THURSDAY A.M. QUARTERBACK: The X's and O's of Harris and Trump
A marginal impact might be enough
THE MORNING AFTER: After today’s five hour-long survey of the news, I admit that I'm surprised by the positive reax I've seen and read re: Harris's appearance on FOX.
Yes, there was a lot of predictable cheerleading on MSNBC and a lot of predictable criticism by Right-Wing website, but I also heard many positive reviews from callers to Michael Smerconish's show on SiriusXM's POTUS channel ... which included a number of Republicans who praised her for standing her ground and a number of Republicans who called-in to say they are voting against Trump because of his rhetoric ... and, not coincidentally, Harris is getting a lot of media traction after calling-out FOX for deceptively editing Trump's threat against "enemies within.”
We will know whether or not this appearance stops Trump's momentum come Sunday, but I do wonder if Trump's "enemies within" will end up being a key saturation point some of those moderate Republicans and independents Harris was targeting yesterday in Bucks County, PA.
At the same time, I also wonder if Trump undermined his momentum with Latino voters yesterday on Univision when he reiterated and expanded on his Haitian Pet Eaters lie. His comments about Jan, 6 being “a day of love” probably didn’t help him with those Republicans in Bucks County. It certainly didn’t help him with Univision’s studio audience. What I do think might hurt him a bit was his response to a question on climate change. A PRRI survey I cited earlier this year in a piece for Truthout found that 76% of Catholic Latinos believe in climate change ... a fact that likely reflects their lived experience. And it was the lived experience of a Cuban-American Floridian that led him to ask Trump if the recent hurricanes caused him to reconsider his claim that climate change is a hoax. Here is how Trump responded:
‘What I do think is this. We can’t destroy our country over being forced to do things. they want to do the green New Deal, they call it the green New Deal some people call it the green new hoax.
‘They want to spend 93 trillion dollars on the climate. Now I happen to think there are very important elements of climate: water and air.
‘In my administration I had the cleanest air on record, and yet I didn’t destroy jobs. I had the most jobs of any administration ever. I also had the cleanest water, crystal clean. We had the cleanest water, the cleanest air.
‘To me those are the primary factors. Clean water, clean air. We went into rural parts of the country and fixed people’s water. They were drinking such terrible water. It was very important to me. All of that’s important.
‘At the same time, you can’t give up your country. You can’t say that we’re not gonna have any jobs anymore. If they said, if they took their ultimate, which is 93 trillion, the Green New Deal, 93 trillion, that’s more money than we would have in 20 years. We wouldn’t be able to survive. We wouldn’t be able to live.
‘So I always feel that with the climate and I have been a great, I have been an environmentalist. I built many things. I own Doral right next door and we did that in a very environment—I got awards, environmental awards for the way I built it, for the water, the way I use the water, the sand, the mixing of the sand and the water.
‘I mean. Many different. But I’ve had many awards over the years for environmental, the way l’ve built, because you know about building, that’s what you do. It’s very important to me.
‘At the same time, we can’t destroy our country and we’re competing against countries that don’t spend anything on climate change, like China and others.
‘And they’re able to make their product for tremendously less than us. And we’re not going to let that happen either. We have to have a strong country and we have to have a nice climate. And there’s nobody better at that I think at that combination than me.
‘I will say this though. I hear a lot about climate and they talk about global warming etc etc. Because they used to call it global warming now they call it climate change cause that covers everything, global warming.
‘The real global warming that we have to worry about is nuclear. The water is coming up 1/8 of an inch over 300 years, the ocean is going to rise and you know nobody knows if that’s true or not but they’re worried about the ocean rising an 1/8 of an inch or a quarter of an inch in 300 years. What I’m worried about is nuclear weapons tomorrow.’
Yes, Trump’s nonsensical blathering on anything and everything seems to matter little to many of his devotees. That’s certainly what The Guardian found in climate-affected Louisiana. But the real-world implications of his recalcitrance may be a wild card in Georgia and North Carolina, where the impact of Hurricane Helene and Trump’s lies about FEMA could have a marginal impact on the final vote tally. After all, it’s widely accepted that this election is locked into “the margin of error” and, given that, I think it is an error for the Harris campaign to not hammer Trump for denying a reality Georgians and North Carolinians will be wading through until election day.
It’s a real weakness they should be exploiting with ads showing Trump’s hoax talk or chunks of that rambling answer at the Univision event intercut with reports on extreme weather in those two states. He’s given them an opening. They need to take it. And they should also take a cue from the record turnout for early voting in Georgia, which is widely seen as a positive sign for Democrats. That might indicate the polling is underrepresenting her support. She has a real opportunity to win Georgia. She’s also got a margin-of-error lead in North Carolina. If she wins both states she’s got a number of paths to victory in the Electoral College. If she carries Nevada and wins Georgia and North Carolina, she only needs one Blue Wall state. She can lose Pennsylvania and Michigan, and still win. She can lose Wisconsin and Michigan, and still win. If she loses Nevada, she’ll need either Pennsylvania or Michigan … but not both.
It’s a fun game you can play out at the must-visit website “270 to win.”