The extremist tail has been wagging the Trump dog for some time. Same thing happened with COVID vaccines. Trump wanted to take credit for the vaccines (which is one good thing he arguably could take some credit for) and seem reasonable on an important issue but the loonies wouldn't let him so now he's anti-vax and hanging around with Brain Worms. He's stuck between his extremist base and the more normal voters he needs to win over. He can't afford to lose either but saying something to appease one group turns off the other. This is what happens when you have no principles and make your base around the worst of humanity. It's now the job of the Harris campaign (and all of us) to drive these wedges harder so he can't form a winning coalition.
It's so important to include all the health care that would be (and is) being affected by abortion limits and bans. But it's women! So who cares! This is one aspect of a larger effort to greatly reduce women's ability to live as full citizens. Others are the push to end no-fault divorce, cutting childcare benefits, and lax to non-existent prosecution of domestic violence. It's a short stretch from abortion bans to domestic violence.
Pardon me for commenting on a different topic, and I'm confident the Real Dan, Pollercoaster-meister, will comment soon enough, but I just wanted to point out that today's NYT poll reflects NO CHANGE in likely voter support, compared to NYT's OWN July 22-24 poll result. And NYT said exactly that in the second paragraph of their own article about it.
Each polling firm has its own modeling assumptions, especially for likely voters, and NYT/Sienna has been polling at consistently lower levels for Harris compared to other HIGH QUALITY polling along the way.
Any suggestion that this reflects some sort of "dip" in Harris' support or D enthusiasm is simply incorrect, whether ignorant or misleading. The trend here is NO INFLECTION AT ALL.
The "honeymoon" is not over, however desperately the commercial media want to impose their drama for profit. Because it's not a "honeymoon" – it's a *movement*, and it's not rolling back. New registered voters are ready to show up and make their voices heard. Swing through the ball.
I'll still be eager to hear Dan's analysis. It's true that the earlier NYT poll was in the field just during the first few days after Biden stepped aside, when the euphoria was just breaking out. But given the tendencies of their polling before then, I'm not confident it would have captured any rise in the interim from which to fall back down.
As for Silver, he's been reported to be simply discounting the recent rise as a "convention bounce" by fiat and assuming it will subside, as opposed to measuring any fall. That is, he has no evidence to support this honeymoon picture, just a (dubious) subjective judgment that he's going to put his thumb on the scale. So as long as he continues with this "model" it simply can't be trusted (without mentally compensating for it by adding a few points back).
I'm still basically taking 538 as the ballpark at this point, and even incorporating the NYT/Sienna poll they still have Harris up by 2.8 points in their aggregate at the moment. It's still too tight to let up on the gas at all (and it will stay too tight to let up on the gas clear through Nov 5!), but the story of a meaningful shift is just not warranted.
I'm looking forward to the debate (I think Harris will handle T smoothly and compellingly, and be fully able to introduce herself to many remaining undecideds, both in terms of policy goals as well as personal character and values – I think she really gets the *real* game here, which is not what the journalists and policy wonks think they are playing, kind of a kabuki dance being performed at multiple levels, especially for the benefit of low-propensity voters in swing states who will decide this election, who don't pay much attention to policy details except as they reinforce character and values), after which the NYT poll will become instantly obsolete, and we'll be chasing the next set of polls to come out immediately thereafter. I think it's actually a minor blessing that this poll dropped only two days before the debate, so it can get quickly washed away by events.
It astounds us all that this is a close race. Trump seems so clearly a demented disaster with policies that range from dumb to anti-democratic. But (unless we take the position that half the voters in this country are evil or stupid) a lot of decent people buy into Trump’s message.
I recently had a canvassing conversation with a seemingly normal, intelligent Trump supporter who countered our message with, “I hear that the Democrats want abortion after birth.” We were able to give her the text of the proposed Florida “Amendment to Limit Government Interference with Abortion”. And point out that abortion after birth is actually murder. Did we make a difference or change a vote? Who knows? Probably the best outcome is a non-vote at the top of the ticket.
But the persistence of MAGA lies, no matter how ridiculous they seem to us, is almost beyond belief. Which means we have to tie Trump and down-ballot candidates to the human cost behind their crazy policies on women’s healthcare, guns, and gay rights.
Hope and pray Kamala will deftly and inextricably link trump to the national abortion ban he will enact regardless of whether he has Congressional majorities.
Being a credible narrator herself, toning down promises, dosing a traumatized and anxiety ridden America with a reality check of modest promises and a call for voters to do our part to defend our nation against foreign and domestic threats to our liberty, our health, our economy, our national and domestic security and defeating trump.
trump, maga and scotus have proven their commitment to dominate our lives, disrespect and extinguish our liberties and our lives, empower the ultra powerful and disparage, disable, punish, endanger and oppress ordinary American consumers, voters, workers, veterans, women, children, POC, non Christians, non evangelicals, LGBTQ individuals and their families.
We just need to look to red and purple states to see what trump and maga Republicans are doing to predict what they will do with trump and maga in charge with absolute power: force women to bleed out and go septic while withholding standard care to avert such a crisis, ban books and speech, empower vigilantes to chase down women, doctors, librarians and teachers who have relied on established Constitutional protections and threatening to imprison and fine them and take away their livelihood.
Let’s not make America into Texas, Florida, Idaho, Arkansas….
Let’s hope the dark promise of trump with absolute immunity and maga Republican state workshops and the maga packed SCOTUS and their machinations, along with the Cheneys endorsements, and a solid debate performance by Kamala Harris will be enough to turn the tide and break the trump trance so that our nation and our people can get another crack at strengthening our democracy and protecting our country, our economy, our people and our planet from unscrupulous actors and movements like trump and maga who play on our insecurities and fears to lure us into giving up on our country, our principles, our liberties, each other and our future.
This flip flop reveals the ultimate hypocrisy and venality of Trump, but I continue to be warned not to rely on reproductive freedom to carry the day all the way. It also seems that just lately there is some budding conversation among journalists about the way they cover Trump--but it is not enough and it is still too late. As I hear more people complaining that they want to hear more about "policies"--especially from Kamala Harris--I sense Trump continually being sanitized, propped back up, while Harris is being held to a much different standard. And I understand people say they want to know more about Harris' policies--but they also are not listening very well--nor are they consuming information in ways that would lead to a becoming better informed. I am told, for example, that Gen Z voters will be unlikely to sit through the entire debate--because they will use other platforms and mediated sources to absorb what they believe they need to know. How will that lead to becoming well informed? The press are not helping us and I am worried and frustrated. On FACE THE NATION Nikki Hayley was given a lengthy interview where she was allowed to underscore her view of the policy weakness of Kamala Harris. God awful. Depravity and cowarduce on parade, but it still sanitizes the Trump campaign--just enough.
Trump and the evangelicals have always been odd bedfellows. But his campaign, and probably Trump himself, understands how much he still needs them, at least through this election (and after that they “don’t need to vote again”). For one thing, their information channels are even more siloed than the average GOP voter. They follow their own media (a lot of it on radio) and influential pastors can have a great deal of influence. He can’t afford to have them turn on him; a few sermons could make the base he activated in 2016 decide to stay home in 2024. Watching him try to thread the needle on this is quite interesting. Maybe as one anti-abortion activist claimed, Satan really is running his campaign.
I'm intrigued by the longer view of what's been going on with the GOP since early in the 20th century and especially since the New Deal. All along it's been the party of big corporations and the very wealthy, but for a long time it was also the party of small-town and rural people in places like New England. These people (who included virtually all of my relatives except my father, who as an army noncom in WW2 registered as a Democrat) were overwhelmingly white, but they were often the political (and often the biological) descendants of "Lincoln Republicans." They were not fans of Joe McCarthy's anti-communist witchhunts.
Then along came the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the mid-1960s. Within a few years most white Southern Democrats had poured into the Republican Party: cue up Nixon's "southern strategy." (This is when IMO the GOP lost its right to claim to be the "party of Lincoln.") And *then,* of course, came Roe v. Wade. The big-business/corporate types held on through the Reagan administration, using racist, sexist, and homophobic dog whistles to keep their coalition together, but then it started to fall apart in a big way. They *needed* the votes of the scared-of-diversity white people and the conservative Catholics and white evangelicals. And over the decades those indispensables took over, culminating in Trump -- an intriguing character who *looks* at first glance like a big-business/corporate type but turns out to be a worthy heir to the likes of Father Coughlin.
What will arise from the wreck of the Republican Party? I hope something does, because those old-style, pre-Reagan Republicans need a home, and I don't want it to be in the Democratic Party, which is finally beginning to talk sense about economic justice.
Without serious campaign finance reform, including the overturning of Citizens United, *any* significant political party is going to be "hostage to money." In a parliamentary system, multiple parties are feasible. In the U.S. not so much -- which is why, until fairly recently, much of the policy wrangling took place under the aegis of the two major parties. Since the Reagan era, the GOP has become less and less diverse, more and more extreme -- and so isolated in their bubble that they apparently thought Project 2025 would have a lot of support.
Not to be too much of a nudge—The Donald doesn’t care about reproductive rights. Or any other social or political or economic issue. My fantasy of the moment is that Camella will make a “L” sign at her forehead every time he lies during the forthcoming debate.
When Trump mentions Afghanistan at the debate, VP Harris must remind voters that Trump desecrated Arlington National Cemetery two weeks ago, continuously degrades the service and sacrifices of military veterans
including POWs and Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice, sucked up to murderous dictators like Putin and Kim as President, and negotiated the Doha agreement with the Taliban that led to our disastrous withdrawal from there.
Frankly, I found the NYT poll to be somewhat disturbing because it shows that VP Harris’s momentum has stalled and says that voters think Trump is more committed to change than she is. If, voters are looking for radical change, then VP Harris is the wrong candidate, being that she is the sitting Vice President.
She is going to have to remind voters that our country was going to ‘Hell in a Bucket’ when Trump was President and be aspirational and forward looking at the same time.
The best way for VP Harris to deal with Trump when he insults her on Tuesday is to either ignore him or ridicule him without coming off as mean-spirited. There is about a 50% chance, in my humble opinion, that the American people will re-elect Trump in November and the United States crosses the point of no return and becomes a soft authoritarian regime beginning in 2025. But if anyone can prevent this from happening, it’s Kamala Harris.
VP Harris is poling significantly better than President Biden was before he suspended his re-election campaign, but not good enough to win the 2024 presidential election. The latest New York Times/Sienna poll has her down by two points in the popular vote 46 percent to 44 percent among likely voters.
Of the seven swing states, she is leading Trump by two points in two of them: Michigan and Wisconsin. In Pennsylvania, her lead is one point in this poll. The other four swing states are dead even.
The Emerson poll released late last week has her up by two points nationally, with results similar to the Times poll in the seven respective swing states. The YouGov from last week poll also has her up by two points nationally. Her numbers in the Emerson poll are exactly what Joe Biden’s were in 2020 at this time. He ended up winning the national popular vote by four-and -a-half percentage points and the electoral college with 306 votes.
Among likely voters, Trump is almost always at 46 percent to 47 percent nationally in respectable polls when minor third party options are included. I would conjecture, from these polls, that about five to seven percent of likely voters are truly undecided. VP Harris’s poll numbers seem to be more fluid than Trump’s numbers. This might be because the American people do not know as much about her as they do Trump.
This is why Tuesday night’s debate is so pivotal. I have a feeling that VP Harris is going to do well because she is a good debater. That small group of undecided voters that I mentioned in the aforementioned paragraph may be swayed to vote for her if she does. When Trump bombed in the first 2020 debate with Joe Biden, it hurt him with these voters.
These undecided voters may be disillusioned Republicans and conservative independents who are repulsed by Trump’s depravity and believe that he presents an acute threat to their personal freedoms due to his position on some issues, if they agree with many of what they think would be the specific policies of his administration. The abortion issue is case in point. Trump is the sole reason why Roe was overturned, and it is his perhaps his biggest political liability.
He is embarrassed about his extremism on this issue in the past and is now running from it. VP Harris must pummel him relentlessly regarding this issue on Tuesday night and not let him hide from his past extremism and current flip-flopping around it in any way.
Apparently, some of the undecided voters are telling pollsters that they think VP Harris is too left-wing and they don’t know enough about the specifics of her policies. She needs to come off as centrist both in her rhetoric as well as with the specifics of her policies on Tuesday. More later.
I think more of the undecideds are voters who often could be in the D coalition, but were very unexcited by Biden, and still haven't heard much about Kamala to codify a decision to vote for her (they generally don't pay attention to politics!). I expect her to pick up more of them after wiping the floor with T in the debate.
As noted in separate comments here, I think the 538 aggregate is still a decent ballpark, where Harris is still up 2.8 nationally as of today, incorporating the NYT outlier result. Still small leads in PA, MI, WI, and extremely tight (fractions of a point either way) in NV, AZ, GA, NC. I'd still rather be us than the opposition, and we have more paths to 270. It'll *really* help to secure PA, no doubt. And we absolutely have to swing through the ball.
Yes, he can. Technically, he’s not an adjudicated felon until the judge confirms it at sentencing. Second, FL law in this case follows NY law (where the trial was held) as to his eligibility to vote. He would be eligible under NY law to vote at this stage of the proceedings.
The extremist tail has been wagging the Trump dog for some time. Same thing happened with COVID vaccines. Trump wanted to take credit for the vaccines (which is one good thing he arguably could take some credit for) and seem reasonable on an important issue but the loonies wouldn't let him so now he's anti-vax and hanging around with Brain Worms. He's stuck between his extremist base and the more normal voters he needs to win over. He can't afford to lose either but saying something to appease one group turns off the other. This is what happens when you have no principles and make your base around the worst of humanity. It's now the job of the Harris campaign (and all of us) to drive these wedges harder so he can't form a winning coalition.
It's so important to include all the health care that would be (and is) being affected by abortion limits and bans. But it's women! So who cares! This is one aspect of a larger effort to greatly reduce women's ability to live as full citizens. Others are the push to end no-fault divorce, cutting childcare benefits, and lax to non-existent prosecution of domestic violence. It's a short stretch from abortion bans to domestic violence.
You can’t believe anything he says. Anything.
Pardon me for commenting on a different topic, and I'm confident the Real Dan, Pollercoaster-meister, will comment soon enough, but I just wanted to point out that today's NYT poll reflects NO CHANGE in likely voter support, compared to NYT's OWN July 22-24 poll result. And NYT said exactly that in the second paragraph of their own article about it.
Each polling firm has its own modeling assumptions, especially for likely voters, and NYT/Sienna has been polling at consistently lower levels for Harris compared to other HIGH QUALITY polling along the way.
Any suggestion that this reflects some sort of "dip" in Harris' support or D enthusiasm is simply incorrect, whether ignorant or misleading. The trend here is NO INFLECTION AT ALL.
The "honeymoon" is not over, however desperately the commercial media want to impose their drama for profit. Because it's not a "honeymoon" – it's a *movement*, and it's not rolling back. New registered voters are ready to show up and make their voices heard. Swing through the ball.
I'll still be eager to hear Dan's analysis. It's true that the earlier NYT poll was in the field just during the first few days after Biden stepped aside, when the euphoria was just breaking out. But given the tendencies of their polling before then, I'm not confident it would have captured any rise in the interim from which to fall back down.
As for Silver, he's been reported to be simply discounting the recent rise as a "convention bounce" by fiat and assuming it will subside, as opposed to measuring any fall. That is, he has no evidence to support this honeymoon picture, just a (dubious) subjective judgment that he's going to put his thumb on the scale. So as long as he continues with this "model" it simply can't be trusted (without mentally compensating for it by adding a few points back).
I'm still basically taking 538 as the ballpark at this point, and even incorporating the NYT/Sienna poll they still have Harris up by 2.8 points in their aggregate at the moment. It's still too tight to let up on the gas at all (and it will stay too tight to let up on the gas clear through Nov 5!), but the story of a meaningful shift is just not warranted.
I'm looking forward to the debate (I think Harris will handle T smoothly and compellingly, and be fully able to introduce herself to many remaining undecideds, both in terms of policy goals as well as personal character and values – I think she really gets the *real* game here, which is not what the journalists and policy wonks think they are playing, kind of a kabuki dance being performed at multiple levels, especially for the benefit of low-propensity voters in swing states who will decide this election, who don't pay much attention to policy details except as they reinforce character and values), after which the NYT poll will become instantly obsolete, and we'll be chasing the next set of polls to come out immediately thereafter. I think it's actually a minor blessing that this poll dropped only two days before the debate, so it can get quickly washed away by events.
It astounds us all that this is a close race. Trump seems so clearly a demented disaster with policies that range from dumb to anti-democratic. But (unless we take the position that half the voters in this country are evil or stupid) a lot of decent people buy into Trump’s message.
I recently had a canvassing conversation with a seemingly normal, intelligent Trump supporter who countered our message with, “I hear that the Democrats want abortion after birth.” We were able to give her the text of the proposed Florida “Amendment to Limit Government Interference with Abortion”. And point out that abortion after birth is actually murder. Did we make a difference or change a vote? Who knows? Probably the best outcome is a non-vote at the top of the ticket.
But the persistence of MAGA lies, no matter how ridiculous they seem to us, is almost beyond belief. Which means we have to tie Trump and down-ballot candidates to the human cost behind their crazy policies on women’s healthcare, guns, and gay rights.
I guess we have to stop being astonished--and keep speaking the truth. What else is there to do?
Hope and pray Kamala will deftly and inextricably link trump to the national abortion ban he will enact regardless of whether he has Congressional majorities.
Being a credible narrator herself, toning down promises, dosing a traumatized and anxiety ridden America with a reality check of modest promises and a call for voters to do our part to defend our nation against foreign and domestic threats to our liberty, our health, our economy, our national and domestic security and defeating trump.
trump, maga and scotus have proven their commitment to dominate our lives, disrespect and extinguish our liberties and our lives, empower the ultra powerful and disparage, disable, punish, endanger and oppress ordinary American consumers, voters, workers, veterans, women, children, POC, non Christians, non evangelicals, LGBTQ individuals and their families.
We just need to look to red and purple states to see what trump and maga Republicans are doing to predict what they will do with trump and maga in charge with absolute power: force women to bleed out and go septic while withholding standard care to avert such a crisis, ban books and speech, empower vigilantes to chase down women, doctors, librarians and teachers who have relied on established Constitutional protections and threatening to imprison and fine them and take away their livelihood.
Let’s not make America into Texas, Florida, Idaho, Arkansas….
Let’s hope the dark promise of trump with absolute immunity and maga Republican state workshops and the maga packed SCOTUS and their machinations, along with the Cheneys endorsements, and a solid debate performance by Kamala Harris will be enough to turn the tide and break the trump trance so that our nation and our people can get another crack at strengthening our democracy and protecting our country, our economy, our people and our planet from unscrupulous actors and movements like trump and maga who play on our insecurities and fears to lure us into giving up on our country, our principles, our liberties, each other and our future.
God help us all.
There is a way to deal with flip-flopping on abortion!
Use the TRUMP ABORTION FLIP-FLOP CLOCK!
https://thedemlabs.org/2024/08/31/trump-abortion-flip-flop-clock/
This flip flop reveals the ultimate hypocrisy and venality of Trump, but I continue to be warned not to rely on reproductive freedom to carry the day all the way. It also seems that just lately there is some budding conversation among journalists about the way they cover Trump--but it is not enough and it is still too late. As I hear more people complaining that they want to hear more about "policies"--especially from Kamala Harris--I sense Trump continually being sanitized, propped back up, while Harris is being held to a much different standard. And I understand people say they want to know more about Harris' policies--but they also are not listening very well--nor are they consuming information in ways that would lead to a becoming better informed. I am told, for example, that Gen Z voters will be unlikely to sit through the entire debate--because they will use other platforms and mediated sources to absorb what they believe they need to know. How will that lead to becoming well informed? The press are not helping us and I am worried and frustrated. On FACE THE NATION Nikki Hayley was given a lengthy interview where she was allowed to underscore her view of the policy weakness of Kamala Harris. God awful. Depravity and cowarduce on parade, but it still sanitizes the Trump campaign--just enough.
Trump and the evangelicals have always been odd bedfellows. But his campaign, and probably Trump himself, understands how much he still needs them, at least through this election (and after that they “don’t need to vote again”). For one thing, their information channels are even more siloed than the average GOP voter. They follow their own media (a lot of it on radio) and influential pastors can have a great deal of influence. He can’t afford to have them turn on him; a few sermons could make the base he activated in 2016 decide to stay home in 2024. Watching him try to thread the needle on this is quite interesting. Maybe as one anti-abortion activist claimed, Satan really is running his campaign.
The GOP under trump and vance have declared war on women.
I'm intrigued by the longer view of what's been going on with the GOP since early in the 20th century and especially since the New Deal. All along it's been the party of big corporations and the very wealthy, but for a long time it was also the party of small-town and rural people in places like New England. These people (who included virtually all of my relatives except my father, who as an army noncom in WW2 registered as a Democrat) were overwhelmingly white, but they were often the political (and often the biological) descendants of "Lincoln Republicans." They were not fans of Joe McCarthy's anti-communist witchhunts.
Then along came the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the mid-1960s. Within a few years most white Southern Democrats had poured into the Republican Party: cue up Nixon's "southern strategy." (This is when IMO the GOP lost its right to claim to be the "party of Lincoln.") And *then,* of course, came Roe v. Wade. The big-business/corporate types held on through the Reagan administration, using racist, sexist, and homophobic dog whistles to keep their coalition together, but then it started to fall apart in a big way. They *needed* the votes of the scared-of-diversity white people and the conservative Catholics and white evangelicals. And over the decades those indispensables took over, culminating in Trump -- an intriguing character who *looks* at first glance like a big-business/corporate type but turns out to be a worthy heir to the likes of Father Coughlin.
What will arise from the wreck of the Republican Party? I hope something does, because those old-style, pre-Reagan Republicans need a home, and I don't want it to be in the Democratic Party, which is finally beginning to talk sense about economic justice.
Without serious campaign finance reform, including the overturning of Citizens United, *any* significant political party is going to be "hostage to money." In a parliamentary system, multiple parties are feasible. In the U.S. not so much -- which is why, until fairly recently, much of the policy wrangling took place under the aegis of the two major parties. Since the Reagan era, the GOP has become less and less diverse, more and more extreme -- and so isolated in their bubble that they apparently thought Project 2025 would have a lot of support.
Not to be too much of a nudge—The Donald doesn’t care about reproductive rights. Or any other social or political or economic issue. My fantasy of the moment is that Camella will make a “L” sign at her forehead every time he lies during the forthcoming debate.
It’s fascinating how he continues to get credit for stuff he didn’t do but no blame for stuff he did do.
When Trump mentions Afghanistan at the debate, VP Harris must remind voters that Trump desecrated Arlington National Cemetery two weeks ago, continuously degrades the service and sacrifices of military veterans
including POWs and Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice, sucked up to murderous dictators like Putin and Kim as President, and negotiated the Doha agreement with the Taliban that led to our disastrous withdrawal from there.
Frankly, I found the NYT poll to be somewhat disturbing because it shows that VP Harris’s momentum has stalled and says that voters think Trump is more committed to change than she is. If, voters are looking for radical change, then VP Harris is the wrong candidate, being that she is the sitting Vice President.
She is going to have to remind voters that our country was going to ‘Hell in a Bucket’ when Trump was President and be aspirational and forward looking at the same time.
The best way for VP Harris to deal with Trump when he insults her on Tuesday is to either ignore him or ridicule him without coming off as mean-spirited. There is about a 50% chance, in my humble opinion, that the American people will re-elect Trump in November and the United States crosses the point of no return and becomes a soft authoritarian regime beginning in 2025. But if anyone can prevent this from happening, it’s Kamala Harris.
VP Harris is poling significantly better than President Biden was before he suspended his re-election campaign, but not good enough to win the 2024 presidential election. The latest New York Times/Sienna poll has her down by two points in the popular vote 46 percent to 44 percent among likely voters.
Of the seven swing states, she is leading Trump by two points in two of them: Michigan and Wisconsin. In Pennsylvania, her lead is one point in this poll. The other four swing states are dead even.
The Emerson poll released late last week has her up by two points nationally, with results similar to the Times poll in the seven respective swing states. The YouGov from last week poll also has her up by two points nationally. Her numbers in the Emerson poll are exactly what Joe Biden’s were in 2020 at this time. He ended up winning the national popular vote by four-and -a-half percentage points and the electoral college with 306 votes.
Among likely voters, Trump is almost always at 46 percent to 47 percent nationally in respectable polls when minor third party options are included. I would conjecture, from these polls, that about five to seven percent of likely voters are truly undecided. VP Harris’s poll numbers seem to be more fluid than Trump’s numbers. This might be because the American people do not know as much about her as they do Trump.
This is why Tuesday night’s debate is so pivotal. I have a feeling that VP Harris is going to do well because she is a good debater. That small group of undecided voters that I mentioned in the aforementioned paragraph may be swayed to vote for her if she does. When Trump bombed in the first 2020 debate with Joe Biden, it hurt him with these voters.
These undecided voters may be disillusioned Republicans and conservative independents who are repulsed by Trump’s depravity and believe that he presents an acute threat to their personal freedoms due to his position on some issues, if they agree with many of what they think would be the specific policies of his administration. The abortion issue is case in point. Trump is the sole reason why Roe was overturned, and it is his perhaps his biggest political liability.
He is embarrassed about his extremism on this issue in the past and is now running from it. VP Harris must pummel him relentlessly regarding this issue on Tuesday night and not let him hide from his past extremism and current flip-flopping around it in any way.
Apparently, some of the undecided voters are telling pollsters that they think VP Harris is too left-wing and they don’t know enough about the specifics of her policies. She needs to come off as centrist both in her rhetoric as well as with the specifics of her policies on Tuesday. More later.
I think more of the undecideds are voters who often could be in the D coalition, but were very unexcited by Biden, and still haven't heard much about Kamala to codify a decision to vote for her (they generally don't pay attention to politics!). I expect her to pick up more of them after wiping the floor with T in the debate.
As noted in separate comments here, I think the 538 aggregate is still a decent ballpark, where Harris is still up 2.8 nationally as of today, incorporating the NYT outlier result. Still small leads in PA, MI, WI, and extremely tight (fractions of a point either way) in NV, AZ, GA, NC. I'd still rather be us than the opposition, and we have more paths to 270. It'll *really* help to secure PA, no doubt. And we absolutely have to swing through the ball.
NYT/Sienna is an outlier, end of story.
We still need to hear from the Real Dan, so I hope he weighs in soon.
Question…T is a convicted felon. He can’t vote. Why is no one talking about that?!?!
Yes, he can. Technically, he’s not an adjudicated felon until the judge confirms it at sentencing. Second, FL law in this case follows NY law (where the trial was held) as to his eligibility to vote. He would be eligible under NY law to vote at this stage of the proceedings.
Thanks Tom.