Thursday, October 10, 2024

THE PARTY THAT BROUGHT YOU THE BIG LIE IS HERE WITH THE BIG BRAG (AGAIN)

I see we're at this stage of the election:
Republicans believe the 2024 race is already over and that former President Donald Trump will be elected back to the White House, according to political analyst Mark Halperin.

A significant number of Republicans have declared the presidential race "effectively over," agreeing with Halperin that Trump will "checkmate" Vice President Kamala Harris with a combination of four to five swing states, the analyst said Tuesday on independent streaming platform 2Way.

"Trump is going to lock up the Sun Belt states, probably all four, but at least three. And then he's going to win Pennsylvania, and that checkmates [Harris]," Halperin told the platform. "They may be wrong. But there's a not insignificant number of them who are quite confident of that. And the data they've seen on the absentees and the early votes and the voter registration ... makes them more confident."
Another reason for all this confidence? Private polling, says Halperin.
“... if you want to understand what’s actually happening, we’re here to tell you,” he said. “I just saw some new private polling today that’s very robust private polling: She’s in a lot of trouble.”
This might be true. On the other hand, it sounds a lot like what we heard from unnamed GOP braggarts two years ago. In 2022, the Republicans' stenographer was Benjamin Wallace-Wells of The New Yorker. He wrote:
Why Republican Insiders Think the G.O.P. Is Poised for a Blowout

... The consensus among a number of G.O.P. pollsters and operatives I spoke to this week is that in the Senate races that are thought to be competitive, Republican candidates are heading for a clean sweep.... The word that kept coming up in these conversations was “bloodbath.”
Specifically?
On Wednesday afternoon, I spoke with a leading Republican political consultant about the Senate campaign in Georgia.... The Republican consultant told me that [Raphael] Warnock’s prospects were even bleaker than many recent public polls suggest. “There isn’t a single private poll in America that has Herschel Walker anything but ahead,” the Republican consultant told me. “Not one.”
Warnock won the general election by 1 point and won the runoff by 3.

And the specifics of that predicted "clean sweep"?
Mehmet Oz will beat John Fetterman in Pennsylvania, and not just by a point or two; Adam Laxalt looks pretty certain to defeat the incumbent Democratic senator Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada; even less regarded candidates such as Blake Masters in Arizona will be carried into office by a predicted wave. “He won’t deserve it, but I think at this point he falls into a Senate seat,” one Republican strategist told me.
Fetterman beat Oz by 4 points. Cortez Masto beat Laxalt by nearly a point. Mark Kelly beat Blake Masters by 5 points.

And why was this blowout supposed to happen?
... according to the insiders, Democrats were too trapped in issues—abortion and the threat to democracy—that appealed to their most devoted and best-educated supporters, and had not done enough to reassure voters that they were addressing material concerns. The Republican pollster, who has been regularly surveying Pennsylvania, told me that, when it came to the Democratic focus on abortion, “there just doesn’t seem to be any specificity. You’d want to do it with high-education, high-income supporters. It’s, like, no, they’re running on abortion constantly in, like, Scranton.”
Scranton is in Lackawanna County. Fetterman won Lackawanna County by nearly 16 points. (In 2020, Joe Biden won it by 8 points.)

This is what Republicans do. They tell reporters that they have the real inside skinny and it says that Democrats are doomed. Eventually, a reporter swallows the bait and reports it as fact.

Look, Kamala Harris might be doomed. I wasn't happy to see that Quinnipiac poll yesterday that showed Harris losing Michigan and Wisconsin, while leading in Pennsylvania. (Whether Harris wins or loses, it would be ironic if Pennsylvania is her best swing state, after all the pundits told her she was a fool not to pick the state's governor, Josh Shapiro, as her running mate.) I know we're not supposed to look at crosstabs, but that Quinnipiac survey has Harris losing 18-to-34-year-olds by 8 points in Michigan and winning them by only 4 points in Wisconsin. By contrast, last month's Harvard youth poll showed Harris beating Trump among 18-to-29-year-olds by 31 points.

That Quinnipiac poll is a concern, as are reports that a Democratic internal poll shows Harris trailing by 3 in Wisconsin. On the other hand, I know that new voter registrations have skewed very Democratic since Harris became the Democratic candidate. I know that early voting is skewing very Democratic and female so far (scroll down here). It's anecdotal, but I like seeing the enthusiasm suggested by this short video taken in a blue city:


And even in blue Cleveland, which is in a state Harris won't win but Senator Sherrod Brown can win:


This seems significant:


I hope Jamelle Bouie is right about some of Donald Trump's weird campaign tactics, like focusing his get-out-the-vote effort on turning out infrequent voters rather than solid supporters, and his decision to deliver speeches at Madison Square Garden and Coachella, both located in states he'll lose:

everything the trump campaign says its doing — trying to turn out secret trump supporters and campaigning in places he can’t win — looks and sounds like the actions of a losing campaign www.nbcnews.com/politics/202...

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— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) October 9, 2024 at 3:38 PM

Wouldn’t surprise me if he’s going just to go someplace where he’ll get a big crowd again. NY metro area doesn’t have enough Republicans to matter for the EC, but it’s got more than enough to fill an arena.

— CeeEmEss (@ceeemess.bsky.social) October 9, 2024 at 3:54 PM

It might be a mistake for Harris to spend so much time wooing moderates and disgruntled Republicans, as Oliver Willis argues (although Reuters says she's now running strong among suburbanites). It might be a mistake for Harris to do interviews at "non-traditional" media outlets while blowing off The New York Times, which just makes the Times angry and therefore skews Harris coverage elsewhere in the media.

Or it might be that Harris's people are successfully turning out the vote and have generated all the excitement needed for a win that, by next month, might appear to be an upset.

I don't know how this election will turn out. All I know is that reporters shouldn't assume Republicans in nice suits know something the rest of us don't when that something just so happens to make Republicans look unbeatable.
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