I wanted to add a short post-script to the post below about Democratic freak outs. I realized in this context it might be read as “don’t worry! Kamala has this!” I don’t think that’s a fair or logical reading. But people understandably read things and interpret them in the context of the moment. So let me be clear: I’m not saying that. My point is more that there’s very little evidence that anything has changed or changed more than very marginally since two or three weeks ago when the mood was pretty dramatically different. Indeed, I not only hear from people thinking Harris is now going to lose the election. They’re already on to the mistakes she made that led her to lose the election.
My own take is one of very cautious optimism. That’s in part based on the current polling information and various hunches I have about turnout, polls, recent election cycles etc. Those hunches could be totally wrong. Which is why I don’t tend to write about them. By the hard evidence in front of us — which is itself not that hard — the race could easily go either way. Indeed, I’d add an additional point. People say this race is super close, maybe the closest ever. I’m not even sure that’s true. What we have is a very high uncertainty election. That’s not the same thing. I think it’s quite possible that either candidate could rack up a pretty sizable winning margin, at least in the Electoral College. There are just so many untested or minimally tested assumptions upon which the “closest election evah” hypothesis is based.
But again, back to my point. I’m not saying, don’t freak out, Kamala’s got this. I’m saying the race is very similar to where and what it was in the second half of September. Close then, close now.
I’ve had a few of you take me to task recently for writing so much about polls. I’ll take that under advisement, though I hear from many readers that they like those posts. The reality is that most political people follow polls closely, even if they wish they didn’t, and they want insights into just what they mean and how to interpret them. But today I want to discuss something a bit different, albeit still somewhat adjacent to polls. That is, what’s with the Democrats’ tendency to freak out, even in the face of the most limited kinds of disappointing news in polls or other markers of campaign performance?
We’ve discussed this phenomenon from various perspectives in recent years. But, big picture, why does this happen? Why do Democrats freak out like this?
Recently a reader asked me why I focus on polls rather than political betting markets for insights into the race and whether I thought polls were more reliable. I was honestly baffled by the question. To me this was like asking whether I thought a scale was a better way to measure weight than dead reckoning. And I’m not trying to be critical of the reader, who is probably reading this. I gave him my answer and we had a good exchange. But I thought it was worth sharing my thoughts on this question.
My analogy about scales is certainly imperfect in a number of ways, just as polls are imperfect. Indeed, it isn’t even really a question of which is better. The most important thing to understand about the relationship between polls and political betting markets is that the latter is largely downstream of the former. Most bets in political betting markets are driven by people looking at polls and betting accordingly. So by definition they can’t be better. Because the bets are derived from the polls.
But there are a few other points that are worth noting and which are worth considering in a broader context.
I heard from a reader yesterday who saw one of the country’s top political journalists give a public presentation about the race. The run-down I got of that event crystallized something I’ve been giving a lot of thought to over the last few months and writing about here and there. At the elite level, political journalists have a basic contempt for Democrats. It’s not even very concealed because in a way it’s hardly even recognized as such. This continues to be the case despite the fact that most of the people I’m talking about, if they vote, probably vote for Democrats. They are socio-economically and culturally, if not always ideologically, the peers of Democrats. We often confuse cosmopolitan social values for liberalism. If anything, this basic pattern has become more the case over the last decade. These people are highly educated. They are affluent. They are the creatures of the major cities.
Are they secretly rooting for Donald Trump? Hardly. Or at least not in the great majority of the cases. Trump is a tiger on the savanna, dangerous but also fascinating and above all alien. That’s why the notorious rustbelt diner interview stories were and are such a staple. They’re safaris. It defines the coverage, and in ways seldom helpful for Democrats in electoral political terms.
A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Kate and Josh talk about the campaign vibes, Trump’s misinformation campaign around recent hurricanes and the beginning of the Supreme Court term.
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It’s rhetoric in line with what Trump has been saying for months, as he and his allies threaten to use the military as a form of law enforcement to crack down on Americans if elected — vowing to deploy the military domestically to carry out mass deportations of immigrants, including some who are here legally, and clamp down on anti-Trump political activity while they’re at it.
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