If you’d like to read this issue on my website, click here! If you’d like to sign-up, and receive this in your inbox each week, click here! Read past issues here.
Good Friday Morning! Except for “Lieutenant Dan,” the man who spent Hurricane Milton on a boat. He became an overnight internet sensation after refusing evacuation. He spent the entire time of Milton in a sailboat on the water. He somehow managed to survive. The internet wasn’t done there, though.
After his survival, internet sleuths found out he was a longtime criminal with a litany of mug shots. Those same internet sleuths used that to warn people away from giving to GoFundMe pages set up for the guy. Internet fame will build you up and then tear you down in the same breath.
This week, I’m focusing on the “vibes shift” in the race. Harris is no longer running on a sugar high. Her campaign is stalling, and Democrats are panicking. Is the stall real? I’ll get into that and more below—links to follow.
Quick Hits:
- The New York Post published a story talking about what Americans use for “emotional support.” They focused on things like dogs, cats, chickens, and more, what you’d usually suspect. They also had a line for something else: 9% of respondents (mostly Gen Z and Millennials) said that they used AI as emotional support. That would include things like chatbots, ChatGPT, and other things. I’d question the accuracy of that poll for larger meanings, but I also know these chatbots are growing exponentially. You can find them in any App Store, and they all have a ton ofreviews. This is one of those quiet changes that’s happening to the world that we’re going to take a harder look at in 5-10 years, wondering what went wrong.
- Both Harris and Trump did two things this week that were smart. Harris went on the podcast “Call Her Daddy.” Conservatives hated it, but it’s one of the largest podcasts in the world and widely listened to. The problem for Harris is that it appears she bombed that interview. The idea is brilliant, but the execution is weak. Trump announced he was doing a rally at Madison Square Garden on October 27 to kick off the final week of campaigning. The weak view is that Trump is trying to win New York. It’s not about that. Trump is going to the center of all media on the planet and doing a rally at the most famous venue there. The New York media will be unable to avoid talking about this event non-stop. Whether or not Trump executes the plan remains to be seen – but like Harris and the podcast, it’s a good idea.
- As expected, there was a significant spike in the number of people applying for unemployment benefits last week: 258,000 versus the 229,000 expected. This is due almost entirely to Hurricane Helene and the broad path of damage across North Carolina, Virginia, South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, and Florida. Hurricane Milton will likely boost those numbers more. This likely confirms that we’ll see an uptick in the number of unemployed people in the November jobs report just before the election.
Where you can find me this week
Please subscribe, rate, and review my podcast on iTunes, Spotify, or Google Play — the reviews help listeners, and readers like you find me in the algorithms. Make sure to sign up for the Conservative Institute’s daily newsletter.
Horse Race Ep. 012: Kamala Harris Losing STEAM | Trump SURGING In Battlegrounds | Latest Polls
Kamala Harris Can’t Escape Election Spotlight – Conservative Institute
Kamala Harris Fails The First Test Of Politics – Conservative Institute
The Home Stretch Is Here – The Harris Campaign Is Panicking
Neither Kamala Harris nor her campaign believes she’s winning the race. Over the past week, I’d noticed a shift in how partisans discussed the election. At first, I chalked it up to looming election nerves, but that was incorrect: Democrats are verging on meltdown over Harris, and Trump’s team is gaining confidence.
I covered this on the YouTube show this week. Still, it bears repeating because a flood of stories emerged on Thursday confirming the new narrative driving mainstream opinion: Democrats believe Harris is losing, and they’re scared of Election Day.
Most major outlets are giving Democrats their preferred spin on the stories, but it’s not hard to see the cracks in their confidence. I’ll start with Mark Halperin, who noted the same shift I did and added the following on his show on Wednesday:
“I just saw some new private polling that’s very robust. Private polling,” says Mark Halperin. Kamala Harris “is in a lot of trouble … In the conversations I’m having with Trump people and Democrats with data, they are extremely bullish on Trump’s chances in the last 48 hours. Extremely bullish.”
Halperin took a lot of heat for that report but stood by it. He added on Thursday:
“There’s a branch of the Democratic Party that I would say can’t handle the truth. I’ve made it clear Harris can still win. Where the polls are now don’t necessarily represent where things will end up,” says Mark Halperin. But “the snapshot of where we are now is that there are a lot of really worried Democrats and there are really no worried Republicans, including in Mar-A-Lago. They’re very confident about where things stand.”
I’m going to make a caveat on internal polling here in a second, but his overarching point stands. Neither Harris/Democrats nor Trump/Republicans think Harris is leading the race. The assumption is that Trump leads the critical battleground states, and Harris is behind.
Axios officially confirmed this reporting Thursday, going in on Harris and the Midwest Blue Wall states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Axios reports:
There’s growing worry among Democrats that Harris seems stuck, even sliding a bit, after a strong start to her young presidential campaign. Her media blitz, heavy spending and largely favorable coverage don’t seem to be moving the needle much, if at all, these Democrats say.
They go on to detail her issues there, which aren’t new: Harris isn’t winning the White Working Class and is struggling with the Working Class overall. If polling does what it did in 2016 and 2020, underestimating these voters means Harris may be down more than polling projects.
For reference, on Thursday, Trump led Pennsylvania by 0.3 points, Michigan by 0.8 points, and Harris led Wisconsin by 0.4 points. These are all tossups, but Harris is wildly underperforming Clinton and Biden in state polling when compared against Trump in 2016 and 2020.
Axios wasn’t alone. Politico started raising alarms from Michigan Democrats about the Black vote in that state. They’re mad at Harris for not targeting Detroit more or getting activists on her side. Politico writes:
Three dozen Black Detroiters, including strategists, activists, clergy, elected officials and likely voters, the vast majority of them men, told POLITICO about their concerns with the campaign’s outreach to Black voters. Some said their appeals come off as condescending. Others added that party officials and surrogates often question their intelligence if they inquire about how their lives will change under a Harris administration. Others lament the campaign hasn’t reached out to enough well-known grassroots organizations, who hear firsthand about the apathy from Black voters in marginalized neighborhoods like Belmont and Delray.
Politico fluffs the piece up with what Harris is trying to do, but that paragraph, and this one, tell a complete story of a campaign in crisis:
But as the campaign draws to a close, Harris is laboring to both turn out her base while simultaneously expanding her appeals to skeptical working-class white voters. Harris’ campaign stop last Friday held at a fire station at an inner-ring suburb of Detroit focused on how it was “so good to be in the house of labor“ — a not-so-subtle nod that she’s gotten the backing of local unions while the national Teamsters and firefighters organizations declined to back her.
Politico’s poor phrase in that paragraph suggests Harris has a “base.“ We have no idea what a base vote looks like for Harris. That’s the reason everyone in politics is focused on her—we know what the Trump base looks like and where he’s growing it. He’s pulling in working-class voters and making life hard for Democrats across the Midwest. He’s bleeding suburban white voters, but those aren’t as strategically well-placed as the working class in the battleground states.
None of this means Harris is guaranteed to lose, far from it. Polling shows a tight race. But what’s worrying Democrats, and correctly worrying them, is the trend lines. We’re in the final stretch, and polling is drifting back towards Trump, just as it did in 2016 and 2020.
For Democrats, this is a PTSD moment where they keep saying, “It’s happening again.“
That said, I agree with Nate Silver’s caution that internal polls are also notoriously wrong. The worst performer among these was Romney’s 2012 campaign, whose pollsters ran on a level of sunshine and rainbows not seen in modern polling. They weren’t even close. Campaigns spend a lot of money on these polls to get an accurate idea, but if campaigns weigh their demographics poorly in these polls, they’ll be off just as much as public pollsters.
I’m not taking these polls as gospel truth: what I’m noting is the same as Halperin: both Democrats and Republicans see the same thing: Harris is losing.
That’s why Harris pivoted this week and started a “media blitz.” She’s going on podcasts, late-night, and more to shift the narrative. Compare this to 2020, when Biden kept things steady right to the end. Charles Blow and David Brooks are writing panicked essays in the New York Times about Harris being unable to “close the deal.“ And Politico’s Jonathan Martin, the Hall Monitor of mainstream Democratic Opinion, published a piece: “Here’s What Harris Must Do To Seal the Deal.”
The freakout bubbling up is similar to the meltdowns over Biden in the fall and spring. The difference is that everyone is locked into the current path. If Harris wins, everyone will say this was just last-minute jitters from Democrats over nothing. That’d be a lie, however.
The last thing you want to hear if you’re a Democrat is that Harris is scrambling to shore up Black and union voters nearly three weeks away from Election Day. This next week marks the middle of October, which is when early voting opens up across the country. Harris is changing her campaign strategy at the end, while Trump is moving along.
Another last-minute gambit: Harris is rushing Walz out for targeted “men“ events. He’s doing interviews with Michael Strahan, giving pep talks to the team he used to work on, going pheasant hunting, and heading to events targeting Black men.
If these events, combined with Harris running to Howard Stern and Stephen Colbert, smell a little desperate, it’s because it is. They need anything to stick in the final stretch.
Whether those internal polls are accurate or not is beside the point: both Democrats and Republicans, including the people at the top of both tickets, believe them. If Harris wins, it’d surprise her internal polling, and she’s scrambling to reverse course. That’s the real state of the race.
Links of the week
Harris faces new urgency to explain how her potential presidency would be different from Biden’s – AP
Harris faces challenge with union voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania – The Hill
Kamala Harris is unable to answer basic questions on ‘60 Minutes’ – NYPost
Artless Dodger: Harris Flustered in Substance-Free 60 Minutes Interview – Washington Free Beacon
An autumn chill has descended on Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. – NY Magazine
Does CBS News Know Where Jerusalem Is? ‘Do not refer to it as being in Israel,’ said the network’s senior director of standards and practices. – The Free Press
MoneyGram app hit by major hack that exposed customer social security numbers and bank accounts – DailyMail
The Spy Who Lied to Us: There is only one person who still believes the infamous Steele dossier was credible: Christopher Steele. – The Free Press
Elon Succeeded Where FEMA Failed: While the Starlink CEO was racing to help the victims of Hurricane Helene, where was the federal government? – The Free Press
X/Twitter Thread(s) of the week
Archeologists discover the carriage house and stable of President Andrew Jackson
Satire of the week
Carnival Cruise Debuts Extravagant All-Inclusive Journey To Edge Of Earth – The Onion
Democrats Perplexed Why Candidate Nobody Ever Voted For Is Slipping In The Polls – Babylon Bee
What A Jerk! Kamala Wants To Help With Hurricane Relief But DeSantis Refuses To Tell Her Where Florida Is – Babylon Bee
Money-saving Hack! This Woman Took the Crumbs on Her Shirt and Reassembled Them Into a Second, Smaller Croissant – Reductress
Opinion: I’m Fiscally Conservative, Socially Liberal, and Internet Communist – The Hard Times
EA Announces New Multiplayer Sims Experience Called “Going Outside” – The Hard Drive
‘**** That’ Senior Hezbollah Figures Decide Not To Bother Announcing New Leader – Waterford Whispers News
Thanks for reading!