Sunday, June 30, 2024

BIDEN'S DEBATE MIGHT NOT HAVE BEEN DISASTROUS, AND A TRUMP-HARRIS RACE WOULD GET VERY UGLY

Maybe I'm not a pessimist. Maybe I'm just a knee-jerk contrarian.

In my last post, I joined the herd and said that it might be appropriate for President Biden to step aside and let someone else lead the ticket. But it's a day and a half after the debate and I'm not convinced that Biden's poor performance on Thursday night matters very much to voters.

This is an electorate that seems locked into its views of the candidates, whom voters have known for years. It's as if they're saying, "Stop making us try to think about these guys. We've told you what we think." In the case of Donald Trump, nothing seems to change Americans' minds -- not January 6 (his temporary dip in the polls was quckly reversed, although his numbers are still decidedly negative); not his indictments; not the civil cases he lost, including one involving a sexual assault; and not his criminal conviction. In Biden's case, his numbers started drifting lower after the Afghanistan withdrawal and continued dropping slowly but steadily during a bad period of inflation. Now his approval is consistently below 40%. Head-to-head matchups show the two men within a couple of points of each other nationwide, though Trump leads in the swing states.

New York magazine's Chas Danner looks at post-debate polls and ... there seems to be no movement: A Morning Consult poll has Biden still leading by 1, and a FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll showed very little change:
Post-debate, 46.7 percent of likely voters said they were considering voting for him, which was 1.6 percentage points lower than before the debate....

The share of likely voters who said they were considering voting for Trump after the debate climbed from 43.5 percent to just 43.9 percent.
So why the panic? Barack Obama suffered a much greater polling drop after his bad first debate in 2012, and he went on to win. Ronald Reagan lost a lot of ground to Walter Mondale after his terrible first debate in 1984, and he won in a landslide. And let's not forget John Fetterman's awful performance in his only 2022 Senate debate. He won too.

Biden's problem is that he appeared to be on his way to a loss before the debate. He needed a big win, and he got the opposite. So I understand the panic.

But I hope we're all prepared for the awfulness of the Republican campaign if Biden steps aside and is replaced by the most popular alternate pick among Democrats, Kamala Harris. Danner quotes the Morning Consult poll...
Three in 10 Democratic voters want Harris to take the reins were Biden to not be the party’s nominee, followed by 20% who said it should be California Gov. Gavin Newsom....
... as well as a poll from Survey USA:
• 43% of likely Democratic voters say it should be Vice President Kamala Harris, including 63% of Black Democrats, 56% of Democrats age 35 to 49, 55% of those with children under 18 at home, and 53% of those with high school educations. Harris leads or ties as the top choice among every demographic subgroup.

• 16% choose California Governor Gavin Newsom....

• 8% choose Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg....

• 7% choose Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.

• 4% choose Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro; 2% Maryland Governor Wes Moore; 1% choose someone else. 20% are undecided.
Unless she turned it down, I think Democrats would have to pick Harris if Biden stepped aside. Wajahat Ali is right -- pundits and Democratic insiders are
musing about potential white saviors who can somehow come in at the last second, less than five months from the election, and magically push Democrats over the top. We’ve heard about Gavin Newsom and Gretchen Whitmer. A name that is rarely mentioned is Vice President Kamala Harris. This is after Democrats have spent the past four years doing absolutely nothing to help bolster her profile or image. How do you think all of this will go over with Black voters, especially Black women, who make up the Dem base?
But we'd have an even uglier general election campaign than the one we're having now, because Donald Trump would immediately crawl into the gutter and go mainstream with the nastiest things rank-and-file Republicans and GOP influencers have been saying about Harris since 2020. Here's a widely available T-shirt:


Amazon stopped selling "Joe and the Hoe Gotta Go" shirts in the summer of 2020, but you can still buy merchandise with that slogan there.

The slogan refers to Harris's brief relationship with former San Francisco mayor and California Assembly speaker Willie Brown in the mid-1990s. As a 2020 Reuters story notes, Brown was legally married at the time, but he'd been separated from his wife for many years. The relationship was no secret: the two made public appearances together. Brown was 31 years older than Harris. That's a somewhat greater age gap than the one between Donald Trump and his wife (24 years), though it's less than the one between Trump and Stormy Daniels (33 years).

Nevertheless, I'm sure Trump would instantly attack Harris the way this influencer with 1.7 million followers has:


Or the way this influential radio host with more than a million followers has:


Republicans think Kamala Harris "knee" jokes are hilarious. Items with this slogan seem to be popular:


Republicans thought this was hilarious last winter:


Trump will go there. He'll probably make his attacks slightly deniable, the way he calls the Black attorney general of New York State "Peekaboo" and pretends he's not really calling her "Jigaboo," But he'll go there, and so will his many people in his circle. Even "high-minded" allies like Speaker Mike Johnson will find a polite-sounding way to slut-shame Harris.

If this happens, I hope there's a huge backlash. Don't forget that the sexual revolution started in the 1960s and was fully under way in the 1970s. You know those gray-haired suburban moms and grandmoms in their fifties, sixties, and seventies who have rallied to the Democrats in recent years? They had fun when they were young. They're not ashamed of it, and they shouldn't be.

I think Biden will stay on the ticket. But if this alternate scenario plays out, it could be a huge miscalculation for the GOP. Let's hope.
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