By Dave Andrusko
If you peruse the Internet, you’ll find plenty of commentary like this from NBC’s Chuck Todd—“Will Biden cost Harris the election?”—and below-the-belt attacks on former President Donald Trump like this from guttersnipe Thomas Edsall—“Donald Trump is so dependent on racial and ethnic antagonism that without it he would be a marginal figure, relegated to the sidelines.”
Should we be even a little surprised? Of course not. It’ll get worse since we are just 20 days away from the Presidential election.
Todd is preparing his audience in case pro-abortion Vice President Kamala Harris loses so he can say “I told you so”–that Biden would seek revenge for being unceremoniously kicked off the ticket.
Conrad Black, writing for the New York Sun, was much more blunt:
Mr. Obama appears to have been instrumental in pulling the rug from under Mr. Biden’s attempted reelection, once he was clearly headed for defeat, but was unable to get a last-minute open convention to seek the best candidate. He and Mr. Biden between them anointed Vice President Harris, as the hapless defender against an avenging Trump…
Edsall’s weekly piece in the New York Times is so rancid we will borrow from Michelle Obama: “When they go low, we go high.”
There has been little movement in the polls since yesterday except for an outlier by Marquette University Law School. Harris is up a point or two in the nation-wide poll. Trump is ahead by a similarly small margin in all of the seven battleground states: Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Nevada.
Getting back to Todd for a second, he writes
From his border policy to the economy he has been presiding over to turmoil overseas, there isn’t a lot about the Biden years that voters love in this moment. It’s why former President Donald Trump has basically a 50-50 chance to return to the White House, just four years after voters fired him. …
But while Biden isn’t on the ballot anymore, voters are certainly feeling his presence. If there’s one thing it’s clear they don’t want, it’s a candidate who reminds them of Biden.
After the sour grapes, Todd hits on an important point from their latest poll:
What’s interesting is how much smaller the Democratic lead is in “blue” states in 2024 compared with 2020 and 2016. In 2016, Trump lost the core Democratic states by 22 points, and in 2020, he lost them by 24 points. In this most recent poll, Trump was losing the core Democratic states by only 13 points.
Which leads Todd to ruefully conclude
Who knows what Trump’s blue-state arena tour over the next 10 days does to his blue-state support, but one thing is for sure: If he wins the presidency while also winning the popular vote, it will be a different kind of mandate for him from the one he claimed to have gotten in 2016.
William A. Galston also offers some keen insights in a piece that appears in the Wall Street Journal under the headline “The Known Unknowns of Election 2024: The gender gap seems wider than ever, while Hispanics and black men shift to Trump.”
He writes
Party identification, meantime, has shifted toward the Republicans. For decades, with few exceptions, more Americans have identified themselves as Democrats than as Republicans. Democrats’ party-identification advantage disappeared in 2004, the only time in the past three decades that the Republican presidential candidate received the greatest share of the popular vote. But this year surveys show Republicans leading in party identification—which should work to Mr. Trump’s advantage.
Galston drives home this essential truth:
There’s evidence that Hispanics will continue the move toward the Republican Party that began at least four years ago and that black voters may join them. In 2020 Mr. Trump received only 8% of the black vote, but a recent New York Times/Siena poll places his share this year at 15% overall, and at 20% among men. A newly released New York Times survey shows Mr. Trump in a dead heat with Ms. Harris among Hispanic men while trailing her 2 to 1 among Hispanic women.
What that means in total is 39% for Trump among registered Hispanic voters.
Finally, Nate Cohn, chief political analyst for the New York Times, tells us,
Like our other surveys this cycle, the polls find Mr. Trump faring unusually well for a Republican among Black and Hispanic voters. Overall, Kamala Harris is ahead, 78 percent to 15 percent, among Black voters, and she’s leading, 56-37, among Hispanic voters.
Almost any way we can measure it, Mr. Trump is running as well or better among Black and Hispanic voters as any Republican in recent memory. In 2020, Joe Biden’s Black support was 92 percent among major-party voters; his Hispanic support was 63 percent, according to Times estimates.
More tomorrow.