Jul.25

electoral-vote.com

Dem 51

   

GOP 49

Structural Factors Point Both Ways

Who's going to be elected president? Beats us. And everyone else. Don't believe people who claim to know. We will have more polls in a week or two, and probably some swing state polls soon, but it takes time for people to process something as momentous and unprecedented as a candidate swap. Double haters, especially those who think anybody older than grandpa is too old to be president, need time to reassess their position. Nevertheless, there are a number of structural factors that are clear now. How big each one will be is impossible to say, though. And there could be more known unknowns (e.g., debates) or unknown unknowns (?) that roil the race.

Here is a short list of factors, but we have added a number of others we thought of ourselves below. The number of items in each list is not terribly important because some of them may be huge and others microscopic.

• Bigotry: Let's start with the 800-pound gorilla sitting peacefully on the couch in the living room and eating a bag of peanuts. Joe Biden beat Trump whereas Hillary Clinton didn't because Biden did much better with white men. There are a substantial number of white men who will simply not vote for a woman, not even a highly qualified white one. They are never, ever going to vote for a Black woman. This group absolutely exists but the key question is how big is it. Clinton got abut 3 million more votes than Trump but they were distributed wrong and she lost three key Rust Belt states. Will we get a rerun of that?
  
  
• Harris' Low Ratings: Harris' approval ratings are poor. Only 38% approve of her and 50% disapprove of her, so she is -12. Not a great start. People don't like her. People usually look at all the issues carefully, think about the consequences of the various policies, and then... vote for the person they want to have a beer with. So far, Harris fails the beer test. On the other hand, Trump is just as bad, with 42% approval and 54% disapproval, so also -12. One key difference though is that 12% don't have an opinion of Harris yet, so she has potential to grow her support.
  
  
• Border Czar: The Republicans' most potent issue with many voters is the border. They are going to label Harris as the failed border czar. This label may be hard to get rid of after $100 million in ads calling her by that title. Of course, she never had any real power to do anything about the border, but czars always have power, no? She can fight back by harping on the fact that there was a border bill worked out by Sens. James Lankford (R-OK) and Chris Murphy (D-CT) but Trump personally killed it because he doesn't want to seal the border, he wants a campaign issue. But facts don't matter anymore.
  
  
• Base is solid: Trump does not have to worry about his base. He has a high floor and a low ceiling. Nothing Harris does or says is going to change the minds of at least 40% of the voters. Nothing. They are his to keep. Harris' base is not as big, at least at the moment, and not as solid.
  
  
• Willie Brown: Republicans are going to run this photo a lot, so you might as well get used to it. You can say you saw it here first:
  
  
  
  In 1994, then 30 and single, Harris dated the powerful speaker of the California Assembly, Willie Brown (above, left), who was 30 years her senior. He put her on some well-paying boards. She took a leave of absence from her work as deputy D.A. in Alameda County and did the work on the boards. No one has ever said she was a no-show or failed to do the work properly, but Republicans are going to say she slept her way to the top. That is totally untrue because what "made" her was not being on the California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board but winning election as San Francisco D.A. and doing a good enough job that she was later elected California AG. Brown's help got her a bit of extra money, but it didn't help her career at all. That's not how Republicans are going to put it, though.
  
  
• Willie Horton: As we have already noted, the Republicans also plan to "Willie Horton" Harris. Officially, what this means is that they will find one or more people who committed criminal acts, and whose ability to do so can be linked to Harris (however tenuously). For example, maybe she approved a plea bargain that allowed a domestic abuser to get out of prison after 5 years, and that person killed the target of their abuse after being released.
  
  However, the real point of the original Willie Horton ad was not "Michael Dukakis was responsible for violent, marauding criminals walking the streets." It was "Michael Dukakis was responsible for violent, marauding, BLACK criminals walking the streets." It is exceedingly improbable that when the Trump campaign (or one of its allied PACs) released their version of the Willie Horton ad, it will focus on a white criminal.
  
  
• Sitting Veeps Rarely Win: So far, 49 people have enjoyed that famous bucket of liquid. All of them probably expected to be sitting in their boss' chair some day. Fifteen of them actually did, but eight of those got to sit in the big chair because the boss died. One (Jerry Ford) got the promotion when the boss resigned. Two more (Richard Nixon and Joe Biden) were elected president after their time as veep was over and they were no longer in office. Only four (John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Van Buren and George H.W. Bush) were elected president while they were the sitting vice president. Put another way, in the past 186 years, Bush was the only sitting vice president to be elected in his own right. Every election is different, but those are not great odds.
  
  That said, there is another way to crunch the numbers. Only 10 VPs have actually managed to secure their party's nomination, and six of those went on to win the presidency. So, Harris has already conquered the biggest "weeder" test when it comes to VPs who would be president.
  
  
• Campaign Skills: Trump knows how to rile up a crowd. Harris ran an uninspiring 2020 campaign. The campaign will be very short this time (unless you are British or French, in which case you will say it is going to be endless). Nevertheless, Harris will have to campaign. It is certainly possible that she has picked up some campaign skills in the past 4 years and she will have far better advisers now than she had in 2020. If she can lasso Barack Obama's campaign manager, David Plouffe, and pull him into her campaign, that would be huge. On the other hand, Joe Biden had the best advisers the Democratic Party has and still blew the debate. As Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has pointed out, candidate quality matters. Maybe Harris is up to the job, but we don't know yet. Her past is not encouraging.
  
  
• Electoral College: The whole country is a giant gerrymander skewed in favor of the thinly populated rural states that always vote Republican. To beat that, a Democrat has to win the popular vote by at least 3 points. Hillary Clinton won by 2.1 points. That wasn't enough. Can Harris pull it off? Of course, she knows that in the end, if she can win three or four of the seven most important swing states, that will do the job, but being popular in Michigan and Wisconsin while being unpopular nationally is tough.
  
  
• Jill Stein and Cornel West: Trump will undoubtedly praise Jill Stein and Cornel West to the moon and Republicans are already funneling money at West (and probably Stein) to get them on the ballot everywhere. Once done, they may run ads for them and do everything they can to help them, knowing that there are Democrats who think Harris is not perfect and so won't vote for her. If Stein and West can siphon off 1-2% of the vote in the swing states, that could flip the election to Trump. We've seen this movie multiple times, certainly in 2000 and in 2016, but some Democrats never learn that the perfect is the enemy of the good.

Looks great for Trump and glum for Harris? Not so fast. There are also a fair number of structural issues that work the other way:

• Timing: Harris is probably the luckiest person alive. The circumstances that got her the nomination are so weird that Aaron Sorkin would never have dared writing this into a script for fear of being laughed out of town. Suppose Joe Biden had annnounced a year ago that he had accomplished his goal of defeating Donald Trump and it was now time for a younger candidate to take over. There would have been a primary, probably featuring Harris, Govs. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI), and a cast of thousands. Harris might well have eked out a narrow win, but unifying the Democratic Party around her would have been a huge problem. Think: Hillary vs. Bernie, part 350. Some Democrats would have stayed home in November "to teach the Democrats a lesson." Others would have voted third-party or written in their defeated favorite. It would have been a terrible start. Now the entire Party is unified and behind her in a way Democrats rarely are. Harris has a black belt in cat herding.
  
  
• Enthusiasm: In part due to the way things have worked out in the past week, Democrats are incredibly excited and enthusiastic. Things looked terrible for at least 6 months and now they are looking up. That is hugely important. Enthusiasm translates into high voter turnout, many volunteers to go door to door, donations, and so much more. Now it is the Republicans who are in shock and dispirited.
  
  
• Money: The enthusiasm is being felt concretely in the form of donations. Harris raised $100 million from small donors and $150 million from large donors in the first 2 days. The small donors (under $200) can be hit up again and again. Money is likely to keep streaming in until Nov. 5. Under Biden, donations had dried up, which is probably one of the reasons he threw in the towel. The completely changed situation also works the other way. As we noted yesterday, Elon Musk is suddenly not going to be giving Trump $45 million/month. He's probably not the only high-profile person who is going to have second thoughts. Certainly, any CEO who wants things from the government is going to think three times before betting the farm on Trump. For example, Trump asked the oil company executives for a billion dollars. They know that if they do that and Harris wins, the hammer will come down on fossil fuels very, very fast and very, very hard. If they stay neutral and Harris wins, they will at least get a chance to make their case for a slow phaseout rather than a very rapid one.
  
  
• Trump's Plans are Obsolete: Trump's entire campaign was built around the idea of attacking Joe Biden as old and senile. There are probably a dozen or more ads featuring him making verbal mistakes that are now in the recycle bin on some computer. The whole carefully planned campaign is in tatters. The Trump campaign has to start all over again. No one on the red team saw this coming. The campaign was not ready for it. Sure, they are going to call Harris a socialist, a Communist, and a pinko, but they have been doing that for decades and it has probably lost its effectiveness. Also, for some young voters, Harris being a socialist is a feature, not a bug.
  
  
• The Age Issue: The whole age and senility thing is now turned 180 degrees. Harris is going to say that Trump is old and senile. There is plenty of video footage of him making mistakes that can be used as evidence. So all of a sudden, the Republicans are going to get their own campaign thrown in their faces. In fact, it has already started. Here is what George Conway's super PAC has put together. Expect more like this:
  
  
  
  
• Low Ceiling: Trump doesn't seem to be able to get more than 47% or so nationally in any election or any poll. More than half the country really dislikes him. If Harris can neutralize the minor parties, she could get over 50%. Winning nationally by 3% or more is very likely enough to do the job.
  
  
• Abortion: Biden is pro-choice, but he is also a Catholic and his heart really isn't into making abortion issue #1, issue #2, and issue #3. Harris is not a Catholic and is a woman and is 100% committed to talking about abortion day and night. This is the Democrats' answer to immigration. Further, it is much easier to make abortion personal. That you won't be able to get an abortion if you need one is a lot more potent for voters, on the whole, than how many people are sneaking across the border in Arizona. She is going to flog this for all it is worth, especially knowing that a large majority of the country is with her. Also, there could be abortion initiatives in as many as a dozen states, which will help drive turnout if she campaigns in those states.
  
  
• The Veep Will Help: Maybe it is karma or maybe hubris, but Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) is the wrong guy for the moment. He doesn't bring anything to the ticket except enraging the base even more. And many of the things he said are very anti-woman (see below). His campaigning so far is mostly him attacking Harris. Women are going to see that as an attack on all women. Democrats are certainly working on ads featuring him already. In contrast, Harris can pick a running mate who actually helps the ticket. We had a rundown of the veepables Monday. The leading candidates are still Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA), Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ), Gov. Roy Cooper (D-NC) and Gov. Andy Beshear (D-KY). The first three each could help in a key swing state. Beshear could help with rural voters. Don't forget James Carville's remark that Pennsylvania is Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, with Alabama in between (though residents of the Keystone State prefer to describe it as "Pennsyltucky"). Beshear could help in the Alabama/Kentucky part. Likewise, Michigan and Wisconsin also have rural areas and what matters is to total number of votes, not which counties they come from. In other words, Harris has her pick of at least four very strong running mates, each of whom could be of great value to the ticket. Vance is worthless to Trump but now he is stuck with him.
  
  
• Black female Prosecutors: Trump has run into Black female prosecutors before—for example, NY AG Letitia James and Fulton County DA Fani Willis. He does not react well to them and tends to call them names and belittle them. Harris has already made it clear that one of the themes of her campaign will be the prosecutor vs. the perp. If in a debate she says: "As a prosecutor, my bread and butter was putting rapists and criminals like you in prison" a dozen times in several variations, Trump could blow his stack and say very nasty things that anger women voters. She surely knows this will try to get under his skin in many ways. He is not very good at controlling himself and she will try to exploit this to the hilt.
  
  
• Pending Legal Issues: Some of the known unknowns relate to Trump's legal issues. Any of them could pop up and become big news. His appeal in the E. Jean Carroll defamation case could be turned down and he could be ordered to pay her $88 million right now. Suppose, to spite him, she used a bit of that money to make a high-profile donation to Harris' super PAC. He'd go bonkers. His own money being used against him. The appeals court in the bank fraud case Letitia James brought could make a quick decision. Judge Juan Merchan could sentence him to prison in September (and note that Merchan is not required to allow Trump to remain free on appeal). Judge Tanya Chutkan could start hearings on whether riling up a mob to invade the Capitol is part of the president's job. Rudy Giuliani could flip to save his own neck (and legal costs) and start spilling the beans. There are many legal pitfalls out there.
  
  
• RFK Jr.: It is widely believed that Robert Kennedy Jr. is being funded by Republican megadonors to pull votes from the Democrats, but that could backfire. Harris could ask some wealthy Democrats to finance a campaign to run TV ads praising Kennedy as an anti-vaxxer. The ad could say: "If you think vaccines are a government plot to make you sick, there is only one candidate who has your back: Bobby Jr." That could pull a significant number of Trump voters to Kennedy without hurting Harris at all. Kennedy would freak out and try to contact the folks running the ads but they could say: "It is illegal for a super PAC to coordinate with a candidate, so we are legally forbidden from talking to you. We think these ads will maximize your votes. That is our goal. Have a nice day and goodbye." Click.

One issue we don't have in either list is the economy. By traditional measures, the economy is in good shape. Inflation is under control, wages are up, jobs are easy to find, the stock market and people's 401(k) plans are way up. This should work for Harris. Her problem is that for many people, all they see is that eggs and milk cost more than they used to. Harris can run ads full of graphs of wages and prices but voters are not particularly knowledgeable about or concerned with macroeconomics, so that could be hard to pull off. As to Trump, he could make ads with people grousing about how much eggs and milk cost nowadays, but would that affect anyone who is not already angry about how much eggs and milk cost nowadays? In short, we don't really know who would or could benefit from making the economy an issue. (V)