So Early In The Cycle

The one thing I've noticed throughout this election cycle is how early everything has been taking place vis-a-vis all the other presidential election cycles I've lived through. I've mentioned here several times that previous leaks from insiders that a losing campsign isn't going well tend to happen in late summer and early fall; this time, we saw calls from influential Democrats for Joe to withdraw as early as February. Just this past week, the Biden campaign issued the ad linked above, which is a last-ditch play to win back African-American voters by taking out-of-context remarks from Trump as long ago as 1989 to prove he's a racist.

This reminded me of Jimmy Carter's failing campaign in 1980 and his desperate attempt to brand Ronald Reagan as a racist -- except this took place that September, not in May, which Biden is doing this year:

It was a mistake, tactically, to call Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign racist. Reagan’s opponent, Jimmy Carter, made that error in a September address at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King Jr. had served as the co-pastor. “You’ve seen in this campaign the stirrings of hate and the rebirth of code words like states’ rights in a speech in Mississippi,” Carter said, adding that “hatred has no place in this country.”

. . . Carter’s statement about code words and hatred reoriented the conversation about Reagan and the Neshoba County Fair, but not in the way Carter intended. Instead of focusing on Reagan’s speech, its effect on black Americans, and what it implied about how he’d govern, the political press concentrated on Carter’s decision to chide Reagan and the tone he’d used in doing so.

Oddly, the 1980 election is remembered as one of the few in which the candidate who was leading in the polls, in that case Carter, was upset by the candidate who was trailing, in that case Reagan.

Reagan's late-breaking surge that year is generally attributed to the only presidential debate between Carter and Reagan -- held one week before the election, on Oct. 28 -- which seemed to move voter preferences in Reagan's direction, as well as the ongoing Iran hostage crisis, which reached its one-year anniversary on Election Day. After trailing Carter by 8 points among registered voters (and by 3 points among likely voters) right before their debate, Reagan moved into a 3-point lead among likely voters immediately afterward, and he won the Nov. 4 election by 10 points.

But let's apply Rush Limbaugh's insight here. The polling companies use the polls to shape the election, not report the news. Only as the election gets closer in time, "all of these polling companies are gonna want to be right when it’s all over". Carter was desperate by September, whether he was leading in the polls or not. Reagan won the 1980 election by 10 points in the popular vote and the Electoral College 489-49.

The link above attributes this result to the October 28 Reagan-Carter debate, but it's hard to avoid thinking this was to save the reputation of the pollsters, who needed some sort of very late development to explain what was a massive landslide upset by Reagan. In retrospect, the "malaise" speech of July 15, 1979, the Iranian hostage crisis, which began November 4, 1979, and even the visual of Carter collapsing during a race near Camp David that September all played a part, as well as high inflation, and the pollsters were likely ignoring the real national mood.

Carter's problem was that by the start of his fall 1980 campaign, it had already been overtaken by events, and his desperation in September was a reflection of that. But in 1980, nobody was desperate as early as May, although Ted Kennedy was running a primary campaign against Carter -- but Carter had performed well enough in the primaries to ensure his nomination by early June. Nevertheless, the failed Iran hostage rescue attempt in April did damage Carter's ultimate standing.

What we're seeing at this point now, though, is completely different. Biden had no significant opposition in the primaries; Trump also quickly became the presumptive nominee, and the presidential campaign for the November elecdtion is well under way. The consensus is that for Biden to have challenged Trump to debates and tacitly agreed to one as early as June reflects Biden's already-weak position -- indeed, the potential that a poor enough performance gives the Democrats leeway to replace him before the convention.

What we're now seeing is the Biden campaign telegraphing its intent to leverage the upcoming verdict in the New York "hush money" trial:

Biden intends to initially address the verdict in a White House setting — not a campaign one — to show his statement isn’t political, according to the people, who were granted anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

Cough, cough. The link continues,

The Biden team’s plans are still being deliberated and could change, the people familiar said. The White House and Biden campaign declined comment.

. . . Biden doesn’t “need to engage with it, because everyone else will,” [think tank executive Matt] Bennett said. “He is the only person who could in some ways lessen the political impact of this by getting involved, because Trump could then make the case that the verdict is political.”

But whatever the outcome of the trial, and however Biden responds to it, his campaign, perhaps even more than Carter's in 1980, has already been overtaken by events -- but this is May, not September or October.