The Tuesday Follies: Harris is Slip-Sliding Away in the Swing States
And how three blown puff interviews scuttled her campaign
In the last week Kamala Harris appeared on three of the easiest possible venues for her to be interviewed—The View, Stephen Colbert, and CBS’ 60 Minutes.
All should have been puff interviews—easy, softball, standard questions designed to make the candidate look like she knows what she’s doing so long as she provides any semblance of a reasonable answer.
She whiffed all three easy pitches. In baseball terms, she struck out in front of the audience she needs to win over most—the few undecided voters left plus the unenthusiastic members of her own base who were giving her one last chance to make them believe, and she failed miserably.
This is the result. For the first time, I’m including a Tilt category, meaning one candidate consistently has a less than 3% lead in the polls in that state for the last week or two. This close to the election, it shows trends, and the trend right now is a growing rejection of the Anointed Candidate of Joy.
If you want to see all three swings and misses for yourself, they are all here in this 20 minute clip by Glenn Greenwald that is only available on Rumble. There’s an added bonus of seeing a real journalist report on what a politician actually said and did, instead of telling us what we are required to believe.
Greenwald provided background for his analysis, comparing Harris’ stated policy positions in 2020 to what they are now, and blasted her abject failure to explain why she changed any of them.
And his descriptions of The View and Colbert’s show, and their audiences, are hilarious.
Going back to the map, Harris has sunk enough in Arizona and Michigan that Trump is up by around 3% in each state, instead of in a dead heat. Throw in all the Arab-Americans in Michigan who will not be voting for a Democrat this year(I conservatively estimated about 1% of the total electorate there), and that critical swing state is slipping out of Harris’ reach.
If the polling in Wisconsin is off by as much as it was in 2020, Trump’s in a similar position there, but I don’t know if they are, so I played it a little conservative here.
Just two days ago I would have colored Nevada a total tossup, but a couple of recent polls show the same trends there that are now in every swing state, so it now tilts towards Trump.
In all the other states tilting towards Trump, he’s held a steady, if tiny, lead for the last two weeks, which is long enough in American election campaigns to make a trend.
The national polls all show Harris with a shrinking lead of less than 5%. In recent history, for a Democrat to win the Electoral College, they have to win the national popular vote by at least 4 or 5%, and Harris is now well under that.
It is possible for a candidate to make a comeback in a race like this, and it has happened before, but there always has to be some dramatic event or gaffe or quip by somebody to turn that around.
In 2024, I don’t think the Democrats can do anything to accomplish that. They will have to rely on Trump to make some monumental blunder, which he is perfectly capable of doing, but the closer to the election we get the more monumental that blunder will have to be.
Thank you for reading, good day or night, and good luck.
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As some political commentator said years ago: "Never underestimate the ability of the Democrats to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory."
It's a party tradition.
Electoral polling is just not my strength and you explain it so effortlessly. Added to the numbers is the recent Democratic Party attack on Jill Stein which can only help her campaign and Obama's blaming black men...Having said that I'm worried about an 'October surprise' as in Israel attacking Iran before the election and Iran's most certain response and US soldiers in harm's way. Not so much as caring about the election but what it portends around the globe.