Here’s a question for you: What if the dynamics of the 2024 presidential election have dramatically shifted — and the national media has been too busy doing stenography to notice?
What if Kamala Harris — after a spectacular entry into the race, a stunningly unified convention, and a devastating debate — is basically running away with it, leaving Trump in the dust, while the national media — still mortified by its failure in 2016 to see the extent of Trump’s support — stubbornly sticks to the safer narrative that it’s a horserace going down to the wire?
But wait, the polls aren’t showing Harris way ahead, you say. At most, they’re showing her with a narrow lead.
Well, polls are garbage these days. And the pollsters, whose arbitrary weightings make a mockery of science, travel in packs. They, more than anyone, are terrified of underestimating Trump support again. So maybe this time they’re overestimating it? (Which they sure did in 2022.)
You could, by contrast, make a solid vibes-and-momentum argument that Harris is winning handily. In an extraordinary turnaround, Democrats now appear even more enthusiastic than Republicans. Harris, unlike Trump, is wooing undecideds and independents. Marquee Republicans like Dick Cheney – Dick Cheney! — are getting on the Harris train. So are former Trump allies.
The economy, which used to be considered a solid indicator of whether an incumbent would win or not, is booming. Inflation is dead. The stock market is at all-time highs.
By contrast, Trump, by any normal standard, has lost it, mentally and emotionally. His speech – at rallies, and most noticeably at the debate – consists of rambling, apocalyptic, nonsensical, hate-filled rhetoric and lies.
He’s saying crazier and crazier things in order to get attention – which the media is giving him – but it’s hard to see that any of it is winning over more voters.
Harris has effectively undermined the image of Trump as some sort of inevitable strongman, and instead has cast him as a failed rich-kid with no plan beyond turning Americans against each other.
Trump is left mostly with his base, which by most calculations is not nearly a majority of the voters.
Trump’s only other ace in the hole is the national media, which sanewashes his and JD Vance’s diatribes, normalizes his extremist platform, buries concerns about his diminished mental capacity, dings Harris at seemingly every opportunity, covers up the Biden/Harris administration’s extraordinary economic record – and benefits financially from high readership as long as it seems like a close race.
Maybe — just maybe — historian Heather Cox Richardson is correct when she writes in her newsletter that “We appear to be in a moment when the reality-based community is challenging the ability of the MAGA Republicans to create their own reality.”
Track Records
How could everyone else be so wrong? Well, it’s not like the pollsters and the pundits have a track record of getting it right. Quite the opposite.
Look most recently at 2016, when the pollsters basically called it for Hillary Clinton; and 2022, when the “red wave” that pollsters had predicted with such confidence never materialized.
Historian Rick Perlstein, writing the in American Prospect, explains that for pollsters, getting it wrong “is practically the historical norm.”
As Perlstein points out:
Past performance is no guarantee of future results; but past performance is all a pollster has to go on. That’s why much of the process of choosing and weighting samples is … well, you can call it “more art than science.” Or you can call it “intuitive.” Or you can call it “trial and error.” But you can also call it “made up.”
As for the pundits? Chris Lehmann, writing in The Nation, concludes that “At virtually every turn, this election cycle has proved pundit wisdom stupendously and gloriously wrong.”
Consider, for instance, all the occasions when journalists predicted that Trump was becoming more disciplined – and, after being shot at, more humble. They were wildly wrong.
And then recall how they were sure Harris would pick either Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro or Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly to be her running mate, because picking someone as liberal as Tim Walz would sink her campaign.
Lehmann writes:
Walz’s solidly prairie-populist record proved no hindrance to the candidate’s dramatic expansion of the electoral map. The Harris-Walz ticket also reduced Trump’s hold on the white working-class vote, making short work of yet another plank of consensus-minded certitude that has driven a monotonous drumbeat of dispatches from heartland diners for the past nine years.
So if the chattering class believes one thing, you just might be better off assuming the opposite.
Maybe, of course, I’m completely delusional to even suggest this as a possibility. If so, I blame that on SFGate columnist Drew Magary, who put the idea into my head with his tour-de-force piece this week excoriating the New York Times and deeming it irrelevant
The column included a powerful summary of the critique of the New York Times from the left:
The Times cares more about its place in the power structure than in actually affecting that power structure. It gladly cedes prominent column space to bad faith politicians who would like to eradicate whole demographics of the American population. It dabbles in trans panic as a sort of weird hobby. And it scoffs at criticism from the progressive wing of the Democratic Party while going out of its way to heed criticism from a Republican Party that would drop a load of napalm on Times headquarters if ever given the authority.
But he also had this to say:
You don’t have to work terribly hard to sum up this race as it stands: Harris is destroying Trump, because Trump is a deranged old s—tbag. See how easy that was?
But that’s too easy if you’re the Times, an institution that has never met a story it couldn’t water down. Rather than give it to you straight, the paper of record has opted, as ever, to give you its patented strain of prestige clickbait.
Look, I’m in Washington, D.C.; Magary is a San Francisco columnist. Maybe we have no clue what’s going on in the real world. Maybe “the media” has it right, and this theory is hogwash.
But what if it isn’t?
I think Drew Magary, who primarily writes for the website Defector, actually lives in Maryland.
Great post, Dan – I agree that it is much more likely that Harris will win this election handily than that Trump will, and that the media is seemingly ignoring this possibility. One minor correction: Drew Magary (two a’s in his last name) also lives in the DC metro area even though he has a column at SFGate; his primary job is being a part owner of/working at Defector Media.
Drew Magary is one of the owners/writers of sports/politics site defector.com and is located in MD, not SF
There is no such thing as a “solid vibes-and-momentum argument”, and I think you know that.
Still, hops you’re right.
Excellent article, with one quibble. Why would you assume that DC and SF are not part of the real world?
They’re not representative of the whole of the United States, certainly, but then again, neither is Nebraska or Ohio. Otherwise, President Trump would be running for his third term (22nd be damned) and Harris would still be a California senator.
I and everyone else would love to believe this. However.
Joe Biden can’t “GROK” the idea that the public might have something to say about Israel, because he and his fellows have been comfortably ignoring the existence of the American people for at least twenty years.
He only cares about what his fellow PMC members think, because they are the ones who deserve to be in charge.
What the Democratic Party has done for at least 20 years, instead of fixing problems, instead of heeding the preferences of the public, is to invite the American people to a chicken game. Daring us to “vote for the other guy.”
We wouldn’t dare, they tell us. We don’t have the guts. Just for the satisfaction of throwing them out of office?
The American people have proven to be willing to put up with quite a lot, in the service of spite.
I afraid the fact that everything is 9.36045% better isn’t necessarily impressing anyone.
^^ I know it’s perfectly on brand for presumably left wing people to ignore policy successes and legislation that helps people, so I assume you simply don’t care about 20 years of progress in things like health care (if nothing but eliminating people getting shifting off insurance for pre-existing conditions, the ACA has had success, and it’s done more than that. Not single payer, but a massive improvement), the IRA, which is currently doing exactly what it promised to do by lowering inflation, softening the economic landing AND investing tens of billions in green technology upgrades — i.e., solar and wind are being installed at massive rates — the infrastructure bill, which is more than $1.2 trillion in upgrades, the CHIPS act, bringing chip manufacturing back to the US, the Biden NLRB, which is putting workers first, the manufacturing investment bill, which is bringing manufacturing jobs back to the US. And the Biden DoJ has been really good with anti-trust issues, his EPA and the Interior have been great on most (not all) environmental fronts.
Of course Gaza is an atrocity. And no, the Democrats haven’t done everything — but ignoring the reality of a Republican party that controls levers in the government means that performative lefities don’t really even understand how Congress works. Like “how have they not fixed everything” is the critique of a child.
When one party is committed to destroying institutions and the other is the one being blamed for it by people who simply hand wave away the veto points Republicans have (including the courts) and completely ignore the things Democrats actually do well, they are no different than the Times, really.
Also, Dan, Drew writes for the SF Weekly, but he’s based in Suburban Maryland (he writes about it a lot in his Defector work).
What’s fascinating is that anyone who challenges the narrative the way you just did (and the way Christopher Bouzy, Simon Rosenberg, and Tom Bonier do) starts attracting either open Trump supporters or the red-brown horseshoe alliance that seeks to suppress Democratic turnout by falsely proclaiming “both sides are the same”. Both ultimately are taking their cues from Moscow which for the supposed lefties is ironic as that puts them on the same side as Putin.
Admitted: the polls are more precise than they are accurate. But the model error will not exceed five points or so. Granted: if there is a big model error, it is much more likely to underestimate Harris than Trump. But still, the polls are the most reliable information we have.
As always in such matters, the proper attitude is pessimism of the intellect; optimism of the will.
https://virtualtout.com nailed it last time.
Thanks Dan. Like you, I find a momentum shift towards Harris. But I’m an optimist and I’m as biased as most are these days; so what do I know?
Regarding the New York Times. Sixty-five years ago, there was a new kid in our school in Detroit. He was from New York and he was cool. Miles Davis cool. His name was Deday, born June 6, 1944.
His 1958 description of the New York Times: “All the news that’s fit to tint.
The more things change the more they stay the same.