The State Of The Honeymoon

Just yesterday, of all things, Nate Silver announced that the race is a toss-up.

Now that the election is in kamala_mode, however, it’s far from clear whose position you’d rather be in, and I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to bet either on Harris or on Trump. At FiveThirtyEight, we actually had a formal definition of a “toss-up”, which is an election where each candidate had at least a 40 percent chance of winning. We’re now quite comfortably into that territory. As of this afternoon’s model run, Harris’s odds had improved to 44.6 percent, as compared to 54.9 percent for Trump and a 0.5 percent chance of an Electoral College deadlock.

This, of course, is based on a model, and I would suggest that putting the percentages down to a decimal point is at best misleading. The problem is that, as this memo from a pollster to the Trump campaign points out, the fundamentals of the race haven't changed.

The Democrats deposing one Nominee for another does NOT change voters discontent over the economy, inflation, crime, the open border, housing costs not to mention concern over two foreign wars. Before long, Harris' "honeymoon" will end and voters will refocus on her role as Biden's partner and co-piiot.

An additional problem is Kamala's weakness as a candidate, versus Trump's quickness at seizing opportunities. A good many commentators are misreading the Real Clear Politics numbers, for instance Elizabeth Stauffer at Legal Insurrection:

Although early polling still shows Trump ahead of Harris, she has managed to narrow the gap to a startling degree.

The RealClearPolitics average of head-to-head polls shows Trump 1.4 points ahead of Harris by a margin of 48.1 to 46.1 percent. Before Biden withdrew from the race, Trump led by 3 points.

The RCP national average fluctuates from day to day, depending on how the most recent poll has been plugged into the model. A pro-Trump poll will raise the average for a few days until the next pro-Harris poll comes out and knocks down Trump's standing by maybe 2 points. Comparing a day in mid July when Trump was up by 3 to a day in August when he was up by 1 is meaningless, this same thing has been going on since last year.

But dealing with Trump at his best, as I've been saying, is a question of subliminal messaging. Let's look at the latest controversy over Trump's appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists. For starters, Jesse Watters is correct in the simple observation that it ripped the news cycle right out of Kamala Harris's hands by creating a new controversy that put him back as the center of attention. But Joy Reid at MSNBC pointed out the subliminal message it conveyed:

To the president and board of NABJ: Y’all got played. Donald Trump showed up at the convention for exactly three reasons. . . to try to dispel the notion that he’s scared to debate a Black woman. Second, to steal the attention that Vice President Kamala Harris has hijacked from him because she’s just more interesting, and her support is more joyous and rooted in popular American culture. Three, to create clips to play for his very white, very right-wing mega fan base of him standing up to the Blacks.

The piece at Gateway Pundit goes on,

Joining Reid, April Ryan, White House correspondent for The Grio and an MSNBC contributor, said “It was a shock and awe moment. I’m still trying to deal with it.”

But Gateway leaves uut what was revealing about the Harris campaign: Kamala was invited to the event, but Trump himself pointed out that she didn't attend. Trump characterized this as bad faith on the part of NABJ, but had she attended, this would effectively have been at least a quasi-debate. We must assume that Kamala's handlers wanted to avoid any such opportunity. Scott Adams, who underatands subliminal messaging, outlined the actual message Trump sent:

How much did I enjoy that? 10/10.

Who changed the conversation about all of politics? Trump did.

Did you hear the word weird yet today?

He managed to changed the entire cycle to 'Why are you being such a bitch' basically.

Basically she was just a total bitch, and he just treated her like a bitch.

. . . it's the best thing I've ever seen in politics.

Now if you tell me that the men sitting in the audience hated that, did they?

I don't think they're going to tell you if they liked it.

Wasn't this precisely Joy Reid's point? This reminds me of the time Barbara Bush characterized Hillary as "a word that rhymes with witch", becasue we're getting into Hillary territory here, as Kamala's mentor and sugar daddy Willie Brown also pointed out, in the context of Trump's political acumen:

“He’s an entertainer, that’s all it is,” Brown argued.

And that can overcome everything else, all of Trump’s manifest liabilities?

“Oh yeah, if the public is fascinated with your antics, you survive,” he said, before lowering the boom. “It’s unfortunate, but you can’t really tell the voters they’re idiots.”

Brown was far more candid about Harris at lunch, before the debate, when Biden’s renomination seemed inevitable and his vice president was more unpopular than he was.

Brown worried out loud that Harris had “the Hillary syndrome” — that “people don’t like her” — and fretted it was not fixable. Thinking through Harris’s future if Biden were to lose, Brown said: “You need a Black woman on every goddamn corporate board in America!”

But the comparison to Hillary goes deeper, to the changed nature of the Democrat coalition. According to Ruy Teixeira,

In truth, the Harris coalition bears more resemblance to the Biden coalition. . . but without as many working-class voters. Or to the Hillary Clinton coalition. . . but with far fewer white working-class voters.

Start with the working class. While Obama carried them by 4 points, four years later Clinton lost them by 3 points. Four years after that, Biden lost them by 4 points and, four years later, Harris in the Times poll is losing them by 15 points.

Contrast this with the trajectory of the college-educated vote. As noted, Obama carried these voters by 6 points. In 2016, Clinton carried them by 13 points and four years later Biden carried them by 18 points. Today, Harris’ lead over Trump among the college-educated is 20 points. This takes the college-educated/working class margin gap from +2 under Obama to +35 today—that is, from doing barely better among college voters in 2012 to a massive class gap today.

. . . Finally, when looking at the nonwhite voting pool as a whole, we see the following trend in Democratic margin: Obama 2012, +64 points; Clinton 2016, +58; Biden 2020, +48; Harris today, +34.

It is difficult to look at these data and not see profound differences between the Obama coalition and the emerging Harris coalition. These differences reflect how much the party has evolved in 12 short years.

. . . Right now, [the Harris campaign is] on a narrow, polarized path to November and their [they're?] reckoning with Donald Trump.

In oher words, much more even than with Obama, Harris is running a campaign aimed at bourgeois white women, the sort of target Groucho Marx could take on -- and one side of Trump is the entertainer truth-teller who has just a dash of Groucho Marx. This is what Scott Adams and Willie Brown both instinctively see.