By Dave Andrusko
Donald Trump
Photo: Gage Skidmore
CC BY-SA 2.0 DEED
Here’s a couple of areas that we will explore today four days before the debate (likely the only one) between former President Donald Trump and pro-abortion Vice President Kamala Harris. The first will discuss the long-running evasion of the media by pro-abortion Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate pro-abortion Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz— stonewalling the media—and the second, a much longer look at the latest polls.
“Do the American voters not need to hear from her directly? She wants to be the commander-in-chief,” America’s Newsroom co-anchor Dana Perino said this morning.”
Harris-Walz campaign senior spokesperson Ian Sams brushed aside Perino, talking about the interviews Harris gave before winning the nomination.
“People maybe weren’t paying attention or listening. She’s taking questions from reporters on the campaign trail so far in this campaign,” Sams said. “People who are covering her every single day, she’s going to do more interviews and talk to the press more and take more reporter questions.”
And exasperated Perino interjected, “Ian, come on.”
In other words, promises of interviews yet to come. Where have we heard that before?
Pro-abortion Vice President Kamala Harris
Photo: Gage Skidmore
CC BY-SA 2.0
Meanwhile, Fox News’s Nikolas Lanum, notes, “Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, have sat down for at least 39 interviews since the Harris-Walz ticket was formed, compared to just six non-scripted interviews for the Democratic presidential ticket thus far.
The polls are pretty much on hold as we approach the weekend. Harris is ahead in the popular vote by 2 to 3 points, while Trump is deadlocked with Harris in the seven swing states which will likely decide the election.
To me, by far the most interesting insight comes from William A. Galston. The headline for his analysis is, “ Is Kamala Harris leading Donald Trump in the presidential race?” His bio includes, “A participant in six presidential campaigns, he served from 1993 to 1995 as Deputy Assistant to President Clinton for Domestic Policy,” so we should expect a pro-Trump conclusion.
In fact, Galston handles the data carefully. He begins, “Do the odds now favor Harris to win the election? Let’s dig beneath the surface to assess how she is doing.”
He offers a counter-intuitive point [underlining added]:
We should also be cautious about concluding that Harris now enjoys a clear lead over Trump. In recent elections, not just individual polls but also poll averages have turned out to be misleading. Not only have there been large gaps between September surveys and actual results; the same has been true for polls conducted just days before the election. These gaps have not been random; most of them underestimated the share of the vote that Donald Trump eventually received, often by wide margins.
I’ll quote a long passage from the end of Galston’s post. As we sprint to the end of the campaign, there is lots of good advice in this that should be remembered:
Some analysts argue that poll findings from recent presidential contests have no bearing on the 2024 race: Kamala Harris is an unprecedented kind of nominee and, as one prominent optimist puts it, “Everything in American politics changed with Dobbs.”
Perhaps it did. But if so, we would expect Harris to be doing considerably better than Joe Biden did in 2020 among the voters who are especially responsive to these considerations—young voters, minorities, and women. As of Labor Day, however, she is still doing measurably worse among some of these groups and no better than Biden with women (as shown by a comparison of recent polls averages with the 2020 results.
What about the abortion issue?
The impact of abortion on the 2022 midterms, when Democrats did much better than expected, is undeniable. But some evidence suggests that its impact may be more muted in this year’s contest. Yes, 12% of women consider abortion to be the most important issue in the presidential election. But twice as many—24%—say that inflation and prices take priority. As expected, the issue scores high among liberals and Democratic identifiers but much lower among groups that contain larger shares of swing voters. Only six percent of moderates and five percent of independents say that abortion is their top issue, compared to 23% and 24%, respectively, for inflation and prices.
Galston then tackles the so-called “hidden Trump voters”:
It is possible that there will be fewer “hidden” Trump voters than there were in recent elections. But the 2022 results, when Trump was not on the ballot, do not provide evidence for this conclusion. Since 2015, the former president has forged a unique personal bond with a substantial share of the electorate. This relationship may have weakened somewhat during the past four years, but it has not evaporated. It is plausible to assume that the 2024 polls continue to understate Trump’s support, although no one can say by how much.
Hillary Clinton’s 2.1-point edge in the popular vote was not enough to yield 270 electoral votes in 2016, and Joe Biden’s 4.5 points turned out to be just barely enough. It is possible that Trump’s vote will be distributed less efficiently in 2024 if, as some surveys indicate, he gets a higher share of the vote in big blue states (such as New York) that he has no chance of winning. Even so, it seems unlikely that Harris can win with less than a three percent margin in the popular vote.
His conclusion?
Taken as a whole, the current evidence suggests that the 2024 presidential election is likely to resemble those of 2016 and 2020. The winner’s national vote margin will be modest, and the race will be decided by a handful of votes in a few swing states. Although the outcome remains unpredictable, the contest will not be boring, and just about anything could turn out to be the decisive factor.
See you on Monday.