By Dave Andrusko
I didn’t listen to Donald Trump’s rocking six-hour-long Madison Square Garden rally yesterday (although I did listen to many speeches today), but my wife and I did listen to the entirety of his funny, witty, and informative three-hour podcast with Joe Rogan on Friday.
I won’t bother you with what you already know: the Legacy Media clobbered both with snark, contempt, and ridicule. Their response says more—much more—about them than it does for our 45th president.
Lots to talk about today.
#1. Trump has overtaken pro-abortion Vice President Kamala Harris in polls measuring popular vote; for all practical purposes they are tied. In the all-important battleground states, Trump is ahead in all seven by a very small margin—0.1%. The crucial factor is to remember that Biden was ahead by 7.5% in 2020, Hilliary Clinton was ahead by 4.5% in 2026.
Trump is habitually underestimated in surveys.
#2 Pennsylvania is considered the state that will probably decide the election. Pro-abortion Sen. John Fetterman was interviewed by Lulu Garcia-Navarro of the New York Times. She remarked that “You’ve said that Trump has a special connection with the people of Pennsylvania.”
“100 percent,” was his answer.
“Why? What is it that you see that he appeals to in your state?”
His long response was incredibly interesting:
“There’s a difference between not understanding, but also acknowledging that it exists. And anybody spends time driving around, and you can see the intensity. It’s astonishing. I was doing an event in Indiana County, very, very red, and there was a superstore of Trump stuff, and it was 100 feet long. And it was dozens of T-shirts and hats and bumper stickers and all kinds of — I mean, it’s like, where does this all come from? I mean, it was almost like Taylor Swift kind of swag. It’s like of everything. It wasn’t just a sign. It’s the kinds of things that has taken on its own life on that. And it’s like something very special exists there. And that doesn’t mean that I admire it. It’s just like it’s, it’s real. And now you have, Musk is now joining him. I mean, to a lot of people, I mean, that’s, like, hey, that’s Tony Stark, and that’s the world’s richest guy. And he’s obviously, and undeniably he’s a brilliant guy. And he’s saying, ‘Hey, that’s my guy for president.’ That’s going to really matter.”
#3. According to Real Clear Politics’ Tim Hains, “NBC elections analyst Steve Kornacki runs down the results of a new CNBC poll giving Donald Trump a 48-46 lead over Kamala Harris nationally, and Harris a negative ten popularity rating, 10 days before the 2024 election.” Hains transcribes the whole of Kornacki’s presentation under the headline “Kornacki: Harris No Longer More Popular Than Trump In New CNBC, NBC Polls”. It’s a breakout of the seven core battleground states. We’re reposting a large chunk of it below.
STEVE KORNACKI, NBC NEWS: This is what the CNBC poll finds: Trump 48 to 46 over Harris. …
And you can see right here, neither one of them has a greater positive than negative; they’re both not that popular. But Trump, you can see the gap here, 42 positive, 48 negative. He is six points underwater on this question. Harris: 39 positive, 49 negative. She’s 10 points negative on this question.
And the significance here is the trajectory of the Harris campaign on this sort of feelings thermometer. When she first got in the race, when she first entered, she was, you know, basically in the same ballpark as Trump on positive and negative.
After about six weeks as a candidate, she had actually, in our poll, moved above water on this question. A couple of weeks ago, we were polling this, and she had a higher positive than negative and had established an advantage. But now, our own NBC poll a couple weeks ago and now this CNBC poll both find that the advantage she seemed to have established here, you know, say back in September on this question, is gone. She’s back in that underwater territory with Trump again.
And again, you take that and you look at the national result of Trump ahead by two. There’s probably a linkage between these things.
#4. Fred Bauer writes in the City-Journal about “A Tale of Two Coalitions.” It’s a fascinating read, filled with insight and suggestions about the future of the two parties.
Bauer argues
With polls showing a dead heat, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are sticking to their blue-collar and college-degree voter strategies, respectively.
Trump has mobilized what might be termed a “Grand New Bargain” coalition anchored in working-class voters. He has run on taming inflation, tightening the border, cracking down on crime, and restoring stability abroad. This is a different campaign than in 2016. Back then, Trump tried to stress the continuity of his program with the conventional Republican Party platform, as epitomized by his selection of Mike Pence as his running mate. Now that Trump has been the party’s standard-bearer three elections in a row, he has more latitude to re-fashion the GOP in his own image. …
Kamala Harris has designed her general-election campaign around a “Belmont+” coalition. In his 2012 book Coming Apart, the social scientist Charles Murray used the wealthy Massachusetts suburb of Belmont as a shorthand for Americans with high social capital and college degrees. While the credentialed elite has been drifting in a Democratic direction for decades, the age of populism has accelerated this trend. Highly educated suburbanites delivered for Democrats in the 2018 and 2022 midterms and proved decisive in the 2020 presidential election. Joe Biden positioned himself to some extent as a link to the hard-hat Democrats of the past; he had strong connections with organized labor and at times resisted the race to the left that characterized Democrats during the Trump years.
#5. Finally, getting back to the Joe Rogan podcast, there is this long, penetrating tweet from Steve Deace.
I just finished the Rogan-Trump interview, I wanted to share my thoughts with it still fresh in my mind. Let’s not bury the lede here to start: this will be the most impactful political interview of my lifetime, including before and after. Attempts will be made to emulate it moving forward, because it will be the model moving forward just as the JFK-Nixon debate in 1960 was a generational harbinger. But whatever comes next will take a back seat to this precedent-setter for the following reasons: 1) Rogan arguably has the largest reach of any singular show since Oprah. But it’s also whom his audience largely is — men who view themselves as some form of truth-seeker but also distrusting of the existing political/informational paradigm. For better or for worse, more discipleship of the next generation of male headship in this country is done via Rogan than The Church (by the latter’s choice). 2) Trump is arguably now the most famous living person in human history. And yet the largest platform in the country was still able to grant him the opportunity to counter so many misconceptions of who he actually is, what he actually thinks, and the resistance movement he represents. This interview alone won’t erase nearly a decade of malevolent corporate journalism, but it’s a D-Day invasion-level event. The marriage of the largest alternative media platform yet devised, and the biggest living threat to the current media-political-industrial complex, has established a beach-head in the enemy’s occupied territory. Just as June 6, 1944, forever shifted the momentum in the last great war, it is quite possible October 25, 2024 will be seen by future generations as the great momentum shifter in the great information war. 3) The beneficial effect of this to candidate Trump would be the greatest (and most expensive) media ad buy in world political history. And thus a buy that probably isn’t possible given the resources needed, and the perfect pithy message also required to maximize it and capture the attention/imagination also needed. Meanwhile, this could be the most watched interview in all of human history. And it featured a candidate, whose previous two presidential campaigns were decided by less than 130,000 total combined votes in the decisive swing states, being granted an unfettered opportunity to redefine himself to millions right as the election is happening. …
More tomorrow.
