A curious thing. There’s a new rush of press stories reporting that Mar-a-Lago is suddenly a bundle of nerves as they see evidence they’re falling short in Pennsylvania. This is certainly why Trump is suddenly going berserk on social media, making freakshow claims that the race is being stolen in PA. We knew that. Meanwhile Trump is suddenly losing ground in betting markets, which for a couple of weeks have shown him to be a prohibitive favorite to return to the White House. This is all very nice to see. But I wouldn’t necessarily see it as some sign of momentum in Harris’s favor.
I do hear positive things from Democrats, to be clear — people who should be able to see the campaign big picture and have access to lots of campaign information. Let’s call it cautious optimism about the Blue Wall and the possibility of winning at least some of Biden’s 2020 southern-tier wins. But the case of what seems like some level of Trump freak out is slightly different. Trump world has been certain for a few weeks that Trump’s winning. There’s an overwhelming consensus about this on Wall Street. I think that’s a mix of standard GOP bluff, head-fake and just Republicans’ default belief that they’re going to win, whether they are or not.
The betting odds are driven, yes, by a lot of game-playing and quite possibly foreign actors willing to drop millions of dollars to shift the conventional wisdom about the state of the race. But it’s kept aloft by a lot of people believing it.
Now, they seem to be having doubts.
I would put it this way. I don’t know who is going to win this election. I’m not even sure who I’d call the favorite. What I’m very confident about is there was zero basis for the idea that Trump was a 2 to 1 favorite. That was absurd. People seem to be waking to that reality. So that bubble is deflating. I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily momentum for Harris as the simple fact that facts on the ground are forcing Republicans to see more clearly the reality as it’s been for weeks.
One final point. A lot of us tend to default to the idea that the campaigns know what’s really happening. They probably won’t tell us for various reasons. Or they won’t be candid about what they know. But they know. That’s the assumption. But in many cases they don’t. In close race with so many unknown variables they may be as in the dark as we are.
