By Dave Andrusko
What a 24 hours! Lots and lots and lots of developments to report on.
If you’ve followed our account of how the election is shaking out, you know that the campaign of pro-abortion Vice President Kamala Harris seems to be coming apart at the seams. For example, in addition to reported strife between the Harris team and Biden’s, Harris is rightly worried about her standing with men in general, young men in particular, and young Black men most of all. What to do?
It’s one thing for her to agree to go on Bret Baier’s show. While appearing on Fox News, Baier has honed a reputation as a non-partisan journalist.
But it’s quite another thing (as Reuters reports] for Harris to “sit down for an interview with popular podcaster Joe Rogan, whose audience leans heavily towards young men, as she works to shore up support with male voters, sources said on Monday.” As of this morning, nothing has been confirmed.
Byron York is a conservative but also with a reputation for being even-handed. He wrote this morning about a private memo from the Trump team about the seven swing states. What’s interesting is the numbers from the Trump team are very similar to those found by the non-partisan Real Clear Politics—Trump is up by the slimmest of margins in all seven battleground states.
York writes that on Sunday the top Trump management team of Chris LaCivita, Susie Wiles, and Tony Fabrizio, released a memo in which the three argued that “Harris experienced a ‘joy ride’ of rising acceptance and support in late July after a secretive group of Democratic power brokers pushed President Joe Biden out of the race and Harris quickly replaced him. But after the joy ride, they said, nothing much has happened.”
The memo added “that despite talk about Harris’s momentum at various times in the race, she really hasn’t had any momentum after that period in July when everything was going her way. And now, with the election three weeks away, she’s struggling.”
Another trend. Party registration is moving in the Republicans’ direction. Tim Hains writes that CNN Senior Data Reporter Harry Enten “looked at party registration data in the swing states and nationally ahead of the 2024 election, which he says compared to past elections, suggests Republicans are on track to win.”
Hains quotes Enten saying
Party ID nationally, you go to October/November of 2016, Democrats had a three-point advantage. You go four years ago, Democrats had a six avenge. Look at where we are today. Republicans with a one-point advantage, a very different picture, very much mirroring what we see in the party registration numbers in those key battleground states, and Pennsylvania in particular. …
“The GOP leads by a point in party identification right now. The average when the Republican Party loses is the Democrats ahead by eight. When the Republican Party wins, the average party ID advantage for Democrats is at three. Republicans right now, are doing even better than the average when they win.” …
If there’s one little nugget that I think Republicans are really helpful for this party ID and this party registration data, it really points in a good direction for them and for Donald Trump.
Finally, Nick Arama of RedState circled back to Harris’s weakness with Black men and to a more limited extent, Black women. In also writing about what Enten had to say, Arama explained
It’s not just a “Kamala Harris-specific problem,” Enten explained, but a long-term trend away from the Democrats. Which means they’re not just rejecting her on the basis of her empty-headedness, they’re seeing that in general the Democrats aren’t working for them and they’re moving to Trump. He said it was the best performance for a Republican and the worst performance for a Democrat with young black men since 1960 when Democrat John F. Kennedy narrowly defeated Republican Richard Nixon.
But there was also a problem with black men in “historically weak performance for a Democrat,” Enten explained as that showed the same trend: Kamala losing 34 points since Obama, only being at 54 points.
On top of all that, Harris is even losing black women if you consider this same trend from Obama. Obama was up 93 points, Hillary was the same. Biden dropped off a bit to 85, but then Kamala has taken a dive to 71. So even with many black women, Kamala is hitting a wall, doing worse than any Democrats since 1960.
“The bottom line is this. At this particular hour… Donald Trump’s going to put up the best performance with Black voters since Richard Nixon in 1960. …
Among Hispanic voters, Donald Trump’s going to put up the best performance for a Republican since 2004…”
As I finishing this post, I saw this story which appeared in the New York Post. The headline was “Older voters power Trump to Michigan lead in head-to-head race, poll reveals.”
The lead to A.G. Gancarski’s story is
If Donald Trump manages to win Michigan for the first time since the 2016 election, voters 50 years of age and older may be the reason.
A new AARP poll of the Wolverine State shows the former president narrowly leads Democrat Kamala Harris, 49% to 48%, in a two-way ballot test.
And Trump leads the vice president by 2 points among voters 50 and up in that scenario.
He adds
Part of Trump’s strength in both ballot tests comes from independents. He’s up +10 in the binary battle and holds a 7-point edge on the full ballot.
Another Trump bulwark comes from senior swing voters — nonpartisans whose decisions ultimately can turn an election one way or the other and who account for 1 in every 6 of those 50 and older who’ll vote this year.
Trump dominates among that cohort, with a 12-point lead, and more undecided or just turned off: 24% say they don’t know who they’ll vote for, and 15% say they’ll opt out of the presidential election altogether.
More tomorrow.
