It's Over

The big quote yesterday was from Mark Halperin:

Former President Donald Trump is on track to win the 2024 presidential race based on the early voting numbers trickling in, according to a longtime political journalist.

“If the early vote numbers stay the way they are, and that’s a big if, we’ll almost certainly know before Election Day who’s going to win,” Mark Halperin, editor-in-chief of the 2WAY video platform, said Tuesday.

Halperin is an interesting case. He grew up in Bethesda as a member of the ruling class, although like me, he didn't go to Sidwell Friends (I went to B-CC; he went to Walt Whitman). He went on to Harvard and had a predictable career as a senior political analyst in corporate media, including ABC, NBC, MSNBC, and Showtime, but allegations of sexual harassment brought this to an end in 2017. As of the 2024 campaign, he seems to have worked hard to rehabilitate himself as the centrist honest broker among all the commentators, so he has a lot riding on this prediction. If he's right, he can probably get back into corporate media.

The headlines on Real Clear Poloitics are baleful: from Politico, The Clock Is Ticking on Kamala Harris:

Since her strong convention speech and superb debate performance, Harris has run out of what her campaign calls tentpole moments. She now needs to drive news in other ways. Appearing with Cheney is a way to do that, but it’s of limited utility if that’s the beginning and end of the messaging.

This remains a winnable race for Harris, but she’s getting hammered in television ads for being a liberal thanks to the far-left stances she took in her ill-fated presidential bid. If she says nothing to contradict that onslaught, voters will believe it. No matter how much she says Donald Trump is a bad man.

The clock is ticking.

But beauty is as beauty does. The conventional wisdom is she had a "superb debate performance", but the one memorable phrase from the debate was Trump's "they're eating the dogs and cats," and everything memorable since then has been Kamala fails. From The Hill:

There is growing fear in Democratic circles that the presidential race could be slipping further away from Vice President Harris.

To be sure, Democrats still think Harris can defeat former President Trump. The margins are so close in the seven battleground states likely to decide the contest, a shift toward either candidate or a mistake in the polling could be decisive.

. . . “Everyone keeps saying, ‘It’s close.’ Yes, it’s close, but are things trending our way? No. And no one wants to openly admit that,” one Democratic strategist said. “Could we still win? Maybe. Should anyone be even slightly optimistic right now? No.”

Every indication, which Halperin has picked up, is that the election isn't going to be close, especially if early voting means it could well be called before election day. But Ed Kilgore at New York Magazine is clinging to the verities:

It’s always possible the polls are all wrong and either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris is on the brink of a decisive victory on November 5. For one thing, it’s close enough in the seven battleground states that either candidate could win all of them. But make no mistake: This apparently very close presidential election reflects a deeply divided electorate where the potential changes in either direction we all talk about constantly are glacial and arguably self-canceling.

. . . Very big differences in the direction of the country will flow from tiny shifts in one direction or another of a closely divided electorate. It’s why anxiety levels are so high right now among those paying avid attention to politics, even though the outcome may depend on “low-propensity voters” barely paying attention at all.

But "the polls" are changing daily. As of this morning, Harris's lead in the RCP average is at 1.1%, up slightly from Monday's 1.0%, but down roughly a point from the previous week. The rule-of-thumb calculation has been that the RCP average underestimates Trump's final peformance by about 3 points, which suggests, as numerous polls recently also do, that he will win both the Electoral College and the popular vote.