On the menu today: A deep dive into the state of the presidential race, with the seven key swing states remaining neck and neck and a dearth of competitive states anywhere else in the country; a look at the enormous advertising advantages that Kamala Harris’s campaign enjoys; explaining how the Harris campaign’s “theory of the case” gets things completely wrong; laying out the scenarios that are now extremely unlikely in this election cycle; and a chat with a new star of the podcast world.
The Harris Campaign’s Theory of the Case Is Wrong
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.
ADDENDUM: In case you missed it earlier in the week, my chat with the always awesome Michele Tafoya.