Time To Get Serious

The following story is co-published with Freddie deBoer’s Substack.

1. With less than two months to go, this election remains a dead heat. A lot of people who should know better keep acting as though Kamala Harris holds a clear lead, but she just doesn’t.

2. Aside from maybe Nevada, among states that are genuinely in play, it’s hard to argue that the Democrats received any convention or debate bounce in the polls at all — despite endless pieces from big-time media declaring that it was over for Donald Trump and that Harris was going to win because of “the politics of joy” or whatever. Once again, we see the same failure to understand that the optics that appeal to media liberals don’t necessarily appeal to undecided voters. I don’t understand why anyone writes immediate post-convention or post-debate pieces that make any claims about their consequences before polls come out for a reality check. As Kristen Soltis Anderson says, “The debate may have done more to fire up or reassure Ms. Harris’s existing supporters than to add new voters to her ranks in large numbers.” This is always the temptation with a big political spectacle like a convention; it’s easy to mistake the enthusiasm of the base (who will vote for their candidate no matter what) for broader popularity.

For the record if you were rooting for Taylor Swift to swoop in and save the election and thus the country you’re rooting for a world where the world’s hegemon is effectively ruled by a pop star and that’s maybe even bleaker than the possibility of another Trump term.

3. Pennsylvania remains incredibly tight, and it appears that the state will hold on to its status as the true bellwether swing state this election cycle. I’ve heard some grumbling (some very motivated grumbling) from the Democratic party’s right wing suggesting that this all shows what a mistake it was to nominate Tim Walz rather than Josh Shapiro. I don’t think that scans. We know that a vice presidential candidate’s home state has had essentially no impact on presidential election outcomes in the modern era. There’s also a lot of bad reasoning here, of this type: Shapiro consistently outpolled Joe Biden in Pennsylvania, therefore Shapiro can get votes that Biden/Harris couldn’t get for themselves. But that doesn’t track logically. The fact that Shapiro is more popular than the Democratic party as governor of Pennsylvania does not mean that he would steal a lot of votes from Donald Trump. The head-to-head matchups are entirely different; Doug Mastriano, Shapiro’s gubernatorial election foe, was an untested far-right figure from a state senate district considered extreme even in the context of Pennsylvania Republicans. Many of Trump’s biggest supporters are just that, Trump supporters, before they’re Republicans or conservatives or anything else. They might very well be willing to cast a vote for Josh Shapiro when he runs against Mastriano (or John Fetterman against Mehmet Oz, lol) but not against their guy. A lot of his supporters are just dead-set on seeing Trump as an outsider who doesn’t conform to the binarism of modern American politics, as absurd as that sounds. You can’t project outcomes based on state races when you’ve got a sui generis candidate like Trump.

4. A big fat question is whether we can trust the polls given that Trump’s chances were significantly underestimated by polling (and thus media narrative) in both 2016 and 2020; last cycle, Joe Biden held a national polling lead of more than 10 points just weeks before the election before some pro-Trump movement near Election Day. Unfortunately, the question of whether we can trust the instruments that we use to gauge public opinion, based on prior misses, is one of those known unknowns/unknown unknowns problems. American political polling has actually performed quite well in the past decade, with undercounting Trump’s strength being a decided outlier. Which, again, demonstrates that he really is a candidate like no other. (Huey Long wasn’t around for modern polling.) There are a ton of recent pieces about this angst over whether we can trust polls, with the “shy Trump voter” phenomenon — the suggestion that the perceived negative social costs of publicly supporting Trump leads to systematic underestimation of his level of support — a particular concern. Nonresponse bias, or the tendency of certain nonrandom populations of voters to refuse to participate in polls, is an interconnected problem. Vox reports that pollsters feel “pretty good” about having corrected the mistakes of the recent past, though, so … yeah. We won’t know until we know, and since we’re likely staring down a long period of counting absentee ballots and similar, it’s gonna be awhile.

5. I guess this is fairly abstract, but as in 2020, I feel like this election has been a little muted compared to the 21st century norm. I’m sure many people are making googly eyes over that claim; certainly there’s relentless coverage in a world in which politics is being forced into our brains all the time. And yet — maybe this is me changing rather than the world — I feel like the 2000s elections provoked a deeper sense of exhaustion in me, more of a sense that the presidential races were truly inescapable. If anything, I feel as though 2012 was the zenith/nadir for wall-to-wall election coverage and politics eating into absolutely everything. That’s the election that felt like it started in fall 2010 and which seemed to consume all of our various forms of media and entertainment. That’s funny because, though no one had any such sense at the time, that election is now often looked back on as a sleepy affair from a less pivotal American moment, in large measure because of the Trump effect. While holding on to the possibility, again, that this is purely something that’s changed with me or my life, it really feels like there has been a correction, and election coverage is less relentless. Maybe it’s because there are more channels of entertainment and distraction now compared to before? More user-generated content compared to a prior world of top-down media? The death of linear cable? Don’t know. But feels real to me.

6. Another thing that feels like it has changed: the degree to which specific policy commitments defined presidential campaigns.

The earliest presidential campaign I (sort of) remember was 1988, when I was 7 years old. In it, milquetoast party loyalist and vice president George H.W. Bush ran on continuity with the wildly popular Ronald Reagan administration, which proved insufficient to give him a safe lead for much of the election. His campaign is most remembered for the line he delivered at the Republican National Convention that year, written by Peggy Noonan: “Read my lips: no new taxes.” The pledge demonstrated the Republican commitment to a simple program of small government, which proved effective against Michael Dukakis, who was too easy to paint as a Massachusetts liberal. (But who probably suffered more from various jabs at his height, which is odd considering that at 5-foot-9 he stands at the median American male height.) The famous “It’s the economy, stupid” line from the 1992 election was actually voiced by chief Bill Clinton strategist James Carville rather than the candidate himself, but it perfectly articulated the Democratic line of attack after 12 years of Republican rule; the early-1990s recession was very badly timed for H.W. Bush. Bob Dole was hampered in 1996 by his inability to distinguish himself from a relentlessly rightward-pushing Clinton, while Al Gore’s campaign floundered all campaign long, looking for some sort of central policy identity. (Hence the SNL lockbox jokes.) George W. Bush and John Kerry battled over The War on Terra, which was close to being the only issue actually debated in the campaign. In 2008, Barack Obama’s vision of hope and change was largely articulated through reference to health care reform and immigration, while John McCain tried to play by 2004 rules with a relentlessly foreign-policy fixated campaign and messaging strategy.

Mitt Romney wanted to “double Guantanamo,” one of the funniest and most telling political moments of my lifetime.

I feel like that fixation on simply policy messages has not been present of late. Hillary Clinton buried her economic agenda beneath a flood of celebrity glitz. Trump pledged not to touch Social Security or Medicare, but his campaigns have all been famously substance-light and based on anti-elite resentment; hence, “concepts of a plan” for health care reform. (In fairness, other Republicans have also utterly failed to articulate what they would replace Obamacare with if they repealed it, which most of them quietly would prefer to avoid.) In 2020, Trump was Trump and Joe Biden was not-Trump; the Democrats largely ran on a “return to normalcy” and bet big on Trump exhaustion, exacerbated by COVID. And now in 2024, Trump’s policy agenda is if anything even less clear, with Harris doubling down on the soaring symbolism that Democrats have used to middling effect in the past several decades. Obviously, you can infer a lot of policy specifics from the parties the candidates belong to, and there are points of contention like Trump’s tariffs or the ideas Democrats have for fighting price gouging. But much of the policy stuff is just adjunct to more culture war — immigration is a policy-laden issue, but almost nothing that’s being discussed right now regarding immigration is about policy. It’s about eating pets and what’s fake news and what isn’t.

I could come up with a big rationale for why this might be the case, but I’m not sure there’s any one particular cause. Certainly the culture war element of politics has always been preeminent, but it’s also true that the last few election cycles have seemed particularly indifferent to policy as policy. Perhaps it’s a function of the dynamic, lamented by many, where the incentives of social media always favor tribalism and thus “culture.” I also acknowledge that saying that politics is no longer about substance is kind of a stock old man thing to do, that this probably sounds like a “kids these days” lament. But the dynamic feels very real to me, and the behavior of both candidates suggests a policy-light election.

7. Since the 2016 debacle, I’ve decided not to make presidential election predictions anymore. I am curious as to whether there’s going to be an “October surprise” coming. I confess that, at this point, it’s genuinely hard to imagine any scandal stopping Trump — if the “Access Hollywood” tape and all of the indictments and so much more couldn’t shake his supporters, it’s difficult to think of what might. The real issue here is the influence of the Electoral College; it remains true that the Republicans maintain a small but real advantage thanks to the distribution of white voters without college degrees throughout the states. Ultimately though, we know what the swing states are and where they stand now, more or less. The advantage for Harris is that she has eked out a lead in several of them; the advantage for Trump is that those leads are very small and could lead to the kind of recurring Election Day chaos that has benefitted the GOP. And I really do worry about the consistent undervaluing of Trump as a candidate in the polls. I guess if you put a gun to my head I would say that Harris likely pulls out Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania by a razor-thin margin, and thus the presidency with abortion and related issues proving decisive. (I cannot believe what a gift conservative Christian Republicans are handing the Democrats with this IVF stuff.) But like I said, I’m done making official predictions about these things. This is an extremely tight race and Democrats and their champions need to act that way, not publish more NYT op/eds about how Kamala will win thanks to the power of friendship or whatever. Time to get serious.