The Backchannel

When New York Mayor Eric Adams was elected in 2021, I told a number of people that I thought he’d either be a great mayor or end up getting indicted for something. A baseball player who bats .500 is a god. So I’m feeling reasonably good about this prediction. I tried to see whether I’d written this down somewhere. Back in December 2021 I wrote on Twitter that “I think there’s a lot about Adams that is really what the city needs. Most of the things. But also concerned that he’ll get indicted for something.” A month later I explained the basis of my largely misguided bullishness on Adams. “For clarity, I’m not cheering anything from the last three days. I think a mayor rooted in the politics of the city’s black middle class (which is Adams’ base) is better for the city today than rooted in the politics of liberals in Manhattan and Brooklyn.”

This general point I still believe.

“You will no longer be abandoned, lonely or scared … You will be protected, and I will be your protector … Women will be happy, healthy, confident and free …You will no longer be thinking about abortion.” You’ve probably heard some combination of these lines and others more than once by now. Donald Trump first posted them on social media sites and then added them to the scripted part of his speech at a rally in Pennsylvania on Monday night. They’ve been greeted with a mix of consternation and mockery. I don’t want to speak for women. But I think it’s safe to say that any woman who has some meaningful investment in abortion rights and reproductive rights generally would find these words some mix of chilling, infuriating, bizarre and absurd. As I read them they essentially say, Only I can be and I will be your total protector. In fact, you will be so totally protected that you will cease to be who you are. Especially coming from a man known to be a serial predator and court-adjudicated rapist — “rape” being the ordinary word, according to the judge in the case, for the acts Trump was found to have committed — these words seem to describe less being protected than engulfed.

Perhaps most simply the words are, as a number of observers have put it, creepy.

I’ve been trying to get my head around a number of issues going on in the campaign. So today I’m just going to flag a few things to keep an eye on.

First, we have something that we’ve discussed a few times. Earlier this year, as part of the Trump campaign’s full takeover of the RNC, Trump’s campaign took field organizing away from the RNC and essentially outsourced it to a series of super PACs including Turning Point USA and Elon Musk’s America PAC. (Musk’s group is run by a team of former DeSantis campaign staffers.) That seemed to many like a risky and possibly self-destructive idea. In modern politics, ground operations are the main role of the national political parties during a presidential campaign. They have experience at it. Why would you hand it off to super PACs, which are often long on dollars but can lack basic institutional knowledge and experience?

I wanted to take a look at the polling news from this weekend and try to help you make some sense of where the race is. Obviously I can’t tell you what’s going to happen in November or necessarily which polls to believe. But I think I can provide some overview of and context for why different polls might seem to show different things, and how to think about that difference. Yesterday, NBC News released a poll showing Harris beating Trump by 5 points nationwide and 6 points if third-party candidates were added. Another national poll from CBS showed Harris 4 points up over Trump nationwide. But it was the NBC poll which got the most attention because poll watchers still give some extra credit to the big, largely phone-based polls from the major national media organizations.

Obviously, no single poll should bulk too large in anyone’s thinking. But what gave the NBC News poll a lot of attention wasn’t so much the result, which was obviously good for Harris, as the fact that it tended to match and confirm and perhaps amplify the trends we’ve seen from a lot of other polls since the debate. Those polls show Harris solidifying a small national lead, consolidating small leads in the Blue Wall states while running about even through the southern tier swing states. There’s been a large volume of polls showing that. But people wanted to see one of those big, high-priced, phone-based polls say the same thing. In part, that was because you have the Times-Siena poll, which as I’ve explained in the past is very respected but also has a totally disproportionate impact on the media narrative about the race, saying something different. That poll has continued to show a much closer race than the great majority of other polls. A nationwide poll from last week from Times-Siena showed a tied race at 47 percent after one a few weeks earlier that showed Trump ahead by 1 percentage point. So that NBC poll wasn’t just another solid poll for Harris. It made it seem a bit more like Times-Siena is an outlier. Not wrong necessarily but an outlier from the majority of campaign.

I suspect this won’t matter. A lot of facts aren’t known. And I’m not sure all the players have yet put their cards on the table. But I wanted to address the topic Nicole put on your radar yesterday. Republicans are making another push to change the electoral law in Nebraska and thus take away a single electoral vote which Kamala Harris is likely but by no means guaranteed to win. We start by making clear that Nebraska has every right to do this. All but two states allocated their electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis. It’s shifty and inappropriate to do it so late in the cycle for a clearly partisan purpose. But there’s no issue here of voting rights or election rigging. They can do this. I should note here that I don’t think it will end up making a difference. But, yeah … it could. It’s certainly possible that Donald Trump could become president again because of this.

Now, we don’t know whether Nebraska Republicans will be able to come up with the votes. We’ll come back to that. But if you remember when this came up earlier in the year, Maine (the other state with this system) said it would also make the change if Nebraska did. In other words, if Nebraska made the change, then Maine would counter and cancel it out. Nebraska Republicans were struggling to come up with the votes anyway. So that seemed to be the end of it. There wasn’t any point.

I continue to have what I guess I would call a mild confidence that not just the Trump campaign but some amount of the political press is missing the political valence of the situation in Springfield, Ohio — the point I alluded to in this post from yesterday. But I want to zoom in on one aspect of the story. Trump and Vance are obviously telling a really lurid and ugly story about half-savage outsiders being foisted on a town of hard-working Americans from the Heartland. But even a lot of the non-far-right coverage has operated on the assumption that either the federal government or some outside entity has essentially resettled a large community of refugees in this one city. But that’s not really what happened here at all. The influx of immigrants into the city is actually a direct result of economic redevelopment plans devised by local leaders, most of whom are Republicans.

Stuart Rothenberg is one of those old school election watcher/analyst types, from the pre-poll aggregator, pre-538 era. Rothenberg, Charlie Cook, Larry Sabato etc. His new column out from him in Roll Call caught my eye. The gist is simple enough. While he’s not predicting this outcome, Rothenberg says we shouldn’t be surprised if the 2024 presidential actually turns out not to be that close, despite the fact that a photo finish is the one thing everyone on every side of the race seems to agree on. He points to new high quality polls out of Pennsylvania and Iowa which suggest the race may not be quite as close as we all universally assume. And Rothenberg is not the type you’d generally expect to predict or hint at something like this. As Rothenberg puts it, after detailing this universal consensus: “[I]f you are something of a gambler and everyone you know believes the 2024 presidential contest is and will remain extremely close, you probably should put a few dollars on the possibility that November will produce a clear and convincing win for Harris.”

When a young man took a shot at Donald Trump in July it was the first time political assassination, attempted or otherwise, had intruded into presidential politics in more than 40 years. Now it appears to have happened a second time in two months. What’s going on here? It comes almost a week after Donald Trump and JD Vance began a campaign of racist anti-immigrant incitement focused on Springfield, Ohio, an effort so destructive and reckless that the Republican mayor and at least two of the three Republican County supervisors have either begged Trump to stop or publicly questioned whether they will even vote for him because they’re so upset about it. The city has been rocked over the last week by repeated bomb threats, school evacuations, the shuttering of one local college which has moved to remote study. This isn’t even counting the experience of Haitian migrants who are being terrorized by the pro-Trump extremists Trump and Vance have incited against them.

TPM Reader DB pressed me yesterday to connect the dots. Because of JD Vance’s racist incitements to violence, now joined by Donald Trump, immigrants from Haiti in Springfield, Ohio, are cowering in their homes, holding their children back from school. Bomb threats have forced evacuations of the town municipal buildings and schools. We can only hope that it doesn’t escalate from here to assaults and murders. But there’s no question this is a community under siege. Vance says full speed ahead, tweeting to his supporters to “keep the cat memes flowing” or, in other words, keep pushing the story.

I wrote soon after Kamala Harris become the de facto Democratic nominee that I did not think that Donald Trump had the mental acuity, stamina or energy to fight for the presidency from behind. As long as he was a bit ahead — very durably a bit ahead — his energy and focus didn’t seem to matter. Everything I’ve seen since then has confirmed this judgment. Tuesday’s debate did so perhaps more than anything. But what I’ve also been increasingly aware of is that Trump has two campaigns in a way that is almost unique in modern presidential politics.

First, there’s Donald Trump, the guy we saw in the debate, the guy we see at the rallies and the guy Trump is, mostly, on social media. (People like Dan Scavino tweet for him sometimes. But even then it’s more an impersonation of feral Trump.) This persona was really the entirety of the campaign in 2016 because there just wasn’t any campaign infrastructure around, though a bit was built up in the last couple months. This campaign is mostly about Trump’s anger and grievances and shows all the signs not only of his longstanding degeneracy but his cognitive and personal decline over the last decade. Let’s call it the Trump campaign. But then there’s an entirely distinct and relatively traditional campaign being run by Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles. That campaign wants to talk about inflation and the southern border. That campaign is running a vast and complex TV air war across all the swing states. Let’s call this the “Trump” campaign.