By Dave Andrusko
What’s new, sadly, is another apparent assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, this time at his golf course in West Palm Beach, Florida. His subsequent remarks to Sean Hannity— Trump jokingly said he wished he’d been able to finish the hole—was preceded by a defiant email to his supporters that “I AM SAFE AND WELL! Nothing will slow me down. I will NEVER SURRENDER!”
I doubt many of us would have that kind of courage, certainly not when the second attempt on his life comes just a little over two months after the first attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. Reflecting on these terrible events, Douglas MacKinnon wrote
What the voters instantly and indelibly learned during the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, is that Trump’s natural instincts are to fight in his defense and the defense of our nation. Again, how many of us, after getting shot by a high-powered rifle meant to take our life, could do what Trump did those seconds afterward when he jumped up from the ground and screamed: “Fight, fight, fight” to the crowd? He truly is a man apart regarding both his fighter instinct and his bravery under fire.
A prayer for Mr. Trump safety.
Back to the other campaign news that has occurred since we last talked on Friday.
Nate Cohn always writes extremely informative posts and today’s was no exception. Since we’ve got a lot of ground to cover, suffice it to say that while his is optimistic take on pro-abortion Vice President Kamala Harris’s candidacy, Cohn hedges his analysis with qualifiers.
He ends his piece with a series of graphs which show what the results would be if the current polls prove to be as much off as much as they were in in 2020 and 2022:
If the polls erred as they did in 2020, Mr. Trump would sweep the battlegrounds. Conversely, Ms. Harris would win big if it turned out the polls were wrong as they were in 2022.
Cohen concluded, “It’s easy to imagine either scenario.”
Veteran Democrat strategist Douglas Schoen asks an intriguing question: “Kamala Harris clearly won the debate. But will it matter?”
In a nutshell, Schoen argues
[P]re- and post-debate polling suggests that, while voters overwhelmingly recognize that Harris won, it has not translated into commensurate boosts in the vice president’s polling numbers, and thus, is unlikely to have any noticeable impact. According to the RealClearPolitics tracker, there have been three polls conducted after the debate that can be compared to pre-debate polls, and all three underscore that regardless of the outcome the debate’s importance must not be overstated.” …
The minimal movement in the polls, despite what many consider a lopsided performance, suggests that the presidential campaign will be neck-and-neck throughout the fall, with every indication that it will be even closer than 2020’s, which famously came down to roughly 100,000 votes in just a handful of states.
CNN’s Daniel Dale is no admirer of Trump—he has factcheck Mr. Trump as well–but did he lay into Harris: “Fact check: Harris campaign social media account has repeatedly deceived with misleading edits and captions.”
Dale begins, “Below are eight examples of false or misleading video posts from the account since mid-August, including three from the latter part of this week. All of them have previously been highlighted by an anonymous rebuttal account called @KamalaHQLies, which itself has more than 268,000 followers.”
Everything from “Misleadingly describing a Trump comment about his supporters” to “Deceptively clipping and misleadingly describing a Trump comment about immigration” to “Deceptively clipping and inaccurately quoting a JD Vance quote about veterans’ health care”—their heavy handedness is all over social media.
The Harris campaign is aware of these distortions but clearly they don’t care.
Brittany Gibson and Brakkton Booker have written a story the truth of which is becoming more and more obvious: “Harris needs incredible turnout among Black voters. But there are warning signs.”
Note that the first half of the post is an extending smooch. Everything is hunky dory. The second half is more sobering:
But Harris’ surrogates and allies stress that there’s still significant work to be done to turn out the vote.
In 2020, roughly 90 percent of Black voters supported President Joe Biden, but that was down from closer to 95 percent in the few elections preceding that one. The network exit poll four years ago did show Black voters between the ages of 30 and 44 were twice as likely to support Trump (19 percent) as those 18 to 29 (10 percent), 45 to 60 (10 percent) or 60 and older (7 percent).
Younger Black men, in particular, have been straying from the Democratic party. The NAACP released a poll on Friday that found one in four younger Black men are backing her Republican opponent Trump. The survey, conducted in partnership with HIT Strategies and Hart Research, found overall 63 percent of Black voters favored Harris compared to 13 percent that backed Trump.
The gender gap is significant. Two-thirds of Black women (67 percent) back Harris, but among Black men under 50 Harris’ support plummets to 49 percent. Researchers caution the poll was conducted in early August — before both the Democratic convention and this week’s presidential debate — and say late-deciding voters may break for Harris.
The most worrisome story for Harris was penned by the Aaron Zitner: “Harris Is Still Struggling to Blunt Trump’s Edge on the Economy. Democrats say she needs to persuade voters she can better handle their top issue.”
Trump has a 10 point lead (55% to 45%) on the question “Makes good decisions about economic policy.” (Other survey put Trump much further ahead.) Zitner continues
Trump has been arguing that Harris’s economic agenda doesn’t present fresh ideas but rather continues the policies of President Biden, which have little credibility with voters. His campaign released a video ad Friday that shows Harris praising “Bidenomics” and includes Trump saying during the debate: “She doesn’t have a plan. She copied Biden’s plan.”
Micah Roberts, a Republican pollster who surveys voters on views of the economy for CNBC, was skeptical that Harris could overcome the feeling among Americans that the economy was robust when Trump was in the White House and had weakened under Democratic leadership.
And then there the real genius of the Trump campaign as written about by less than friendly reporters.
According to Axios’s Sophia Cai and Torey Van Oot, “The Trump campaign’s internal materials prioritize getting to ‘hard-to-reach, low-propensity voters’ — those who’ve shown interest in Trump by attending a rally, for example, but aren’t necessarily likely to show up at the polls.”
They tell us that other groups “fill in gaps in the campaign’s efforts” and that RNC Battleground States Communications Director Rachel Reisner has told Axios that “Team Trump is doubling down on our efforts to reach voters where they are at and share President Trump’s plans to make America prosperous again.”
Finally, election analyst Nat Silver, assisted by Eli McKown-Dawson, write this morning that Sunday was “A mostly quite strong day of polling for Kamala Harris — but with one big exception, an AtlasIntel poll that shows Trump ahead by 3 or 4 points nationally, depending on which version you use. Outliers happen, but AtlasIntel is a highly-rated pollster and gets a lot of weight in our model, so resist the temptation to unskew or cherry-pick.”
More on Tuesday.