, a shift from 2020 when Democrats surpassed
indies by 20,000.
With hundreds of voters moving into
Arizona by the day — most registering as independents, giving them the option
of voting in either party primary — Harris now has a problem Biden didn’t have
when he won.
“The enthusiasm is as high as it
could possibly be for Harris, but there is a numbers problem in Arizona,”
Pearson said. “There is just a mathematical complication in Arizona that other
states don’t have. None of the other swing states have lost Dems the way
Arizona has.”
NOTUS spoke to more than a dozen
people involved in the race — ranging from Harris staffers and surrogates to
Republicans backing Harris to state Democrats and donors — and the vibe on the
ground is hopeful, but not optimistic.
“If you would rank the seven
battleground states, people think it’s the least likely she wins, which is
surprising considering the confidence when she first replaced Biden,” a
Democratic operative close to the vice president said about national campaign sentiment.
The Harris campaign had the convention that it wanted —
and the polling numbers barely changed. The campaign had the presidential
debate that it wanted — and the polling numbers in the swing states didn’t
budge. The campaign got the jobs report that it wanted, and still nothing
changed. The Washington Post news team offered another analysis that
was wildly under-noticed and under-discussed:
Harris is running a campaign about
three times the size of Trump’s operation, according to recent spending
reports. She has placed $263 million in ads between the end of the Democratic
convention and Oct. 4, nearly 2½ times as much as the $109 million spent by
Trump, according to AdImpact.
She boasts more staff, more
volunteers, a larger surrogate operation, more digital advertising, a more
sophisticated smartphone-based organizing program and extra money for
extraneous bells and whistles typically reserved for corporate product launches
and professional sports championships. A Harris drone light show recently flew
over Philadelphia. Her rally attendees often get light-up pop-concert
bracelets. There are even plans in the works for a late October infomercial to
air on swing-state broadcast networks.
The scale of her financial
advantage is larger than anything Trump faced in his two previous races for the
White House. When combining campaign and national party spending, Harris is
further ahead of Trump than Hillary Clinton at this point in 2016, Joe Biden at this point in 2020, or Barack Obama was ahead
of his Republican opponents in his two races for the White House, according to
a Washington Post analysis.
All those advantages . . . and the seven swing states
that will decide the election are as close as ever.
I’m reminded of the old joke about the advertising genius
who is hired to boost sales of a brand of dog food. The genius redesigns the
package with brighter colors, makes fun new commercials and billboards, makes
sure the product is placed at the front of stores with elaborate displays, etc.
But sales remain flat. He goes to a supermarket and watches a man with a dog
walk past the big display with his client’s brand and instead reach down to a
low shelf to choose a different brand. Perplexed, the advertising genius goes
up to the man and asks, “Sir, pardon me, but I just have to know, you walked
right by that display with that premium brand of dog food — why are you buying
this other brand?”
The man gestures to his dog and says, “He doesn’t like
that other one.”
The advertising for Harris is state-of-the-art. But roughly half the country doesn’t like the product.
One of the favorite phrases of our globe-trotting Noah
Rothman — currently touring the chip-making Hsinchu Science Park in
Taiwan — is the “theory of the case.”
The Harris campaign’s entire theory of the case is wrong.
Reminding people about what they couldn’t stand about Trump and emphasizing
“joy” and “vibes” is not sufficient to close the deal with an electorate. It
completely misreads the mood of the voters, who have been coping with runaway
inflation and a high cost of living for most of the past four years, who have a
growing sense that no one is in charge at the border, who worry about a genuine post-Covid rise in crime, and who see an
international scene beset by invasions, terrorism, and massacres, all presided
over by a doddering old man who was hidden from the public by a staff that took
Edith Wilson as a role model.
This past weekend, Peggy Noonan asked the question the
Harris brain trust should have asked: Is this the right moment in American life
to proclaim a new politics of “joy”? “Do you want to feel joyful?” is the wrong
question; almost all of us would prefer to be happier. The question is: Do you
look around at the state of the United States and the world today — and the
performance of this administration for the past four years — and feel like joy
is the appropriate response?
On The View yesterday, Sunny Hostin asked Harris,
“If anything, would you have done something differently than President Biden
during the past four years?” The vice president responded: “There is not a
thing that comes to mind.”
(As noted on yesterday’s Three Martini Lunch podcast, let’s just
take a moment to savor the irony that Sunny
Hostin asked Harris the question that did so much damage.)
Harris needed to name at least one clear policy
difference with Joe Biden, after some throat-clearing: “Now, I love Joe, and
I’m proud of what we’ve done together, but when I’m president, we’re going to
do some things differently.”
And pick something. Say you’re going to boost funding and
technology for U.S. Customs and Border Patrol. Say you’re going to enact
tariffs on imports from any country using slave labor. Say you’re going to
emphasize the development of autonomous drones for military usage, or jump-start the glacial pace of Naval shipbuilding. Say
you’ll meet with the Taiwanese president, no matter how much Xi
Jinping throws a tantrum. Just find something that hasn’t been done enough
under Biden, say that it was a mistake that it wasn’t prioritized enough, and
pledge you’re the person to get it done. Throw Biden under the bus if you have
to; the man’s got a 40 percent approval rating.
Harris needed the opposite of a basement campaign that protects the candidates in Bubble Wrap. Openness, blunt
talk, and acknowledging trade-offs build trust. A lot of Americans feel like
they got a bait-and-switch with Biden. He was supposed to be the amiable,
centrist, caretaker “bridge president.” They got the cranky, mumbling geriatric
whose administration was effectively Elizabeth Warren’s staff and who was so
hell-bent on remaining president as an octogenarian that Nancy Pelosi had to
pry him out of the Oval Office with a crowbar.
I know people think I’m obsessive on this subject, but in
retrospect, it is mind-boggling that Harris didn’t do what she could to lock up
Pennsylvania’s 19 electoral college votes by picking Governor Josh Shapiro as
her running mate.
Harris allowed a bunch of anti-Israel protesters — who didn’t show up in Chicago! — to exercise a veto over
her VP selection. She’s the tough, strong prosecutor who backed down from a
bunch of college kids in keffiyehs.
Instead, she picked the goofy doofus who tries to mask
his far-left views in folksiness. Yesterday, Tim Walz apparently went rogue and declared, “I think all of us know the
Electoral College needs to go,” at a campaign fundraiser with California
governor Gavin Newsom. The Harris campaign rushed to emphasize that eliminating
the “Electoral College is not a campaign position.”
It’s still early October, and there’s a lot we don’t yet
know. But we already have a sense of a few scenarios that are unlikely to
happen:
·
We’re not likely to have an Electoral College
landslide. If Trump carries Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina, he’s at 262
Electoral College votes. A lot of Democrats dream that the Trump-era Republican
Party will get some sort of stinging national comeuppance that forces them to
abandon their current stances, or as Axios fantasized, that brings about “the
destruction of the modern GOP.” The odds of that are growing smaller and
smaller; you’d have to see Trump go 0-for-7 or 1-for-7 in those swing states
for the GOP to feel truly defeated.
·
We’re not likely to have a Democratic-controlled Senate.
·
We’re not likely to have a big majority in the House in either
direction.
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