On the menu today: In the face of accusations that Donald Trump was holding a rally at Madison Square Garden that echoed a Nazi rally at the same site in 1939, one comedian took it upon himself to tell jokes about Latinos, Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and Jews, making the job of the Harris campaign much easier. A new theory about this year’s polls contends that Trump’s stronger performance is where he needs it least, in deep-blue states like California and New York and safely red states like Texas and Florida. And the New York Times answers my request, polling the state of Nebraska.
The ‘Floating Island of Garbage’ That Was Trump’s Opening Speaker
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.