This new piece in The Atlantic captures what the article’s author, Ron Brownstein, portrays as the current air of pessimism, or at least deep sobriety, within Democratic campaign and political operative circles. The general gist is that Harris hasn’t sealed the deal with voters, hasn’t closed the sale, whatever metaphor you choose. And the shortcoming is that in her effort to build up a positive brand, she hasn’t focused voters enough on the horrors of another Trump term. (Of course, one of the earlier lines was that it wasn’t enough to demonize Trump. There had to be a positive agenda. So that seems to have changed. Let’s not worry about that difference of opinion.) I’ve always been of the mind that the other guy being scary and dangerous is among the best reasons to vote. (In medicine, “first, do no harm” is seen as a pretty good general approach.) In any case, that’s the idea, the emerging argument, that Brownstein picked up among Democratic insiders. He fleshes this out by noting a series of recent polls showing voters have a rising perception of retrospective Trump approval — in other words, how they remember their approval of Trump’s presidency, even if their recollection of how they felt is actually substantially more positive than it was at the time. There’s no denying there is a small but measurable movement in the poll averages in Trump’s direction. But it’s less clear whether that tilt is picking up a real change in the situation on the ground. And I think it’s even less clear whether outside observers know why it’s happening, if indeed it is. Mostly people are reading their pre-existing assumptions and fears into bumpy data, the drivers of which are largely inscrutable.
I’d be more inclined to dismiss this analysis if it weren’t coming from Brownstein, because he’s a very sharp observer. To be fair, it is a bit unclear to me whether the piece captures his view or simply the consensus he’s reporting among people in that world. If we go purely by poll averages, there has been a small but measurable movement in Trump’s direction — something between a quarter and a half of a percentage point. Not much but not nothing in what polls tell us is a tight race.
Regardless, the imperative, he argues, is that Harris needs to close the campaign reminding voters of just how bad Trump’s first term was and how much worse a second would be. Whether or not this scaffolding of analysis and this view of the campaign trajectory is right, what I think is right is Brownstein’s argument that the proper message is the one from the convention: We ain’t going back. It manages to capture all the swagger, positivity and dynamism of Harris’s campaign with that effortless reminder that Trump is part of the past and absolutely needs to be kept in the past.
We can agree on that. And I suspect the campaign does too.
Let me add a few observations in no particular order.
First, it is my distinct recollection that the consensus among the same Democratic political professionals going into the final weeks of the 2022 midterm was similarly that the Democrats were toast — pretty much what media analysts and Republicans also thought. That’s not dispositive really one way or another. I put it forward simply to note that the prominent strategists and political operatives don’t necessarily have a clearer or better read on the “real” political situation than you or I do. Doesn’t mean they’re wrong. But just as much doesn’t mean they’re right. Indeed, they are at least as liable to the cardinal misstep of most campaign analysis: if something’s going wrong, or not right enough, it’s due to the lack of the thing that fits with my prior assumptions, or whatever theory clicks for me personally or aligns with my interests, regardless of whether I have any real basis to believe that this theory of the case is related to anything that’s happening. When these Democratic insiders say Harris hasn’t made people fear Trump enough, in a way that sounds like a strategy-fied rework of the question that has loomed over this race for every Democrat, which is basically: how is it that this guy who was a terrible president, who most people thought was a terrible president and who now promises to be much more terrible is even in contention? It’s a very good question! And yet here we are.
Second, a point I made on this week’s pod: We’re hearing a lot about how this is the closest contest, at least in the Electoral College, maybe in decades. But super close isn’t the same as super high uncertainty. Take a moment to absorb that. Super high uncertainty isn’t the same as the race being super close. If you take the current polls totally at face value, it’s really true that it could hardly be closer. At numerous points over the last several weeks all the swing states have been under one percentage point in difference. They’re seldom much more than one percentage point. We talk a lot about “margin of error” in polls. But that is a formal statistical measure. It doesn’t get into the fact that the result is heavily driven by assumptions pollsters make about the electorate that could simply be wrong. Polls are rarely accurate to within the margins we’re now talking about. When you add to this that polls of the national popular vote are right near that threshold that a Democrat needs in the popular vote (a lead of around two percent) to win the Electoral College, you can see how everything — and I mean everything — seems right on the cusp.
But polls never perfectly predict elections. They are often directionally accurate. But they only get you into a certain range. My hunch is that the result is actually not going to be that close. I think a lot of these super close swing state races are going to go in one direction in a more or less uniform way. Who that will favor, I’m not sure. But that’s my hunch. It won’t actually be that close, at least in the Electoral College, if not in the national popular vote.
My third point addresses why I think this. As I’ve dug into these questions of polling methodologies and different ground-game strategies, I’ve increasingly seen the whole election story, or better to say our whole understanding of the election story, as a series of interlocking puzzle pieces. Or maybe it’s like a Jenga game. Each of those questions about how to weight the polls, each assumption about how to understand the 2024 electorate, the importance of how each campaign has invested in GOTV efforts, seems far more consequential than the minute shifts we’ve seen in averages for say Pennsylvania or Arizon and really all the other states. So in a way I see Election Day less as a matter of public decision-making than as a great reveal for just who had the theory of the electorate right and who had it wrong.