Member Newsletter
Here’s one thing that’s been in the back of my mind for some time and with a greater focus since Joe handed the football off to Kamala. Donald Trump is old. If you look, he’s much older than in 2016 and 2020. People say these kinds of things as part of the rather dismal “who’s older?” scuffling that’s been going back and forth all year between the two candidates. Here though I mean it in a basic descriptive sense. The difference between being 70 and close to 80 is a big one. It happens to everyone.
Trump doesn’t get held to these standards as much because his raging gives a feeling of focus and edge that Biden lacked. But just in a basic sense, he is not the candidate he was in 2016, not even the one he was in 2020. This was hidden in a way so long as Biden was the nominee and it was hidden or perhaps rendered meaningless as long as Trump was ahead. If your candidate is old but he’s winning … well, whatever. If Joe Biden had spent the last year sitting on a five point lead, the whole campaign, clearly, would have gone quite differently.
What’s not clear to me is whether Trump has the fight and fluidity left to battle from behind, to run a campaign as an underdog. This obviously assumes some key hypotheticals not yet in evidence. At the moment, poll averages show Kamala Harris with a very small popular vote lead. That likely makes the Electoral College as of this moment if not a tie, per se, than something like a jump ball. Of course, her momentum could dissipate as fast as it built up. Or she could continue on the same trajectory. My gut tells me we’re in a fundamentally changed race. But we don’t have enough evidence yet to operate beyond impressions and hunches.
My point in writing this is that we haven’t really seen candidate Trump much this year. He’s just been doing a more scattered and dissolute version of his old roadshow — chants, attacks, complaining, you know the routine. I don’t mean that people haven’t focused enough on the race yet or that he’s secluded on Truth Social or other right wing platforms. I mean he’s generally been able to coast on the small but significant lead he’s had for roughly a year. He hasn’t had to shake up the race or deliver in big ways at key moments. Yes it seems like his “Haha! You say you’re Black AND Indian” routine was planned. But that doesn’t mean he was able to pull it off. He also hasn’t had to activate or flip portions of the electorate. Those are things you have to do if you’re not sitting on a lead and especially if you’re behind. We could also mention mixing up names and states and all the rest. But if you’re connecting on the other fronts, stuff like that, even if it may be a sign of age, isn’t going to be a big driver. It’s the ability to deliver in those other ways, to command the stage and shift the trajectory of the race that counts. There are lots of things we’ve seen so far this year — like his convention speech, this Black/Indian rage spasm — that make it very questionable whether he can still do that.