🇺🇸 Harris v. kakistocracy: a live dog, 66 days out

TL;DR — The 2024 US presidential race is now very, very close.

Kamala Harris and her campaign have executed the most dramatic one-month turnaround in the modern history of American politics. She has not fucked up.

In July, Trump was ahead in every battleground state, and coasting to victory over Joe Biden. Conventional wisdom (and my own analysis) was that Harris wouldn’t do better than Biden. But that notion has now been proven wrong. She is doing much, much better than Joe Biden was.

It’s been a 40 days since Joe Biden ended his campaign. Biden was not going to win. That was as close to a mathematical certainty as you can get in politics.

I didn’t think Kamala Harris could win, either. But within 72 hours of Biden’s withdrawal, I realized I had been wrong. She proved she can win, by bringing the race — which Trump had been leading all year — to a statistical tie.

That isn’t to say she will win. Even though most polling indicates a toss-up, we have data from 2016 and 2020, and historically Trump does better in real elections than he does in polls[1].

But can win is a lot better than can’t win.

Initial surge of support for Harris (now stabilized?)

It seems like the initial surge of enthusiasm that Harris harnessed after the Biden withdrawal has now mostly stabilized.

In general, people don’t give a shit about the Vice President, which is why it was pretty difficult to poll “what-if” scenarios before she was actually the presidential candidate. Various pollsters did try, sometimes, just because Biden was so old. But those results were always suspect, because people tend not to know (or care) that much about the Vice President, so opinions tend not to be firm.

The most interesting visualization comes from the Wall Street Journal:

That looks dramatic! But don’t forget the First Rule of US Presidential Elections: winning the popular vote doesn’t necessarily matter. In 2016, Hillary Clinton got 2,868,686 more total votes than Trump, but Trump still won — with only 46.1% of the popular vote.

So for fans of Harris, or just enemies of fascism, that trajectory looks good, but she’s still the underdog. A live dog, for sure, but still a dog. The US electoral system is intentionally biased to give rural voters more power. Rural voters tend to be more religious, more racist, and more Republican. That’s reflected in various prediction models, which consider various other factors in addition to polling, and my favorite of which is produced by Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin.

If you aren’t a huge political nerd, but that name sounds familiar, it’s probably because he’s the guy that inspired the movie Moneyball, and became famous in political circles for his FiveThirtyEight site and correctly predicting 49/50 states in 2016, and 50/50 states in 2012. (But, like virtually everyone else, he didn’t predict Trump winning in 2016.)

This model, and others like it, are largely based on polling but also attempt to factor in other data points, and their correlations to historical election results, to generate a “probability of receiving 170+ electoral votes” for each candidate. Factors include economic conditions, historical performance of the incumbent vs. the challenger, etc.

The key thing to understand about these models is that they are probabilistic guesses, and therefore may be far less accurate than polling averages. Even a model that has been right before may be much more inaccurate this time. So while these models produce the same kind of charts, they don’t have the same kind of precision. If you are up 9% in the polling in a given state, you are very probably going to win that state. But Silver himself has said that in this model, anything closer than 60-40 is a “toss-up”, and I think that is true.

So don’t let the numbers fool you. This model is saying “our best guess is that it’s 50-50, with Trump still maybe having a slight edge”, while when Biden was the presumptive nominee, it was “2-1 chance that Trump would win”.

So what does that mean? It means we have no idea who is ahead right now, because it’s too close. What we do know is that the present situation reflects a massive improvement from the day Harris entered the race as the candidate for president.

Her rise may or may not be leveling out. The next couple weeks will tell us.

How we got here: the significant events in August

I’ll start by getting my own personal analysis out of the way.

First, Harris has run a fantastic fucking campaign so far. Her internet and social media team — presumably three of the smartest Gen-Z mean girls on earth — have been fucking killing it. As awful as it is to be back on the oligarch’s website, I have to do it in order to see the entire picture but the pitch-perfect tweets have left me laughing out loud several times.

Her physical boots-on-the-ground campaign has been nothing short of spectacular. Not only is she busy, hitting city after city, often in multiple states on the same day, but she’s kicking the shit out of Trump in his own favorite metric: crowd size. She’s filling arenas, and turning out huge crowds, from wine moms to young hipsters.

My favorite crowd-size comparison of all time is, of course, this masterpiece from some shitposter on Twitter:

For those who didn’t yet know how unhinged and narcissistic Trump was when he became president, one of the first signs was his whiny insistence that his inaugural crowd was bigger than Obama’s. (It was not.)

I doubt Harris will be able to beat Obama’s inaugural crowd numbers, either, but she is decidedly beating Trump’s crowd sizes, essentially since she entered the race.

Crowd size isn’t an important indicator for elections in general, but in my opinion, the enthusiasm level of these crowds is probably quite significant in this election specifically.

Why? Because Trump owns the old vote, the male vote, and the low-education white vote. (And the one-two punch of old and low-education-white means he owns the overall white vote, too.)

• If you go by race, Trump wins white people, Harris wins everyone else.
• If you go by gender, Trump wins men, Harris wins women.
• If you go by education, Trump wins people who never graduated from university, Harris wins people who did.
• If you go by age, Trump wins people over 50, Harris wins people under 50, and notably slaughters Trump in with registered voters younger than 30.

Moreover, I’ve read a couple reports that while Harris is doing far better than Biden did overall, her performance among older white voters is actually worse than Biden’s. Which matches my intuition. And therefore, I think the “turn out the young people” will be every bit as import for her as it was for Barack Obama in 2008.

I was skeptical that Harris could do anything close to what Obama did that year to turn out the youth vote, but I’m starting to see a pattern here — namely, me drastically underestimating her competence as a politician. She’s really improved since 2020.

Still, in and of themselves, it’s hard to know what these crowd sizes mean. I suspect they bode well for young voter enthusiasm, and therefore turnout, which is good for the Harris campaign.

The third thing that I noticed about her campaign is that they basically told the mainstream media to fuck off:

She didn’t give single sit-down interview until the end of August. This is highly unusual, and struck me as a risky strategy tactic.

However, in hindsight I think it paid off for them. When she finally sat down with a friendly (if predictably vapid) interview with CNN, she did fine. If she hadn’t, then the missteps in that one interview would have loomed large and been repeated over and over again in the media. It could have also confirmed MAGA talking points that she’s unintelligent, not good at speaking in public, etc. — attacks that have so far not resonated much outside of the MAGA base.

The upside of the low-traditional-media approach, it seems to me, stems from the fact that she’s a relatively “normal” person, and clearly a normal political candidate, while Trump is a bizarre ass-clown narcissist. Trump lies all day every day, a nonstop barrage of lies about things large and trivial, and the media’s normalcy bias has crippled their ability to cover him. The process goes like this:

• Trump lies about something or says something batshit-crazy
• Traditional TV/print media reports on it, and then wants to ask Harris about it
• Now we’re talking about the batshit-crazy or false thing that Trump said, not what Harris wants to talk about

This, in fact, did happen during the Harris interview[2], but she was obviously prepared for it, and handled it near-perfectly. But there’s a case to be made that the mainstream media is “not doing its job” by not covering Trump’s lies, and therefore not really “earning” the level of engagement that they typically get in a presidential campaign.

With only 66 days to go (as I write this August 31), the fact that she’s so new to the race might make this unconventional “low-traditional-media” approach help her control the narrative.

I think it will be obvious, later, whether or not it was a good idea, but it’s not really obvious at the moment. But it’s different.

Not giving the media a lot of direct access almost guarantees that the upcoming debate with Trump will become the central story of the campaign, for a while.

I think this will work in her favor, although that remains to be seen. It’s very hard to imagine a scenario where Trump is able to win a debate against the much quicker, well-spoken, more knowledgeable, and obviously more intelligent Harris. (But I recommend trying; it’s fun. 😆)

The best case outcome for Trump, then, is to make it a shitshow that degrades both of them. That may be doable.

😬 But now I’m veering off in to prognostication, which isn’t what these updates are for. These are about what has really happened and the current state of the race. So I’ll end this editorial part of this post with the final important observation I have about Harris: as an orator, it’s clear she’s no Barack Obama.

I see a lot of people on the Internet, who desperately want her to win, saying shit like “Obama-like atmosphere!” and “OMG Kamala KILLED it!“. There’s not; she didn’t. If you think that, you’re probably to some extent projecting your hopes onto her.

Her convention speech was very good. But that’s not her delivery was awesome, or that her oratory was inspirational on the level of Obama, or for that matter, Ronald Reagan.

It was a good speech because she stayed disciplined as a competent, professional politician — one who, I think, now understands her own limitations and strengths much better than she did when she ran in 2020. There was no mention at all of being a woman, or black. Everybody who cares about those things, everybody who gets teary-eyed at the prospect of the first woman president… she’s already got those people. She needs to capture another 2-3% of the vote in a few specific states, and viewed through that lens, rather than as an oratory performance, her convention speech was great.

She started her speech by saying “OK, let’s get to business.” (Boom!) After perfunctory thanks to her husband, etc., as she introduced herself to the country, she structured the narrative around growing up middle class, working family concerns, prosecuting criminals, and — judo throw bodyslam! — border security and military strength, and America being the greatest country in the world, to chants of “USA! USA!” from the crowd.

It was good, but it was good because of the content and disciplined, on-message delivery.

OK, but what actually happened in August?

Soooo much fucking shit. So much, in fact, that I think I need to make these updates weekly from now on.

Tim Walz selected as VP

In the first week of August, Harris selected Tim Walz as her VP candidate.

He is literally the guy that implemented with the idea to ridicule Trump by pointing out how “weird” he is, instead of treating him as a grave threat to democracy. I’ve previously ranted about how great that tactic is. (Trump indeed is a threat to democracy, too — but labeling him that way both takes too long to explain, and makes him seem powerful.)

The pick was questioned immediately — surely Shapiro, governor of Pennsylvania, might be a more strategic pick? — but now the choice seems inspired. Teacher, high school football coach, veteran, hunter, handyman, corny dad-joke father, and now governor of Minnesota, he’s not only provided balance to the ticket, but also is able to project chemistry with Harris. Hard to explain what I mean, but it enabled them to produce this weirdly compelling ten minute documentary-style political ad:

The Trump team tried to “Swift Boat” him, but it didn’t work. In fact, so far, nothing has stuck to him and his favorability ratings remain high.

Trump fucked up his interview at the National Association of Black Journalists as badly as possible

Also in the first week of August (technically, on July 31, but the news dominated the election coverage for the next few days) Trump went to the NABJ to do an interview with black journalists, and shit the bed so badly that many people wondered: Is he trying to lose? Others suggested that his instinct was just to make the news about him, even if it was negative coverage. A third theory was that he intentionally went to NABJ and said offensive, racist shit as a kind of performance aimed at the MAGA base.

But regardless, he fucked it up as bad as I have ever seen a politician fuck up a public appearance. You can see the video here — the first couple minutes are enough. He:

• bristled at the first question (from a black female journalist) and said it was “nasty” and a “very rude introduction”
• said of Harris, “Well… I didn’t know she was black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn black and now she wants to be known as black. So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she black?” (to audible gasps from the audience)
• said “I have been the best president for the black population since Abraham Lincoln”

After 31 minutes, his team cut the interview short, and he left. This event, too, got fairly wide and negative coverage in the press.

Trump freaks out about Harris’s crowd, claims they’re “AI”

One exhausting thing about watching Trump, as I have done for the purpose of this blog, and as many political reporters do regularly (🫡 thank you for your service, heroes), is that it’s a firehose of batshit-crazy lies and non-sequiturs, to the point that after watching even a single Trump rally, you just can’t even remember all of them.

An incomplete list:

• Democrat states allow abortion “up to and even after birth — you can kill the baby after it’s born” and Harris explicitly supports that; Trump said, “She wants abortions in the eighth and ninth month of pregnancy, that’s fine with her, right up until birth, and even after birth – the execution of a baby”
• Harris wants to pass laws to ban red meat like beef steaks and hamburgers
• we are losing “300,000” people per year to fentanyl overdoses (fentanyl’s a real problem, but the point is that he makes up numbers, that don’t make sense)
• he received calls from “hundreds of governors” about this or that (there are only 55 governors, including all states and territories)
• illegal immigrants took “107% of new jobs” (um… what?)
• violent crime is up since 2020 when he lost (it’s not)
• “The late, great Hannibal Lecter… he’d like to have you for dinner. Hannibal Lecter would like to have you for dinner.” (um, srsly WAT?)
• bacon prices are up 300-400% (its actually 18%, but again… he makes up numbers)
• Harris will quadruple taxes (makes up numbers)
• he claims that he, Trump, passed the law capping insulin prices at $35 a month (it was Biden)

Even just that list is exhausting, but it’s not even close to a full Trump rally’s worth of bullshit.

(Journalist Daniel Dale has been collecting and debunking Trump’s false claims for years, and would be the place to start spelunking that rabbit hole.)

But given that backdrop, it typically doesn’t make any news at all when Trump says some new crazy false bullshit claim. Because it’s literally not news. It’s the thousandth time, and the audience doesn’t want to hear it again.

So when Trump posted some whacked-out rant claiming Kamala Harris’s crowd was “AI”, I was skeptical that he’d take damage, or that non-Twitter people would even know:

But this time, it did. This claim (perhaps because it is so easily verified as false, or maybe because Trump repeated this claim several times) was extensively covered by the NY Times, NPR USA Today, PolitiFact and even The Verge, among many others… even Fox News.

(Only Fox managed to cover it without any implication that only a stupendously ignorant person could believe this.)

Trump “press conference” (feat. Willie Brown)

Trump, by this point, was concerned about all the coverage of Harris, and her crowd sizes. She was getting most of the coverage. So he decided to hold a press conference. His advisors desperately wanted him to get back to “the economy” which is an area where he is better perceived by the public.

So he held a “press conference”, that immediately veered off-script, and which included “162 lies and distortions” according to NPR.

But one of those lies (or perhaps delusions might literally be the better word) was that Trump had been in an emergency helicopter landing with former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown. Curiously, in Trump’s telling, Willie Brown took this opportunity to tell Trump “terrible things” about Kamala Harris.

Why does Trump want to bring up Willie Brown? It is because his campaign is pushing a narrative that Harris traded sexual favors for career advancement. This gambit is based on trying to distort the widely-known fact that Harris and Brown dated in the 1990s. That’s why Trump often makes some kind of weird, off-topic comment about Willie Brown. It will seem like a weird non-sequitur on regular TV, but fans on Truth Social will notice, and e.g. start posting gross sexual memes about Harris there.

We know it’s not just “his followers” because Trump himself reposts things like this:

Yeah, gross.

But, there was something else unusual about this particular “Willie Brown helicopter emergency landing” story: Willie Brown never rode in a helicopter with Trump at all. It turned out that Trump was either fabricating, or having a senior moment, or can’t tell black people apart. The man with Trump in the helicopter was Los Angele was politician Nate Holden.

“Willie is the short Black guy living in San Francisco,” Holden said. “I’m a tall Black guy living in Los Angeles.”

This detail was widely reported by the press, and it’s likely that the false anecdote probably harmed Trump’s campaign more than Harris’s.

The Democratic National Convention

Before this, I watched the Republican National Convention, too. It was awful on a lot of levels — Hulk Hogan was arguably the best speaker — but it was also a jubilant celebration Trump’s impending victory over Biden. (Which made it even more awful for me, because at that time, I knew they were right.)

But that jubilation was nothing compared the Democratic National Convention. It was well-covered, so I won’t go into too much detail, but it really is summed up fairly well by this short comparison video:

The convention of each party usually gives their candidate a bounce in the polls, which is usually temporary, and they no longer move the needle like they did in the old days. But this time, coming so soon after Harris becoming the presidential nominee, it had a lot riding on it. No fuckups — they pulled it off. They gave Biden his tribute (although after prime time, when many people had gone to bed — which I am gonna say was a good idea). They deployed both Obamas. They had Oprah. They had Lil Jon. It was a good show.

And I’ve already described the speech by Harris herself that closed it. No fuckups. Achieved the main goal, which was to energize their base, without giving ammunition to their opponents.

RFK Jr. drops out and endorses Trump

The weird-stuff-with-animals antivaxxer RFK Jr. dropped out of the race and endorsed Trump. This turned out to not matter much; any polling shift caused was too small to be teased out of the noise. Fuck that guy. (Fuck Tulsi Gabbard, too; she also disgraced herself with an endorsement, but almost nobody remembers her at this point. None of these endorsements seemed to matter at all.)

Harris/Walz interview on CNN

After a few weeks of not doing interviews, Harris and Walz finally sat down with CNN. They did fine.

Much like the DNC convention, it was well-prepared, on-message, no fuckups. As far as I can tell, the consensus among non-invested viewers and pundits was that it was a pretty good interview.

But it didn’t really move the campaign forward, either, in my personal opinion. It was good defense. She avoided taking any damage. But did she capture new voters? I don’t know for sure, but I tend to doubt it, and I haven’t seen any polling that suggests it. (But of course, it takes time for polls to reflect recent events.)

At the same time, a TV interview probably isn’t the best way for Harris to peel off undecided voters — their aggressive bus tour of battleground states, where they’re campaigning in person, is probably going to be more effective, as long as they can sustain the current momentum. That’s because that kind of retail campaign pulls in volunteers, who then go out and go door to door, work the phones, and do the grunt work of getting out the vote.

Trump team stages fake event in Arlington National Cemetery

Then, there was this. It was a wild one. I don’t have time to do more the the TL;DR here, but this Atlantic article covers it in more detail.

The basic TL;DR:

• Trump campaign hatched a plan to stage a fake “event” at Arlington National Cemetery, take photos and videos, then bash Biden for not showing up.
• But you’re not allowed to take photos or videos at Arlington National Cemetery without approval, and the staff there tried to stop them.
• At that point, the Trump goons berated her, and allegedly physically pushed her aside and stormed the gravesite.
• The police were called, and the incident ended up getting widespread news coverage, so the Trump campaign called the cemetery employee “despicable” and “clearly having a mental health episode”
• …which, in turn, caused the FUCKING U.S. ARMY to issue a public statement rebuking the Trump campaign for their actions and praising the cemetery employee for acting with professionalism.
• The U.S. Army is extremely unwilling to wade into politics (for good reason) and I don’t think this kind of official rebuke to a presidential candidate has every happened in my lifetime.
• Then, Trump campaign chief Chris Lacivita tried to start a Twitter beef with the fucking Army! 🤯
• And, the 🍒 on top: apparently, Fox News didn’t get the memo that the scheme had failed, and still ran the fake-news story! 🤯🤯🤯

(Later, the oligarch who owns Twitter had the community note removed, according to multiple sources.)

This got big play in the news, both mainstream and Internet, almost becoming a small scandal. Trump had taken another hit, so he wanted to change the subject, and perhaps take on what is probably Harris’s strongest issue, abortion.

Trump flip flops on abortion, then flip-flops again

So… he flip-flopped on abortion! 😂 After bragging for months about getting Roe v. Wade overturned — wildly popular with hardcore evangelical conservatives, but extremely unpopular in the US overall — he said that Florida’s new abortion ban was too extreme, implying that he would support the upcoming Amendment 4 ballot initiative in Florida to guarantee abortion rights in the state.

Whoops! That didn’t go over well with his base, and sent his campaign scrambling to do damage control, after 24 hours of which he flop-flipped back to saying he would vote against abortion rights in Florida.

This left him casting about for another way to get the narrative focus back on himself, and to (ahem) blunt the gains Harris has made with younger voters, so…

”Smoke some weed!”

Presumably while visiting the Florida Panderhandle, Trump came out in favor of legal weed in Florida! 😂

Otherwise known as Amendment 3, this will legalize smoking marijuana recreationally in the state. I think that’s a sensible policy, so I guess as a Trump-hating anti-fascist US citizen, my only worry is… that Trump will kick JD Vance to the curb and replace him with Snoop Dogg?

That’d be a much harder ticket to beat.

What’s next?

The big thing we know that is coming up next is the debate.

Writing this up was exhausting, and I had to omit a shit-ton of stuff, too, so the plan is to make these updates weekly going forward.

Until next weekend! 🤞