The Backchannel

Given that there’s been a lot of encouraging news about the Harris campaign, there’s an understandable and salutary resistance to any commentary that looks like counting chickens before they are hatched. We have more than two months to go before Election Day. A lot can happen. But there’s something going on with Donald Trump.

In the first week or two after Harris’ campaign launched, it was perhaps understandable that his campaign had a hard time knowing how to respond. Not entirely understandable, of course. His campaign hoodwinked the Times into running a whole story about how it was locked and loaded with ads, oppo and messaging, ready to annihilate Harris and her campaign on the launch pad the moment Biden stepped aside. But when it happened the very next day, they were caught flatfooted. That was odd since the possibility of Biden stepping aside had been very real for six weeks. Still, it’s hard to prepare for something of such magnitude.

This morning on Twitter, Tim Murtaugh, a former Trump campaign spokesman, concluded a tweet attacking Harris by writing: “Her whole vacant message sounds like it’s from a party that’s out of power. But they’re her messes.” Through the spittle and frustration you can see him making a point which quite understandably has Trump’s campaign angry and bewildered. Harris has made Trump into the incumbent with her as the challenger running on a campaign message to turn the page. Whether this is fair or true or any number of other descriptors you might come up with, there’s little doubt that it is an accurate description of the campaign we are in the midst of. The Trump campaign itself is telling us this, almost in spite of itself. And it’s worth taking a moment to consider how exactly this manages to be the case. Since Harris is not only a member of the incumbent party. She’s literally the incumbent Vice President.

I can’t explain it entirely myself because I haven’t been able to completely understand it. But I can point to several key parts of the puzzle.

We’ve spoken a few times about the ongoing discussion of when Kamala Harris’s “honeymoon” is going to come to an end. We had a lot of press conversation about how it had to end a week after she got into the race. There’s been a growing media hunger for it to end. I was prompted to write this post because of a piece I saw in New York Magazine headlined, “How Long can ‘Brat Summer’ Last? The vibes are good, but at some point, Kamala Harris has to leave her bubble.”

I need to be really clear about what I mean here. On the podcast, Kate and I keep saying that there are going to be reverses in this campaign, to be prepped for them, not to lose heart at the first ugly attack that lands or the first bad poll. I’ve said similar things in various posts. So when I talk about “honeymoonism,” I don’t mean to suggest that I think we’re in a straight-line progression from now until Election Day. Just as we should never lose heart in the bleakest moments, we should always be mindful to invest positive energy in future resilience. But through these discussions of Harris’ “honeymoon” and when it has to end or when she has to come out of the “honeymoon” bubble, we can see an assumption or claim that is a bit different. It’s that somehow what’s happened during the first month of Harris’ campaign isn’t quite real, that it’s a sugar high, if you will, a burst of excitement that can’t last.

I’ve been having a series of discussions about press coverage over the last couple weeks and they’ve drawn some seemingly not entirely related issues together in my mind. So this post won’t have a fully linear structure or focused point. It’s more collecting together notes I’ve been keeping in my head.

In a staff discussion several days ago we got to talking about how recently a lot of political press reporting just seems … well, bad. Everyone’s a critic of course. And TPM has always been critical of many things about mainstream media. But it seems worse. So we were discussing, is that really the case? Is it different? And if so, why would that be? We didn’t come up with any answers but we discussed some structural factors that I think play at least some significant role.

Whether or not it is enduring, Kamala Harris’ transformation of the 2024 presidential race is stunning. There’s no other way to put it. When Joe Biden dropped out of the race he was approaching 4 percentage points behind Donald Trump. Today Harris is just shy of three points ahead, a six- or seven-point shift. What is even more striking is the shift in her net favorability. As of today, according to the 538 average, she remains three points “underwater,” as the jargon has it — her unfavorability three points over her favorability. But in post-2016 politics this amounts to being absolutely on fire. The numbers tell the story: on July 9th, Harris had a net unfavorability of 17.5 percentage points. Today it’s 3. Shifts like this are simply unheard of. They don’t happen. And in today’s dismal politics, you often get less popular with more exposure, not more popular.

In retrospect, the dynamic seems clear. Pre-hot-swap, Harris’ public image and poll numbers were an artifact of Biden’s. She was actually slightly less popular than he was, judged by net favorability. Mostly she was a stand-in for him. But this would have been a wildly optimistic assumption going in.

They probably would have gotten to it on their own. But I think TPM Reader NR is right about the trajectory here.

There’s an added component to your piece today on the media’s call for Harris to do interviews and put forward policies — the demand was a Republican demand first, and the media picked it up. Reporters didn’t come to this in some collective epiphany that they wanted more from the Harris campaign, but instead heard Trump and Vance and their surrogates claiming Harrs was too weak or unprepared or stupid to handle a presser. It is, once again, the media being led around by the right wing on what’s important and not important. 

This is a post not so much focused on the news of the moment but one in response to a question I get a lot. It’s also a post I’ve wanted to do because I’ll be able to refer back to it as we go forward through the final sprint of the campaign. The question is a really basic one: Given what happened in 2016 and 2020, how much confidence can we have that the current polls are giving us an accurate or realistic picture of the current campaign?

Let me deal briefly with what are important but mostly obvious caveats. Polls, or really poll averages, are almost never exactly right and not infrequently they suffer from systemic error. So can we rely on them? No. That would be silly. Most of the time they are fairly accurate predictors of election outcomes. But in close races, a “normal” polling miss of a point or two can change the result. But what people who ask me this question are really asking is whether we should expect that polls are underestimating Trump’s strength as they did in 2016 and 2020.

I’m reading through a Puck newsletter, sent out under the heading “The Vibes Election.” Some of this is similar to what I discussed in yesterday’s Backchannel — Happy v. Mad, etc. But most of it zeroes in on the idea that Harris’ campaign is all vibes and no substance, a sugar high, something that can’t last. Will it be enough to carry her to Election Day? Here’s one snippet.

Put another way: Vibes, baby! Harris has not outlined any specific economic agenda, speaking only in generic terms about corporate greed, standing with labor unions, protecting Social Security and Obamacare, and fighting for the middle class. She is framing the election simply as “the choice about what direction this country will go in”—conveying an agreeable set of center-left values against Trump rather than a 10-point plan for this or a white paper for that.

I’m not the first to note this. I saw a headline somewhere over the weekend that the campaign had reset to one between the Happy Tribe and the Angry Tribe. It’s always reductive to try to capture the vast complexity of two national campaigns in a simple catch phrase or binary opposition. But those broad descriptions can capture realities that transcend the details; they are often the takeaway for those watching only at a distance.

It doesn’t take much imagination to think of Trump and the MAGA movement as the Angry Tribe. I mean, they’ve always been Team Angry, or maybe Team Grievance or Team Vengeance. But what about the Harris campaign and the earlier Biden campaign? The Biden campaign, which I supported greatly, was not a happy tribe. I don’t mean that as a criticism. Happy isn’t the only or most important part of a political campaign. Especially when there’s quite a lot not to be happy about.

One thing that gets a bit lost in all the helter-skelter of the last few days: Trump caved big time. Harris said he needed to show up on September 10th. And after three weeks of threats and whining he agreed.