The Briefing, Vol. XII, Issue 35
This week:
- How big will Harris’s bounce be?
- The RFK effect
- Alaska Republicans come together
Outlook
President 2024
Dem convention: A party convention is a four-day exercise in disseminating propaganda. By that measure, Democrats had a very successful convention and earned a massive buy-in from the mainstream media. Harris, whom liberal journalists once desperately begged to get off Biden’s ticket so that she wouldn’t drag him down, was magically transformed — for the moment, anyway — into a magic candidate of “joy” who has no offensive position on any issue and can do no wrong.
It is doubtful that this impression can be maintained all the way to Election Day, although Harris’s no-media strategy suggests her campaign staff believe otherwise.
Harris should get a bump from the convention, and some polls already suggest she has. This makes former President Donald Trump the underdog. Even if the Fairleigh-Dickenson poll showing her seven points ahead nationally turns out to be an outlier, it is one of several showing her in the lead. Harris has led Trump in four of the last five head-to-head national surveys.
Then again, as we have noted many times here, Trump is not competing in a national election. He needs to carry specific states, which we will discuss more below.
But this national polling is not a reason to panic. For context, Trump rarely led in national polls in 2016 when he won — in fact, he led in only 28 out of 259 polls taken, and he led in the RealClear polling average for just a couple of days after the Republican convention. What’s more, Trump trailed in 18 of the last 20 national polls of that race before Election Day.
And for further context regarding the Democratic convention specifically, at the end of her July 2016 Philadelphia convention, Hillary Clinton led Trump in the first batch of ten national polls by anywhere from 5 points to 15 points, with three of the ten showing double-digit leads.
RFK endorsement: On Friday, independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dropped out of the race and endorsed Trump. We have always viewed RFK as a spoiler working in Trump’s favor, but that probably changed when Biden dropped out. It is likely that Harris’s accession was helping Democrats claw back whatever support RFK was drawing away from Biden. The question now is whether the endorsement helps Trump regain the RFK vote based on the esoteric set of issues they have in common, such as medical autonomy and
In his passionate speech, Kennedy described the current state and goals of the Democratic Party as those of an anti-democratic institution that has lost its mooring. “The DNC deployed aligned judges to throw me and other candidates off the ballot and to throw President Trump in jail,” he said. “It ran a sham primary that was rigged to prevent any serious challenge to President Biden. Then, when a predictably bungled debate performance precipitated the palace coup against President Biden, the same shadowy DNC operatives appointed his successor, also without an election. They installed a candidate who was so unpopular with voters that she dropped out in 2020 without winning a single delegate.”
He also railed against Democrats’ newfound embrace of political censorship, which is in keeping with these other themes.
Kennedy’s oration, although its consequences might take some time to detect, was well-timed to disrupt the successful Chicago convention as it was having its full effect, just like Biden’s abrupt exit from the race was timed well to disrupt Republicans’ successful convention in July.
Georgia: One place Republicans can breathe easier is Georgia, where Trump has decided it’s finally time to bury the hatchet and end his feud with Gov. Brian Kemp (R). Their destructive, hostile relationship — a result of Trump’s dissatisfaction with the 2020 outcome in Georgia — was not helping matters. Trump’s path to the White House almost certainly requires him to win Georgia. And indeed, if he does win Georgia, all he will need to finish the job is North Carolina and Pennsylvania.
Ultimately, winning has to be more important than always being right, always winning one’s feuds, or even just always letting Trump be Trump. It is a good sign for Trump if he himself is coming around to this realization.
Electoral map:
Although Harris has to put some states in play where Trump seemed to be dominating Biden (North Carolina especially), and she has probably taken Minnesota out of contention, she has not managed to build a clear lead in any of the key battlegrounds.
This is important. It means that, even at what will probably prove to be Harris’s high-tide moment, Trump has maintained a tie or even a tiny lead in the key states of Georgia, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Michigan. (But it should be noted that some of these states have not been polled since the convention started.)
This is a very close race, but one in which Trump can win if he manages to dispel the fear on his own side, unite his party, run a modestly more disciplined and issue-focused campaign, and do everything he can to help, not hinder, his party mechanisms in turning out his voters.
In short, as bad as some of the national polls look, not all of the polling is terrible for Trump even now, at what is likely the moment of peak Kamala post-convention.
In Virginia, for example, he trails by just three points. That is not an insurmountable margin, it was taken at the very height of the Harris-hype media campaign, and it is in a state Trump does not need or expect to win anyway.
In short, Harris probably looks a lot stronger on paper right now than she will prove to be. She has a lot of downside potential, and the RFK Jr. endorsement is still not baked into any of the data available as of this morning.
House 2024
Alaska-At Large: A bit of good news for House Republicans: Alaskan Republicans have buried the hatchet and will work together in this year’s House race. Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstom (R), who had Trump’s endorsement for Congress, dropped out after finishing in third place so that Nick Begich (R) could go into the general election as the only serious Republican competitor to Rep. Mary Peltola (D). This doesn’t guarantee victory, but it makes it much more likely.
Peltola won in 2022 because of the state’s ranked-choice voting system, since former Gov. Sarah Palin (R), also in the race that year, endorsed Peltola while attacking Begich.
