The Backchannel

I’ve made this point a few times in recent weeks, here and on the podcast. I’m going to make the point again because I think it’s critical for understanding this election nine days out. We keep hearing that this is the closest election in decades. Polls say that’s right. At least 5 of the 7 swing states are within a single percentage point — fairly meaningless margins statistically. National poll averages are between one and two points — right on the cusp of where most believe a Democratic Electoral College victory becomes possible. But I don’t think that’s the right way to look at it. What we have is a high uncertainty election. That’s not the same thing. There’s every chance that most or every race that looks close will veer more or less uniformly in one direction. And that wouldn’t necessarily be because of one late-breaking story, some great decision by one of the candidates or even undecideds all “breaking” in one way. It could simply be because the dominant understanding of the race and the electorate was just a bit off and had been all along.

Axios this morning leads with the email subject line: “Dems’ private panic.” And then inside the email “1 big thing: Dems fear they’re blowing it.” In this case I’m not really writing to criticize Axios, which I admittedly, and rightly, often do. Because what they’re describing here is real. This post is agnostic on what the result of the election is going to be. And for what it’s worth, I keep in close touch with numerous high level campaign operatives in the swing states and I do not sense panic or pessimism from them. They all know it could go either way but I don’t think they think they’re losing. My topic is this blame feature of Democrats’ mass psychology, which is strongly echoed in the press, and their tendency to panic and almost always think they’re going to lose unless the available evidence to the contrary is simply overwhelming. But it’s not the “bedwetting” that interests me most. It’s the second version of the headline, that blame feature: “Dems fear they’re blowing it.”

We have a nice addition to the emerging library of reporting on Republican ground operations from Ryan Cooper at The American Prospect. Cooper actually lives in one of the swingiest parts of Pennsylvania. So he’s not only a very sharp political reporter and commentator, he’s there on the ground as a recipient of the door-knocking and mailering and all the rest — both lab-coated scientist and guinea pig, as it were. So it’s a unique view. The gist matches what I’ve come up with. There just doesn’t seem to be much if any GOP ground operation in the sense of door knocking, dropping off pamphlets or much of anything else. There’s a slew of mailers. And there you’ve got the other issue I’ve been obsessed by: Cooper is a left-leaning Democrat who I’d assume has seldom or ever voted for a Republican. So why is his mailbox bursting with GOP mailers?

Like many people, I’ve been watching the early vote closely to see if I can glean anything predictive about what we’ve seen so far. On balance I’ve seen very little that gives any real indication either way. I want to stress that point because I think it’s the most important point in this entire post: I’ve seen little if anything that gives any real or clear indication who the winner of the election is going to be.

One of the many surprising things in the floppy and shambling political career of Colorado’s Lauren Boebert is that she has always been full freak show, a full Freedom Caucus stalwart, despite being from a GOP-leaning swing district. We expect the crazies to be from lopsided Republican districts where they’re never going to face any real price for their antics. But something’s caught my eye over the last week or so. There are actually three members of the Freedom Caucus who appear to have real races on their hands at the moment.

Each race is different, both in how serious a challenge the individual rep faces and in how much evidence we have to suggest they could be in danger. So let me go through all three.

I get this question a lot: are right-wing pollsters flooding the zone? So I thought I would answer it generally in a single post.

Are they? Yes, they definitely are. But there are some important caveats and qualifiers to know to make sense of the whole story.

Just to review the basics: There are a series of Republican or right-wing pollsters who are overtly partisan, use questionable or floating methodologies and pretty clearly release polls not as a predictive enterprise but to produce friendly numbers for Republican candidates. The worst offenders are places like Rasmussen, Trafalgar, InsiderAdvantage. We know this from a mix of a lack of transparency about methodology, general behavior that betrays a goal of shaping election perceptions and outcomes rather than measuring public opinion, and extreme “house effects” — the tendency to favor a particular party’s candidates over the other’s relative to what most pollsters are finding — that support their agenda. After those, there’s a larger penumbra of often less-known pollsters who don’t appear to be as flagrant, but generally seem to be in the same category.

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.

The first I heard of this was late this afternoon from TPM Reader EM. But even after EM shared a link verifying the story, I still couldn’t quite believe it was true. But it really does seem to be true. Not only have reporters from multiple local news outlets covered it, they also have pretty clear photographic evidence. Mailers going out in support at least of Colorado’s GOP House candidates Gabe Evans and Jeff Hurd are being sent and paid for by the Arizona Republican Party.

So here’s the deal. The Colorado GOP appears to be under the control of one weird dude, Dave Williams, who spent most of the party’s money on preventing people from firing him as party chair, trying and failing to get himself nominated for a House seat and … oh yeah, one other thing, Lauren Boebert. Other Colorado Republicans tried to oust Williams but a judge ruled against them. El Paso Country District Judge Eric Bentley ruled against state party chair pretender Eli Bremer and confirmed that Williams is in fact the chair of the Colorado Republican Party. In any case, the point is that, for the moment, the Colorado GOP is basically the personal property of this guy Williams. Once that happened, Coloradans in at least two congressional districts started getting mailers for the local Republican candidate coming from the Arizona state Republican Party.

So what’s going on here? Why is the Arizona Republican Party, which has a contested Senate and presidential race, among others, funding campaigns in Colorado?

Here’s what appears to be happening.

I’ve had a few of you take me to task recently for writing so much about polls. I’ll take that under advisement, though I hear from many readers that they like those posts. The reality is that most political people follow polls closely, even if they wish they didn’t, and they want insights into just what they mean and how to interpret them. But today I want to discuss something a bit different, albeit still somewhat adjacent to polls. That is, what’s with the Democrats’ tendency to freak out, even in the face of the most limited kinds of disappointing news in polls or other markers of campaign performance?

We’ve discussed this phenomenon from various perspectives in recent years. But, big picture, why does this happen? Why do Democrats freak out like this?

I heard from a reader yesterday who saw one of the country’s top political journalists give a public presentation about the race. The run-down I got of that event crystallized something I’ve been giving a lot of thought to over the last few months and writing about here and there. At the elite level, political journalists have a basic contempt for Democrats. It’s not even very concealed because in a way it’s hardly even recognized as such. This continues to be the case despite the fact that most of the people I’m talking about, if they vote, probably vote for Democrats. They are socio-economically and culturally, if not always ideologically, the peers of Democrats. We often confuse cosmopolitan social values for liberalism. If anything, this basic pattern has become more the case over the last decade. These people are highly educated. They are affluent. They are the creatures of the major cities.

Are they secretly rooting for Donald Trump? Hardly. Or at least not in the great majority of the cases. Trump is a tiger on the savanna, dangerous but also fascinating and above all alien. That’s why the notorious rustbelt diner interview stories were and are such a staple. They’re safaris. It defines the coverage, and in ways seldom helpful for Democrats in electoral political terms.