Whew, That Was A Short Honeymoon!

Here's what's plain as day, but nobody mentions it. First, when people say "the polls", they mean the Real Clear Politics "averages", which is the word they use, but these numbers aren't the "arithmetic mean", they're something cooked up in their "model", which is the same sort of thing that told us there'd be mass graves in public parks in 2020 after the hospital ships ran out of beds or something. But second, the polls on which they base their models are a select group of approved pollsters that release predictable results on a monthly basis.

What happens every month is one pollster releases predictably favorable results for Trump -- let's say Rasmussen has him up by 6 over Joe or Kamala. RCP feeds it into their model, which spits out Trump up 3. Then a pro-Harris poll comes out, maybe Reuters/Ipsos, with Harris up 2. RCP runs its model, and it comes out with Trump now up only 1.2 -- or whatever. This goes on all month, every month, and the results have been exactly the same since last year: depending on what poll just came out, Trump has been up on RCP ("the polls") between maybe 0.7 and 3 depending on what day, month after month.

There are people who are paid -- I'm not sure why -- to look at these meaningless numbers and think they're finding a "trend", when the differences come only from the day of the month you're looking at. This piece in the Never Trump National Review is at least aware of the odd consistency of "the polls" month to month:

Substituting Harris for Biden has helped Democrats claw back to the position they occupied before the first presidential debate — both at the national and swing-state levels. But Democrats were losing the race for the White House even before the debate.

This is another way of saying that if you looked at "the polls" after the June 27 debate, early in July, the latest Rasmussen would have kicked the RCP model up to Trump ahead 3. But a week or two later, WSJ and Reuters/Ipsos would have brought the model back down to 1.7, which was what had been happening all year anyhow, debate or no debate, Harris or no Harris. This is the same "trend" commentators were finding after Joe's State of the Union, which had Joe gaining ground against Trump the same way -- until he wasn't, and Obama and Pelosi finally told him to get lost, even though "the polls" hadn't changed at all.

That, of course, was the point Joe kept trying to make, it was a margin-of-error race and a tossup, but it did him no good. But doesn't that suggest that the Democrat insiders weren't taking "the polls" seriously? No matter how you sliced "the polls", as far as the lizard people were concerned, Joe was going to lose. But the legacy media, and even some on the right, were ginning up a "honeymoon" narrative.

The polls ["the polls"!] are in after a chaotic few weeks in the 2024 presidential election, and they point to a newly hyper-competitive race.

Vice President Kamala Harris’ elevation has jolted the race and blunted the momentum former President Donald Trump could have seen coming out of the Republican convention and the assassination attempt that preceded it. Though polling showed Trump building a lead over President Joe Biden following their debate last month, that advantage has mostly evaporated against Harris in the fresh round of surveys conducted since she became the all-but-certain Democratic nominee.

Translated: the predictable monthly fluctuation in the RCP model has fluctuated yet again, and the fluctuation continues in precisely the range it's had since the start of the year. Depending on where you are in the month, Trump "has a lead", or his previous "advantage" has "mostly evaporated". At least, that's for public consumption. The lizard people, though, aren't buying it:

Democrats are privately expressing concerns over Harris’s candidacy. One source familiar with the internal discussions told the Hill that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) was “lukewarm” about Harris becoming the nominee, a view that appears to be widespread among the party elites.

“She wasn’t a great candidate,” a Democrat senator told the Hill about Harris’s 2020 presidential campaign. Harris ended her campaign before the Iowa caucuses. “And she may not be as a political campaigner as good as Biden was in his prime,” the senator said.

Another story makes an important point:

After numerous gaffes as vice president, Harris shied away from the press and has not sat for a single one-on-one interview with the media since becoming the de facto nominee.

Any interview, and especially any debate against Trump, is likely to be as disastrous for Kamala as Joe's June 27 debate --but at the same time, it isn't going to be reflected in "the polls", just as Joe's June 27 debate wasn't, and just as the assassination attempt in Butler wasn't. But if "the polls" weren't affected by such momentous events, why did the lizard people force Joe out? Were they disingenuous?

Democrats at the highest levels are making a critical push for President Joe Biden to rethink his election bid, with former President Barack Obama expressing concerns to allies and Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi privately telling Biden the party could lose the ability to seize control of the House if he doesn’t step away from the 2024 race.

My view continues to be that whatever finally influenced the lizard people, it wasn't "the polls". They let Joe dither for fully two weeks after the June 27 debate, but something between the assassination attempt on July 13 and his abrupt retreat to Rehoboth June 17 changed things irrevocably, and apparently after a final nudge from Obama, he withdrew on July 21.

Did the lizard people seriously expect something to change if they swapped out Joe? I would have to guess that they didn't if the replacement was Kamala, which might be reflected in the Seymour Hersh report that Obama's first choice was Mark Kelly -- but even there, Kelly wasn't, and isn't, a national figure; at 60, he's the same age as Kamala but looks older; and he isn 't a cheerful or optimistic figure. If he was the best alternative, well, fine, but they couldn't choose him no matter what, because Kamala.

The coup had to be some sort of desperate last resort when everything else failed, but whatever it was, it wasn't, and isn't, "the polls". Nor is swapping Joe out for Kamala, however desperate a move it may have been, going to change a thing. Why they did it is still a puzzle.