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September 9, 2024 - 11:45am
From Joe Biden’s departure from the presidential ticket to Kamala Harris’s high-flying “vibes” campaign, Democrats had a golden summer. But summer can’t last forever. A campaign borne aloft on winds of hope and joy has fluttered back to earth as autumn breaks and voters’ minds turn to policy.
The story of Harris’s shrinking lead over the Republican nominee, former president Donald Trump, is told in the recent polls. This is particularly true of yesterday’s New York Times/Siena College poll, which showed Trump moving into the lead in a survey of nationwide voters, 48% to 47.
The survey, conducted between 3 and 6 September, was the first major poll out since Labor Day, the traditional start of the campaign season in America. It reveals a statistical tie between the two candidates and is the best news Trump has received from pollsters in a month. By way of comparison, at this point in 2020 the RealClearPolitics average of polls had him down 7.1%, and the NYT/Siena poll later that month showed a similar eight-point deficit. On 8 September 2016, the story was much the same: Trump trailed Clinton by 2.8 points and the Times had him down by two points.
In each case, Trump slightly outperformed those numbers in November. Whether the 2024 numbers are similarly undercounting Trump voters or are accurate, they are beginning to point to a Republican trend.
Two months remain until election day and many things can change, but people’s opinions of Trump have remained static for a long time. After his four years in the White House and four more remaining in the public eye since, voters still largely carry the same views about Trump they did before. They knew Biden about as well. It is only Harris who remains a mystery — largely at the insistence of her own campaign.
Her public statements in the coming months — especially at tomorrow’s debate in Philadelphia — will dispel the glamour she and her campaign have created of being all things to all people. The Vice President has been on both sides of many of the issues that matter to the electorate.
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Subscribe“She has two months to figure out how to look like someone who stands for something — and hope that the public agrees with her.”
She can’t because she doesn’t, and they won’t.
If she had something, anything, we’d know by now. Will be watching/listening on Wednesday.
But she does stand for something. It’s just something that’s unelectable in the US (left/progressive San Francisco doesn’t travel well). So she’s desperately back-padalling and trying to pretend she’s some sort of centrist. But I suspect she’s too vacuous and inept to be able to clear what’s a pretty low bar and pull it off. The unforced errors are all there, waiting to be made. Wheareas Trump’s errors are all already out there and priced in. A stock that’s ripe for shorting.
“She’s desperately back pedalling”…
I don’t think Kamala is actually riding the bicycle. She is riding in the baby-car behind the bicycle. The media is doing all the pedaling for her. Or peddling. Kamala is a hard left stooge who Biden chose for DEI purposes. The media is trying to pretend she is a soccer mom, as if she wasn’t in every one of this administration’s decisions since 2020. It’s a neat trick if they can pull it off
No, Sanders and Warren actually believed in the positions that Harris espoused. Harris merely pretended to.
Imagine an alternate universe where Biden had been forced to appoint Sanders or Warren as his VP. It is completely inconceivable that their four years in office would have produced so little. Warren’s cause would have been monopolies and corruption, Sanders’ almst certainly health. These initiatives would probably have been watered down or blocked (oh hi, Sens Manchin and Sinema) but there would have been at least the semblance of activity.
With Harris, there has been nothing.
Yes, that contrasts with Trump, who stands for “Donald J. Trump”.
The d**k Cheney and Liz Cheney endorsements, with Kamala saying she was ‘honored to have their support’, feels very like a Clinton deplorables moment.
It’s also really weird how all the Democrat surrogates sharing it online, don’t realise how bad it looks.
Even the UnHerd moderation realised how bad it looks and “bleeped” out D. Cheney’s first name.
And yet, he was in effect the “brains” behind the George W. Bush Presidency.
It can’t hurt to have endorsement from moderate Republicans, even though it might not help that much.
“Moderate”? Not to large numbers of anti-war Democrat grassroots. D.Cheney has been sold to them as the embodiment of a nasty, warmongering Republican (cf Haliburton and WMD). And now the Cheneys support Kamala, and she’s happy to accept…
It won’t move any Republicans because the Never-Trumpers already left and voted Biden in 2020. But it might be a huge WTF moment for ordinary Democrats, particularly those who are starting to worry about the one-party authoritarian streak on bread-and-butter issues like free speech, and rising prices. There’s a softness to support for Kamala, and this might push more of those uneasy democrat voters away, and into Trump’s anti-war coalition.
Exactly right.
The proper anti-war crowd have already left of course. They will either vote for Jill Stein, or they won’t vote at all. The people this might alienate are the ones of my generation, for whom the Iraq war was the great lie, the quintessential cocktail of cynicism, blundering and failure. To them (us) Cheney is and will remain an ogre.
But many of those who were against the Iraq war, and who railed against the Patriot Act, Guantanamo, the enhanced interrogations and the extraordinary rendition have grown up, got jobs and NYT subs and forgotten all that. A good many of those people have now got Ukrainian flags on their twitter handles and wring their hands at the “complex issues” in Gaza.
The risk is that accepting the endorsement of my generation’s real-life Darth Vader reminds all those former radicals of the time, many years ago, before “blue no matter who” when they cared deeply about this stuff.
I don’t think that they end up on team Trump but maybe they don’t vote, maybe they don’t show up to volunteer in quite the way they might have, don’t, maybe write that cheque they otherwise would have.
Liz Cheney, maybe, but d**k? I really struggle to see the upside here.
Reality can only be hidden for so long. Dems summarily rejected Harris in the 2020 cycle; she did not win a single delegate in the primaries. Her subsequent performance as VP was less than inspiring, something that even Dems talked about before the party told them to blindly support her. Harris’ stated positions are out there and no number of politically-convenient flips can change that. There is no core to Harris; there is only identity and rank tribalism, plus she cannot say “how about four more years of the same?”
Seems Starmer & Harris enjoy the same foot wear “Flip`Flops”
A bounce in the polls was inevitable once the Democrats had removed their mentally-impaired sitting President from the ticket in favour of a candidate not suffering from dementia. It was bound to be a short-lived phenomenon.
The weekend story about white coffee cup lids and lipstick was bizarro world. Supported by tye cackling, I really found myself wondering if she’s all the ticket. Very odd behaviour relative to context.
Once upon a time, Harris was a fairly hardline California prosecutor because that is the kind of prosecutor they like to elect in California. Then she reinvented herself as a progressive to run for the senate because that is the kind of senator that Californians like to elect. Then she positioned herself on the left wing of the Democratic coalition to run for president because it was clear from the excitement behind the Sanders campaign, that the Democratic base was moving left and the party wanted a sensible centrist to grab some of those votes off the true believers. She withdrew because her support of those positions looked completely inauthentic when compared to Sanders and Warren and her polling was a rounding error.
Then she got picked to be Biden’s Vice President. Many people have said that this was a DEI appointment and it’s pretty clear that this was a factor but it was also a case of old-fashioned ticket balancing. Biden is on the right of the party, Harris had run on the left. As a right winger, Biden wanted a VP to secure votes from the party’s left but he also wanted a VP who would be completely ineffective at securing any of the things the left actually wanted. He didn’t want a leftie, he wanted a fake leftie. Biden must have made that decision on one of his more lucid days because that one worked. Harris duly abandoned her (shallow) support for leftie causes.
And now, because Biden would not allow a proper primary, the Dems are stuck with Harris, a woman whose career has been defined not by flip flopping – far from it – but by her dogged commitment to whatever seems advantageous right now.
She has revealed no principles of her own, shown no spine and displayed no lasting identity. She is not a leader but a follower. The question is, from whom will she take her instructions if elected? And the most straightforward, path-of-least-resistance answer would be that she inherits the team that ran Biden’s White House whilst the man himself was out to lunch.
Continuity Biden
The fact that she’s been the VP in a poorly performing administration should be enough to sink her if Trump and the GOP can take advantage of it. What can she do? Promise another four years of the same or come up with new policies and essentially throw Biden under the bus?
Her MSM supporters are trying to get her elected on likability points but hopefully American voters won’t buy it. Canadians fell for Justin Trudeau’s media-endorsed Sunny Ways campaign and we’re still paying the price nine years later.
Those who always vote Democrat will still vote Democrat, although they may hold their noses. Republicans will still vote Republican too. But the undecided will need some convincing.
All to play for, as they say.
Sorry, but notwithstanding the ludicruousness of Kamala, I think the polls skew toward Repubs and that she will win.
Historically, US polls have underestimated Republican support. They certainly did in 2016 and 2020.