Welcome to The Campaign Moment, your guide to the biggest moments in the 2024 election \u2014 and where we\u2019re open to changing our assumptions (and you should be, too).<\/p>\n
Before we start, make sure you\u2019re signed up for this newsletter. And also make sure you\u2019re subscribing to the Campaign Moment podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever else.<\/p>\n
It pains me to say this as someone who relies on polls, defends them and, yes, even loves them. But I have to admit it: Polls of the 2024 presidential race have gotten, well, a little boring.<\/p>\n
The race is very close, it\u2019s been very close, and it will apparently continue to be very close right through Nov. 5. Things have barely budged since Vice President Kamala Harris\u2019s initial surge. The vast majority of national and swing-state polls are within the margin of error, meaning we just don\u2019t really know who\u2019s ahead.<\/p>\n
But sometimes a poll smacks you across the face, and that\u2019s certainly the case with a new Fox News poll.<\/p>\n
The survey taken from Friday through Monday shows former president Donald Trump leading nationally by two points, well within the margin of error. But as more than a few Democrats on social media noted, it shows something very different in the seven key swing states: Harris leading by six points.<\/p>\n
We really should not oversell this one poll, for reasons I\u2019ll get to. But it does cast a spotlight on a very live issue in the 2024 campaign:<\/p>\n
Could Republicans\u2019 electoral college advantage be fading?<\/p>\n
It sure looks as though it might be \u2014 despite Harris\u2019s running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D), recently (briefly) calling for a national popular vote.<\/p>\n
That Trump benefits from the electoral college has long been an article of faith. He, after all, was elected in 2016 despite losing the popular vote by more than two points. Trump then in 2020 lost the popular vote by more than four points, but lost the \u201ctipping-point\u201d state \u2014 Pennsylvania \u2014 by less than a point. (The tipping-point state is basically the state in the middle of the results of all 50 states that gives the winner their 270th electoral vote.)<\/p>\n
As The Washington Post\u2019s Lenny Bronner noted a couple months back, Republicans benefited from a nearly three-point electoral college bias in 2016 and a nearly four-point one in 2020 \u2014 the largest such advantages since the World War II era. That bias measures the difference between the winner\u2019s margins in the popular vote and the tipping-point state.<\/p>\n
But as the above chart makes clear, these things are subject to change. Republicans haven\u2019t always had the edge. And ahead of 2016, a lot of us (sheepishly raising my hand here) were talking about how it was the Democrats who appeared primed to benefit.<\/p>\n
Bronner noted this indeed appeared to be changing in 2024. But where does it stand?<\/p>\n
The first thing to note is that Fox\u2019s poll isn\u2019t a great measure. The poll isn\u2019t made up of individual surveys from the swing states, but a subsample of voters across them \u2014 with a large margin of error. The idea that Harris benefits from something like an eight-point electoral college bias is highly implausible. As the chart above shows, it would be without modern precedent.<\/p>\n
The better measure, then, is using polls with larger sample sizes. So let\u2019s use those.<\/p>\n
When Bronner wrote his piece in early August, he noted that Trump was running just one point better in what appeared to be the tipping-point state (Michigan) than he was nationally. So that was a one-point electoral college bias in Trump\u2019s favor, at least at that point. (The tipping-point state is not set in stone.)<\/p>\n
When the New York Times ran its own numbers last month, the pro-Trump electoral college bias was just 0.7 points.<\/p>\n
Today, it looks as though it might be even less of a Trump advantage \u2014 if it\u2019s one at all.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not at all clear what the tipping-point state might be, because all of the swing states are so close. But right now The Post\u2019s polling average shows it\u2019s either Michigan, Pennsylvania or Wisconsin. Winning all three would deliver the 270 electoral votes Harris needs, and she leads by about two points in each of them. That\u2019s virtually the same as her two-point edge in national polls.<\/p>\n
So it\u2019s looking as though electoral college bias could be, more or less, a wash.<\/p>\n
Why might the electoral college edge be narrowing for Republicans? Bronner pointed to Democrats appearing to bank fewer votes in large states, which pulled down their share of the popular vote but didn\u2019t really impact the electoral college. The Times\u2019s Nate Cohn similarly noted that Trump seemed to be doing better than he previously had in noncompetitive states where Republicans made some of their bigger gains in the 2022 midterm elections.<\/p>\n
Whatever the case, the evidence suggests the electoral college isn\u2019t primed to bite Democrats as hard as it has previously in the Trump era.<\/p>\n
That doesn\u2019t mean it won\u2019t matter; in a very close race like this one, even a small electoral college bias could mean the popular-vote loser is elected for the third time since 2000 (remember Bush v. Gore?). But at least for now, Democrats\u2019 popular-vote promoters such as Walz don\u2019t seem to have quite as much to fear from the electoral college.<\/p>\n
Wednesday brought some of the highest-profile interviews to date in the 2024 election, including Harris\u2019s foray onto Fox News\u2019s airwaves and a pair of town halls featuring Trump \u2014 on both Fox and on Univision.<\/p>\n
A few reflections, especially on Harris\u2019s high-profile Fox interview:<\/p>\n
Harris seems to perform better in such combative interviews, and that was certainly the case in her Fox News interview \u2014 one that in many ways resembled a debate between her and host Bret Baier.<\/span> \u201cThere were no guns down there [on Jan. 6, 2021]. We didn\u2019t have guns. The others had guns, but we didn\u2019t have guns.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2014 Trump at a Univision town hall Wednesday night in Doral, Fla.<\/p>\n This quote is the most directly that Trump has tied himself to the Jan. 6 insurrectionists \u2014 people his allies and lawyers initially strained to distance him from in early 2021.<\/p>\n It\u2019s the culmination of a long-standing effort from Trump to downplay the events of Jan. 6 and even pitch them as something to be celebrated \u2014 despite the American people\u2019s strong disagreement with that. (Also, there were guns and many other weapons on Jan. 6.)<\/p>\n Trump momentarily seemed to refer to the rioters as \u201cwe\u201d during last month\u2019s presidential debate, before quickly changing course and calling them \u201cthis group of people.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cPanel formed after Trump rally shooting calls for Secret Service shake-up\u201d (Washington Post)<\/span> Welcome to The Campaign Moment, your guide to the biggest moments in the 2024 election \u2014 and where we\u2019re open to changing our assumptions (and you should be, too). Before we start, make sure you\u2019re signed up for this newsletter. And also make sure you\u2019re subscribing to the Campaign Moment podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":11264,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11263","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11263"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11263\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11264"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nHarris made a point to say, \u201cMy presidency will not be a continuation of Joe Biden\u2019s presidency\u201d \u2014 adjusting her wayward answer on \u201cThe View\u201d last week in which she struggled to enunciate something she would have done differently than Biden.<\/span>
\nA key moment for her was when Baier seemed to try to bait her into attacking Trump\u2019s supporters \u2014 and she didn\u2019t take the bait. Baier noted that nearly half of Americans support a candidate that Harris has labeled so bad and dangerous. He asked whether she contended those people were \u201cstupid.\u201d \u201cOh, God, I would never say that about the American people,\u201d Harris responded. Harris then accurately noted that Trump\u2019s attacks on her own base are far more pitched than what she says about his.<\/span>
\nOn that same subject, in perhaps the most viral clip, she effectively accused Fox of whitewashing Trump\u2019s recent comments about using the military against \u201cradical left lunatics\u201d and the \u201cenemy within.\u201d<\/span>
\nTrump in his Fox town hall didn\u2019t exactly back off the idea that his comment was geared toward Democrats, despite days of his allies trying to suggest that wasn\u2019t what he meant. He lumped the Pelosis in with the \u201cenemy within,\u201d after previously citing Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.). Republicans now get to try to account for this again.<\/span><\/p>\nA momentous quote<\/h3>\n
Take a moment to read:<\/h3>\n
\n\u201cTrump backers are more primed to doubt the election than they were in 2020\u201d (Washington Post)<\/span>
\n\u201cMassive influx of shadowy get-out-the-vote spending floods swing states\u201d (Washington Post)<\/span>
\n\u201cMcConnell called Trump \u2018stupid,\u2019 a \u2018despicable human being,\u2019 new book says\u201d (Washington Post)<\/span>
\n\u201cInside the Secretive $700 Million Ad-Testing Factory for Kamala Harris\u201d (New York Times)<\/span>
\n\u201c\u2018Now I like him\u2019: Some Black voters in Georgia see Trump as a real option\u201d (Politico)<\/span>
\n\u201cMike Pence is haunting this election\u201d (Atlantic)<\/span><\/p>\n