The Case for Staying Nervous in the Slog Ahead
The Case for Staying Nervous in the Slog Ahead
Wipe away those post-Democratic-convention grins—plenty of things can still break in Donald Trump’s favor.
THE DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION was stunning. The production was impeccable, Vice President Kamala Harris’s speech was brilliant, and divisions among fractious Democrats that dogged President Joe Biden seemed to have melted away.
Harris rode a wave of jubilance through the four-day joyfest in Chicago, and Democrats now hope a polling bounce will lock in a lead for her weeks before early voting begins in key states.
A campaign memo detailed the impressive momentum the convention produced, with volunteers signing up for 200,000 shifts just last week (90,000 between Thursday and Friday alone) and $540 million raised in less than five weeks, “a record for any campaign in history.” One third of the contributions Democrats collected last week were from first-time donors.
Yet the time for exuberance is over.
Anyone who believes Donald Trump must never secure a second term should remain concerned about the state of this campaign.
Say it with me now: This will be a close race.
SOON AFTER THE 100,000 RED, WHITE, AND BLUE balloons were dropped, and then popped, in the United Center on Thursday night, reality set in. Within days, the wars in Europe and the Middle East have escalated. Monday marked the third anniversary of the loss of thirteen U.S. service members in a terrorist attack during the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, which Trump commemorated at Arlington National Cemetery.
And of course Robert F. Kennedy Jr. left the presidential race and endorsed Trump. While it shouldn’t boost Trump much, in a race decided by thousands in swing states, RFK Jr.’s rants against the establishment, and his alliance with the former president, remain a potential problem. The possibility that Cornel West and Jill Stein may still be on some swing-state ballots come November is worrisome, too.
The post-convention polls should be good for Harris, but maybe not. Bounces following conventions have thinned in recent cycles because rising polarization has yielded fewer swing voters. Hillary Clinton received an 8-point bounce after her convention and then lost to Trump.
Trump is surely flailing, unable to command the attention he once could, and self-destructing because of it. The odds are that at the debate scheduled for September 10, the real Trump will show up, be an asshole, and lose.
But Harris has a mountain to climb to beat Trump.
Before the convention the internal polling on Harris wasn’t cause for celebration. “Much less rosy” than public polls, is how one official with a pro-Harris super PAC described them.
Those public polls showed Harris had succeeded in bringing home Democrats disaffected with Biden, while also improving with independents. After becoming the nominee, Harris’s once-low favorability ratings soared, reaching 50 percent in the Morning Consult poll.
Yet while she has gained with women, as well as non-white voters and young voters, Harris is not polling as well with seniors as Biden did. And there may be a bit of a white man boomerang underway. In New York Times polling, white men 65 and older moved to Trump by 6 points after Harris became the candidate.
All this suggests that while Harris has opened a path through some of the Sun Belt states (Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia) that had closed for Biden, she will be challenged in the Blue Wall states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania where the voters are older and whiter than the rest of the nation.
And the Electoral College decides elections—and favors Trump.
As JVL noted weeks ago, Harris will never be the favorite unless she leads national polling by more than 3 points outside the margin of error because “even if Harris becomes a mild favorite at 5+ nationally, she’d still be in the margin of error for a solid chance of a Trump victory.”
Polling errors in 2020 were worse than they were in 2016, “the least accurate in decades,” according to the American Association of Public Polling. Biden’s final numbers underperformed national polls by 3.9 percent and state polls by 4.3 percent. While Biden won with a 7 million popular-vote margin, he nearly lost the Electoral College. Fewer than 50,000 votes spread across four states made the difference.
Just like in 2016, the 2020 results were skewed by the fact that Trump voters, and low-propensity voters in general, tend not to respond to pollsters. House Democrats, who in 2020 had expected to increase their majority by about a dozen seats but instead saw it shrink by about a dozen even as Trump lost, found in a post-election analysis that more low-propensity voters had turned out than expected.1
Trump and Republicans are hitting Harris for refusing to answer questions, and for being “dangerously liberal,” with ads blanketing swing states that focus on the border crisis.
But they will also seek to paint her as a phony who has “copied” his “no taxes on tips” plan and who “went from communism to capitalism in about two weeks,” as Trump said. Her evolution on crime could also help Trump in battlegrounds.
Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance, will spend most of his time in the Rust Belt, where—according to CNN—he “is expected to continue efforts to connect the opioid epidemic to immigration.” Vance will spend most of his time in Pennsylvania, and will also be back on television every Sunday. In each appearance he will accuse Harris of dodging tough questions and refusing to provide the specifics of her policy agenda.
Harris has flipped on some previous positions, on fracking and a Green New Deal, yet it’s not clear if she is planning to break with Biden on any issues. She has spoken more emphatically than Biden has about prices remaining too high, and a recent NPR/PBS/Marist poll showed her closing the gap on the economy, cutting Trump’s lead over Biden’s numbers in June from 9 points to 3 points. Still, Trump remains ahead of Harris on the most important issues to voters—inflation, immigration, crime, and foreign affairs.
In the time left, Democrats prefer to make the campaign about how “we’re not going back” to a second Trump term rather than focusing on something like a “new way forward” to a Harris administration. One is a referendum, the other is not.
Harris has avoided policy specifics that could come under attack from the GOP, ensuring this will become a focus of questions from moderators at the debate. A deputy campaign manager said on MSNBC last week Harris would sit for an interview “on her time and when she’s ready,” and she should be getting ready now.
Being interviewed in the next ten days, before the debate, would allow Harris to avoid being accused—once on stage with Trump—of hiding her positions. And such an exchange could perhaps help hone her responses to any questions that might come up at the debate, like how aware she was of Biden’s cognitive decline. Given her past performances, there is no guarantee that an interview won’t harm Harris’ campaign, but continuing to put it off will likely harm her more.
The campaign is in the final stretch. The first ballots will be cast weeks from now. There may not be a ceasefire or hostage deal coming. Campus protests will almost certainly resume soon, and any focus on foreign crises that call into question the Biden administration’s policies, or Harris’s role in them, could be divisive in her party and problematic with swing voters.
Worry we must.
Correction (August 27, 2024, 2:35 p.m. EDT): As originally published, this paragraph mistakenly said that Democrats lost the House majority in the 2020 election; in fact, they retained the majority but lost seats in a year they expected to make gains.