WHY I DON'T AGREE WITH DAN FROOMKIN THAT HARRIS MIGHT BE WINNING A BLOWOUT

I think Kamala Harris is the favorite to win this election. I wanted to say that right at the outset, in case you think I'm reverting to the gloomy predictions I made when Joe Biden was still in the race. I thought Biden was on course to lose the election. I still think he would have lost, and I think he would have lost even the popular vote. But Harris is a much better candidate -- more eloquent, more energetic, more in tune with the culture, more willing to talk in plain language about reproductive rights.

But I think Harris is only a slight favorite to win. FiveThirtyEight says she's winning 57% of its election scenarios. Nate Silver, after having Donald Trump in the lead for a while, has Harris at 58%. The bettors at PredictIt have Harris at 56 cents on the dollar, though Trump is at 48 cents. At Polymarket, Harris is at 51% and Trump is at 48%.

All that seems about right. Harris appears to be slightly ahead nationally and slightly ahead in the battleground states she needs. And while it would be nice if Dan Froomkin were right, I don't believe he is, for reasons I'll explain.

Froomkin writes:

Here’s a question for you: What if the dynamics of the 2024 presidential election have dramatically shifted — and the national media has been too busy doing stenography to notice?

What if Kamala Harris — after a spectacular entry into the race, a stunningly unified convention, and a devastating debate — is basically running away with it, leaving Trump in the dust, while the national media — still mortified by its failure in 2016 to see the extent of Trump’s support — stubbornly sticks to the safer narrative that it’s a horserace going down to the wire?

Froomkin rejects the polls -- "polls are garbage these days," he writes. I know most of you agree. This sounds right:

And the pollsters, whose arbitrary weightings make a mockery of science, travel in packs. They, more than anyone, are terrified of underestimating Trump support again. So maybe this time they’re overestimating it?

I could believe that, except for one thing: These pollsters are using the same weightings when they poll Senate and gubernatorial races in swing states. And what happens? Democratic candidates in those races are consistently outperforming Harris.

According to Real Clear Polling, Trump is up by 2 points in Arizona -- but Ruben Gallego is beating "Trump in heels" Kari Lake by 6. Harris is up by 1.2 in Nevada -- but Jacky Rosen is beating her Republican Senate challenger by 10. Harris is up by 0.4 in Pennsylvania -- but Democratic senator Bob Casey is up by 5.2. Trump is up by 1.2 in North Carolina -- but Democrat Josh Stein is leading Republican Mark Robinson by 7.7.

Why would this be happening? Because millions of voters blame the president when major national issues aren't going the way they like, and Harris, for obvious reasons, is seen as a stand-in for the president in a way that even an incumbent senator of the president's party isn't.

Many voters are still very upset about economic issues. Froomkin writes:

The economy, which used to be considered a solid indicator of whether an incumbent would win or not, is booming. Inflation is dead. The stock market is at all-time highs.

But most people don't own stocks. And inflation isn't dead if your household just gets by in ordinary times, as a large percentage of American households do, and you needed to dig fairly deep into your credit lines to pay for basics. Average credit card interest right now is nearly 25%. That's preposterously high -- an all-time high, in fact. Many people in this country are still paying interest on groceries they consumed a long time ago. They remember lower prices when Trump was president. That's why Harris isn't doing as well as Gallego or Casey. There's no need to overthink this.

Froomkin writes:

... Trump, by any normal standard, has lost it, mentally and emotionally. His speech – at rallies, and most noticeably at the debate – consists of rambling, apocalyptic, nonsensical, hate-filled rhetoric and lies.

He’s saying crazier and crazier things in order to get attention – which the media is giving him – but it’s hard to see that any of it is winning over more voters.

But Trump said crazy things when he was president, and many voters think it was just his personality and it somehow didn't translate to problems for America -- and besides, he's that business genius from The Apprentice, so he doesn't even need to think all that hard to solve economic problems, and he wrote The Art of the Deal, so he can effortlessly make deals to end all the wars. The way these voters remember it, when he was president that last time, life was okay, as long as you weren't an asylum seeker crossing the border with your family. Yeah, COVID sucked, but that was the virus's fault, not Trump's. (I think many of the voters who believe all this are not Trump superfans.)

Froomkin writes:

You could ... make a solid vibes-and-momentum argument that Harris is winning handily. In an extraordinary turnaround, Democrats now appear even more enthusiastic than Republicans.

Democrats weren't going to win this one without enthusiasm, and there was a bad enthusiasm gap when Biden was the candidate. But while Harris's voters are more enthusiastic than Trump's in some polls, the gap isn't massive:

There are still millions of Americans out there whose love of Trump constitutes their entire personality. Add in the "Well, he says a lot of crazy stuff, but groceries were cheap in 2019" crowd, and he still has a fairly solid bloc of voters.

Froomkin points out that pollsters underestimated Democratic support in the 2022 midterms. That's true. Poll defenders say pollsters underestmated Trump's support in 2016 and 2020. That's also true -- Trump turns out some voters who don't usually vote, and certainly don't bother to vote when he's not on the ballot, so pollsters don't count them as "likely voters."

My guess is that these two pollster blind spots are canceling each other out, and therefore the polls are roughly accurate. Which means that even though Harris will probably win on the fundamentals -- Democrats have a conventional get-out-the-vote operation, while Trump has largely outsourced his to the increasingly incompetent Elon Musk -- it's still a tight race. But I'll be thrilled if Froomkin is right.