Friday, October 4, 2024

Is The Race Really "Razor Thin"?

We're continuing to see headlines like Emerson Poll: Presidential Race Razor-Thin; Senate Race Tightening. This has been some version of the story of the presidential race since Kamala's nomination -- except that in recent weeks, there's been another, like Robert Reich in The Guardian: Donald Trump is gaining on Kamala Harris in the polls. I have some theories why.

How can the race be stuck at "razor thin" when Trump is gaining? This is the sort of question I was taught not to ask in college, and as I was a schoolmate of Robert Reich back in the day, I must assume he absorbed that lesson well. He asks,

With less than 40 days until election day, how can it be that Trump has taken a small lead in Arizona and Georgia – two swing states he lost to Biden in 2020? How can he be narrowly leading Harris in the swing state of North Carolina? How can he now be essentially tied with her in the other key swing states of Michigan and Wisconsin?

More generally, how can Trump have chiseled away Harris’s advantage from early August? How is it possible that more voters appear to view Trump favorably now than they did several months ago when he was in the race against Biden?

He seems to be referrinmg generally to the Real Clear Politics aggregates, which have been static for weeks. As of this morning, Harris is ahead 2.2 in the meaningless national average, while Trump is ahead 0.1 in the "battlegrounds". These totals have changed little in the past month or so -- and they're the main reason anyone can claim the race is stuck and razor-thin. This piece cites Trafalgfar/Insider Advanatage: The piece cites similar numbers from Atlas Intel and Ipsos. Reich, hough, puts out another theory:

By now, almost everyone in America knows Trump and has made up their minds about him. Recent polls have found that nearly 90% of voters say they do not need to learn more about Trump to decide their vote.

But they don’t yet know Harris, or remain undecided about her. More on this in a moment.

Trump is exploiting this asymmetry so that when it comes to choosing between Trump and Harris, voters will choose the devil they know.

This requires, first, that Trump suck all the media oxygen out of the air so Harris has fewer opportunities to define herself positively.

. . . In other words, Trump is running neck-and-neck with Harris not despite the mess he’s created over the last few weeks but because of it.

In part, one could counter Reich by suggesting that Harris is forgoing opportunities to definme herself positively by avoiding press conferences and penetrating interviews. But on the other hand, Harris's main surrogates, Tim Walz and her husband, Doug Emhoff, haven't done well defining her, either. I covered Emhoff's latest escapade yesterday, but the fallout from Walz's debate performance is continuing:

Walz is more than a knucklehead. He's a liability. Why? Because vice presidential nominees take an electoral version of the Hippocratic Oath: Do no harm to the top of the ticket. Walz had a good rollout and a quick and effective speech at the Democratic National Convention. He entered the debate with positive favorable ratings. Yet he's become a distraction for Kamala Harris and her campaign. Walz is a walking reminder that Harris's judgment is questionable at best.

I no longer think "razor thin", "effectively tied", "narrow", and so forth are effective ways to describe the current state of the race, and Real Clear Politics is a major factor in enabling this misperception.

posted by test @ October 04, 2024   0 Comments