SUNDAY AT THE RACES: What's Actually Up For Debate?
It's neck and neck heading into the clubhouse turn...
This is it.
The Democratic Party’s month-long celebration is finally over.
Yes, donors continue to enthusiastically pour money into the Harris Campaign by a 3-to-1 advantage over Trump. And she’s closed the key demographic gaps Biden’s candidacy opened-up among women, Black and Hispanic voters. But the “outside the margin of error” leads she enjoyed during during her campaign’s “euphoria stage” have finally faded. The launch party is over, but the once-demoralized Democratic party is securely back on familiar ground.
And so are we.
The race is a dead heat.
That fact was evident in all the polling released over the last week. Harris is up nationally by one or two points in some polls. And Trump is up by a couple in the polls showing him ahead of Harris. They are basically tied, which was confirmed today by the latest NYTimes/Siena poll of likely voters. It’s a useful poll because it’s functioning like a tracking poll, giving us a good sense of the directional shifts and trends as we close in on November. Right now the shift is slightly back toward Trump.
He’s up by one point nationally (48%-47%).
The Times’s data guru Nate Cohn did say “it’s worth being at least a little cautious about these findings” because Trump’s lead is a bit of an outlier in the polling. He’s usually trailing in current polls and he’s mostly trailed since the switch. That said, it does make sense. She’s still defining herself and she’s also being defined by Lee Atwater-inspired ads that, history shows, tend to work. And it could represent a simple reversion back to the political norm now that the launch party is over. It’s probably a combo of both increasing voter attention to Harris’s candidacy and the reemergence of the 50-50 divide that makes a swing state a swing state.
To wit, the NYTimes/Siena poll found that stark divide reestablished in all the swing states. Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina and Arizona are within a one or two points. Not too far afield is Wisconsin, where Harris up by three.
The TAKEAWAY: Everything is within the margin of error.
If there is going to be some statistically significant separation, it’s going to come from Tuesday’s debate. It’s an opportunity for both, but their expectations and their margins for error are quite different.
Millions of voters expect Harris to run circles around Trump. And everyone expects Trump to do or say something outrageous. If she doesn’t run circles around him, it’ll be deflating. If she stumbles badly, it’ll be both demoralizing and it could turn off GOP moderates and independents in the suburbs.
If Trump somehow manages to finally “look Presidential,” he could assuage those same GOP moderates and independents. If he goes “go off the rails,” that may turn off a sliver of the 3-5% of undecideds revealed throughout the NYTimes/Siena poll.
Then again, what damage was actually done by his extended monologue on his history as a sexual predator outside a New York courtroom or his comically convoluted answer on childcare to a New York economic forum? Like so many of his “shockers” it probably did nothing … nada … zippo.
You’ve probably heard it a million times … Trump’s cake is already baked with either mindless adulation or physical revulsion, depending on who’s eating it. What icing could he possibly put on that cake this coming Tuesday? Unless he starts executing puppies on live television, I can’t imagine anything shifting Americans’ off their well-worn positions. Love him or hate him, his personality is uncontested.
Kamala Harris, on the other hand, has everything to gain … or lose.
In many ways, this is her first real “try-out” for the gig of President. The convention speech was fine … she delivered all the right platitudes and spoke the magical military words of war. She projected strength and signaled the virtue of patriotism. Mission accomplished.
But on Tuesday, voters will see in real-time how she handles stress, how she performs under pressure and how she reacts to a menacing bully. It’s almost like a dry run for how she’d stand up to Putin or Kim Jung-un or President Xi. Trump is a test. No doubt, this test is tainted by the differing standard a woman faces in politics. She’s gotta be tough, but not too tough, lest she appear ”unlikeable” … or, as Trump often says about women who challenge him, “nasty.”
It’s not fair, but it still is the reality for millions of voters, as evidenced by the macho manliness of Trump’s gender-obsessed politics and the persistent gender gap it has produced.
So, as much as Democrats would love to see Kamala the Prosecutor pick Trump apart and humiliate him, New York magazine’s Gabriel Debenedetti predicted attacks that “will likely be more along policy lines than personal ones.” That’s going to require discipline, particularly if Trump baits her with insults. After discussions with the commonly-cited *people close to the candidate,* Debenedetti expects Harris “to turn to the camera and highlight Trump’s antics by modeling restraint rather than by confronting him and getting dragged into the mud.” To prepare for the mud, the NYTimes reported that she’s practicing on “a stage” with “replica TV lighting and an adviser in full Lee Strasberg method-acting mode, not just playing Donald J. Trump but inhabiting him, wearing a boxy suit and a long tie.”
It’s an interesting detail, if ultimately unrevealing.
For my part, I think the bigger clue to the Harris campaign’s approach came in the form on Friday’s much-hyped endorsement by Dick Cheney. It followed his daughter’s entirely predictable endorsement on Wednesday. Taken together I think those announcements dovetail with the campaign’s targeting of Republicans in suburbs like the decisive “Collar Counties” around Philadelphia.
While they’ve fed their base a diet of doomsday scenarios born of Project 2025 and a national abortion ban, they’ve also been building (political jargon alert!) a “permission structure” for disaffected Republicans and for undecided, center-right independents. The idea is that this subset of Trump-averse voters seeks “permission” to vote contrary to their hardened, long-held policy positions. To get there, they need to feel comfortable voting for a candidate they largely disagree with so they can, in turn, vote against a candidate they either don’t like or see as dangerous to democracy … or both.
Some of them are Nikki Haley voters, and they need to be reassured they’re not voting for a “radical liberal from San Francisco” who, as the Trump campaign predicts, will “destroy” America and the world. That’s the image Harris was attempting to blunt in her almost jingoistic convention speech. I believe they’re convinced White, college-educated, independent-to-Republican suburban men in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia and Arizona could help to blunt Trump’s significant advantage with non-college educated White men and so-called “low propensity voters” (LPVs!).
They’ve been telegraphing that strategy with moves to the middle like targeted tax cuts for small business. They’ve sown the seeds with media-savvy surrogates like former Representative Adam Kinzinger and Georgia's former lieutenant governor, Geoff Duncan. And they’ve asked “Republicans For Harris” to join their effort to “reach out to other Republican, Independent, and Trump-skeptical voters.” Meanwhile, Nikki Haley sits “on-standby,” waiting in vain for Trump to enlist her as a surrogate.
Ultimately, the impact of these efforts and endorsements maybe be difficult to quantify until the votes are tabulated and the exit polling comes in. Moves in one direction or the other by the various subsets of voters are likely to be marginal for the remainder of the race. Then again, if Tuesday doesn’t produce a major win or an epic flame-out, razor-thin margins are destined to be the name of the game come November.