The Briefing, Vol. XII, Issue 32
This week:
- Hiding Kamala Harris
- A referendum, but on whom?
- Another ‘Squad’ member likely to lose tomorrow
Outlook
A completely new presidential race is taking shape — albeit one that still looks a lot like the old one did before June 27. But new and credible data remain sparse and hard to come by. This week, a look at what’s out there, and what the campaigns will try to do.
Meanwhile, four more states choose their nominees for down-ballot offices tomorrow: Kansas, Missouri, Michigan, and Washington State. We will look at a handful of important and competitive races below.
President 2024
In the meantime, the presidential race really has been everything it was cracked up to be. This has been one of the most eventful election cycles in history, featuring an assassination attempt on Donald Trump, the forced removal (probably under duress) of President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee, and his abrupt replacement by Vice President Kamala Harris (D).
Last week, we observed that the race had essentially reverted in time to before Biden’s disastrous debate performance. Democrats still found themselves trailing, but not by the growing post-debate margins that many polls were showing in key swing states.
Recall that, prior to the debate Biden and Trump traded leads in national polls, but Trump seemed to hold the cards in enough swing states that a Biden victory seemed improbable. Trump had seemingly locked up 268 electoral votes, leaving him one shy of a tie and victory.
Data lacking: Since Harris’s entry into the race, the national polls remain within the margin of error, but there have been very few polls of swing states. But we should look at the ones that do exist: There is essentially just one crop of post-Harris swing-state polls, from Bloomberg, whose results too weird to put much stock in. For example, it is impossible to believe that national polls have barely swung at all (as the national poll in the group indicates), yet that Michigan has gone from a tie to an 11-point lead for Harris. Likewise, one would expect a substantial change in national polling for Nevada to swing overnight from a statistically significant Trump lead over both Biden and Harris to a tie (or a two-point Harris lead in a two-way race). The rest of the polls, which generally favor Trump, seem equally suspicious. For example, how can Trump reach 50 percent in a head-to-head in Pennsylvania while slipping by double digits in other swing states? It just doesn’t make a lot of sense.
One we have better data, we should probably expect a very close race. Each party will have a specific goal for the last three months of the campaign.
How each candidate wins: Republicans will aim to define Harris, and try to keep the focus on the Biden-Harris administration. This is why they are so eager to tie her (deservedly) to Biden’s record on immigration and public safety. Incidentally, this is why Democrats and pro-Democrat media outlets are so eager to deny that Biden put Harris in charge of immigration policy, even though there is video showing he did so.
As a secondary goal, they will also be eager to exploit her facile, cliche-ridden and empty manner of speech, in which she appears to confuse banality for profundity. As one commentator put it, they will try to highlight her as “America’s wine mom.”
Democrats, on the other side, want to hide their candidate so that Trump stands out all the more. This is identical to what they did in 2020. The entire point, once again, is to keep the focus on Trump.
Biden was completely failing to do this when he was the presumptive nominee. The election was clearly shaping up in swing states as a referendum on the Biden administration. The question is, can Harris avoid this fate? Can she turn it around and make it a referendum on Trump’s always-unlikeable personality?
This will depend on several things, including whether she can evade media attention to her own record and character, and whether Trump chooses to put himself at the center of everything. In the most dramatic case, Harris might even refuse to debate Trump. Still that may be too risky. Harris will probably have to show herself at least a little bit in order to earn voters’ trust. There is a careful balance here, because it is unlikely that she can simply coast to victory on whatever momentum she has gotten from her party and media honeymoon.
As of this writing, Harris has remained carefully hidden from the media and from any situation where she has to speak extemporaneously. Her only non-scripted comments to reporters since Biden withdrew from the race illustrated precisely the problem with her speaking without a teleprompter or debating Trump.
Governor 2024
Washington: The likely outcome in tomorrow’s top-two primary for governor is that former Rep. Dave Reichert (R) and Attorney General Bob Ferguson (D) will advance to the general election out of a field of two dozen candidates. It isn’t possible to win under Washington’s primary system by getting to 50 percent in the first round.
Washington has not elected a Republican governor since 1980.
Senate 2024
Michigan: Former Rep. Mike Rogers (R) is widely expected to win his Republican primary over a field that whittled itself down when former Rep. Pete Meijer (R) dropped out. Former Rep. Justin Amash (R) might have gained more traction but for his vote to impeach President Trump, which he has tried to explain away as merely indicating he wanted Trump to go to a Senate trial, not as a sign he actually wanted Trump removed.
On the Democratic side, Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D) will easily win the nomination.
Montana: Sen. Jon Tester (D) is not benefiting from his social media “attaboy” for a Pearl Jam poster depicting the killing of Donald Trump. In a state Trump will easily win by more than 20 percent, this is an obviously unforced error.
Tester faces a very difficult race against retired Navy SEAL and businessman Tim Sheehy (R) in what Republicans regard as their second-best chance to pick up a Senate seat after West Virginia.
House 2024
Missouri-1: Rep. Cori Bush (D) is expected to lose her primary election tomorrow against St. Louis County prosecutor Wesley Bell (D). Bush has made herself a target through a vast range of unhinged behvaior while in office. This includes an ethics scandal related to her campaign spending on security, her claim to be able to cure cancer, and her lusty embrace of the radical “Defund the Police” movement, which contrasts sharply with her opponent’s measured support for criminal justice reform.Much of the opposition to Bush, however, and to other radicals from the so-called “Squad” of incumbent leftist House members, has been due to their anti-Israel activism. In a context of increasingly antisemitic activism against Israel, Jewish Democrats are expected to turn out to vote at high rates. They also donate to political causes at high rates and volunteer at high rates. As the linked article above reports, at least two synagogues in other states have been phone-banking against Bush. Pro-Israel organizations of all backgrounds have made Bush’s removal a priority, just as they did for Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D), who lost his primary recently in New York.
