Sept. 30, 2024, 4:43 p.m.
We have a presidential election with seven states so close that they may go days past the official Nov. 5 balloting before officially being called. At this point, it boils down to a simple card game metaphor. Vice President Kamala Harris was dealt a really bad hand of cards, but she’s playing those cards flawlessly. Former President Trump started out with an excellent hand, but he’s playing it very poorly.
There is no doubt that Harris is saddled by that fact that her last name appears in the "Biden-Harris administration" moniker. It’s difficult to separate from that without creating new, different headaches. With a country that is very unhappy and seeking change, she can’t be seen as the candidate of continuity and still win. To borrow a thought from James Carville, she needs to be the new and “fresh” candidate, not the old stale one, like Trump.
A CNN poll earlier this year indicated that 61 percent of Americans saw the Biden presidency as a failure (39 percent a success), while 55 percent perceive the Trump presidency as a success (44 percent a failure). The Gallup poll for September indicated that President Biden’s job approval rating was just 39 percent (58 percent disapproval). That’s five points below both his August numbers and Trump’s numbers in September 2020, two months before he lost reelection. That is an anchor to which no one wants to be chained.
The issues of the border and the cost of living are the twin policy burdens that Harris must carry in this campaign.While illegal crossings from Mexico have dropped over the last year to tolerable levels, it was only after the administration put into place tough enforcement policies—the kind they insisted for three years they did not have the authority to implement.
Similarly, while the rate of inflation has declined to almost acceptable levels, the cost of living is still roughly 20 percent higher than it was when Biden took over, having been largely dormant for over three decades. Even with the Federal Reserve’s half-point reduction in the federal funds rate last week, interest rates are still higher than they were at any point under Trump.
But it would be hard for Harris to play things any better than she has. The Biden-to-Harris transition went amazingly smoothly, the convention in Chicago was a success, and her performance in the Sept. 10 debate was a masterclass. She is in a position to win a substantial share of truly undecided voters (about 4 to 6 percent of the electorate), something that simply was not realistic at all for Biden after his own debate performance against Trump. It is difficult to reconcile the awkwardness of her 2019 campaign style and apparatus with the skill she has demonstrated this year.
For Trump, even with all of the baggage that he has accumulated since he burst onto the political scene in June 2015, he has never executed any worse than he has since Biden dropped out of the race. Given the importance that voters place on the border and cost of living, and how badly they believe the administration has performed on these two issues, he should be talking about nothing else.
Instead, he’s debuted an array of distracting ad hominem attacks on Harris and made alarmingly ridiculous claims about immigrants eating dogs and cats. It’s maybe eccentric enough to raise questions among those undecided voters as to whether Trump is stable enough to be commander-in-chief for another four years.
Last week, this column warned of the danger of obsessing over minor fluctuations in poll numbers, both national and in the seven swing states. Polling never was precise enough to pinpoint exactly where a race like this one stands, when it’s all within the margin of error and when pollsters have increasing problems in obtaining a representative sample and the pattern of under-sampling Trump voters in both 2016 and 2020.
We need also be wary of focusing too much on changes in one demographic group without recognizing that public opinion today has many moving parts. That Democrats have lost some ground among Latinos was apparent in two new surveys. An NBC-Telemundo survey released over the weekend found that Harris only narrowly leads among Latino voters, 54-40 percent, while a Pew Research Center poll released last week shows a 57-39 percent split among the demographic. (Latinos supported Biden over Trump, 66-32 percent, in 2020.)
While such changes may reflect a deteriorating political situation or a misstep on the part of a party, it can also mean that an ethnic group is behaving more like others in that social-economic group and less like a distinct racial group. Gender can come into play in that the gender gap that has been pronounced and growing since the 1980s among whites and may be catching on among African Americans and Latinos. In other words, African American and Latino men may be voting more like other men and less like others in their minority group. We also have seen evidence that as new generations of African Americans reach voting age, their attachment with the Democratic Party, forged in the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s, may be weakening.
At the same time, Democrats have improved their position significantly among college-educated whites.
If Trump is to win this race, it will require a much greater degree of discipline than he has shown this year. He has seemed rattled and even more erratic than normal. For the weeks leading into Biden’s departure from the race, nothing seemed to go wrong for Trump; since Biden stepped away, little has gone right.
Americans have already discarded one older candidate who they thought was not geared for another four years. Might they do it again? This game is not yet over, but is this the tell?
