Kamala’s Conservative Pitch
The VP is running a risk-averse campaign that’s light on vision and substance. It may well work. But sometime soon, her party will need to decide what kind of future it wants for the country
With just under a month to go until Election Day, Kamala Harris is ahead of Donald Trump. The polling aggregators all say so: FiveThirtyEight has her 2.5 points ahead; she leads by 2.2 at RealClearPolitics; and Nate Silver has her beating Trump by 3.1. She also leads, consistently if very narrowly, in all three of the crucial northern rustbelt swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
That’s good, and vastly better than Joe Biden would be doing if he’d stayed in the race.
Yet Biden himself was doing much better in the polls four years ago against Trump, hovering during the final month of the race between 8 and 10 points ahead of the incumbent president. In the end, Biden prevailed by 4.5 points in the nationwide popular vote, demonstrating the difficulty pollsters were having with accurately measuring Trump’s support. If pollsters this year have fixed this problem (or overcorrected by boosting Trump’s standing beyond his true level of support in the electorate), then Harris will probably win on November 5. But if they’ve once again undercounted Trump’s support, then the former president might actually have a slight edge. We just don’t know, and we won’t know until the votes are counted in the hours (or, more likely, days) after the voting stops early next month.
The truth, then, is that the race is extraordinarily tight, despite the fact that Trump is running for president for the third cycle in a row. And that he is disliked or loathed by more than half of the country. And that he is a convicted felon and faces additional legal jeopardy in numerous jurisdictions. And that he attempted a self-coup the last time he held office. And that he’s less sharp and energetic on the campaign trail than he was in 2016 or 2020. And that his lengthy rallies don’t energize the MAGA masses as they once did.
Despite all of that, the Harris campaign can’t seem to pull into a comfortable lead over her opponent. We will have plenty of time to try and figure out why after the election, once we have actual results and accurate exit polls to pour over and analyze. Yet it’s still possible to speculate about the answer now, if only to lay down some hypotheses that get tested later. That’s what this post will attempt to do.
The Conservative Democrats
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