There should not be another debate. Obviously, the Harris campaign should *say* there should be and then work under the radar to make certain it doesn't happen. Go out on a high note. The easiest way to lose is to try to "win harder." Sequels are always a disappointment. Let this debate be THE moment.
At the same time, Harris and Walz should be on local TV in Philadelphia, Atlanta, Charlotte, and Phoenix multiple times a week. Local news reporters are local for a reason - they don't yet have the "I'm going to be a star by proving my objectivity" attitude the national folks have, and they're more likely to be star-struck.
Oh, and turn Trump's debate answers into 30-second TV ads.
I agree. There was a piece in the Times today (can’t find it now) about how undecided voters didn’t feel they got enough specifics from Harris about her plans. But a debate with Donald J. Trump is the worst possible format to try to share specifics! You made your point about who’s more cogent; now give the undecideds what they want.
The idea that undecided voters want more policy details is the kind of story that NYT journalists love despite it being definitely false. Most undecided voters pay very little attention to politics.
Never, not even one time in my life, has an "average voter" said to me, "I just need to know more about [candidate]'s position on the mortgage interest deduction."
I’m interested to know more about this. It seems possible to not pay much attention to politics AND to feel like you don’t know enough details to know who to vote for—indeed, one could cause the other! But does the research show that undecideds specifically don’t care about policy?
Here's a recent study: http://newamerica.org/political-reform/reports/undecided-voters-who-they-are-what-they-want-and-how-they-decide-our-politics/ It's not that they don't care about policy, but they have idiosyncratic views that only tenuously relate to their voting behavior and their view of parties, in part because they aren't paying much attention. The vast majority of voters in this group are not pouring over candidates' policy briefs. It's going to be hard enough to get through to them even a simple message like "Harris wants to help out first time homebuyers." Politics junkies often have difficulty understanding that the vast majority of the public is not like us and that's especially true of most undecided voters. (Yes, some voters who pay lots of attention are undecided, but there aren't that many of them.)
I think the idea is that low-information voters are fuzzy on the concept that the Democrats are the party of retaining Social Security and Medicare. Or that Republicans want to cut those programs. As in I'm agreeing with you- low info types literally don't really understand the differences between the parties, except for vibes kinda. So the concept needs to be reiterated for them a number of times.
So I agree with Joseph, Harris should be going on local TV stations and saying the words 'Social Security' over and over and over. I'm actually disappointed that she didn't emphasize this enough in the debates last night
Had a chance at a city council candidates' forum to get involved in small-group conversations with the candidates. It was interesting to see how some other attendees had this one little thing that was bugging them, probably based on their recent life experience, that they somehow thought they could convince the candidates to take action on.
Is it that voters are idiosyncratic, or that the political parties have chosen dumb things to argue about? My life as a YIMBY tells me it's the latter.
I think it's something low information voters say to reporters because they don't want to look like ignorant hayseeds in the newspaper. And understandable position to have!
I think its more like you want a surgeon to be able to give you an extremely detailed explanation about what is going on...even if you don't want to listen to it.
Similarly, undecided voters want Harris to provide details, but they don't want to read them.
I don't think the NYT doing a handful of interviews with nonrandomly selected undecided voters should get any weight at all in understanding what undecided voters as a group are looking for.
Not sure what the NYT doing interviews with nonrandomly selected undecided voters has to do with my point. I was saying that low information voters are easily fooled into thinking this, but hearing the media talk about "the candidate shared their plan" matters more than what the plan actually is.
Right now r/neoliberal is full of memes about the ludicrously uninformed positions of undecided voters. It’s mostly shit-talk but I think the point still stands that if you don’t know [about whatever] by this point, you really just don’t care to know at all.
My mind goes back to all the "undecided" supposedly democrat leaning young voters who kept saying "Why should I vote for Hilary? And don't say 'Because of the supreme court'" when literally the supreme court thing was absolutely 99% of the reason to vote for Hilary.
Undecided voters are just looking for a reason to like one candidate or another. The trick is finding out what weird thing each of them want to hear.
I am certainly not an undecided voter in the sense that I am choosing between the two candidates (Trump is out of the question), but I am undecided in the sense that I may or may not show up to vote at all.
Policy specifics make a legitimate difference for me, and I think other educated, degree-holding moderates as well.
The problem is that this slice of the electorate is, like, 3-5% at most? More self-identified undecided voters are just idiosyncratic and pay significantly less attention to politics writ large.
There's clearly a massive double standard being applied. Harris didn't give enough specifics about the economy; sure, maybe. Trump gave almost no specifics about anything, and the specifics he did give were obvious lies. But nobody on either side actually thinks of Trump as a person from whom they expect things.
She actually did at least give a _few_ specifics in the debate last night($25,000 homebuying, $50,000 small business startup break, $6,000 first year CTC, would sign Roe v. Wade). I think the only one he gave was the tariffs.
The Daily Show, during the runup to one election or another, sat down with undecided voters like a week before the election, and the correspondent played it perfectly; namely, sheer exasperation. IIRC, the correspondent kept asking them questions like, "how, despite an election season lasting basically two years, and bombardment of TV ads, do you still have no idea who you are voting for? What is the crucial bit of information you don't yet have to make your decision???"
I think that talking to local news would be great, but I disagree about having more debates. We’ve gotten consistent feedback from polls that voters think that they don’t know Harris well enough, and every debate is a huge high-audience earned media event— which also generates lots of downstream coverage— where Harris is near certain to come off well (because she’s a smart and good-looking late middle aged former prosecutor standing next to an emotionally incontinent sundowning narcissist who looks like shit.)
To use the prosecutor's analogy doing another debate could turn into a case of "over proving" something ie showing the jury so much evidence that they get confused and decide to acquit.
I'm not sure that she is an underdog. This really all comes down to whether she got her convention bounce in July or in August. Both sides have good arguments. If she got her bounce in July, Nate's model is wrong, and she's 50-60% favored.
He was more disciplined (still lying) in the debate against Biden. I think the risk was that Trump could've said, "Kamala no one cares about your jab about my crowd sizes, people are worried about the economy." He literally could've said that every time. A replacement level candidate would have!
The lack of discipline really is something. He just seems constitutionally incapable of not taking the bait. I really don’t think he can change that about himself at this point either. Dude is just pure emotion. As a “wear my heart on my sleeve” type of dude myself I could see myself feeling sorry for him in a dystopic alternate universe!
When he repeated the Vance thing about pets being eaten, and then the transgender surgery in prisons (which I think is a backpedal from transgender surgery in the public schools because even MAGA couldn't believe it), I concluded that Trump has only one strategy for any and all venues: to repeat the emotional rhetoric that the MAGA crowd responds to.
He occasionally gets scared and alters it a bit (i.e. won't say he supports a federal ban on abortion.) It's easy for him to do that because he himself has no moral convictions.
The surgery part seems to have been correct, per CNN, which describes her 2020 responses to an ACLU questionnaire:
> “It is important that transgender individuals who rely on the state for care receive the treatment they need, which includes access to treatment associated with gender transition,” Harris wrote in a reply expanding on her answer. “That’s why, as Attorney General, I pushed the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to provide gender transition surgery to state inmates,” she wrote.
> Harris explained that she supported granting prisoners and detainees access to “surgical care” for gender transition.
Agreed, although she did an excellent job laying traps at the right moments, particularly on issues with unfriendly ground for her, such as immigration, Afghanistan, inflation. On the issues where she had the advantage (democracy, abortion), she stated a clear and concise position and let Trump flail around.
It is if Trump hides from view, which is pretty much what he was doing prior to the debate. The Democrats are swimming upstream this cycle, that's just the truth, and they need to realize it.
(I have a half-baked theory that Trump is reluctant to campaign very much because he's afraid of getting shot again, and his campaign is pretty happy to just let him do that because they know its to their benefit if he mostly keeps his mouth shut.)
Can I suggest that Harris is was the underdog as of 3 days ago was overblown. I feel like so much of this discussion is basically about Nate Silver’s modeling. And I feel like multiple things are true at once:
- Silver is probably still the election prognosticator I trust most. He’s extraordinarily data driven with his models and he clearly has a good track record. Too many Democrats dunk on Silver with regard to 2016 when in some ways it was greatest triumph. All sorts of forecasters gave Clinton like 90% chance of winning and he was raising alarm bells that his modeling was showing Trump gaining ground rapidly last few days.
- Silver is especially obnoxious and pompous. He has more reason than most people to have a certain degree of earned ego. But nonetheless it’s off putting and it would behoove him to show more humility.
- Silver has been somewhat negatively polarized by the furious backlash he received from progressives about Covid. I do think the cavalier Spock like way he talked about Covid deaths genuinely was off putting and come across as uncaring. To a certain degree I actually get the progressive backlash. Nonetheless the backlash was way too over the top and Silver’s probability analysis weighing risks of COVID post vaccine vs risks associated with strict COVID measures I think was big picture correct.
- Silver’s ire at progressives has led him to be over the top smarmy that he should probably dial back.
- I think there is a legit criticism of his model in that it likely now overweights convention bounce because convention bounces were more pronounced in the past. Nonetheless, recent polls before the debate are I think a partial vindication for silver even if again I think his model needs to be tweaked
- A lot of the backlash is likely people conflating poll numbers with probabilities. Seeing Trump skyrocket to say 65% liklihood of winning makes it seem like he suddenly had this polling lead when most polls still have him down. Again I think Silver’s model overweighted a convention bounce but the criticism he received also reflects people’s lack of understanding of probability stats.
- I think it’s legit criticism to ask why Silver’s model is including Trafalgar and Rasmussen or at least not down weighting them more. The timing of these polls is not accident and they are transparently a way for GOP aligned pollsters to mess with polling averages. It’s ironic because the person who told me that Rasmussen was no longer trustworthy was Nate silver.
- As Matt noted on the podcast. Polling averages will be a much bigger part of Nate’s model as we get to October. Freaking out about his model from first week of September is kind of silly.
- Too many progressives don’t grasp that Trump likely has an electoral college advantage. Too many pundits (including silver I think) assume that electoral college bias will be exact same as 2020 and 2016. And too many pundits just assume that polls will be off the exact same direction in 2024 when polling misses are actually usually random (person who taught me this is silver. Also, I think there are real data points to suggest Harris will outperform her polls). State polls in swing states consistently show Harris up which suggest the electoral college advantage Trump has may be overstated.
It’s quite clear from recent polling that Silver was right and all the people whining about his convention bounce adjustment were wrong, so it’s strange that you think he still shouldn’t have applied the adjustment that was, again, quite clearly accurate.
I don't think that is true. If it were, you would see the models without the convention bounce converging to Silver's estimate. But they haven't been, they've been pretty stable in the mid-50s range for Harris winning.
I believe Nate did a post where he took the convention bounce out and it pretty much went back to 50-50, though I think Trump was slightly over 50%. This may have been before some more recent polling which was mixed for Harris.
OK so if you average Silver Bulletin minus convention bounce (say 50%), 538 (currently 55%), and Decision Desk HQ (also 55%), you get about 53%, which seems plausible. (The Economist model doesn't give me a number but it looks similar, with Harris having a very slight edge.)
I think that that post was from several days ago and I believe Nate's convention bounce fades over time, plus Harris got some poor swing state polls for awhile there (though the last batch before the debate was OK). I suspect a convention-bounce-adjusted Nate forecast would be something like 55% or so for Trump now.
But big-picture, this is all just quibbling over meaningless percentages and anything in the vicinity of "this is a very close race" is reasonable.
I mean, his polling averages have her up in enough swing states to win, plus NC. Her national lead isn't great (+2.2) but it's consistent with a small EC lead. She got some good recent swing state numbers as you say. I don't know where his model comes out today minus convention bounce but if it's really ten points away from the others despite those numbers, I'm suspicious. (Agree with your last paragraph.)
How does one adjudicate whether the convention bounce adjustment was “wrong?”. It’s actually easier to adjudicate whether there should be a convention bounce adjustment than whether it was “correct” any one year. If you look at the elections since 1968, candidates have gotten a convention bounce roughly 90 percent of the time, though the size of these bounces has pretty clearly faded since the days of Bush Sr. and Dukakis. Negative polarization and the overall stability in 2024 polls mean convention bounces on average, will be smaller than in past years, Silver tries to account for this, his thesis that the bounce peaks at 2.5 points is reasonable, but if you weightrecent bounces more heavily than older bounces, you would end up with a peak bounce of ~1.5 percent. Last week, I crunched the numbers monte carlo style with a 1.5 point bounce adjustment, that raised Harris’s odds to ~47%. With a one point bounce adjustment it was 50/50.
Would the bounce adjustment be debunked if Harris rises in the polls? Not at all. She could rise in the polls because of the debate or other events. The polls could be biased against Harris. The utility of the convention bounce can only be proven over time and it has a solid track record. Any serious argument should be about what size adjustment should apply, the only reasons to insist on a coefficient of zero are parsimony and laziness.
I think anyone whose mood changes when one candidate's Silver model-generated probability of winning goes from 53.2% to 53.7% probably needs to get a life.
Modeling such a low N type event when fundamental conditions change so much from election to election is not a profitable use of anyone's time to either do or to pay attention to.
A good addendum to my post. At the end of the day the polling shifts were quite moderate. A 1% change in either direction is very possibly statistical noise and certainly not large enough to warrant some of the more overheated takes. And yes I'm definitely including MSM pundits here. Definitely saw tweets from journalists who should know better who took this slight shift to Trump as some sign that Harris has huge momentum problems, is this why she's going to lose in November. One tweet in particular made me laugh that said the debate was the "last chance" for Harris to change the narrative. Like are you joking?! Look at the landscape two months ago and see how much has happened and ask yourself how in the world you could make such an absurd statement.
Also, good place to point out that Biden's poll numbers at his lowest were still within striking distance of Trump. Judging by pundit analysis and the entire behavior of the GOP at their own convention, you would have thought Trump was cruising with a 10-15 point polling lead.
Why is modeling the election a worse use of one’s mind than chess? Or are you comfortable with abstraction as long as it’s cordoned off from the real world?
Silver's model is probably the most accurate, but it's still one of many. While I appreciate his transparency regarding some of the subjective choices he can make with model control factors, adjustments, etc. (and I'm sure this is true for other modelers as well), it does make me concerned that he will unintentionally let his thoughts about the race flow into the model via the various options and levers it has. I do think he's the single best modeler, though I would not make a bet based solely on his model.
When you say "Seeing Trump skyrocket to say 65% liklihood of winning makes it seem like he suddenly had this polling lead when most polls still have him down" - Silver is taking into account that the popular vote isn't what matters, it's the electoral college, and polling suggests that Harris may struggle in PA while not having a > 50% chance of compensating through GA/NC/etc.
As far as his attitude, he is very cocky, sometimes to a fault. Personally, I like his bluntness and his willingness to call people "fucking stupid" or something similar rather than couch things in a "oh, you're mistaken" or "so and so's take isn't a great one", because many of the people he winds up in feuds with really are acting in bad faith, or have ludicrous takes, i.e. Jaime Harrison on Biden.
I think Matt Y does a better job than Nate at poking holes in bad arguments, or counter-trolling. Nate goes on tilt in a way that’s uncomfortable to watch.
I think he’s honestly just a little autistic and gets hyper fixated on specific details (not derogatory!) – which he keeps repeating until they’re “priced in” to the broader market of takes, or the moment has totally passed.
That's genuinely the part I didn't really get. A few negative state polls came in, but most I saw had her up or tied in most of the key swing states. I'll fully admit that a deeper dive into his model might have answered my question, but even his explanation I still was left feeling like there was a disconnect.
I bit the bullet and subscribed thru election day for $40. Nate's model currently assumes the EC bias will be about 2.5%, a little bit less than 2020 and similar to 2016.
People too often underestimate Nate’s humility. His best trait is not trying to squeeze more certainty out of a situation than the data permit. He is almost always closer to 50/50 than other modelers, and the data have borne him out
Even on the epistemically part ... I think he sometimes under-sells the degree of manual dial turning going on in these model as more data driven than it really is. The one example I'm thinking of is how to manually weight the economic fundamentals and especially given that Biden is / was unpopular and polarization has increased over time. The 538 model had X% and his 2024 model has Y% and he dug in there but both are just assumptions. There's probably 20 other manual weights in his model that are like that.
A lot of negative "Riverian", to use his terminology, traits seem to have rubbed off on him a bit from hanging in those circles. Arrogance, over confidence, assuming that your intelligence is transferable to all fields etc etc, it's very SV/VC brain.
Generally agree with your take here Colin but with two caveats--one minor and one more meaningful:
- The minor one is that I think Silver is less pompous than you characterize him. I would describe him as Krugmanesque: he knows his stuff, doesn't suffer fools gladly, is a very good writer, and takes no prisoners. Also like Krugman he doesn't hesitate to say "I told you so" (which I suppose is a little obnoxious), but I think it's leavened by the fact that they both make clear statements that are falsifiable and are willing to admit when they are wrong. Anyway, I get that you were actually defending Nate, but I think you still overstated a bit the case against him.
- The more meaningful one is about the last point you made about the polls being off. I'm definitely more worried than you seem to about the potential for them again underestimating Trump's support. Here is my thinking. The polls in 2016 and 2020 both missed significantly in the same direction. One theory, of course, is that it is simply chance. Assuming that level of polling errors happens about half the time, then chance would suggest that a quarter of the time we would see a polling error happen in two straight elections favoring the same candidate, so an eighth of the time we would expect to see Trump overperform the way that he did.
However, another theory is that there is something about the unique nature of Trump's candidacy that is causing these errors. And since my memory (though I haven't checked) is that the level of polling error in these races was significantly less than 50% likely to be true by chance, the likelihood of it undercounting Trump's support was significantly less than 12.5%. Which makes me think that the argument that something about Trump is causing it is more likely.
Long story short, I'm more worried than you. So I would love to understand why you think the polling error, if there is any at the moment, is actually undercounting Kamala's support. Would love to hear something that will make me less worried.
Good points! I think the Krugman comparison is incredibly apt. Almost mad I didn’t think of it. I’m a pretty big Krugman booster but it’s absolutely true there is a real smugness to some of his writing. And like Silver, he’s sort of earned a certain degree of smugness unlike the majority of people who exhibit such traits. But yeah totally get why Krugman is sort of hate read by the right; if you don’t agree with his worldview it can probably infuriating to read his work combined with the likely deep seated fear there is a good chance he’s right.
Regarding the polling error (or possibility of polling error) I take your point. I fully admit it’s totally possible that polling error once again means we are understating Trump’s support. Polling errors are often random (person who taught me this; Nate Silver). A coin coming up heads three times in a row is unlikely but not that unlikely. A few points to back up my contention
- see my bullet point about secretly Silver’s greatest triumph. The polling miss in 2016 wasn’t actually as pronounced as we think. The Comey letter likely swung the election (again see Silver). Ultimately Clinton won the popular vote
- I’m a big believer that in 25 years time we’re going to see all stars from 2020 to 2023 as one big outlier; inflation, crime, extreme left wokeness and yes polling. Given the weird circumstances and of who was home or not home or just the incredible weirdness of the period generally. Makes sense polling was also off as well. Speaking of 2020
- Democrats had a severely diminished GOTV and ground game in 2020 because they were actually adhering to COVID rules. I’ve actually been one to downplay on the ground operations in the past but I think it’s more likely now that in the past the two parties cancelled each other out. I think 2020, Trump door knocking was impactful especially in places like the Texas border. This year? Trump is apparently outsourcing this to Musk super PACs. Ask DeSantis how that goes.
- I actually think the Taylor Swift endorsement matters. I’ll rely on my wife for this one but in general I think we underestimate the gender gap this time around.
- democrats have been consistently over performing polls since 2021; midterms, special elections etc. Now these are low (or lower) turnout elections. But sort of the point; the Democratic coalition is the one increasingly likely to actually show up Election Day.
- Here’s maybe the biggest one. How much do we believe polling about African American vote. There was a definite small but noticeable shift in 2020. And I think it’s entirely plausible that there is a further shift right. But polling seems to be indicating one of the biggest realignments like ever. My wife and l have actually discussed some plausible reasons that may make democrats squirm (see Matt’s post about antisemitism). But again, polling is indicting a seismic shift. I’ll eat humble pie if it comes to pass but this is a definite I’ll believe it when I see it.
You can absolutely poke holes in all by bullet points. I’ll reiterate; it was Silver who first taught me polling misses can be kind of random. But hoping to point out that my contention polling is underestimating likely Harris vote numbers isn’t entirely wishcasting on my part (will admit it’s probably partly).
Maybe I need to "do my own research" but the idea that these polls are correctly taking in the effect of COVID deaths, Dobbs, new voter registrations, the long term viability of sane-washing of Trump, poll response rates cratering, switching candidates late, etc is hard to swallow. It seems like the error bars should be two or three times bigger. The continued sales of these polls and these pollsters as really good is more malpractice of the news media.
That said, the Harris campaign needs to keep up the urgency, work across all the channels and run through the tape. On net the Harris campaign seems to be moving the overall race in a positive direction everyday.
I'm voting for Kamala and I'm swayed by most of the positions you listed, but your comment is, uh, one-sided. I was tempted to just drop "found the guy in the thickest bubble". Harris is only competitive because the polls have already incorporated that stuff. Meanwhile, the American right has a comparable list of other concerns that she doesn't speak to, and some of those concerns land with swing voters.
The Harris campaign needs to figure out which of those they can live with matter most, then get to town making swing voters believe they care, not cope themselves out of an election.
I've mentioned this before but I do think there is some reason to believe that polls were a) off in 2020 due to COVID and b) possibly more today than in the past given increasing difficulties involved with polling itself (and reaching younger voters).
My contention regarding 2020 is related to the fact that Democrats were more likely to adhere to Covid restrictions and therefore more likely to be reached by pollsters. Another article I read noted that in 2020 there was an uptick of people who screamed some obscenity, gave answers that indicated they would likely vote for Trump (the "fake news" can't be trusted), but didn't actually finish the polling call (because they furiously hung up) and weren't counted as a Trump voter. Sort of on the fence as to how impactful this really was, but it doesn't seem that crazy either (upshot of this article is pollsters are supposedly counting these people this time around).
I read about parties' internal polling all the time. Does anyone have any reason to believe they're better predictors than the big public polls? If so, why?
What I always hear is that campaigns don't see such polls as predictive but rather snapshots used to help them refine their message and decide which voters to target.
I think the one reason they might be better is that they likely do a lot more of them. They only ever release a tiny cherry picked fraction of them, but if they’re hearing from 300 people in each swing state each day, that’s a lot of meaningful information.
They might be better but they are released selectively. The Harris campaign wants donors to think she is slightly behind because anxiety drives contributions. It's not something to take too seriously.
The Obama campaign also selectively leaked internal polls of Pennsylvania that showed it artificially more competitive than it actually was to get Republicans to waste resources there in a state he was comfortably winning.
>State polls in swing states consistently show Harris up which suggest the electoral college advantage Trump has may be overstated.<
As of a day or two ago Nate was also giving Trump around a 40% chance of winning the *popular* vote. That's not the same as his "advantage" in the Electoral College. But it does filter into the big picture of the odds. That seems a bit high to me, but not hugely so: a pure average of the polls probably has Harris (going into the debate) up by about 2.5%, which is within the margin of error in most of those polls.
I mean...yeah? I guess? And that would've been my reaction if you'd mentioned this possibility to me before reading Nate's analysis on this topic. But he's not stupid when it comes to elections! So, I had to reckon with his analysis and came to the conclusion: yes, although Harris is certainly favored to win the popular vote, one of the decidedly non-impossible scenarios whereby Trump wins this thing is a clean popular vote win.
(Though I'd love to think after this debate such a possibility retreats even further into non-plausibility. Then again, would anybody be shocked if, ten days from now, it becomes clear the debate moved the needle very little? Sigh).
Silver's model I think at one point had Trump's odds of winning close to 65% and continuing to climb over the last week. Given everything he probably is (or was) the favorite but honestly like 55% to 45% at best. Again, I think Silver's model is overweighting the convention bounce. Other thing is the RFK Jr. issue (dropping out of the race and then trying to get his name off the ballot) I suspect is also scrambling the odds. And again, including Rasmussen and Trafalgar I actually think is the strongest anti-Silver argument; I honestly don't know how you can include these polls.
He laid out that from his perspective: "despite that strong Republican house effect, however, they’ve had roughly average accuracy" and its results that matter. Is there more explanation you are looking for?
>And again, including Rasmussen and Trafalgar I actually think is the strongest anti-Silver argument; I honestly don't know how you can include these polls.<
You can include them if you adjust (ie, underweight them) for their track record and their methodological shortcomings.
i don't just mean the specifics of silver's forecast. i mean that the things she still has to do in order to win are legitimately quite hard. matt makes a convincing argument to that effect in today's podcast.
Interesting thoughts on Silver - I appreciate your perspective. My smarm/arrogance-o-meter is usually very sensitive and I don’t notice Silver acting too different than he ever did, which to me wasn’t ever a big deal. He’s more of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur than he ever was a journalist, and I think he’s pretty raw about the 538 thing...but always seemed to me to be pretty honest about the weaknesses and assumptions built into his model, and talks through scenarios openly where the model could be off openly. I agree that his 2016 poll was a triumph…the fact is, 2016 revealed many people on both sides don’t have an inherent grasp for what it means to offer data-driven probabilistic prediction that he does, how it differs from claiming some moral certainty about the future…when you say X has a 2/3 chance, you expect Y to happen 1/3 of the time. I fully supported Nate for the ire his Covid messaging got. Anyone trying to do cost benefit analysis, anyone who raised the idea of differential risk, anyone in less than full-panic, anyone arguing to ease the hawkishness got treated as some kind of traitor…(along the same lines as MY himself for not being in lockstep on Left identity politics during the Trump admin)…
BTW - I think Nate said recently that he includes and weights Rasmussen heavily mainly for balance - because there are very few right-leaning polls even close to reliable.
Silver doesn't think the electoral advantage will be "the same as 2020 and 2016" I believe he said he thinks its shrinking, but still there. He is, of course, applying a model for the advantage itself, but it is one that is a bit more sophisticated than copy-paste from 2020 or 2016. Unless there is good evidence to think the electoral college advantage problem is gone, we ought to be worried about Harris current numbers.
I’ll fully admit I am likely conflating a bit Silver’s analysis a bit with some other pundit’s prognostications who seem to be way over confident the polling miss will be the same direction. Nonetheless my skepticism of Silver's contention remains while acknowledging I will take Silver’s analysis 100 times out of 100 over most MSM pundits if that makes any sense.
I think one upside of not doing much press before the debate is that some of the canned lines she did were less stale than if she had been doing them on every tv show in the country. (I know some of these lines, but I've watched videos of most of her rallies so am not a normal person). I wonder if that was, at least in part, intentional. Agree that it would make sense for her to do more press now.
Let me add that some of the ``new'' lines she did (or came up with) were absolutely killer, so I'm hoping that the ones I've heard before sound good to normal people, too (I can't tell). Her body language did a good job of flagging nonsense, even with the muted mics. And, of course the one time she tried to really speak over the muted mic really made me wonder what it was she wanted to get out. It did not disappoint.
Last night's debate performance if anything only makes the no press, no interviews thing more puzzling. Judging from how well VP Harris did here, and the fact that even Governor Walz (someone who likes and positively shines in interviews) has been refusing any substantive questions from the press, I can't help but wonder if they're trying a kind of sandbagging strategy - sure you seem evasive or even aloof to the electorate for long stretches but you also don't give the opponent any real meat to chew on - and you get moments like the DNC speeches where you can pop out and show 'em. The debates are an even stronger opportunity because of the haymakers you land if you take a few calculated risks (as Yglesias wrote).
That being said I'm still of the camp that thinks Harris and Walz should be doing interviews and press throughout the week every week to November. The dress rehearsals have gone well enough and I'm pretty sure this is as close to showtime as it gets.
I live in a swing district in a swing state. Trump and Harris are here so often it doesn't even make the front page of the newspaper anymore. But they have done zero interviews.
PS Every day I get a slew of anti-Harris / pro-Trump fliers, "hand-written" letters from local politicians imploring me to vote for Trump and grainy photographs of Harris shaking hands with communists or whatever. About once a week I will get generically pro-Democrat fliers from a PAC.
I don’t think it’s true that the campaign is entirely run by Biden people. There’s overlap, sure, but she brought on former Obama people and her own longtime advisors: https://wapo.st/3zeM1B4
Yeah but the people running the show are the Biden people out of Delaware(!), starting with the incompetent Jen O'Malley Dillon, who should have been fired when Harris took over given her leadership of the Biden campaign into absolute disaster.
Trump is right. The Democrats have become very sensitive to HR concerns and don't like to be ruthless and fire people anymore. It's a bad thing for us.
It is interesting at the same time as the Harris campaign performance in the debate is being loudly applauded that the “you’re fired” comment by Trump is considered as needed to be applied seriously within the Harris campaign organization. This is another case of applying a “reality show” mentality before evaluating the results or consequences of present events. The country has been living a Trump reality show the last 10 years and the emperor has again finally been defined as naked before the public. Let’s critique the campaign as Matt did in this piece not be distracted reality tv show mental.
You shouldn't fire people who merely failed to succeed at a task. They should either be moved into a position they can succeed in or worked with to enable them to succeed. If fire everyone who fails to accomplish what you like then you end up in a situation (like Trump) where nobody competent will work with you because they know they will just get thrown under the bus at the slightest provocation.
This is a common assumption but it's really hard to do as campaigns are temporary organizations (especially this one!) so there can be real downsides to just firing a bunch of people. Who's going to book all the new interviews after you've fired all the communications staff?
Likewise just because you have problems with the "A Team" doesn't mean the new "B Team" will be better, we saw this a lot with Trump's White House where he'd fire people and the new people would be significantly worse than those he replaced and then he fire them and the cycle would repeat.
If you hire a bunch of people and you have to fire one of them, you had to fire one of them. If you have to fire people all day perhaps you're the one who needs to be fired.
Actually presidential campaigns fire people all the time, especially HIGH LEVEL people. Firing the campaign manager has worked before, most recently for Trump in 2016.
You guys are acting like someone's going to fire all the young staffers, but we are talking about senior people who should absolutely know that if they do a crappy job they won't be working for the campaign anymore.
I wonder if the campaign team, having been built for Biden to avoid the press, simply lacks the nuts and bolts skillset and contacts to get the type of press you and Matt suggest. It may be one of the challenges of having to switch candidate and strategies so completely so late in the race.
she has done some interviews and taken press questions besides the cnn one. You can find them by looking on youtube. There is one that is about 8 minutes with the press taking questions a few days before the convention (``I am still working on my speech but it is coming along nicely'' or something like that), a couple radio interviews, a spot addressing the cheyney endorsement in a liberal spice store etc. Some of the silly questions people yell at her (``will you pardon hunter?''), makes me wonder whether it is one of the reasons she hasn't done more formal press conferences.
I think point 15 is the most important—every second that Kamala is not in the news, Trump fills the void. When Trump is driving news cycles he feels inevitable, I think, because it reminds us of when he was president and drove every news cycle. Counterintuitively, it makes us subconsciously perceive him as the president, as though he already won.
I can't understand why "everyone" thinks that the way for her to stay in the news is to do a bunch of interviews. I mean, sure, in the literal sense doing an interview puts you on the news, but if MAGA pounces on an out-of-context quote as proof that Hunter Biden is smuggling felons across the border to perform nonconsensual gender reassignment surgeries on children that survived post-partum abortions, that will become the story. Meanwhile she's wasted time that could've been spent doing rallies in swing states.
Since we're doing football analogies, when your team is coming from behind, "timing" your moves is as important as the content of those moves. For instance (this is more about football than politics) you want to try to time your last couple of drives so that you don't leave too much time on the clock for the other team's QB at the end of the game.
I think the problem with the sports metaphor is that in football, you know what the objective score is right now. And in politics you don't.
To belabor the point: if you're up 3 points right now in football, and you can run out the clock, you DEFINITELY win. If you're down 3 points and you run out the clock, you DEFINITELY lose.
Even if we assume that Nate Silver's election forecast (or someone else's) is as exactly accurate as it is possible to be, it suggests that if you run out the clock, you have... a 40% chance of winning or a 60% chance of winning.
This kinda breaks the analogy. Like, there's much more incentive for the "winning" side to make risky plays than there would be in sports, and vice-versa there's more risk of a risky play for the "losing" side to drop their chance of winning from 40% to 37%.
Maybe (American) football is the wrong analogy. Perhaps soccer is better. Where no one knows when the game will actually end (or what day the election will actually take place). And players try to deceive the referees by rolling on the field shrieking in pain and then when the red card is flashed they pop up and run off like nothing happened. And then when one team wins, the other team's fans run on the field and destroy the place.
In sports, you know if you're winning or you're losing. Yes, there is uncertainty about how the rest of the game is going to go, but you know instantaneously what's happening.
If you're losing a play that says, "I have a 50% chance of put a touchdown up and a 50% chance to give the opponent a touchdown" is appealing, because losing by more doesn't really hurt you (to a first approximation), while getting a touchdown puts you in a winning position. And vice versa if you're winning.
But in politics, where you aren't sure if you're winning, if you have a play to make that has a 50% chance of increasing your chance of winning by 5% and a 50% chance of decreasing it by 5%, that's a neutral play regardless of whether you currently think you have a 40% chance of winning or a 60%. There's much less obviously a different correct play for the "underdog."
I thought Harris pretty deftly handled owning some aspects of the Biden record but distancing herself from others, but I don't know how much she's gonna be able to thread that needle going forward. A good opponent would have said something like "Oh you're proud of the IRA? You take credit for that? What about the economy, do you take credit for that? Can you tell us which parts of the Biden presidency you want to own and which parts you want us to forget?"
She doesn't really have to thread the needle though. There are no more debates, and no real need for any big sit down gotcha interview. If she follows Matt's advice her sparring partners will be local news, sympathetic outlets, and friends she makes in the back of her campaign plane who can be schmoozed into being nice so they can be the well sourced White House correspondent for their network/organization, a la John McCain.
- "Look, everyone watching knows I just baited Trump with the crowd size comments, and he fell for it hook, line, and sinker. He was easily manipulated right before your eyes. Imagine what Putin and Xi are capable of doing to him."
- "As a gun owner...as opposed to do Donald Trump who is not." If he says he is, remind him he is a felon and it is illegal for him to own a gun ;)
Matt's right in that you can't "debate" Trump since he just vomits lies and half truths at an unfathomable pace but in the same vein I wish she would just flat out make fun of him at times. For example, Trump thinks other countries "pay tariffs." She could easily say something like "I don't like the inflation that happened in 2022-2023 either, which is why I'm against applying a 10% tariff on everything. We want to lower prices for the American people, unlike my opponent who thinks other countries pay tariffs when it's really the American people."
"Trump, in theory, could have been scrupulously honest."
The "in theory" in that sentence is doing enough heavy lifting to make Arnold Schwarzenegger at the height of his powers look like a 95-pound weakling.
One thing I would love to see is for her to do some media with content creators. Trump has been making the rounds of YouTubers - Harris needs to do that. A popular suggestion on Reddit was that she should do Hot Ones. Maybe that's not the right suggestion but she needs to be seen in a more informal setting.
I think Hot Ones is the perfect opportunity for her (if they'll have her). She says she loves spicy food and big names on that show get MILLIONS of views of what I assume is mostly young Americans (though of course there's international viewers too). I don't think there is a single other reasonable place for her to get that level of exposure in what would likely be a pretty friendly environment.
Brace yourself for the Trump reaction to such an appearance: "She goes on this Hot One show and she's eating wings while cackling - but I saw on television that down the street from the studio, the criminal illegals were ripping the wings off beautiful pet birds! The Haitians, the Veneuzelans, they're using cockatiels for food! Are they giving the pet wings to Kamablah for food? I don't know, but people a lot of questions and we'll be getting to the bottom of this very soon."
A lot of people miss how huge these Youtube shows are. A lot of the Youtube audience is younger so they don't get info from traditional media, and they are also more likely to be undecided.
Youtube channels and podcasts are where it's at. Local media can't hurt (and it's regionally targeted, come to think of it) but my guess is the big podcasts have way more voters. And you can do a much more effective 30 mins or hour.
My point is both that they shouldn't be targeting the popular vote, target the electoral college, and that local media tend to be less full of themselves than the national media, so you can get your message out. Not opposed to podcasts or Youtube, though, go on Rogan for example
Going on Rogan would easily be worth 10k, 50k votes. If nothing else it would be generate free "earned media" and show her not to be scared of RFK voters and "manly men".
Basically, but in rotation (fatigue is a thing). And Pittsburgh and Milwaukee at least should be thrown in that mix. Probably Grand Rapids, Harrisburg, and Madison too (they're big enough media markets that the tipping-point voter for each state could be/probably is in that broadcast range.)
When Harris talked about the all-of-the-above energy strategy and pointed out that domestic oil production is higher today than under Trump, my immediate thought was about Slow Boring and how she listened to Matt.
I know the Harris campaign wanted the mikes to stay on so she could rebut him, and they had to scramble to retool her strategy when ABC kept the pre-agreed muted mikes in place. Honestly, I’m glad the Harris team lost this fight. Everyone thinks the way to beat Trump is to fact-check him in real-time, but all this does is exacerbate his gish gallop tendencies. And then of course she’d be struggling to finish a sentence when it was her turn to speak because he can never shut up. The end result would have been an incoherent mess of a debate that most viewers probably would have hated.
Everybody's giving Harris great reviews on this debate generally. And preaching to the choir I thought she did great. But if it's about peeling off that 1 to 3% of Republican voters and getting some undecideds I give her effort last night a C+. It is hard to debate a psychopath but at the end of the day winning that sliver is what's necessary at this point. No clue why she talked about handing everybody $25,000
She talked about the $25,000 because people trying for their first house, or concerned about people trying for their first house, see the 25k as a meaningful step from where they are today. That the net effect is that much of that 25k would be eaten up by the market shifty it would cost, is not a well understood phenomenon.
Right but to right-wingers it's going to sound like more irresponsible handouts. And that center right voter is who we need. A center right voter like myself. Who is confused when progressive economists say this is a bad idea that she keeps saying this crap.
Small business owners are a huge constituency for republicans. She explicitly said she'd give them money. She said she was a gun owner. If you're judging her on pandering to the center, she knocked it out of the park.
Except that's not the kind of pandering that does well with the right. More handouts from libs that are going to take the money from other people seems like a bad idea we'll give you a small business something but then bend you over on the taxes anyway. And nobody expects Kamala to know s*** about guns let's be straight up about that .. how many times has she been hunting how often does she stay up on her marksmanship at the range The answer to most of that is going to be next to zero. They are so out of touch they don't even know how to pander well
"Well that doesn't count, because she's never been hunting and I bet her marksmanship sucks!"
What's this? Since when do you have to go hunting to be a gun owner in good standing with the American Right? Can't you be an urban gun owner who doesn't like hunting but who wants to own a handgun for personal defense? The Second Amendment is about a "well-regulated militia," not about hunting.
And frankly, if you wanted to make good marksmanship a prerequisite for gun ownership, I'd be 100% in favor of that, but I get the feeling if a librul said that, the Right would go flippin' nuts.
You're totally right I'm just saying on the merits, The gun ownership conversation is a lot larger than just having one. And yes the type of people that will move the goal posts are the types of people we are trying to win. Perhaps if she had gone into a nuanced position about guns and ownership it would have been better. But I'm telling you as somebody who is an infantry officer for over 15 years and know a lot of gun-toting nuts. Her gun ownership is about as authentic as Obama meeting with religious leaders to show that he's a Christian. Sure maybe he is. But I probably know how he's going to weigh in on people baking cakes.
Are we trying to win the kind of people who will move the goalposts? Those sound like committed partisans who don't want to change their views vs undecideds who presumably won't move the goalposts.
Yeah I don't know I know a lot of my conservative friends I won over to Biden. But kamala's rhetoric on taxing the wealthy giving handouts to businesses and first time home buyers really didn't resonate. And these are people who the first person they ever voted for Democrat wise was Biden. It is hard to get a sense for who swing voters are though at least I've had a hard time truly understanding. I can just share what's been in the groups of discourse that I have been around. My comfort for these guys is like Trump said, is not going to be able to do really anything except handle wars and trade well because she's not going to have a supportive Senate
Edit: I stand by this, but it doesn't apply to KH if she said she owns the gun for self-defense.
You've got a point, but "I own a gun" isn't going to move any needles, anywhere. My septegenarian mother owns a gun that she inherited from my father, but she's never held it, probably never opened the safe, and straight up hates having it in her house.
If a Democrat wants to make inroads with gun owners, the bare minimum is going to involve persuading them that he or she actually gets it, probably by credibly explaining the reason they have a gun - because they love shooting, because they hunt, for self defense, whatever.
I hope you're right... I would prefer something more robust than what you've given and I really pray that it's right. From the circles I'm talking to mainly people in Alabama Tennessee and Utah. That's the vibe I'm getting. And as somebody that grew up conservative that was my read on it.
I mean... she was DA. She hung out with cops for most of her career. She's probably been to the shooting range far more often than the typical republican. And it's obvious she is the type of gun owner who owns one for security reasons, not recreational ones. Never at any point did she try to make herself sound like a deer hunter lol.
Owning a gun and standing up for the interests of the second amendment crowd is very different. I doubt she could wade in to the space well. Nor would it play to her base very well to talk about land access issues out in Utah, hunting wetland preservation, The personal defense stuff, armed guards at schools. This is something that the left bangs drums about but knows generally next to nothing about as well.
Yeah, this is just disingenuous goal post moving again. Obviously no one who has any plans of attacking the second amendment would talk about owning a gun, that'd make them seem like a hypocrite. You can even believe they are a hypocrite, it doesn't matter, they wouldn't, as politicians, want to SEEM like one. Kamala is very strongly signaling here that she won't support gun bans. I don't know what the hell else you want. She doesn't have to cosplay Elmer Fudd to make the point.
I think the thing about schools is revealin. Virtually every school in America that has armed guards is in an urban district that votes heavily democrat, even the ones in very red states. Yet for some reason you think the right is more informed on the issue?
Yes generally I do they just have different opinions about what they want to do about it. Most of the lefties I know want to get what they call assault weapons taken up when pistols do the majority of the killings but yes the left is incoherent and lost on guns generally as a whole not that there are not some academics on the left that would exceed what people on the right would generally know. And yes the left if they had their way would just get rid of all of them honestly.. And from a human harm perspective that would be the right call actually.
The left is full of Trojan horse lying. Okay we're going to take this lesser stance but at the end most of us want some form of socialized everything and no guns and redistribution and let's get affirmative action back in the ivy leagues and other places and we're just going to master plan this whole thing freedoms be damned unless those freedoms are to be gay or have access to transgender surgeries or free college without military service. I'm sure there's lefties that don't agree with all of that but that's definitely the broader subtext and platform for a whole bunch of people.
I guess it depends on whether there are people who are currently voting for him who don’t want to vote for the guy who’s always ranting about transgender illegals doing post-birth abortion and eating people’s pet dogs.
I mean to give you the perspective of somebody who was conservative their whole life until 2016.... Kamala's answers on abortion were bad... Trump kicking stuff back to the States is a very conservative view and the view that the people should decide but at the state level came off a lot stronger than kamala's story about female autonomy, a better crafted message could help get even more women in conservative states on the Democratic side. Immigration and undocumented people or as they like to call them illegals are big on both sides right now and that's why Kamala has shifted her stance and tried to pull a tough on immigration posture without alienating the far left. (Trump was right she has flip-flopped on damn near everything). Also the transgender stuff I find a lot of people on the left and including in this comment section are not very accepting there and anybody that talks about being tough on trans stuff or protecting sports, or we don't know about it but it's weird and we need to be cautious is going to be over and above with a low information swing voter or anybody on the right wing over somebody that's like transgender inclusion full stop. A lot of conservatives don't like Trump but are going to vote for him anyway because well Harris is nowhere near conservative and keep saying crazy lefty baloney that she won't be able to do. So unless Kamala can get talking points that resonate better it's going to be let's go to the polls and turn out is going to be more important than persuasion I think we should wage both wars both turn out and convincing. That will require a different tact from Harris's team one that I don't know they have the brain power or staffing to pull off or if Kamala can do any of that kind of talk convincingly
1) Trump had some good points about how lots of legal scholars didn't like Roe v. Wade, but that's a pretty in-the-weeds answer.
2) Kicking it back to the states was I think way more popular in the past until it actually happened and the states started trying a bunch of extreme bans on abortion - her IVF statement, and her examples were all pretty strong here.
I think the people who _still_ aren't convinced on this are either super pro-life (and wouldn't vote for her anyway) or die-hard libertarian states rights, but there aren't that many, and both candidates have lots of anti-libertarian positions.
I mean, I think it's a dishonest talking point even when it's made in a more sophisticated way (such as by Alito in Dobbs). It works by conflating (1) people who think Dobbs is correct with (2) people who think that there's a constitutional right to abortion but Roe doesn't do a good job as a matter of judicial craft and/or relied on the wrong rationale and (3) people who think that on a blank slate there's no constitutional right to abortion but stare decisis should have been decisive in favor of retaining Roe and Casey. All together, (1), (2), and (3) is a lot of scholars (though certainly not "all") but it's really only (1) that counts as a defense of Dobbs.
Yeah I think those are some really good points. I'm more talking about the people that lean more broadly conservative will generally say they want it at the states. And for him to say hey look I'm not anti-abortion but I did this weird thing that a lot of other smart people like is defensible. Even though I find it repugnant because things they don't like they kick up to the fed if they don't get the results they want they take it to the States or try to and they go back and forth until they get what they want and then when they catch the dog they get mad because then they got to pick on something else like transgender people to try to get people angry to the polls. A piece of this isn't just winning swing voters which I think is important but also keeping your base riled up and ready to show up for you on voting day. Obviously Trump lied so many times but the way he talked about things and the way he came off is going to keep the motivation up for his side.
I mean this is a case where we have both politicians that will try to say anything they can to get elected and minimize anything they can't say to keep them from being damaged. I don't trust either one of them to do well in the role obviously Trump the bigger dumpster fire
> Trump kicking stuff back to the States is a very conservative view and the view that the people should decide but at the state level came off a lot stronger than kamala's story about female autonomy.
Yeah he doesn't cite his source there I'd be interested to take a look at it. I think abortion is one of the biggest opportunities for Kamala and she did okay but I don't think she hit it out of the park.
She gave that spiel twice and I couldn't help thinking she needed to get that number crap out of here there for everything but the CTC, she's debating Donald Trump. She should have said she had a plan to invest in new homeowners and new business owners with down payment assistance and tax credits, while Donald Trump's plan, if you could call it that, was to cut billionaires' taxes again and sign whatever new abortion bans or other restrictions on American freedom the radicals on his team put on his desk.
There should not be another debate. Obviously, the Harris campaign should *say* there should be and then work under the radar to make certain it doesn't happen. Go out on a high note. The easiest way to lose is to try to "win harder." Sequels are always a disappointment. Let this debate be THE moment.
At the same time, Harris and Walz should be on local TV in Philadelphia, Atlanta, Charlotte, and Phoenix multiple times a week. Local news reporters are local for a reason - they don't yet have the "I'm going to be a star by proving my objectivity" attitude the national folks have, and they're more likely to be star-struck.
Oh, and turn Trump's debate answers into 30-second TV ads.
100% agree with this.
I agree. There was a piece in the Times today (can’t find it now) about how undecided voters didn’t feel they got enough specifics from Harris about her plans. But a debate with Donald J. Trump is the worst possible format to try to share specifics! You made your point about who’s more cogent; now give the undecideds what they want.
The idea that undecided voters want more policy details is the kind of story that NYT journalists love despite it being definitely false. Most undecided voters pay very little attention to politics.
Never, not even one time in my life, has an "average voter" said to me, "I just need to know more about [candidate]'s position on the mortgage interest deduction."
I’m interested to know more about this. It seems possible to not pay much attention to politics AND to feel like you don’t know enough details to know who to vote for—indeed, one could cause the other! But does the research show that undecideds specifically don’t care about policy?
Here's a recent study: http://newamerica.org/political-reform/reports/undecided-voters-who-they-are-what-they-want-and-how-they-decide-our-politics/ It's not that they don't care about policy, but they have idiosyncratic views that only tenuously relate to their voting behavior and their view of parties, in part because they aren't paying much attention. The vast majority of voters in this group are not pouring over candidates' policy briefs. It's going to be hard enough to get through to them even a simple message like "Harris wants to help out first time homebuyers." Politics junkies often have difficulty understanding that the vast majority of the public is not like us and that's especially true of most undecided voters. (Yes, some voters who pay lots of attention are undecided, but there aren't that many of them.)
I think the idea is that low-information voters are fuzzy on the concept that the Democrats are the party of retaining Social Security and Medicare. Or that Republicans want to cut those programs. As in I'm agreeing with you- low info types literally don't really understand the differences between the parties, except for vibes kinda. So the concept needs to be reiterated for them a number of times.
So I agree with Joseph, Harris should be going on local TV stations and saying the words 'Social Security' over and over and over. I'm actually disappointed that she didn't emphasize this enough in the debates last night
Had a chance at a city council candidates' forum to get involved in small-group conversations with the candidates. It was interesting to see how some other attendees had this one little thing that was bugging them, probably based on their recent life experience, that they somehow thought they could convince the candidates to take action on.
Is it that voters are idiosyncratic, or that the political parties have chosen dumb things to argue about? My life as a YIMBY tells me it's the latter.
I think it's something low information voters say to reporters because they don't want to look like ignorant hayseeds in the newspaper. And understandable position to have!
I think its more like you want a surgeon to be able to give you an extremely detailed explanation about what is going on...even if you don't want to listen to it.
Similarly, undecided voters want Harris to provide details, but they don't want to read them.
I don't think the NYT doing a handful of interviews with nonrandomly selected undecided voters should get any weight at all in understanding what undecided voters as a group are looking for.
Not sure what the NYT doing interviews with nonrandomly selected undecided voters has to do with my point. I was saying that low information voters are easily fooled into thinking this, but hearing the media talk about "the candidate shared their plan" matters more than what the plan actually is.
Right now r/neoliberal is full of memes about the ludicrously uninformed positions of undecided voters. It’s mostly shit-talk but I think the point still stands that if you don’t know [about whatever] by this point, you really just don’t care to know at all.
My mind goes back to all the "undecided" supposedly democrat leaning young voters who kept saying "Why should I vote for Hilary? And don't say 'Because of the supreme court'" when literally the supreme court thing was absolutely 99% of the reason to vote for Hilary.
Undecided voters are just looking for a reason to like one candidate or another. The trick is finding out what weird thing each of them want to hear.
Worse yet, they seem to think undecided voters want the sort of plans Elizabeth Warren has.
I am certainly not an undecided voter in the sense that I am choosing between the two candidates (Trump is out of the question), but I am undecided in the sense that I may or may not show up to vote at all.
Policy specifics make a legitimate difference for me, and I think other educated, degree-holding moderates as well.
The problem is that this slice of the electorate is, like, 3-5% at most? More self-identified undecided voters are just idiosyncratic and pay significantly less attention to politics writ large.
Honestly, I’d guess much less than 3-5%. Educated, interested, and maybe not voting?
I’d humbly point out that not voting is functionally the same as voting for both.
You can call this slice the “Caplan” voter block, after professor Bryan Caplan (who, I think, exemplifies this sentiment).
This came up a few times in WaPo's article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/interactive/2024/presidential-debate-voter-poll/
There's clearly a massive double standard being applied. Harris didn't give enough specifics about the economy; sure, maybe. Trump gave almost no specifics about anything, and the specifics he did give were obvious lies. But nobody on either side actually thinks of Trump as a person from whom they expect things.
She actually did at least give a _few_ specifics in the debate last night($25,000 homebuying, $50,000 small business startup break, $6,000 first year CTC, would sign Roe v. Wade). I think the only one he gave was the tariffs.
While revealing he still does not understand how tariffs work...
It was interesting to me that 3/4 of her plans were tax cuts. Felt very 1990s Bill Clinton.
Ah yes, undecided voters and their thoughtful questions:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAG37Kw1-aw
The Daily Show, during the runup to one election or another, sat down with undecided voters like a week before the election, and the correspondent played it perfectly; namely, sheer exasperation. IIRC, the correspondent kept asking them questions like, "how, despite an election season lasting basically two years, and bombardment of TV ads, do you still have no idea who you are voting for? What is the crucial bit of information you don't yet have to make your decision???"
I think that talking to local news would be great, but I disagree about having more debates. We’ve gotten consistent feedback from polls that voters think that they don’t know Harris well enough, and every debate is a huge high-audience earned media event— which also generates lots of downstream coverage— where Harris is near certain to come off well (because she’s a smart and good-looking late middle aged former prosecutor standing next to an emotionally incontinent sundowning narcissist who looks like shit.)
I think the Harris campaign just wants the Trump people to say they don't want another debate.
No mas! No mas!
Counterpoints: The Empire Strikes Back. Max Max: The Road Warrior. Rambo.
Counter-counter point: First Blood: Part II should obviously have been called just Second Blood
To use the prosecutor's analogy doing another debate could turn into a case of "over proving" something ie showing the jury so much evidence that they get confused and decide to acquit.
She is still an underdog, she should increase variance
I'm not sure that she is an underdog. This really all comes down to whether she got her convention bounce in July or in August. Both sides have good arguments. If she got her bounce in July, Nate's model is wrong, and she's 50-60% favored.
Yeah, I tend to agree that this would be the optimal outcome.
I get the point about calculated risks, but Harris' bet that Trump is lying and undisciplined didn't seem too risky to me
He was more disciplined (still lying) in the debate against Biden. I think the risk was that Trump could've said, "Kamala no one cares about your jab about my crowd sizes, people are worried about the economy." He literally could've said that every time. A replacement level candidate would have!
You know, I think he literally could *not* have said that.
The lack of discipline really is something. He just seems constitutionally incapable of not taking the bait. I really don’t think he can change that about himself at this point either. Dude is just pure emotion. As a “wear my heart on my sleeve” type of dude myself I could see myself feeling sorry for him in a dystopic alternate universe!
A broken clock is… broken.
When he repeated the Vance thing about pets being eaten, and then the transgender surgery in prisons (which I think is a backpedal from transgender surgery in the public schools because even MAGA couldn't believe it), I concluded that Trump has only one strategy for any and all venues: to repeat the emotional rhetoric that the MAGA crowd responds to.
He occasionally gets scared and alters it a bit (i.e. won't say he supports a federal ban on abortion.) It's easy for him to do that because he himself has no moral convictions.
The surgery part seems to have been correct, per CNN, which describes her 2020 responses to an ACLU questionnaire:
> “It is important that transgender individuals who rely on the state for care receive the treatment they need, which includes access to treatment associated with gender transition,” Harris wrote in a reply expanding on her answer. “That’s why, as Attorney General, I pushed the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to provide gender transition surgery to state inmates,” she wrote.
> Harris explained that she supported granting prisoners and detainees access to “surgical care” for gender transition.
(https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/09/politics/kfile-harris-pledged-support-in-2019-to-cut-ice-funding-and-provide-transgender-surgery-to-detained-migrants/index.html)
Fwiw, I support it too, at least in theory.
Nope. That’s wild and I’m surprised to see this was real.
Agreed, although she did an excellent job laying traps at the right moments, particularly on issues with unfriendly ground for her, such as immigration, Afghanistan, inflation. On the issues where she had the advantage (democracy, abortion), she stated a clear and concise position and let Trump flail around.
It is if Trump hides from view, which is pretty much what he was doing prior to the debate. The Democrats are swimming upstream this cycle, that's just the truth, and they need to realize it.
(I have a half-baked theory that Trump is reluctant to campaign very much because he's afraid of getting shot again, and his campaign is pretty happy to just let him do that because they know its to their benefit if he mostly keeps his mouth shut.)
Can I suggest that Harris is was the underdog as of 3 days ago was overblown. I feel like so much of this discussion is basically about Nate Silver’s modeling. And I feel like multiple things are true at once:
- Silver is probably still the election prognosticator I trust most. He’s extraordinarily data driven with his models and he clearly has a good track record. Too many Democrats dunk on Silver with regard to 2016 when in some ways it was greatest triumph. All sorts of forecasters gave Clinton like 90% chance of winning and he was raising alarm bells that his modeling was showing Trump gaining ground rapidly last few days.
- Silver is especially obnoxious and pompous. He has more reason than most people to have a certain degree of earned ego. But nonetheless it’s off putting and it would behoove him to show more humility.
- Silver has been somewhat negatively polarized by the furious backlash he received from progressives about Covid. I do think the cavalier Spock like way he talked about Covid deaths genuinely was off putting and come across as uncaring. To a certain degree I actually get the progressive backlash. Nonetheless the backlash was way too over the top and Silver’s probability analysis weighing risks of COVID post vaccine vs risks associated with strict COVID measures I think was big picture correct.
- Silver’s ire at progressives has led him to be over the top smarmy that he should probably dial back.
- I think there is a legit criticism of his model in that it likely now overweights convention bounce because convention bounces were more pronounced in the past. Nonetheless, recent polls before the debate are I think a partial vindication for silver even if again I think his model needs to be tweaked
- A lot of the backlash is likely people conflating poll numbers with probabilities. Seeing Trump skyrocket to say 65% liklihood of winning makes it seem like he suddenly had this polling lead when most polls still have him down. Again I think Silver’s model overweighted a convention bounce but the criticism he received also reflects people’s lack of understanding of probability stats.
- I think it’s legit criticism to ask why Silver’s model is including Trafalgar and Rasmussen or at least not down weighting them more. The timing of these polls is not accident and they are transparently a way for GOP aligned pollsters to mess with polling averages. It’s ironic because the person who told me that Rasmussen was no longer trustworthy was Nate silver.
- As Matt noted on the podcast. Polling averages will be a much bigger part of Nate’s model as we get to October. Freaking out about his model from first week of September is kind of silly.
- Too many progressives don’t grasp that Trump likely has an electoral college advantage. Too many pundits (including silver I think) assume that electoral college bias will be exact same as 2020 and 2016. And too many pundits just assume that polls will be off the exact same direction in 2024 when polling misses are actually usually random (person who taught me this is silver. Also, I think there are real data points to suggest Harris will outperform her polls). State polls in swing states consistently show Harris up which suggest the electoral college advantage Trump has may be overstated.
Think I covered everything. Thoughts?
It’s quite clear from recent polling that Silver was right and all the people whining about his convention bounce adjustment were wrong, so it’s strange that you think he still shouldn’t have applied the adjustment that was, again, quite clearly accurate.
I don't think that is true. If it were, you would see the models without the convention bounce converging to Silver's estimate. But they haven't been, they've been pretty stable in the mid-50s range for Harris winning.
I believe Nate did a post where he took the convention bounce out and it pretty much went back to 50-50, though I think Trump was slightly over 50%. This may have been before some more recent polling which was mixed for Harris.
OK so if you average Silver Bulletin minus convention bounce (say 50%), 538 (currently 55%), and Decision Desk HQ (also 55%), you get about 53%, which seems plausible. (The Economist model doesn't give me a number but it looks similar, with Harris having a very slight edge.)
I think that that post was from several days ago and I believe Nate's convention bounce fades over time, plus Harris got some poor swing state polls for awhile there (though the last batch before the debate was OK). I suspect a convention-bounce-adjusted Nate forecast would be something like 55% or so for Trump now.
But big-picture, this is all just quibbling over meaningless percentages and anything in the vicinity of "this is a very close race" is reasonable.
I mean, his polling averages have her up in enough swing states to win, plus NC. Her national lead isn't great (+2.2) but it's consistent with a small EC lead. She got some good recent swing state numbers as you say. I don't know where his model comes out today minus convention bounce but if it's really ten points away from the others despite those numbers, I'm suspicious. (Agree with your last paragraph.)
See my comment "recent polls before the debate are I think a partial vindication for silver".
How does one adjudicate whether the convention bounce adjustment was “wrong?”. It’s actually easier to adjudicate whether there should be a convention bounce adjustment than whether it was “correct” any one year. If you look at the elections since 1968, candidates have gotten a convention bounce roughly 90 percent of the time, though the size of these bounces has pretty clearly faded since the days of Bush Sr. and Dukakis. Negative polarization and the overall stability in 2024 polls mean convention bounces on average, will be smaller than in past years, Silver tries to account for this, his thesis that the bounce peaks at 2.5 points is reasonable, but if you weightrecent bounces more heavily than older bounces, you would end up with a peak bounce of ~1.5 percent. Last week, I crunched the numbers monte carlo style with a 1.5 point bounce adjustment, that raised Harris’s odds to ~47%. With a one point bounce adjustment it was 50/50.
Would the bounce adjustment be debunked if Harris rises in the polls? Not at all. She could rise in the polls because of the debate or other events. The polls could be biased against Harris. The utility of the convention bounce can only be proven over time and it has a solid track record. Any serious argument should be about what size adjustment should apply, the only reasons to insist on a coefficient of zero are parsimony and laziness.
I think anyone whose mood changes when one candidate's Silver model-generated probability of winning goes from 53.2% to 53.7% probably needs to get a life.
Modeling such a low N type event when fundamental conditions change so much from election to election is not a profitable use of anyone's time to either do or to pay attention to.
A good addendum to my post. At the end of the day the polling shifts were quite moderate. A 1% change in either direction is very possibly statistical noise and certainly not large enough to warrant some of the more overheated takes. And yes I'm definitely including MSM pundits here. Definitely saw tweets from journalists who should know better who took this slight shift to Trump as some sign that Harris has huge momentum problems, is this why she's going to lose in November. One tweet in particular made me laugh that said the debate was the "last chance" for Harris to change the narrative. Like are you joking?! Look at the landscape two months ago and see how much has happened and ask yourself how in the world you could make such an absurd statement.
Also, good place to point out that Biden's poll numbers at his lowest were still within striking distance of Trump. Judging by pundit analysis and the entire behavior of the GOP at their own convention, you would have thought Trump was cruising with a 10-15 point polling lead.
Why is modeling the election a worse use of one’s mind than chess? Or are you comfortable with abstraction as long as it’s cordoned off from the real world?
Silver's model is probably the most accurate, but it's still one of many. While I appreciate his transparency regarding some of the subjective choices he can make with model control factors, adjustments, etc. (and I'm sure this is true for other modelers as well), it does make me concerned that he will unintentionally let his thoughts about the race flow into the model via the various options and levers it has. I do think he's the single best modeler, though I would not make a bet based solely on his model.
When you say "Seeing Trump skyrocket to say 65% liklihood of winning makes it seem like he suddenly had this polling lead when most polls still have him down" - Silver is taking into account that the popular vote isn't what matters, it's the electoral college, and polling suggests that Harris may struggle in PA while not having a > 50% chance of compensating through GA/NC/etc.
As far as his attitude, he is very cocky, sometimes to a fault. Personally, I like his bluntness and his willingness to call people "fucking stupid" or something similar rather than couch things in a "oh, you're mistaken" or "so and so's take isn't a great one", because many of the people he winds up in feuds with really are acting in bad faith, or have ludicrous takes, i.e. Jaime Harrison on Biden.
I'm a big fan of the Yglesias "Gonna Be a Close One" model (tm) myself. Proven track record.
I think Matt Y does a better job than Nate at poking holes in bad arguments, or counter-trolling. Nate goes on tilt in a way that’s uncomfortable to watch.
Can he shut up about Shapiro for even 30 seconds?
I think he’s honestly just a little autistic and gets hyper fixated on specific details (not derogatory!) – which he keeps repeating until they’re “priced in” to the broader market of takes, or the moment has totally passed.
Very fair! But is Silver “assuming” that the EC bias will be the same? I thought he was basing that on state polls.
That's genuinely the part I didn't really get. A few negative state polls came in, but most I saw had her up or tied in most of the key swing states. I'll fully admit that a deeper dive into his model might have answered my question, but even his explanation I still was left feeling like there was a disconnect.
I bit the bullet and subscribed thru election day for $40. Nate's model currently assumes the EC bias will be about 2.5%, a little bit less than 2020 and similar to 2016.
This is data-based and can change over time.
People too often underestimate Nate’s humility. His best trait is not trying to squeeze more certainty out of a situation than the data permit. He is almost always closer to 50/50 than other modelers, and the data have borne him out
He’s epistemically humble. I wouldn’t say he’s personally humble.
Even on the epistemically part ... I think he sometimes under-sells the degree of manual dial turning going on in these model as more data driven than it really is. The one example I'm thinking of is how to manually weight the economic fundamentals and especially given that Biden is / was unpopular and polarization has increased over time. The 538 model had X% and his 2024 model has Y% and he dug in there but both are just assumptions. There's probably 20 other manual weights in his model that are like that.
Bingo
A lot of negative "Riverian", to use his terminology, traits seem to have rubbed off on him a bit from hanging in those circles. Arrogance, over confidence, assuming that your intelligence is transferable to all fields etc etc, it's very SV/VC brain.
Generally agree with your take here Colin but with two caveats--one minor and one more meaningful:
- The minor one is that I think Silver is less pompous than you characterize him. I would describe him as Krugmanesque: he knows his stuff, doesn't suffer fools gladly, is a very good writer, and takes no prisoners. Also like Krugman he doesn't hesitate to say "I told you so" (which I suppose is a little obnoxious), but I think it's leavened by the fact that they both make clear statements that are falsifiable and are willing to admit when they are wrong. Anyway, I get that you were actually defending Nate, but I think you still overstated a bit the case against him.
- The more meaningful one is about the last point you made about the polls being off. I'm definitely more worried than you seem to about the potential for them again underestimating Trump's support. Here is my thinking. The polls in 2016 and 2020 both missed significantly in the same direction. One theory, of course, is that it is simply chance. Assuming that level of polling errors happens about half the time, then chance would suggest that a quarter of the time we would see a polling error happen in two straight elections favoring the same candidate, so an eighth of the time we would expect to see Trump overperform the way that he did.
However, another theory is that there is something about the unique nature of Trump's candidacy that is causing these errors. And since my memory (though I haven't checked) is that the level of polling error in these races was significantly less than 50% likely to be true by chance, the likelihood of it undercounting Trump's support was significantly less than 12.5%. Which makes me think that the argument that something about Trump is causing it is more likely.
Long story short, I'm more worried than you. So I would love to understand why you think the polling error, if there is any at the moment, is actually undercounting Kamala's support. Would love to hear something that will make me less worried.
Good points! I think the Krugman comparison is incredibly apt. Almost mad I didn’t think of it. I’m a pretty big Krugman booster but it’s absolutely true there is a real smugness to some of his writing. And like Silver, he’s sort of earned a certain degree of smugness unlike the majority of people who exhibit such traits. But yeah totally get why Krugman is sort of hate read by the right; if you don’t agree with his worldview it can probably infuriating to read his work combined with the likely deep seated fear there is a good chance he’s right.
Regarding the polling error (or possibility of polling error) I take your point. I fully admit it’s totally possible that polling error once again means we are understating Trump’s support. Polling errors are often random (person who taught me this; Nate Silver). A coin coming up heads three times in a row is unlikely but not that unlikely. A few points to back up my contention
- see my bullet point about secretly Silver’s greatest triumph. The polling miss in 2016 wasn’t actually as pronounced as we think. The Comey letter likely swung the election (again see Silver). Ultimately Clinton won the popular vote
Sorry didn’t finish.
- I’m a big believer that in 25 years time we’re going to see all stars from 2020 to 2023 as one big outlier; inflation, crime, extreme left wokeness and yes polling. Given the weird circumstances and of who was home or not home or just the incredible weirdness of the period generally. Makes sense polling was also off as well. Speaking of 2020
- Democrats had a severely diminished GOTV and ground game in 2020 because they were actually adhering to COVID rules. I’ve actually been one to downplay on the ground operations in the past but I think it’s more likely now that in the past the two parties cancelled each other out. I think 2020, Trump door knocking was impactful especially in places like the Texas border. This year? Trump is apparently outsourcing this to Musk super PACs. Ask DeSantis how that goes.
- I actually think the Taylor Swift endorsement matters. I’ll rely on my wife for this one but in general I think we underestimate the gender gap this time around.
- democrats have been consistently over performing polls since 2021; midterms, special elections etc. Now these are low (or lower) turnout elections. But sort of the point; the Democratic coalition is the one increasingly likely to actually show up Election Day.
- Here’s maybe the biggest one. How much do we believe polling about African American vote. There was a definite small but noticeable shift in 2020. And I think it’s entirely plausible that there is a further shift right. But polling seems to be indicating one of the biggest realignments like ever. My wife and l have actually discussed some plausible reasons that may make democrats squirm (see Matt’s post about antisemitism). But again, polling is indicting a seismic shift. I’ll eat humble pie if it comes to pass but this is a definite I’ll believe it when I see it.
You can absolutely poke holes in all by bullet points. I’ll reiterate; it was Silver who first taught me polling misses can be kind of random. But hoping to point out that my contention polling is underestimating likely Harris vote numbers isn’t entirely wishcasting on my part (will admit it’s probably partly).
Maybe I need to "do my own research" but the idea that these polls are correctly taking in the effect of COVID deaths, Dobbs, new voter registrations, the long term viability of sane-washing of Trump, poll response rates cratering, switching candidates late, etc is hard to swallow. It seems like the error bars should be two or three times bigger. The continued sales of these polls and these pollsters as really good is more malpractice of the news media.
That said, the Harris campaign needs to keep up the urgency, work across all the channels and run through the tape. On net the Harris campaign seems to be moving the overall race in a positive direction everyday.
I'm voting for Kamala and I'm swayed by most of the positions you listed, but your comment is, uh, one-sided. I was tempted to just drop "found the guy in the thickest bubble". Harris is only competitive because the polls have already incorporated that stuff. Meanwhile, the American right has a comparable list of other concerns that she doesn't speak to, and some of those concerns land with swing voters.
The Harris campaign needs to figure out which of those they can live with matter most, then get to town making swing voters believe they care, not cope themselves out of an election.
The reason why is that the polls has still done a reasonably good job of predicting events. Definitely not perfect, but better than anything else.
I've mentioned this before but I do think there is some reason to believe that polls were a) off in 2020 due to COVID and b) possibly more today than in the past given increasing difficulties involved with polling itself (and reaching younger voters).
My contention regarding 2020 is related to the fact that Democrats were more likely to adhere to Covid restrictions and therefore more likely to be reached by pollsters. Another article I read noted that in 2020 there was an uptick of people who screamed some obscenity, gave answers that indicated they would likely vote for Trump (the "fake news" can't be trusted), but didn't actually finish the polling call (because they furiously hung up) and weren't counted as a Trump voter. Sort of on the fence as to how impactful this really was, but it doesn't seem that crazy either (upshot of this article is pollsters are supposedly counting these people this time around).
The last article I read said the democrats' internal swing state polling still showed her behind slightly.
I read about parties' internal polling all the time. Does anyone have any reason to believe they're better predictors than the big public polls? If so, why?
What I always hear is that campaigns don't see such polls as predictive but rather snapshots used to help them refine their message and decide which voters to target.
I think the one reason they might be better is that they likely do a lot more of them. They only ever release a tiny cherry picked fraction of them, but if they’re hearing from 300 people in each swing state each day, that’s a lot of meaningful information.
They might be better but they are released selectively. The Harris campaign wants donors to think she is slightly behind because anxiety drives contributions. It's not something to take too seriously.
The Obama campaign also selectively leaked internal polls of Pennsylvania that showed it artificially more competitive than it actually was to get Republicans to waste resources there in a state he was comfortably winning.
>State polls in swing states consistently show Harris up which suggest the electoral college advantage Trump has may be overstated.<
As of a day or two ago Nate was also giving Trump around a 40% chance of winning the *popular* vote. That's not the same as his "advantage" in the Electoral College. But it does filter into the big picture of the odds. That seems a bit high to me, but not hugely so: a pure average of the polls probably has Harris (going into the debate) up by about 2.5%, which is within the margin of error in most of those polls.
I’d be shocked if Harris actually lost the popular vote. But I take your point.
I mean...yeah? I guess? And that would've been my reaction if you'd mentioned this possibility to me before reading Nate's analysis on this topic. But he's not stupid when it comes to elections! So, I had to reckon with his analysis and came to the conclusion: yes, although Harris is certainly favored to win the popular vote, one of the decidedly non-impossible scenarios whereby Trump wins this thing is a clean popular vote win.
(Though I'd love to think after this debate such a possibility retreats even further into non-plausibility. Then again, would anybody be shocked if, ten days from now, it becomes clear the debate moved the needle very little? Sigh).
she is still the underdog
Silver's model I think at one point had Trump's odds of winning close to 65% and continuing to climb over the last week. Given everything he probably is (or was) the favorite but honestly like 55% to 45% at best. Again, I think Silver's model is overweighting the convention bounce. Other thing is the RFK Jr. issue (dropping out of the race and then trying to get his name off the ballot) I suspect is also scrambling the odds. And again, including Rasmussen and Trafalgar I actually think is the strongest anti-Silver argument; I honestly don't know how you can include these polls.
Have you read his explanation about Rasmussen and just disagree with it, or have you not read it?
*don't know if he's talked about Trafalgar...
I did and to be honest I found the explanation wanting.
"Wanting" seems different from "disagreeing."
He laid out that from his perspective: "despite that strong Republican house effect, however, they’ve had roughly average accuracy" and its results that matter. Is there more explanation you are looking for?
Do they not have a consistent house effect that can be estimated?
>And again, including Rasmussen and Trafalgar I actually think is the strongest anti-Silver argument; I honestly don't know how you can include these polls.<
You can include them if you adjust (ie, underweight them) for their track record and their methodological shortcomings.
i don't just mean the specifics of silver's forecast. i mean that the things she still has to do in order to win are legitimately quite hard. matt makes a convincing argument to that effect in today's podcast.
Interesting thoughts on Silver - I appreciate your perspective. My smarm/arrogance-o-meter is usually very sensitive and I don’t notice Silver acting too different than he ever did, which to me wasn’t ever a big deal. He’s more of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur than he ever was a journalist, and I think he’s pretty raw about the 538 thing...but always seemed to me to be pretty honest about the weaknesses and assumptions built into his model, and talks through scenarios openly where the model could be off openly. I agree that his 2016 poll was a triumph…the fact is, 2016 revealed many people on both sides don’t have an inherent grasp for what it means to offer data-driven probabilistic prediction that he does, how it differs from claiming some moral certainty about the future…when you say X has a 2/3 chance, you expect Y to happen 1/3 of the time. I fully supported Nate for the ire his Covid messaging got. Anyone trying to do cost benefit analysis, anyone who raised the idea of differential risk, anyone in less than full-panic, anyone arguing to ease the hawkishness got treated as some kind of traitor…(along the same lines as MY himself for not being in lockstep on Left identity politics during the Trump admin)…
BTW - I think Nate said recently that he includes and weights Rasmussen heavily mainly for balance - because there are very few right-leaning polls even close to reliable.
Silver doesn't think the electoral advantage will be "the same as 2020 and 2016" I believe he said he thinks its shrinking, but still there. He is, of course, applying a model for the advantage itself, but it is one that is a bit more sophisticated than copy-paste from 2020 or 2016. Unless there is good evidence to think the electoral college advantage problem is gone, we ought to be worried about Harris current numbers.
I’ll fully admit I am likely conflating a bit Silver’s analysis a bit with some other pundit’s prognostications who seem to be way over confident the polling miss will be the same direction. Nonetheless my skepticism of Silver's contention remains while acknowledging I will take Silver’s analysis 100 times out of 100 over most MSM pundits if that makes any sense.
I think one upside of not doing much press before the debate is that some of the canned lines she did were less stale than if she had been doing them on every tv show in the country. (I know some of these lines, but I've watched videos of most of her rallies so am not a normal person). I wonder if that was, at least in part, intentional. Agree that it would make sense for her to do more press now.
Let me add that some of the ``new'' lines she did (or came up with) were absolutely killer, so I'm hoping that the ones I've heard before sound good to normal people, too (I can't tell). Her body language did a good job of flagging nonsense, even with the muted mics. And, of course the one time she tried to really speak over the muted mic really made me wonder what it was she wanted to get out. It did not disappoint.
Last night's debate performance if anything only makes the no press, no interviews thing more puzzling. Judging from how well VP Harris did here, and the fact that even Governor Walz (someone who likes and positively shines in interviews) has been refusing any substantive questions from the press, I can't help but wonder if they're trying a kind of sandbagging strategy - sure you seem evasive or even aloof to the electorate for long stretches but you also don't give the opponent any real meat to chew on - and you get moments like the DNC speeches where you can pop out and show 'em. The debates are an even stronger opportunity because of the haymakers you land if you take a few calculated risks (as Yglesias wrote).
That being said I'm still of the camp that thinks Harris and Walz should be doing interviews and press throughout the week every week to November. The dress rehearsals have gone well enough and I'm pretty sure this is as close to showtime as it gets.
Yeah, I think that the campaign needs to stop having Joe Biden PTSD and encourage Harris to talk to people.
It's a swing state election. She is doing local news interviews in those states.
These tend to be under the radar for the rest of us so we think she's "hiding" from the media.
I hope she hits those local media every day and I don't give a damn if she never gives another national interview.
I live in a swing district in a swing state. Trump and Harris are here so often it doesn't even make the front page of the newspaper anymore. But they have done zero interviews.
PS Every day I get a slew of anti-Harris / pro-Trump fliers, "hand-written" letters from local politicians imploring me to vote for Trump and grainy photographs of Harris shaking hands with communists or whatever. About once a week I will get generically pro-Democrat fliers from a PAC.
Is she? I thought people are saying she has been doing no media interviews, even with local news or podcasts.
The problem is it is run by the Biden folks and she can't fire them because she needs Biden's cooperation as President.
The one thing Trump says that he is right about is Biden and Harris need to learn to fire prople.
I don’t think it’s true that the campaign is entirely run by Biden people. There’s overlap, sure, but she brought on former Obama people and her own longtime advisors: https://wapo.st/3zeM1B4
Yeah but the people running the show are the Biden people out of Delaware(!), starting with the incompetent Jen O'Malley Dillon, who should have been fired when Harris took over given her leadership of the Biden campaign into absolute disaster.
Trump is right. The Democrats have become very sensitive to HR concerns and don't like to be ruthless and fire people anymore. It's a bad thing for us.
It is interesting at the same time as the Harris campaign performance in the debate is being loudly applauded that the “you’re fired” comment by Trump is considered as needed to be applied seriously within the Harris campaign organization. This is another case of applying a “reality show” mentality before evaluating the results or consequences of present events. The country has been living a Trump reality show the last 10 years and the emperor has again finally been defined as naked before the public. Let’s critique the campaign as Matt did in this piece not be distracted reality tv show mental.
You shouldn't fire people who merely failed to succeed at a task. They should either be moved into a position they can succeed in or worked with to enable them to succeed. If fire everyone who fails to accomplish what you like then you end up in a situation (like Trump) where nobody competent will work with you because they know they will just get thrown under the bus at the slightest provocation.
This is a common assumption but it's really hard to do as campaigns are temporary organizations (especially this one!) so there can be real downsides to just firing a bunch of people. Who's going to book all the new interviews after you've fired all the communications staff?
Likewise just because you have problems with the "A Team" doesn't mean the new "B Team" will be better, we saw this a lot with Trump's White House where he'd fire people and the new people would be significantly worse than those he replaced and then he fire them and the cycle would repeat.
Paraphrasing:
If you hire a bunch of people and you have to fire one of them, you had to fire one of them. If you have to fire people all day perhaps you're the one who needs to be fired.
Actually presidential campaigns fire people all the time, especially HIGH LEVEL people. Firing the campaign manager has worked before, most recently for Trump in 2016.
You guys are acting like someone's going to fire all the young staffers, but we are talking about senior people who should absolutely know that if they do a crappy job they won't be working for the campaign anymore.
I wonder if the campaign team, having been built for Biden to avoid the press, simply lacks the nuts and bolts skillset and contacts to get the type of press you and Matt suggest. It may be one of the challenges of having to switch candidate and strategies so completely so late in the race.
she has doug, have you seen him do press? he also supposedly called scaramucci before the convention to ask for some republicans to put on stage...
she has done some interviews and taken press questions besides the cnn one. You can find them by looking on youtube. There is one that is about 8 minutes with the press taking questions a few days before the convention (``I am still working on my speech but it is coming along nicely'' or something like that), a couple radio interviews, a spot addressing the cheyney endorsement in a liberal spice store etc. Some of the silly questions people yell at her (``will you pardon hunter?''), makes me wonder whether it is one of the reasons she hasn't done more formal press conferences.
All politicians get silly questions yelled at them.
I mean, I forgive Hunter
I think point 15 is the most important—every second that Kamala is not in the news, Trump fills the void. When Trump is driving news cycles he feels inevitable, I think, because it reminds us of when he was president and drove every news cycle. Counterintuitively, it makes us subconsciously perceive him as the president, as though he already won.
I can't understand why "everyone" thinks that the way for her to stay in the news is to do a bunch of interviews. I mean, sure, in the literal sense doing an interview puts you on the news, but if MAGA pounces on an out-of-context quote as proof that Hunter Biden is smuggling felons across the border to perform nonconsensual gender reassignment surgeries on children that survived post-partum abortions, that will become the story. Meanwhile she's wasted time that could've been spent doing rallies in swing states.
My guess is just that they were waiting until after Labor Day since no one watches the news in August.
Since we're doing football analogies, when your team is coming from behind, "timing" your moves is as important as the content of those moves. For instance (this is more about football than politics) you want to try to time your last couple of drives so that you don't leave too much time on the clock for the other team's QB at the end of the game.
I think the problem with the sports metaphor is that in football, you know what the objective score is right now. And in politics you don't.
To belabor the point: if you're up 3 points right now in football, and you can run out the clock, you DEFINITELY win. If you're down 3 points and you run out the clock, you DEFINITELY lose.
Even if we assume that Nate Silver's election forecast (or someone else's) is as exactly accurate as it is possible to be, it suggests that if you run out the clock, you have... a 40% chance of winning or a 60% chance of winning.
This kinda breaks the analogy. Like, there's much more incentive for the "winning" side to make risky plays than there would be in sports, and vice-versa there's more risk of a risky play for the "losing" side to drop their chance of winning from 40% to 37%.
Maybe (American) football is the wrong analogy. Perhaps soccer is better. Where no one knows when the game will actually end (or what day the election will actually take place). And players try to deceive the referees by rolling on the field shrieking in pain and then when the red card is flashed they pop up and run off like nothing happened. And then when one team wins, the other team's fans run on the field and destroy the place.
Yes, but is the election just as likely to end in a draw? What’s the equivalent of a penalty kick shootout?
Throwing the election to the House is to a vote by the people as a penalty shootout is to how God intended sporting events to be decided.
Then the analogy works better if there are still 15 minutes on the clock
But my point is:
In sports, you know if you're winning or you're losing. Yes, there is uncertainty about how the rest of the game is going to go, but you know instantaneously what's happening.
If you're losing a play that says, "I have a 50% chance of put a touchdown up and a 50% chance to give the opponent a touchdown" is appealing, because losing by more doesn't really hurt you (to a first approximation), while getting a touchdown puts you in a winning position. And vice versa if you're winning.
But in politics, where you aren't sure if you're winning, if you have a play to make that has a 50% chance of increasing your chance of winning by 5% and a 50% chance of decreasing it by 5%, that's a neutral play regardless of whether you currently think you have a 40% chance of winning or a 60%. There's much less obviously a different correct play for the "underdog."
I thought Harris pretty deftly handled owning some aspects of the Biden record but distancing herself from others, but I don't know how much she's gonna be able to thread that needle going forward. A good opponent would have said something like "Oh you're proud of the IRA? You take credit for that? What about the economy, do you take credit for that? Can you tell us which parts of the Biden presidency you want to own and which parts you want us to forget?"
Of course she knows she doesn’t have a good opponent, so…
She doesn't really have to thread the needle though. There are no more debates, and no real need for any big sit down gotcha interview. If she follows Matt's advice her sparring partners will be local news, sympathetic outlets, and friends she makes in the back of her campaign plane who can be schmoozed into being nice so they can be the well sourced White House correspondent for their network/organization, a la John McCain.
Should have worked in:
- "Look, everyone watching knows I just baited Trump with the crowd size comments, and he fell for it hook, line, and sinker. He was easily manipulated right before your eyes. Imagine what Putin and Xi are capable of doing to him."
- "As a gun owner...as opposed to do Donald Trump who is not." If he says he is, remind him he is a felon and it is illegal for him to own a gun ;)
Matt's right in that you can't "debate" Trump since he just vomits lies and half truths at an unfathomable pace but in the same vein I wish she would just flat out make fun of him at times. For example, Trump thinks other countries "pay tariffs." She could easily say something like "I don't like the inflation that happened in 2022-2023 either, which is why I'm against applying a 10% tariff on everything. We want to lower prices for the American people, unlike my opponent who thinks other countries pay tariffs when it's really the American people."
Lol.
"Trump, in theory, could have been scrupulously honest."
The "in theory" in that sentence is doing enough heavy lifting to make Arnold Schwarzenegger at the height of his powers look like a 95-pound weakling.
Now we see how much journalists normalize and minimize Trump’s bizarre behavior in the coming days.
One thing I would love to see is for her to do some media with content creators. Trump has been making the rounds of YouTubers - Harris needs to do that. A popular suggestion on Reddit was that she should do Hot Ones. Maybe that's not the right suggestion but she needs to be seen in a more informal setting.
I think Hot Ones is the perfect opportunity for her (if they'll have her). She says she loves spicy food and big names on that show get MILLIONS of views of what I assume is mostly young Americans (though of course there's international viewers too). I don't think there is a single other reasonable place for her to get that level of exposure in what would likely be a pretty friendly environment.
Brace yourself for the Trump reaction to such an appearance: "She goes on this Hot One show and she's eating wings while cackling - but I saw on television that down the street from the studio, the criminal illegals were ripping the wings off beautiful pet birds! The Haitians, the Veneuzelans, they're using cockatiels for food! Are they giving the pet wings to Kamablah for food? I don't know, but people a lot of questions and we'll be getting to the bottom of this very soon."
Sounds like there's no downside for Kamala then.
A lot of people miss how huge these Youtube shows are. A lot of the Youtube audience is younger so they don't get info from traditional media, and they are also more likely to be undecided.
She and Walz should be doing local news and morning shows in Philly, Detroit, Atlanta, Reno, Savanah and Charlotte nearly everyday. Plus the Hot Ones.
Youtube channels and podcasts are where it's at. Local media can't hurt (and it's regionally targeted, come to think of it) but my guess is the big podcasts have way more voters. And you can do a much more effective 30 mins or hour.
My point is both that they shouldn't be targeting the popular vote, target the electoral college, and that local media tend to be less full of themselves than the national media, so you can get your message out. Not opposed to podcasts or Youtube, though, go on Rogan for example
Going on Rogan would easily be worth 10k, 50k votes. If nothing else it would be generate free "earned media" and show her not to be scared of RFK voters and "manly men".
Basically, but in rotation (fatigue is a thing). And Pittsburgh and Milwaukee at least should be thrown in that mix. Probably Grand Rapids, Harrisburg, and Madison too (they're big enough media markets that the tipping-point voter for each state could be/probably is in that broadcast range.)
Phoenix for sure.
Yes, definitely, those were not meant as an exhaustive list, just illustrative.
When Harris talked about the all-of-the-above energy strategy and pointed out that domestic oil production is higher today than under Trump, my immediate thought was about Slow Boring and how she listened to Matt.
I know the Harris campaign wanted the mikes to stay on so she could rebut him, and they had to scramble to retool her strategy when ABC kept the pre-agreed muted mikes in place. Honestly, I’m glad the Harris team lost this fight. Everyone thinks the way to beat Trump is to fact-check him in real-time, but all this does is exacerbate his gish gallop tendencies. And then of course she’d be struggling to finish a sentence when it was her turn to speak because he can never shut up. The end result would have been an incoherent mess of a debate that most viewers probably would have hated.
Agreed - the facial expressions and mouthing a few things worked pretty well without losing coherence.
Everybody's giving Harris great reviews on this debate generally. And preaching to the choir I thought she did great. But if it's about peeling off that 1 to 3% of Republican voters and getting some undecideds I give her effort last night a C+. It is hard to debate a psychopath but at the end of the day winning that sliver is what's necessary at this point. No clue why she talked about handing everybody $25,000
She talked about the $25,000 because people trying for their first house, or concerned about people trying for their first house, see the 25k as a meaningful step from where they are today. That the net effect is that much of that 25k would be eaten up by the market shifty it would cost, is not a well understood phenomenon.
And the people who would most understand that the 25k would be eaten up by the market also understand Trump's tariff really _is_ a sales tax on us.
Right but to right-wingers it's going to sound like more irresponsible handouts. And that center right voter is who we need. A center right voter like myself. Who is confused when progressive economists say this is a bad idea that she keeps saying this crap.
Small business owners are a huge constituency for republicans. She explicitly said she'd give them money. She said she was a gun owner. If you're judging her on pandering to the center, she knocked it out of the park.
Except that's not the kind of pandering that does well with the right. More handouts from libs that are going to take the money from other people seems like a bad idea we'll give you a small business something but then bend you over on the taxes anyway. And nobody expects Kamala to know s*** about guns let's be straight up about that .. how many times has she been hunting how often does she stay up on her marksmanship at the range The answer to most of that is going to be next to zero. They are so out of touch they don't even know how to pander well
Sounds like shifting the goalposts, honestly.
"Democrats/liberals don't know sh*t about guns!"
"Actually, Kamala Harris owns a gun."
"Well that doesn't count, because she's never been hunting and I bet her marksmanship sucks!"
What's this? Since when do you have to go hunting to be a gun owner in good standing with the American Right? Can't you be an urban gun owner who doesn't like hunting but who wants to own a handgun for personal defense? The Second Amendment is about a "well-regulated militia," not about hunting.
And frankly, if you wanted to make good marksmanship a prerequisite for gun ownership, I'd be 100% in favor of that, but I get the feeling if a librul said that, the Right would go flippin' nuts.
You're totally right I'm just saying on the merits, The gun ownership conversation is a lot larger than just having one. And yes the type of people that will move the goal posts are the types of people we are trying to win. Perhaps if she had gone into a nuanced position about guns and ownership it would have been better. But I'm telling you as somebody who is an infantry officer for over 15 years and know a lot of gun-toting nuts. Her gun ownership is about as authentic as Obama meeting with religious leaders to show that he's a Christian. Sure maybe he is. But I probably know how he's going to weigh in on people baking cakes.
Are we trying to win the kind of people who will move the goalposts? Those sound like committed partisans who don't want to change their views vs undecideds who presumably won't move the goalposts.
Yeah I don't know I know a lot of my conservative friends I won over to Biden. But kamala's rhetoric on taxing the wealthy giving handouts to businesses and first time home buyers really didn't resonate. And these are people who the first person they ever voted for Democrat wise was Biden. It is hard to get a sense for who swing voters are though at least I've had a hard time truly understanding. I can just share what's been in the groups of discourse that I have been around. My comfort for these guys is like Trump said, is not going to be able to do really anything except handle wars and trade well because she's not going to have a supportive Senate
Edit: I stand by this, but it doesn't apply to KH if she said she owns the gun for self-defense.
You've got a point, but "I own a gun" isn't going to move any needles, anywhere. My septegenarian mother owns a gun that she inherited from my father, but she's never held it, probably never opened the safe, and straight up hates having it in her house.
If a Democrat wants to make inroads with gun owners, the bare minimum is going to involve persuading them that he or she actually gets it, probably by credibly explaining the reason they have a gun - because they love shooting, because they hunt, for self defense, whatever.
She has said it is a pistol for self-defense. It's not uncommon for people involved in the judicial system.
All good, then!
Can you find any objective metric or evidence that agrees with what you're saying?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/interactive/2024/presidential-debate-voter-poll/
Every poll of undecided / swing voters says she crushed him.
I hope you're right... I would prefer something more robust than what you've given and I really pray that it's right. From the circles I'm talking to mainly people in Alabama Tennessee and Utah. That's the vibe I'm getting. And as somebody that grew up conservative that was my read on it.
I mean... she was DA. She hung out with cops for most of her career. She's probably been to the shooting range far more often than the typical republican. And it's obvious she is the type of gun owner who owns one for security reasons, not recreational ones. Never at any point did she try to make herself sound like a deer hunter lol.
Owning a gun and standing up for the interests of the second amendment crowd is very different. I doubt she could wade in to the space well. Nor would it play to her base very well to talk about land access issues out in Utah, hunting wetland preservation, The personal defense stuff, armed guards at schools. This is something that the left bangs drums about but knows generally next to nothing about as well.
Yeah, this is just disingenuous goal post moving again. Obviously no one who has any plans of attacking the second amendment would talk about owning a gun, that'd make them seem like a hypocrite. You can even believe they are a hypocrite, it doesn't matter, they wouldn't, as politicians, want to SEEM like one. Kamala is very strongly signaling here that she won't support gun bans. I don't know what the hell else you want. She doesn't have to cosplay Elmer Fudd to make the point.
I think the thing about schools is revealin. Virtually every school in America that has armed guards is in an urban district that votes heavily democrat, even the ones in very red states. Yet for some reason you think the right is more informed on the issue?
Yes generally I do they just have different opinions about what they want to do about it. Most of the lefties I know want to get what they call assault weapons taken up when pistols do the majority of the killings but yes the left is incoherent and lost on guns generally as a whole not that there are not some academics on the left that would exceed what people on the right would generally know. And yes the left if they had their way would just get rid of all of them honestly.. And from a human harm perspective that would be the right call actually.
The left is full of Trojan horse lying. Okay we're going to take this lesser stance but at the end most of us want some form of socialized everything and no guns and redistribution and let's get affirmative action back in the ivy leagues and other places and we're just going to master plan this whole thing freedoms be damned unless those freedoms are to be gay or have access to transgender surgeries or free college without military service. I'm sure there's lefties that don't agree with all of that but that's definitely the broader subtext and platform for a whole bunch of people.
I guess it depends on whether there are people who are currently voting for him who don’t want to vote for the guy who’s always ranting about transgender illegals doing post-birth abortion and eating people’s pet dogs.
I mean to give you the perspective of somebody who was conservative their whole life until 2016.... Kamala's answers on abortion were bad... Trump kicking stuff back to the States is a very conservative view and the view that the people should decide but at the state level came off a lot stronger than kamala's story about female autonomy, a better crafted message could help get even more women in conservative states on the Democratic side. Immigration and undocumented people or as they like to call them illegals are big on both sides right now and that's why Kamala has shifted her stance and tried to pull a tough on immigration posture without alienating the far left. (Trump was right she has flip-flopped on damn near everything). Also the transgender stuff I find a lot of people on the left and including in this comment section are not very accepting there and anybody that talks about being tough on trans stuff or protecting sports, or we don't know about it but it's weird and we need to be cautious is going to be over and above with a low information swing voter or anybody on the right wing over somebody that's like transgender inclusion full stop. A lot of conservatives don't like Trump but are going to vote for him anyway because well Harris is nowhere near conservative and keep saying crazy lefty baloney that she won't be able to do. So unless Kamala can get talking points that resonate better it's going to be let's go to the polls and turn out is going to be more important than persuasion I think we should wage both wars both turn out and convincing. That will require a different tact from Harris's team one that I don't know they have the brain power or staffing to pull off or if Kamala can do any of that kind of talk convincingly
1) Trump had some good points about how lots of legal scholars didn't like Roe v. Wade, but that's a pretty in-the-weeds answer.
2) Kicking it back to the states was I think way more popular in the past until it actually happened and the states started trying a bunch of extreme bans on abortion - her IVF statement, and her examples were all pretty strong here.
I think the people who _still_ aren't convinced on this are either super pro-life (and wouldn't vote for her anyway) or die-hard libertarian states rights, but there aren't that many, and both candidates have lots of anti-libertarian positions.
> Trump had some good points about how lots of legal scholars didn't like Roe v. Wade, but that's a pretty in-the-weeds answer.
But that's not what he said, was it? He said "everyone, including every Democrat, thought what I did was perfect".
I believe I should have said "effective point" rather than "good point"
Trump said ALL legal scholars agreed with the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe.
It was not a point or nuanced. It was another gish gallop.
He exaggerated something that had a kernel of truth. For Trump that's practically being honest.
I mean, I think it's a dishonest talking point even when it's made in a more sophisticated way (such as by Alito in Dobbs). It works by conflating (1) people who think Dobbs is correct with (2) people who think that there's a constitutional right to abortion but Roe doesn't do a good job as a matter of judicial craft and/or relied on the wrong rationale and (3) people who think that on a blank slate there's no constitutional right to abortion but stare decisis should have been decisive in favor of retaining Roe and Casey. All together, (1), (2), and (3) is a lot of scholars (though certainly not "all") but it's really only (1) that counts as a defense of Dobbs.
There is an exaggeration and then there are absurd lies so out there that it makes you laugh.
One does not need to lie if their position has merit.
Yeah I think those are some really good points. I'm more talking about the people that lean more broadly conservative will generally say they want it at the states. And for him to say hey look I'm not anti-abortion but I did this weird thing that a lot of other smart people like is defensible. Even though I find it repugnant because things they don't like they kick up to the fed if they don't get the results they want they take it to the States or try to and they go back and forth until they get what they want and then when they catch the dog they get mad because then they got to pick on something else like transgender people to try to get people angry to the polls. A piece of this isn't just winning swing voters which I think is important but also keeping your base riled up and ready to show up for you on voting day. Obviously Trump lied so many times but the way he talked about things and the way he came off is going to keep the motivation up for his side.
I do think his obvious refusal to say he would veto a national abortion ban will hurt him though.
I mean this is a case where we have both politicians that will try to say anything they can to get elected and minimize anything they can't say to keep them from being damaged. I don't trust either one of them to do well in the role obviously Trump the bigger dumpster fire
> Trump kicking stuff back to the States is a very conservative view and the view that the people should decide but at the state level came off a lot stronger than kamala's story about female autonomy.
https://x.com/davidplouffe/status/1833677440759026096
> Forty point difference with undecided voters on their abortion answers. Widest gap I’ve ever seen in debate dials.
Whatever your politics, you don't seem to have a good handle on what swing voters thought about the debate!
Yeah he doesn't cite his source there I'd be interested to take a look at it. I think abortion is one of the biggest opportunities for Kamala and she did okay but I don't think she hit it out of the park.
You know it is weird how Trump accepts RFK’s endorsement and turns around and insults RFK. Not a nice thing to do.
She gave that spiel twice and I couldn't help thinking she needed to get that number crap out of here there for everything but the CTC, she's debating Donald Trump. She should have said she had a plan to invest in new homeowners and new business owners with down payment assistance and tax credits, while Donald Trump's plan, if you could call it that, was to cut billionaires' taxes again and sign whatever new abortion bans or other restrictions on American freedom the radicals on his team put on his desk.
I feel like these are so easy too...🤦♀️ Unfortunately Harris is the marginal candidate that we will have to take to the ballots.
Until the end I thought Trump was actually more cogent than I expected. Not more honest than I expected, but less rambling/word salad.
I still thought it was good for her, I just hoped it would be worse for him.
I think his handlers made sure he got a good nap, and they took away his phone for it.