In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

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 discon...

Two pieces in two days at Real Clear Politics say Kamala has the benefit of a "short" presidential campaign. Yesterday, Sean Trende concluded : In short, we can’t think of this campaign as a traditional campaign. It’s a sprint, and a shorter sprint than people acknowledge. This morning, Karl Rove echoed : This presidential election was one of America’s longest: . . . But with Mr. Biden’s withdrawal and replacement by Vice President Kamala Harris, it suddenly became one of the shortest. Regular visitors know that my estimate of both Karl Rove and Sean Trende isn't high, but here I think they've about pegged out on the obtuseness meter. The traditional start of the presidential campaign season is Labor Day, but even if we put the start farther back at the summer nominating conventions, which is when we learn for sure who the actual nominees will be, I don't see how this year's schedule differs much from any other. In fact, it's very similar to 1...

Jennifer Van Laar at Red State broke the initial story, at least on a national platform, that there may have been an as-yet-undisclosed medical event, not just a positive COVID test, that caused Joe's sudden premature departure from his Las Vegas campaign tour on July 17. But this is just one of the whole series of events between the July 13 assassination attempt on Trump in Butler, PA, and Joe's July 21 announcement on Twitter from his Delaware basement that he was withdrawing from the November race. The juxtaposition seems at minimum incongruous. The most extensive analysis of that chain is on Seyumour Hersh's Substack behind a quasi-paywall, which I've so far been unable to bypass, even though it's theoretically possible. However, Van Laar now provides a pretty good summary in this piece at Red State . In her interpretation of Hersh's story, there are many unanswered questions: According to Hersh's latest reporting the Democrat inner c...

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 mo...

Remember Fani Willis? Seems like years ago, but just last January, the Georgia racketeering case, according to CNN, was "key", because as a state case, it’s not something that could be dismissed through a presidential pardon, which applies only to federal matters. Trump’s lawyers have long considered this case the most significant legal threat given the jury pool and the fact that it is beyond pardon powers. Within weeks of that assessment, that "most significant legal threat" had disintegrated amid jokes about Nathan's Famous Hot Dogs. This is just one example of Trump's extrordinary combination of luck and deftness that's driven his campaign, especially his ability to exploit subliminal cues. This is a factor with the insertion of Kamala Harris into the race that's so far completely eluded commentators. Let's take the latest Democrat talking point that emerged over the weekend, which seems to have come simultaneously from so many differ...

Isn't it odd how the composition of the photo above very faintly echoes Michelangelo's Pieta , just as the more famous one of Trump pumping his fist beneath the flag echoes the photo of the flag raising at Iwo Jima? Says something important, I think -- and neither of those photos was remotely posed, they were lucky catches by the photographers. This is part of the underlying authenticity of the whole event. As I noted yesterday, it seems as though the most momentous events of the campaign so far don't seem to move the polls. There are several possible explanations. One is that the impact of certain events isn't easily quantifiable, or at least not over a short time. Another is the Rush Limbaugh theory, that the polls are carefully curated and massaged to shape the news, not to report it. Another is that some of the most momentous events don't even reach the news, and as one example, here is a report from Seymour Hersh via The Gateway Pundit : As The Gateway...

An uncharacteristically insightful piece at Hot Air this morning leads in passing to an intriguing question: First, Biden didn't really crater all that much from the debate. On June 27, the day of the debate, Biden's RCP average was 45.1, and it bottomed out on July 3 at 43.6. By the time Biden withdrew, though, he'd recovered most of that lost ground to have an RCP average of 44.8. Trump went from 46.6 on June 27 to 47.9 on July 21, but much of that gain came after the assassination attempt and then the GOP convention. Second: Harris only negligibly improves on Biden, even in the honeymoon week. On June 27, before the debate, Biden was 1.3 points behind Trump in the RCP average. Trump had a 3.1-point lead on Sunday, when Biden withdrew. Now, at the end of what should be the friendliest news cycle Harris will ever get, Trump still leads by 1.7 points -- slightly better than his lead when the debate aired. The writer thinks this is about Kamala, but I think the big...