I almost forgot again that Wednesday is YouGov poll day. I guess maybe I have an excuse this week. Anyway, here it is:
Harris is now three points ahead nationally and things have been bouncing around that level for weeks within the margin of error. There's just nothing much to say about this except the banal "It's gonna be a close one!"
looks like trump lost a voter today; let's go brandon (wapo)
A 36-year-old Maryland woman was sentenced to 18 years in prison Wednesday for conspiring to shoot up power substations around Baltimore as part of a white-supremacist-inspired plot to sow societal chaos.
Though Clendaniel accepted responsibility for her crimes, prosecutors pointed out in court Wednesday that after being arrested and locked up in the case, Clendaniel had been in touch with a leader of the Terrorgram Collective, described by authorities as a terrorist group devoted to attacking America’s critical infrastructure and carrying out hate crimes.
Clendaniel’s co-defendant in the case, Brandon Russell, whom federal authorities have described as a neo-Nazi leader, is set be tried in the plot in November.
Well, Trump is dominating the headlines....
Close = rat fucking loss. Sad.
I read some good news today. Despite the Teamster national leaderships failure to endorse anyone, a few more locals in midwestern states have endorsed Harris/Walz.
I will not relax until (if ever?) Harris has a 7 point nationwide lead for three weeks in a row. She's doing the best she can, and succeeding wildly, but she hasn't had much *time* for name recognition and to shake off old embarrassments while crafting and polishing a message for 2024.
That difficulty is entirely the fault of Joe Biden. If Trump wins, Biden will deserve all the obloquy directed at him.
That difficulty is entirely the fault of Joe Biden.
Your "entirely" is doing massive heavy lifting. While Biden's initial decision to run for a second term (and his delay in pulling out) may contribute to a Harris loss (if that's what transpires), Trump has been terrifyingly competitive for basically the entire year. A lot of the analysts these days suggest "fundamentals" or the "structural picture" aren't as decisive as they used to be. And that's probably true. But that doesn't means they no longer matter at all.
In other words, if Trump wins, future historians may simply believe that various structural factors—the anti-incumbency mood, the inflation hangover, the unsettled geopolitical situation, the gradual weakening of support for Democrats among working class voters of color, and so on—meant that Trump's floor was simply not ever going to drop low enough for the Democratic nominee to win, given the latter's real disadvantage in the Electoral College.
This election looks very winnable for Harris: if the polls are accurate she's the (modest, to be sure) favorite: the bulk of the simulations suggest she's got something like 2/3rds odds of winning the Electoral College if she's three points up on Trump in the popular vote.
But I think skepticism is warranted regarding claims that, if it doesn't work out, it's on Biden. We have no way of knowing how a competitive primary would have shaken out, but the overwhelmingly likely winner would still have been Kamala Harris. Only now she'd be saddled with a lot of unhelpful political baggage acquired during the primary campaign.
This is deeply uninformed.
There is literally no reason to think that an additional few weeks or months would have made the slightest difference. Shes we'll known, was already on the ticket, has run a national campaign in the past and most importantly, there is zero evidence that more time makes a difference.
'I just needed more time to do things and stuff!' is always a lame excuse, especially when its used in advance to excuse a possible future failure.
So, if Biden had waited another 3 weeks before bowing out it wouldn't be a problem? By your reasoning, it wouldn't. I disagree.
Re name recognition: That's a metric of limited usefulness. What's important is name *familiarity*, where the individual isn't simply a first and last name, but instead, someone known for personal traits and achievements. That takes time. Time on the Sunday shows. Time on the hustings. Time as an occasional paragraph in a news story.
It's ok, Dana--you can stop now. You've adequately salted the record with your preemptive blame game, so if Harris loses, you'll be well-set up to enjoy your I-told-you-sos. I'm sure it'll feel really good for you to blame an elderly man who was a bona fide great president for millions of people voting for Trump, so I hope you are looking forward to that.
In the meantime, I also hope you knock this shit off and get to work electing Harris.
There's just nothing much to say about this except the banal "It's gonna be a close one!"
IIRC Kevin's predictive theory earlier this year was that Trump would be defeated, because, given the fact that he's exceptionally well-known—IOW the challenger this cycle is effectively the incumbent—nearly everyone who's going to vote for Trump had already decided to do so, and therefore the bulk of undecideds would go to Biden.
If that theory holds, the advantage with late-breaking undecideds should be even greater for Kamala Harris, because Trump's familiarity edge is even bigger vis-a-vis her compared to Biden (Joe's the actual President of the United States, after all).
I wonder if Kevin still clings to this theory. It would be nice if it were valid, because at this juncture, the election looks like a coin toss, and the GOP nominee possesses both the willingness to cheat, and a Supreme Court majority if push comes to shove.
It sure would be nice if Harris could get her lead up to five points or so, and flip a couple of Trump's 2020 states: a close election is easier to steal than a not-so-close election.