The Outsider Perspective Issue 409 | The Beltway Outsiders

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Good Friday Morning! Except for otters, the furry little animals have a litany of social media accounts proclaiming them the cutest creatures on earth. It turns out otters are dangerous. To wit, this week, a Malaysian jogger was left in a bloodied mess after a gang of otters attacked her in a park. The video showed the pack of otters fleeing the scene – not so cute now, huh?

The big story this week is the debate. I’ll jump into that below – links to follow.

Quick Hits:

Titus Techera had an interesting piece exploring 9/11 in movies and television. Samuel Goldman recommended it on X/Twitter and noted that 9/11 never finding a foothold in popular media matters because “art (and, for the last century, especially cinema) *is* popular memory. Without effective films, it is as if 9/11 never happened.” The closing of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars effectively ends that chapter of American history. In 2026, we will commemorate the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
A recent study found that the use of C-Sections in Korea is hurting the overall fertility rate in that country. What’s interesting is that you can see some racial divides in America as certain races are using C-Sections more while others are not. The group with the most significant spike in C-Section use is Asian populations, which have lower-than-normal fertility rates. The Korean example is interesting to follow because the use of C-Sections spikes in 2011 for no discernible reason.

Where you can find me this week

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Trump Retakes Momentum In Race – Conservative Institute

Trump Loses A Debate While Harris Slips In Campaign – Conservative Institute

With Press Like This Who Needs The Democratic Party? – Conservative Institute

Post-Debate State Of The Race

I wrote in my CI column that Trump lost the debate. I still hold to that, and I think that’s a blindingly obvious point. Frankly, I thought he lost it because he took her bait without making the obvious points waiting for him on the table. The moderators set her up on a tee, and there were obvious answers. He missed most of his opportunities and took all the rabbit trails, which falls on Trump.

For Harris, “winning a debate” is not the same as changing the race. While she got in fun jabs from the progressive side of things, she didn’t do much to establish herself. Voters, particularly undecided ones, don’t know who she is or what she stands for on any issue, except maybe abortion.

Before the debate, Nate Cohn at the New York Times analyzed the Times poll, which showed that Trump had a one-point lead over Harris nationally. He made similar points to my own, such as how Harris runs as the undefined/generic candidate. He then dove into how the undefined/generic candidate strategy had its limits. Cohn wrote:

In this poll, the risks associated with this strategy are evident. Despite a month of favorable coverage, voters still don’t know enough about her: 28 percent of voters said they needed to learn more, compared with only 9 percent who said the same about Mr. Trump. More than anything, voters say they want to hear more about where she stands on the issues, something her campaign has seemed to struggle to lay out.

The poll also hints that the Trump campaign has begun to fill in some of the blanks. Nearly half of voters say she’s “too liberal or progressive.“ A majority of voters see her as at least somewhat responsible for the problems along the border. And a majority of voters say she’s a “risky“ choice and “more of the same“ — hardly an enviable combination.

Nate Cohn went on to talk about how the debate would allow Harris to answer those questions, define herself, and introduce herself to the American people.

But then the debate happened. As I noted in my column, Harris never answered a single question. Whatever the topic, she immediately diverted. After she did that with the first question on “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?“I thought Trump’s easiest line of attack would be to start off by saying, “Notice something. The new person on this stage can’t answer any questions.“

Harris was prepared to evade and not answer anything. Had Trump pushed her on that point, she’d have crumbled.

Sean Trende at RealClearPolitics noticed this, too.

The great advantage she had in this race, which I’ve been writing about for months, is that her late entry provided a shot of adrenaline that enabled her to keep going to the start of early voting. What I missed, though, is the disadvantage: When a presidential candidate makes her way through the primary process and the dead period between the end of the primaries and Labor Day, she is effectively introducing herself to the American people. She’s fleshing out electoral positions, perfecting her stump speech, and creating an image of herself that provides a foundation for the fall campaign.

Harris got none of that. The result is that even people who have followed the campaign closely know only a few things about her from a policy perspective: She’s pro-choice, she’s a former prosecutor, she once held a raft of policy positions that were pretty far to the left but that she may-or-may-not still hold, and she isn’t Donald Trump.

Her debate strategy leaned heavily into the former aspect, but as described above, “not Donald Trump“ as a strategy has its limits. Vibes can only get you so far. She probably needed to use the debate to better introduce herself to the American people, to flesh out her policy stances, and to reassure people that the changes of heart she has had on issues are sincere.

In 2020, Joe Biden could run the generic candidate blueprint because he’d been in politics forever and was Obama’s Vice President. He was well-known and reasonably well-liked at the time. What Biden ran into in 2024 was the fact that voters no longer viewed him as generic; they had very specific, very defined negative beliefs of him.

Donald Trump is also well-defined at this point. Trende makes this point, and I agree with it, that liberals are under the delusion that if voters only heard more about Donald Trump, they’d stop liking him. If that were true, we’d have seen some proof of that in 2016 and 2020. Some people like Trump, some hate him, but that’s not the overriding feature of voting for him – unless you’re in a far-left bubble.

Side note: this is also why the debate moderators stepping in so hard and fact-checking Trump missed the point. They made the night about Trump. Harris was already evading questions, but by pushing the night further on Trump, Harris faded into the background at times. She needs to define herself, and the moderators linked arms to prevent that.

Last week, I said two events would shake up this month: the debate and Donald Trump’s sentencing. The debate is over, and Trump’s sentencing was postponed beyond the election.

A few other things have happened to boost Trump ahead of the election:

RFK Jr. was removed from the ballot in North Carolina.
RFK Jr. was forced back on the ballot in Michigan.
Jill Stein defeated Democratic Party lawsuits attempting to kick her off the Wisconsin ballot.
Georgia prosecutors had two criminal charges dismissed against Trump.

The North Carolina lawsuit helps because it likely pushes more voters to Trump. In Michigan, it’s the reverse. RFK Jr. being on the ballot likely hurts Harris more. She has real issues in Michigan that appear to be getting worse. The pro-Hamas/Palestinian voting bloc in Michigan is real, and it hates her. Wisconsin is another swing state where 0.25% of a vote moves outcomes significantly.

In other words, Trump won a clean sweep on the legal front. Does it guarantee anything? Who knows. Will it make the Harris campaign sweat? Absolutely.

Finally, the polls. I expect Harris to get a bump in the polls. The two early polls are Reuters/Ipsos and Morning Consult. Ipsos has been a reliable pro-Biden/Harris pollster throughout the cycle. While others showed Biden sinking, Ipsos was the last one off the Titanic. They have Harris at a +5, up one point from her previous +4.

Morning Consult was a Harris +3 and jumped to Harris +5. Both results suggest some response issues from Trump-leaning voters. Ipsos has Trump at 42%, which he won’t be on Election Day, and Morning Consult has Trump at 45%. I’m expecting Trump to be around 47% by Election Day.

Both are good results for Harris, but we don’t know immediately if the race has changed.

She’s sitting at +1.5 in the RealClearPoltics average, something everyone expects to move. Harry Enten at CNN warned viewers this week that the Harris enthusiasm surge wasn’t showing up in critical ways. Republicans closed the voter registration gaps in two battleground states: Pennsylvania and North Carolina.

Harris is trying to run the 2020 Biden campaign. She wants to be a generic Democrat. Trump is already well-defined and actively trying to define Harris. He did a poor job of that during the debate, but his ad campaign is reasonably filling in those gaps.

My comp for this race is 2012. Harris is playing the Romney role, and Trump is in the Obama spot. Romney tried running as a generic Republican, too. Obama blasted Romney over the summer, defining him with the Bain Capital ads, and Romney never recovered. Romney had bright points in the debates but could never define himself to the voters that mattered.

For Obama, the critical state was Pennsylvania, where he wiped the floor with Romney. It’s the same for Trump. If Trump wins Pennsylvania, the map opens up, and he will likely win. Also, if Trump wins Pennsylvania, he’ll likely carry the other Midwest states. 2016 and 2020 showed us these states can act like dominos.

Harris can’t run as an undefined quantity. The video clips of her saying insane things are everywhere. Trump’s campaign must blanket the airwaves with attack ads in battleground states and fill in the empty lines. He didn’t do that during the debate, but his campaign does it elsewhere.

As of September 12, 2024, there are 52 days until the election.

Links of the week

Did Harris Really Get the Debate She Needed? – Sean Trende, RealClearPolitics

The Battle for Skeptical Independents: Actions matter more than words with non-partisan voters. – John Halpin, The Liberal Patriot

Some undecided voters not convinced by Harris after debate with Trump – Reuters

Pennsylvania: A Single Grain of Rice Could Win the Presidency – RealClearPennsylvania

Fox News Post Debate Panel Discusses How Trump and Harris failed – FoxNews

Mandating Insurance Coverage For IVF Will Not Boost Fertility – Institute for Family Studies

Israel destroyed reported Iranian underground missile factory in Syria ground raid – Axios

Kirby: ‘No use in responding’ to a ‘handful of vets’ on Biden’s botched Afghan withdrawal: ‘Obviously no use in responding. A “handful” of vets indeed and all of one stripe,’ Kirby said in a ‘reply all’ email chain – Fox News

X/Twitter Thread(s) of the week

People are increasingly living solitary lives, with no connections.