In no particular order, some observations, thoughts and concerns in the homestretch.
1)Here's the 538 presidential forecast model, as of earlier today:
That’s what seasoned political analysts call “close.”
The New York Times averages give Kamala Harris a less than one point lead in four of the seven battleground states - Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Nevada. Trump leads by the same margin in NC and by about two points each in Arizona and Georgia.
As a reminder, if Harris wins the three "blue wall" states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, plus the single electoral vote from the Congressional district encompassing Omaha, Nebraska, she wins 270 electoral votes, the bare majority she needs to win the presidency.
There has been apparent movement in the polls in the past two weeks toward Trump. I say apparent because the movement has been slight and there is a lively debate among those who follow such matters about whether that change is the result of GOP-leaning pollsters "flooding the zone" with polls that give the impression of movement toward Trump. I won't get into the weeds of that debate, except to say that, even if you remove those polls, the overall picture doesn't change dramatically (and once you start removing polls whose results you don't like, you're just cherry-picking, as the polling analyst Lakshya Jain puts it). Long story short, based on everything we know, this election is a true toss-up.
2)With that in mind, much of the attention of these closing weeks is focused on the relatively few remaining undecided voters. The Times estimates that, in the battleground states, roughly four percent of the electorate still hasn’t made up its mind. And as they put it, “Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump are carrying out a virtual house-to-house hunt for the final few voters who are still up for grabs, guided by months of painstaking research about these elusive Americans.” And who are these folks that the Times describes as a “fickle sliver”?
The truth is, they're not easy to categorize nor make clear sense of. As recounted recently by Rick Perlstein, Chris Hayes, the MSNBC star, wrote a piece as a young cub reporter in 2004 (which is hard to find on the internet) about his experience canvassing for John Kerry in Wisconsin. Hayes' experience led him to challenge the notion that undecided voters were discerning in their political views, weighing carefully the parties' stances on the issues and trying to decide which array of stances better matched their own preferences. Instead, Hayes argued, “[m]ore often than not, when I asked undecided voters what issues they would pay attention to as they made up their minds I was met with a blank stare, as if I’d just asked them to name their favorite prime number … the very concept of the ‘issue’ seemed to be almost completely alien to most of the undecided voters I spoke to.” Indeed, what we know generally about the typical undecided voter is that they tend to be less engaged, less informed and less likely to vote. That makes reliable polling of this group inherently challenging, not only because it’s hard to know exactly what will make many of them ultimately decide whom to vote for, but also how likely they are to show up at the polls at all.
I’ve done lots of canvassing over the years, not specifically targeting undecided voters. Among those people I’ve spoken to who seemed genuinely not to have made up their minds, some were quite well informed about the news generally, while others were barely aware that we were in an election year. But as much as the campaigns try to model and estimate this group and what will likely win it over, the campaigns are ultimately just guessing. The ungodly sums of money both campaigns are spending on political ads illustrate the ultimately shot-in-dark nature of all this. There’s been lots of research over many years about the impact of political ads on election outcomes, a very difficulty phenomenon to study. And the results of that research essentially tell us we don’t know which ads will hit home nor what difference the ads make.
All we do know is that neither side believes it can unilaterally disarm in the ad wars, so if you live in a battleground state (and, say, watch lots of sporting events on television), you will be bombarded with a *constant* barrage of the same ads.
3)I don’t know how much what I am about to say bears on persuading the “fickle sliver.” But I’ve been thinking recently about the late North Carolina Senator, Jesse Helms. When I first moved to North Carolina for grad school in 1989, I already *hated* Helms, a man who’s toxic political legacy is still with us. But I heard all the time from people that, whatever else you could say about Helms, “you knew where he stood.” Helms was plainspoken, unapologetic about his inflammatory views and, in a way, seemed unlike the typical politician who carefully chooses their words so as neither to give offense nor level with people. In that connection, this recent Kevin Drum post argued that, whatever else we can say about Trump, he has made pretty clear where he stands on many major issues.
Drum enumerates:
He's against illegal immigration.
He's anti-woke.
He's in favor of tax cuts.
He's against China and in favor of protecting American industry.
He's pro-Christian.
He'll fight against bureaucratic red tape.
He's in favor of more coal, oil, and gas production.
He's anti-crime and pro-cop.
He's pro-gun.
By contrast, Drum argues:
This is less true of Kamala Harris. Partly that's because she's been on the national stage for only three months compared to Trump's ten years. But there's more to it than just that. She's certainly in favor of abortion rights. Everyone knows that. She supports Obamacare and believes in climate change. But take a look at that list of nine Trump positions. Harris is a little fuzzy on every single one of them.
I'm obviously extremely pro-Harris, but this doesn't blind me to the way she comes across. Most people know she's generally liberal and will do liberalish things as president, but that's about it. There's still some doubt on where, precisely, she stands on lots of hot button issues. There's no similar doubt about Trump.
There is a larger truth, which is that Democrats are more apt to explain, in four parts, why some policy they support is worth supporting. Republicans, by contrast, are more likely to just assert the truth of their position as good versus evil and be done with it.
I’m not claiming Democrats never use strident language, nor that they never demonize their opponents (nor that they lack their own great communicators). But their approach to campaigning is qualitatively different, partly a product of the nature of their governing agenda. To circle back to climate change, as an example, what we need to do to have any hope of mitigating its most disastrous consequences, if it’s not already too late, is a kind of future-orientation that Democrats must rely upon voters to accept. I believe in the necessity of that fight, but in my old-ish age, I have fewer illusions about how tough a sell are the sacrifices implied in that goal.
Does that mean I think the remaining undecided voters are more likely to break for Trump? No, not necessarily. People can both be relatively “innocent of ideology,” as political science has long argued, and complicated in other ways. Many millions of Americans find Trump to be an abhorrent, despicable person, including some who support his policy positions. And others have principled reasons for why they why won’t vote for Democrats. But the fact is that, ever since Trump first started running for president in earnest nine years ago, he’s always been viewed unfavorably in public opinion polls by a majority of Americans. As a baseline, as I’ve said previously, seventy million or so people are going to vote for him, and seventy million or so people will vote against him. We can spin lots of narratives from those basic facts, as we will be able to from the millions of Americans who won’t vote at all.
I find it deeply depressing that even as Trump devolves further into depravity and derangement, there doesn’t seem to be meaningful movement in the polls. Trump’s main advantage, however, remains a simple one - he was able to take over one of our two major political parties, which ensured him a baseline of 45% or so of the vote right off the bat. That sucks for all sorts of reasons, as does an electoral college system that effectively negates the votes of the majority of the electorate and gives him an even chance in an election that he would almost certainly lose were we just counting popular votes.
All of this is a wind up to say that this not Trump country. He could win, and that would be disastrous, but I remain convinced that a majority of Americans are not on board with who he is and what he stands for. Whether enough people in the right places show up to demonstrate that on election day, we don’t yet know.