Why is Kamala Harris keeping pace in a race that seems 50/50 at this point?
After all, shouldn’t she be losing badly? She’s part of the Biden administration, and by most metrics they’ve done a lousy job compared to Trump’s track record. She doesn’t speak well, especially when unscripted. She has an off-putting personality to a lot of people. She doesn’t have viewpoint consistency and can’t explain her many flip-flops.
Nevertheless, the race is a toss-up. Here’s my list of the reasons why:
(1) The vast majority of people still vote party line, and the country is pretty evenly split in that regard. I’m not talking about party registration, which is a different matter because many many people who pretty much always vote party line nevertheless register as Independents.
(2) The MSM is a huge factor and shapes public perceptions for the Democrat.
(3) In line with #2 and the Democrats’ message for the last eight years, Trump has been so successfully demonized that a great great many people would vote for literally anyone who would run against him.
(4) Abortion is still a huge issue and Kamala is its champion. This attracts many people who are essentially one-issue voters.
(5) Identity politics, in which Kamala Harris is a twofer: female and black. And her exact percentage of blackness in the genetic sense is unimportant. She is black enough.
(6) Kamala Harris is also relatively young, and looks good for her age. Trump is getting pretty old now, even though he’s very mentally alert. His choice of a young whippersnapper like Vance is good in that regard, but there is still a big age gap between Trump and Harris.
(7) Harris represents herself as an agent of change, which seems ludicrous to me since she’s been vice president for almost four years. But I think there are voters who buy it. After all, she’s never been president before. Biden has, and Trump has. And although Obama beat her at becoming the first black president, she would be the first female president, which also represents something fresh and new to a lot of people.
We don’t know the actual state of the race. Polling is frequently agenda driven and at best unreliable. The same media that assured us Biden was as sharp as a tack now pushes the polling info. We’ll find out.
I think the reverse is true, with all the money, all the endorsements, practically every major mid and large newpaper and tv station, ‘why isn’t she 50 points ahead’
Kamala Harris represents bureaucracy and elite consensus: they’re not voting for her, they’re voting for the System. That’s why they pivoted to her on a dime and would do the same if she dropped out tomorrow and they stuck someone else in there.
Also, the polling is false. Polling companies are for-profit entities, and the general public are not the paying customers, and there are no rewards or punishments for accuracy. Polls are conducted according to very detailed instructions from the paying customers (often media organizations). The instructions can run up to 50 pages and specify which zip codes to poll, which ages, ethnicities, party affiliations, etc. In a free and fair race measured by statistically sound polls, the two candidates would NOT be running neck and neck. Kamala is significantly behind, and can’t win without “irregularities.”
That said, all your points are good, and the race is still closer than it should be given the weakness of the candidate, the policy platform, the track record, etc.
I can’t fully agree with “(2)” since MSM had been steadily dropping in ratings over the years, and right-wing media (RWM?) has been growing.
The others are agreeable – especially “(4)”. Melania Trump seems to have jumped in with both feet on the abortion issue tho, and makes a strong case for pro-abortion. Upset a lot of anti-abortionists, but they are pretty much biting their tongues—forced to bite their tongues, IMHO.
Over the past few days have seen some talk about DEMs internal polls showing Harris is doing poorly enough that they are worried. One article said (Paraphrasing here…) something like the DEMs are throwing out all kinds of Oct surprises but nothing is sticking, and that they would probably increase the throws.
That suggests to me that they have no real ‘October Surprise’ in their pocket.
Hurricane Helene may hurt them with Harris, but I don’t think it will hurt them in the Congressional races…
The election is close, but probably not as close as the polls suggest. The pro-Democrat bias may be worse this year than it was in 2016 and 2020. By my reckoning, polls conducted in the final week before election day were biased against Trump by an average of 1.7 points and 3.6 points, respectively. My estimate for 2020 is consistent with a report by the American Association for Public Opinion Research, which found that polls conducted within 2 weeks of election day 2020 erred in favor of Biden by an average of 3.9 points (https://aapor.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/AAPOR-Task-Force-on-2020-Pre-Election-Polling_Report-FNL.pdf).
Karmi:
I disagree. I have noticed for years that people can rate the MSM very low in reliability and yet be HIGHLY influenced by it without realizing it. The subject is not always (maybe not even usually) aware of the effects of propaganda.
Plus, every election I read about how the internal polls show this or that. Sometimes that ends up being the case and sometimes not.
neo – good point…
The national popular vote is very close, but that’s not how we decide the winner. The winner is decided by how effective the democrats are at cheating in the toss-up states.
Because 50% of the population is on the low side of the intelligence bell curve. And a significant fraction are at less than 1 sigma. Of course, given that so many leftists are on the supposed high side of the curve, maybe my argument is moot.
Is there an emotional/logic bell curve?
(8). There needs to be a public perception it is close so that the fraud with vote by mail /late counts on election night in blue counties/cities called Philly, Milwaukee, Fulton county GA, Raleigh/durham, maricopa az, Las Vegas NV, Detroit, will not seem so obvious.
“Because 50% of the population is on the low side of the intelligence bell curve. And a significant fraction are at less than 1 sigma. Of course, given that so many leftists are on the supposed high side of the curve, maybe my argument is moot.”
I think it less a matter of IQ than a dearth of common sense among the low-info dem voters. As for so many leftists being on the supposed high side of the curve… let us not forget Orwell’s trenchant observation of them, “There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.”
Being smart is more often about being able to rationalize rather than being able to reason. But if even if people reason correctly, they have different values, and so the same set of facts and correct logic will lead them to different results.
To really be able to reason rightly, you have to continually look for things that might prove your position wrong rather than just rack up things that support it. Very few people have any desire to put work into potentially proving themselves wrong.
At this point, it feels like more energy will go into making Trump’s life hell if he’s elected than is going into electing Harris.
Kamala’s womanness counts for a lot more than her blackness. We’ve had one black president and will have others, but we haven’t had a woman yet. Both sex and race have been muted this year. It’s not like 2008 or 2016 when people were talking a lot about electing a black or female president. Democrats want to make those big issues, but people who aren’t already fully behind Harris don’t really care.
People do tend to pick up things from the media subliminally or by osmosis. That may be one reason why Democrats are so ferocious about going after their enemies and Republicans hold back. Part of that is just decency (or maybe weakness), but Democrats get a double dose of partisanship from the mainstream media and sources further left, while what Republicans get from right wing media is diluted by the attitudes disseminated by the MSM.
I believe the polls are manipulated and the media, even Fox and NewsMax, want the polls to be close because it gets them eyeballs. They do all they can to gin up excitement over such a “close race.”
In spite of all the points Neo raises, and they’re good ones, I don’t think it’s that close. Inflation and the border are still the main issues. Harris has not said or done anything to provide her solutions for those two issues. Even Oprah looked skeptical when she hosted a special for Harris. And there’s her abject failure to respond to the devastation of Helene.
That said, if the RNC can’t actually deliver on its plans to stop the cheating inn the swing states, it could be close.
I think Jeff and former legislator above have it about correct. They (the Dems, the media, the deep state cabal) will keep the polls fairly close so that on election eve, election morning, and into the next few days the mail-in ballots and other magically discovered votes will be able to overcome the polling margin they’ve established.
If the pollsters have been doing their ostensible jobs, then they should have been improving their polling to eliminate or reduce the overestimation of the Dem vote. I think it would be risky to assume the same disparity between vote and polls that existed in 2020. (Do we all remember the “unskewed polls” of 2008 and 2012?)
If they have not done this, it’s either because they can’t figure out how to do it, or they don’t want to do it. A good explanation for “don’t wanna” would be “no one wants to pay that much.”
I’ve never been able to find out what exactly internal polls are doing differently that they should be more reliable but I expect they misled Clinton in 2016. That aside, if a candidate is paying for an accurate poll they plan to use for strategy, I can see that being different from a poll a media organization is paying for to write “horse race” stories about. It should be more difficult and more expensive to poll more reliably.
I haven’t a clue what motivates people. I can say that street-level Democrats are indifferent to accomplishment when assessing candidates.
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If you review the biographies of notable Democratic presidential candidates in the last 50 years, you discover that most have earned their living in electoral politics and lobbying. There have been a number of lawyers, but they generally had an ordinary solo practice or a berth in a small partnership they pursued for a single digit span of years. Two of the three who made it to the ten year mark in law (Hellary and John Edwards) are known crooks. The only ones who worked in business were Bob Kerrey, Paul Simon, and Jimmy Carter. Wesley Clark was in the military. Howard Dean was a small town GP.
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Now look at their ticket this year. Both have been government employees since about 1990. Both earned their keep in venues (the courts, the public schools) which function poorly.
I didn’t think Trump had a snowball chance in hell of winning in 2016, and neither did the polls.
Anecdotally, on X there is a desperation that I sense from “team kammie” commentary from influencers and celebrities. Mostly it’s the usual “look how (fill in the blank) Trump is” but nothing on Kamala’s actual policies, just feel-good happy place nonsense.
David Muir reportedly lost 1,000,000 viewers after the POTUS debate.
Taylor Swift reportedly lost 2 million subscribers from a music app after her Harris endorsement.
The dock strike didn’t just organically get delayed out of an obligation to the economy.
Inflation is still a thorn in everyone’s wallet.
Trafalgar which is perhaps the best has a few point advantage