The Briefing, Vol. XII, Issue 33
This Week:
- Hype over Harris-Walz, potential RFK collapse make presidential race hard to read
- Sheehy is already doing better than Rosendale did in MT-Sen
- Another “Squaddie” in danger of losing this week
President 2024
Kamala Harris is still enjoying something of a honeymoon period since seizing the Democratic nomination from Joe Biden.
Professional Democratic writers and pundits are trying even to make a virtue of her likely unwise choice of Tim Walz a resounding success, defending his public misrepresentation of his military service as no big deal, or maybe even a good thing. His 1990s DUI arrest in Nebraska, in which his blood-alcohol concentration was an extraordinary 0.128, has not been raised quite as often, although it is noteworthy that the media no longer treats this as controversial or negative the way it once did. (Walz’s 2006 campaign for congress denied that he had been drunk when arrested, although court transcripts say otherwise.)
These are just signs that partisan politics is tightening within the opinion window. This is not new — it happens before every election. The abject panic over Biden has subsided, and Democrats are now working very hard to make the Harris rollout a success.
Harris’s replacement of Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket has doubtless boosted her party’s prospects in the short run, as the entire mood of the election has changed. However, it remains unclear what the long-run consequences will be of this completely unprecedented party coup d’etat.
The biggest concern for Democrats has to be that they cannot hide her forever from the media and from normal interactions with voters. Her inauthenticity as a person and her political malleability have always been her weakest point as a candidate and as vice president. They did her in during the 2020 Democratic primary.
At the very least, Harris has now committed to debate Trump on Sept. 10. If Democrats tightly limit her public interactions until then, it could result in something not unlike the Biden debate debacle. Harris will not evince a lack of mental faculties, but there is a great risk associated with putting all eggs into a single public appearance by a candidate.
In the meantime, however, the polls certainly seem encouraging for her. A new set of media polls from swing states is the second to show Harris leading, although there are other polls pointing to a Trump lead. New York Times-Siena polls of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania all show Harris leading by the same 50 to 46 percent in all three.
This outcome, if accurate, would not necessarily guarantee her the presidency (Trump could still win, for example, by carrying Omaha), but it shows that Republicans cannot afford to remain complacent. If Harris is gaining ground in other places, it might actually start to endanger what seemed like an easy glide-path for Trump when biden was still a flailing incumbent in the race.
There are problems with these polls. For example, the same Pennsylvania poll has Sen. Bob Casey (D) leading former Army Ranger and hedge fund manager Dave McCormick (R) by an extraordinarily large margin of 14 points — at 51 to 37 percent.
Even when they seem slightly suspicious, one cannot just ignore polls as “skewed” whose results one dislikes or finds distressing. This was an important lesson of 2008 and 2012. Even so, 2016 and 2020 showed that Trump generally outperforms his polling.
Not all the polls are running against Trump either. Trafalgar, a Republican firm, also has a new set of state-level polls. In these, Trump leads in Pennsylvania by just over a point, and he continues to lead in Arizona, Nevada, and North Carolina. Meanwhile, polls by Insider Advantage have Trump up in Wisconsin and down in Michigan, both well within the margin of error.
One more note on the inconsistent polling: Independent candidate RFK, Jr. may be experiencing a collapse in support in some places due to some very strange recent media exposure. This might be contributing to the inconsistency of the various state and national polls, on top of the turbulence associated with Harris’s accession to the Democratic nomination.
Issues to run against Harris-Walz: So basically, the lesson here is to pay less attention to polling for a couple of days and see where things go once the market has fully priced in Harris as the new nominee. With the race in flux and the Democratic convention just about to begin next week, the best advice is probably to avoid riding the emotional roller coaster of the election. What the Democrats have done has never been tried before, and its results are going to be unpredictable.
Meanwhile, the message against Harris needs to be sharp and focused in a way that it has not been over the last seven days. Trump and running-mate JD Vance need a laser focus on precisely the issues that have made Biden’s administration so unpopular — economy, crime, and the immigration — and attach Harris to all three.
The Trump-Vance promise of 1 million deportations is at least a stab in that direction. There might also be a more positive way to describe getting the border under control, and that sort of message should be used as well.
Senate 2024
Montana: In 2018, Sen. Jon Tester (D) squeaked out his win against Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-Mont.), his third narrow win statewide. But it is worth pointing out that in that year, he led narrowly in almost every poll of the race.
This time around, it’s already a bit different. Businessman and former Navy SEAL Tim Sheehy (R) leads Tester in the few polls taken this summer. So he is already ahead of where Rosendale was. The latest survey, which shows Trump leading Harris by 15 points, shows Sheehy winning by just two, 48 to 46 percent.
What makes this race uniquely bad for Tester is the fact that Montana is a “Trumpy” state much more than it is a Republican state. It might be a lot harder to swim against the tide of the presidential outcome than it was to swim against, say, Mitt Romney’s (R) top-ballot appeal in 2012, the last time Tester had to run in a presidential year.
House 2024
Minnesota-5: There will be a third serious opportunity to oust a member of the leftist “Squad” tomorrow when Rep. Ilan Omar (D-Minn.) faces the voters. Omar, a Somali immigrant known for antisemitic and anti-American rhetoric, defund-the-police radicalism, a turbulent personal life of adultery and husband-stealing, and possible ethics violations, nonetheless enjoys a great deal of support as a hijab-wearing representative of the Islamic religion in government.
Her base of support is among the Somali-American community in Minneapolis, although it appears she has long had a robust base of opposition there, too.
Her opponent, former Minneapolis Councilman Don Samuels (D), came within about 2,500 votes of defeating Omar in 2022. The vocal opponent of the “defund the police” ballot measure Omar supported may just finish the job this time, which would make Omar the third “Squaddie” to fall this election season after Reps. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) and Cori Bush (D-Mo.).
