That depends on whom you ask.
That depends on whom you ask.
A palpable panic has settled over Democratic partisans. The race for the White House is, at best, a tossup, with Donald Trump seeming to regain some lost ground in recent polling. Despite the Harris campaign’s spending advantages, her ads that attempt to cast Trump as anathema to all civically minded Americans aren’t working. “Trump speaking often helps him, not us,” one pained Democrat told The New Republic. Harris is parking herself in the “blue wall” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and devoting conspicuous attention to what should be core Democratic constituencies like African-American men. The Beltway’s most reliable expostulators of conventional wisdom seem like they’re coming to terms with a Trump victory in November. The lay of the land suggests that, with just three weeks to go before the vote, the Harris campaign is imploding.
At least, that’s the impression any political observer would take away from the behavior of both campaigns’ supporters. Never the sort to project anything other than the utmost self-confidence, Donald Trump and his backers are leaning into triumphalism. If you survey the bombast that passes for discourse on social media, the only outstanding question among Trump’s advocates is the scale of his victory. By contrast, Democrats are either beset by anxiety or succumbing to resignation. But is their trepidation justified by anything tangible, or are they just “bedwetting”? That depends on whom you ask.
The former pollster Adam Carlson posited that Democratic apprehension is a self-perpetuating phenomenon fueled primarily by “media pieces quoting anxious party insiders.” The panic doesn’t seem empirically justified by what he identified as a “0.4-point shift toward Trump in the swing states” over the last week (a shift that elides some similarly modest movement toward Harris in Pennsylvania and Georgia). Carlson is not alone in attributing the party’s fits of terror to “normal Democratic nerves.” Indeed, regular bouts of crippling self-doubt among the party’s partisans are a source of reassurance to some. Even in election cycles destined to redound to the party’s benefit, its boosters are prone to despondency in the waning days of the campaign. Maybe it’s all just jitters.
Maybe. But sometimes, Democratic panic is amply justified. So, which is it? Are Harris’s boosters paralyzed with irrational self-doubt? Or are those criticizing Democrats for overreading the barely perceptible signals voters are communicating to the political class through pollsters short-circuiting a necessary corrective mechanism while there is still time left to stanch the bleeding?
The party’s more nonchalant elements are right that there has been little movement in the average of national polling. Harris hovers around 49 percent support among voters nationally while Trump seems stuck at a familiar 47 percent (despite his rising favorability numbers). The swing states are tighter — all seven are as close to tied as you can get, with each showing both candidates running within a single point of the other. For partisans invested in a particular outcome in this election, panic seems like the only rational response to these data.
But what if the situation for the Harris campaign is even worse than the polling suggests? What if surveys still cannot capture the universe of voters who have for two consecutive presidential-election cycles now turned out for Trump but tend to abstain from midterm, off-year, and special elections? It’s possible that unmeasurable phenomenon is still at work, but the pollsters themselves seem more confident that they’ve corrected for past errors. As pollster Greg Strimple told Politico last week, it is far more likely that online surveys will miss the “hardcore Trump” vote than telephone polls sampling from voter files. “His folks are not hard to get to on the phone but hard to get to online,” Strimple said. Marquette Law School Poll director Charles Franklin told The Hill that his industry is “making an ‘extra effort’ to reach the areas that lean toward Trump that were previously underrepresented in past years,” by hybridizing its sampling methodology to find hidden voters or weighting results to compensate for a lack of response.
The untested assumption buttressing these reforms is that the electorate is likely to be very large — even bigger, perhaps, than the record-setting turnout in the 2020 election. But will it be? So far, early voting is down precipitously compared with 2020 — a condition that may be explained as easily by the disappearance of the pandemic as by a relative lack of enthusiasm for either candidate. As elections analyst Henry Olsen observed, the decline is dramatic in the “blue wall” states. “This is troubling news for Democrats as their voters have in recent years dominated among mail ballots,” he noted. Still, Harris’s campaign can boast a ground-game advantage that should be able to maximize the Democratic early vote insofar as more Democrats than Republicans report their intention to cast their ballots before Election Day. The question is whether Harris can enthuse her voters as much as the Biden administration’s failures enliven her opponents.
That question gets at the root of Democratic anxiety. Kamala Harris is a bad candidate. That is no earth-shattering revelation. Harris’s reliably maladroit performance as a campaigner was a known weakness well before it became necessary to recast her as the apotheosis of political acumen after Joe Biden shuffled off the stage. It would be unfair to attribute her struggles in the effort to appeal to young black males, Hispanics, and independent voters entirely to Harris’s talents, or lack thereof. Her problems with these demographics are more a function of the Democratic Party’s deteriorating brand than of Harris’s shortcomings. But what is she going to do to address those deficiencies? How can she shake up the dynamic of this race in the coming days?
One thing the Democratic panic has going for it is that it seems to have convinced the Harris campaign that it has to run scared. The vice president, we learned on Monday, will sit for a presumably hostile interview with Fox News Channel host Bret Baier this week — a nod to the inconvenient reality that the winning candidate in this race will be the one that appeals to voters outside their bubble. But given her struggles in interview settings, few should expect that this or any other single event will reshape the political landscape.
The Democratic panic isn’t irrational or unfounded. Given the environmental advantages the GOP enjoys this year, a tie will go to the Republican challenger. But Democratic voters can take some heart in the fact that their party is reacting to a tied race as though it’s on the cusp of an epochal humiliation. If complacency is the enemy of winning campaigns, you at least cannot say the Democratic candidate or her supporters are content to rest on their laurels.