On the menu today: If you like Democratic panic, this might be the best day since the morning after Joe Biden’s debate performance. Democrats who live in Washington, D.C., are getting out of town because they expect violence sometime between Election Night and Inauguration Day; polls keep showing the presidential race as tied or a near-tie, both nationally and in the seven key swing states, which is better news for Donald Trump than Kamala Harris; why there probably isn’t as much of a “shy Trump” voter effect this year; and why Harris can’t close the sale with the remaining undecideds.
Is Washington Burning?
Over at Politico, Michael Schaffer writes about a phenomenon that you might have expected, but not on such an extensive scale:
As Washington reaches the end of a fraught election season — and prepares for a potentially even more fraught interregnum — people across the political spectrum are expressing worry about a violent display by the losing side. For liberals, fears of a Jan. 6 rerun are baked in, based on very real history. But conservatives also worry about antifa-style outrage.
Which means all kinds of people are scouting conveniently timed vacations: The policy scholar who was happy to find he had business in Los Angeles and his wife would be in Florida. The former Hill staffer who decided months ago that election week was a good time for a Mediterranean voyage. The liberal think tanker who planned an Arizona bike getaway. . . .
At a Tuesday election-preparations breakfast briefing for D.C.’s mayor and city council, legislators raised a variety of worries that might have seemed fantastical in the innocent days before 2020. “We’re already getting requests from businesses, should they board up?,” said Brooke Pinto, whose district includes downtown and Georgetown. Regular residents, she added, were asking whether they should move garbage cans indoors lest they be lit on fire by a mob. Her colleague Charles Allen, whose district includes the Capitol, told the group that he’d been fielding requests about nearby school closures on Jan. 6.
At the museums near the National Mall — mostly free to the general public — there’s been worry about what will happen if rioters get turned away from the Capitol complex and go looking for soft, elite-seeming targets. There’s little precedent for that, yet the conversations around unlikely scenarios reflect the broader mood of worry about the next 10 weeks. . . .
“I said to the guys, ‘I want you to call Lowe’s and Home Depot and ask what it takes to buy six or seven pallets of plywood” to cover storefront windows, the leader of another D.C. local business organization told me. Ideally, the organization leader quickly added, the stuff would be returnable. “I want to be prepared, but I hope we don’t need it. It sends a terrible message the minute you board up a window.”
I’ll take Schaffer’s word for it that there really are at least a handful of Republicans worried about Antifa or other left-wing violence in the city. But as you likely know, Washington, D.C., just doesn’t have many Republicans.
In 2020, Joe Biden received 317,323 votes in the District of Columbia, and Donald Trump received 18,586, a 92 percent to 5 percent split. This year’s D.C. GOP presidential primary had one polling place, open for three days. Nikki Haley won, 1,279 to 676. (No, I did not leave off a zero or two.) By contrast, 95,095 voted in the uncompetitive Democratic presidential primary. The number of District residents who voted for Marianne “dark spiritual forces” Williamson earlier this year was almost twice as many as the number who voted in the GOP primary.
No, Washington, D.C., and the greater Washington area have gobs and gobs of Democrats, oodles of white-collar urban-professional types and old-money big-donor Georgetown high-society types, but also minority groups and immigrants and suburban soccer moms and pickleball-playing seniors.
So sure, some of what we’re seeing in Washington, D.C., right now is Democrats worried about the MAGA crowd traveling into the city from the suburbs, exurbs, and beyond and rioting . . . but a lot of it is non-riot-inclined Democrats fearing the angry young leftist crowd that already lives in the city will take to the streets and rage and rampage.
Could Harris win narrowly, Trump and the MAGA crowd insist the election was stolen, and we get a rerun of January 6? Sure. We’ve seen it before.
But we also saw quite a bit of violence on Trump’s inauguration day back in January 2017, which has largely been forgotten and hand-waved away, because it complicates the Democrats’ preferred narrative that political violence is a right-wing phenomenon. (One of the reasons it was so quickly and thoroughly forgotten was because federal prosecutors decided to drop all charges.) Even now, as you’re reading this, there’s some left-of-center reader in the comments section typing, “HOW CAN YOU SAY THAT? JANUARY 6 WAS SO MUCH WORSE THAN TRUMP’S INAUGURATION!” as if the real problem with the January 6 Capitol Hill riot was that it went outside the boundaries of the acceptable level of political violence. (Admittedly, when you’re assaulting a police officer with a “thin blue line” flag, you’re as spectacularly contradictory as that podcaster who insisted, “Hitler had many Jewish commanders and generals in his military, This whole ‘Hitler hated the Jews’ is nonsense[sic].”
Neither side of the political spectrum is free from mayhem-minded yahoos, and the further out onto the fringe you go, the worse it gets. (This morning, somewhere within the headquarters of the Secret Service, there is a sign saying “It has been [41] days since someone has attempted to assassinate Donald Trump.”) You don’t get any bonus points if the “rioting reprobate” head count comes up with your side having slightly fewer.
Violent yahoos can gather and hurt people just about anywhere; Charlottesville, Va., is a liberal college town where Hillary Clinton won 80 percent of the vote in 2016 and Joe Biden won 85 percent of the vote four years later. But if there’s going to be right-wing violence in Washington, D.C., in the coming weeks or months, the overwhelming majority of the perpetrators will have to come into the city from somewhere else.
If there’s going to be left-wing violence in D.C. . . . much more of it will be “home grown.”
(For anyone wondering, my Veterans Day weekend trip aligns with my anniversary, and we always go away that weekend! I just hope we have a resolved presidential election by then.)
Democratic Panic, Part Two
This morning, the New York Times revealed the results of the last Siena poll of the cycle, finding Donald Trump and Kamala Harris “locked in a dead heat for the popular vote, 48 percent to 48 percent.”
If the national vote is a tie or rough tie, Kamala Harris is extremely unlikely to reach 270 electoral votes. (And how would you like to be the one Democrat on earth who lost the popular vote to Trump? Even Hillary Clinton would be scoffing, “Wow, isn’t she terrible? What a loser!”)
Trump continues to enjoy small leads — sometimes extremely small leads, as in two-tenths of a percentage point — in the RealClearPolitics average of all seven key swing states. In the FiveThirtyEight averages, Trump trails by seven-tenths of a percentage point in Michigan, leads by two points in Arizona, leads by 1.5 percentage points in Georgia, 1.2 percentage points in North Carolina, leads by three-tenths of a percentage point in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and is tied with Harris at 47.3 percent in Nevada.
Jon Ralston, after crunching the early vote numbers in his home state Thursday afternoon: “If the turnout pattern remains this way, Harris will lose Nevada.”
Mind you, this is after Harris has dramatically outspent Trump, even in recent weeks: “Harris’ campaign continued to significantly outspend Trump over the first 16 days of October — dropping just shy of $166 million compared to $99 million for the former president’s campaign.”
And Now, the Counterevidence . . .
In almost every discussion of polling, someone will point out that Trump overperformed his polls by several percentage points in 2016 and 2020, so a 2024 poll showing a tie means Trump is probably ahead by four or five points.
Brent Buchanan, a Republican pollster who founded Cygnal, tells the Washington Post why it’s unwise to assume the same trend will hold this year:
When you look at the swing-state polls, Trump is definitely polling at a better ballot share than he’s ever polled in the three elections that he’s been running. I think that means there’s not a whole lot of shy Trump voters left. It’s possible that Trump’s support is being underrepresented, but the fact that his ballot share is higher shows that it’s not the same [extent] of underrepresentation [as in previous years].
Monday’s newsletter and yesterday’s Corner post have emphasized that Harris, despite her incoherent word-salad and other flaws demonstrated on the trail, is not to be taken lightly or underestimated as a candidate. (Particularly if the Republican get-out-the-vote machine is as shaky as some reports indicate.) I often hear replies that no Republican is taking her lightly or acting like the race is already won. Uh-huh. Here’s Axios, this morning: “Top Republicans, in private conversations, seem shockingly confident, given the consistent 50-50 polls. They talk in granular detail about White House jobs and discuss policy playbooks for ’25.”
ADDENDUM: Over at that other place I write for, a discussion of Harris’s performance in the CNN town hall:
Besides calling Trump fascist, Harris repeated the line that Trump allegedly called fallen soldiers “suckers” and “losers.” The Atlantic reported that back in September 2020. More than 74 million Americans voted for him two months later. I know lots of Democrats think that line should be disqualifying. And the Jan. 6 attack should be disqualifying. And Trump’s four indictments should be disqualifying. And his conviction should be disqualifying. But for those remaining undecided, they aren’t disqualifying. Stop making the argument that this crowd has heard and rejected a hundred times. Find another argument about Harris’s qualities.
The remaining undecided voters are, by definition, not sold on Trump yet. But they’re extremely unlikely to be persuaded by the umpteenth version of “Trump is a dangerous dictator.”
Since becoming the candidate, Harris has been vague about what she would do differently from Biden, has been reluctant to concede that the Biden administration made any significant mistakes or bad decisions, has stuck to nebulous platitudes when asked specific policy questions, and has insisted that seemingly every promise she made during her presidential campaign in 2019 is no longer in effect. I suspect the remaining undecideds dread another four years of Trump, but simultaneously fear Harris is very far left and would just continue the parts of the Biden administration they can’t stand.