Messaging And The Last Seven Weeks

Yesterday, seven weeks before the 2024 Presidential election, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris had a Presidential debate, that, by all accounts, Harris performed well in (in stark contrast to the debate between Trump and President Biden that triggered Biden's withdrawal from the Presidential race).

Harris used this rare moment with the eyes of the nation on her and Trump to go on the attack and to show, as much as tell, the audience that Trump is a weak and small man who has lost his marbles, by baiting him into rants that prove this point.

The Race Is Close

Terrifyingly, this Presidential race is extremely close. Nevada, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, and Arizona are all polling within one percentage point of a tied race. Harris has a 1.7 percentage point lead in Michigan and a 2 percentage point lead in Wisconsin. Trump leads by 4.4 percentage points in Florida. One candidate or the other leads by at least 5.3 percentage points in every other state or electoral vote granting Congressional District.

Harris leads in national polling by 2.8 percentage points, which given the inherent bias of the Electoral College against Democrats relative to the popular vote, is just barely enough, or maybe not quite enough, to win.

Worse yet, polling was consistently and decisively biased against Trump in both 2016 and in 2020, mostly because of low response rates from Trump supporters relative to supporters of the Democratic candidates. So, notwithstanding the narrow lead in the polls that Harris has, and the efforts of pollsters to address this problem, Harris may be doing worse than the polls are letting on.

This makes no sense.

If you look at the race from a rational, logical perspective, as Democrats are prone to do, this makes no sense.

The fundamentals of the U.S. economy and the state of the union are strong.

- Unemployment has been low on a sustained basis for a record length of time.

- Wages have been rising.

- Gas prices are below average and the current rate of inflation is low.

- The stock market and the gross national product have been growing tremendously.

- Crime rates are at close to record lows.

- The teen birthrate has never been lower.

- Opioid overdose rates have finally stabilized after growing relentlessly for decades.

- We are a nation as close to at peace has we have been for decades. The war in Afghanistan is over. The Iraq War is over.

Trump should be a uniquely weak candidate.

- Trump lost the 2020 election and a lot of Americans are sick of him.

- Trump's speeches are routinely rambling, almost incoherent word salad that are riddled with multiple factual assertions that are not true every single minute, alternating with just bizarre, inexplicable claims.

- Trump is a former Democrat, who lived most of his life in New York City, is married to an immigrant, and claims to be a billionaire who started out in life with a $400 million inheritance back when that was worth a lot more than it is today. He has very little in common with his based in any way.

- The departure from Afghanistan was chaotic and ugly because Trump cut a deal with the Taliban shortly before he lost the 2020 election, that undermined the U.S. backed regime there, Afghans who backs U.S. forces, and U.S. forces.

- Roe v. Wade was overturned, in an immensely unpopular decision, because he appointed three ultra-conservatives to the U.S. Supreme Court. Public confidence in the U.S. Supreme Court has never been lower.

- Trump has taken the side of long standing U.S. enemies like Vladimir Putin and King Jung-Un, and has shown open admiration of China's authoritarian leader.

- Trump stands convicted of 34 felonies for which he will face sentencing after the election and before the inauguration.

- Trump is still dealing with three more criminal cases where he was indicted, all of which are tangled up in appeals unrelated to the merits of whether he committed the crimes.

- While the Colorado Supreme Court's decision that Trump was not allowed to run for office because he engaged in an insurrection was not upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, this decision was reversed without disturbing the determination of the Colorado courts that Trump had engaged in an insurrection.

- Several dozen of Trump's senior close associates have been convicted of felonies.

- No living former Republican President endorsed Trump, and only a handful of senior officials from his administration have done so, while many former official in his administration have endorsed Harris.

- Trump's personal lawyer has been disbarred and is bankrupt from sanctions imposed upon him for his misconduct fighting the 2020 election results. Many other lawyers who helped him in connection with that were also disbarred or had their licenses to practice law suspended. Some of the people who pushed that losing fight are in prison.

- About a thousand people involved in the January 6, 2021 attack on the capital to overturn his losing electoral vote outcome have been convicted of crimes, many of which were serious.

- Fox News had to settle a defamation case related to its election outcome fraud for about $800 million. Several other conservative news commentators who backed him have lost defamation suits that sent them to bankruptcy and/or lost their jobs.

- Trump's Truth Social conservative social media outlet has seen its stock market price tank.

- Trump lost a civil fraud lawsuit resulting in a judgment against him for hundreds of millions of dollars.

- Trump lost a pair of defamation and civil sexual assault lawsuits, resulting in a civil finding that he sexually assaulted a woman.

- Trump is 78 years old and starting to show strong signs of dementia in his public speeches.

- The media not longer hesitates to call out Trump for his non-stop lying about every factual matter under the sun.

- Trump's mismanagement of the COVID epidemic cost hundreds of thousands of Americans, disproportionately Republicans, their lives.

- Trump ran up the deficit tremendously, and not just from COVID related spending. A lot of that deficit comes from huge tax cuts for corporations and the rich that did little or nothing to help the economy.

- The fact that Trump had an affair with a prostitute while his wife was pregnant with his youngest child, and then paid her $100,000 of hush money.

- Trump has had five children with three wives and indisputably cheated on all three of his wives, including his current one.

- Both Trump and his wife are former pornography actors.

- Trump rarely, if ever, attends church and lacks even surface level understanding of the Bible or Christian doctrine.

- Trump's older children have profited handsomely from selling their relationship to him for the corrupt reason of their apparent political influence and Trump himself received immense improper personal financial gain during his Presidency. Their misconduct with a charity that they were involved in has caused them to be barred from running charities in New York State.

- Trump's businesses, have gone bankrupt six times, including a casino.

- Trump University was a dismal failure that he had to settle for a huge sum because he personally participated in fraud promoting it.

- Trump has a long history of losing or having to settle racial discrimination lawsuits and his father was a literal Nazi and KKK member.

J.D. Vance isn't helping his ticket.

- Trump's running mate, J.D. Vance, has also repeatedly put his foot in his mouth, and plays to the MAGA base, not to swing voters.

Biden's departure should help.

- Joe Biden's advanced age had been a major talking point in the Presidential race. Now that talking point has been turned on its head with Harris replacing him in the race.

- Joe Biden did little campaigning, wasn't very effective at it when he did, and did miserably in the first debate.

Walz helps his ticket.

- Governor Walz from Minnesota is a very decent guy and a military veteran (like Vance) who is moral in all of the ways that Trump and Vance are not.

Republicans in Congress are dysfunctional.

- The Republican Party holds a razor thin majority in the U.S. House but has been plagued with infighting, struggled to elected a speaker in the first place, replaced their speaker, and struggles to pass even basic appropriations bills without Democratic party backing.

- Maverick gadflies in the House GOP have more power than they should because the GOP majority is so thin, and they have repeatedly embarrassed their party on a national stage, while undermining their own majority coalition.

- There is a real possibility that the government will shut down on October 1, 2024, a little more than a month before the election, because House Republicans can't agree on a continuing resolution to keep the government functioning.

- In the U.S. Senate, a rogue Senator from Alabama has single handedly impaired the functioning and good order of the U.S. military by blocking defense department related appointments.

- The Republicans have not been very effective in achieving their goals in the U.S. Senate despite the fact that two Democratic Senators have left their party midterm (and will not be re-elected in 2024).

- For example, Biden has appointed new federal judges at roughly the same rate that Trump did.

Why is Trump so greatly over performing in face of all of the factors that should make this race a landslide for Harris?

* At the federal level at least, partisan divides have never been bigger. There is not a single Democrat who is more conservative than a single Republican in Congress. There are very few moderates of either party in Congress. The magnitude of the gap between the parties is as big as it has ever been since the eve of the U.S. Civil War.

* The amount of split ticket voting in 2020 was a record low and all but about 8% of voters have a clear partisan preference which they always back in every election.

* The deep partisan divide reflects a deep economic and cultural divide between "red counties" and "blue counties". Biden won less than 54% of the popular vote in 2020, but the counties he won account for 71% of the nation's GDP. Trump won a little more than 46% of the popular vote, but the counties he won account for only 29% of the nation's GDP.

* Red America is less educated, less affluent, more religious, less diverse, and more rural, than Blue America. Red America has participated very little in the last 50 years of economic growth.

* The economic weakness of less educated white men in Red America has caused them to fail as economic providers resulting in them less often getting married, usually having children out of wedlock, and getting divorced when they do get married early and often at unprecedented rates. Their failure as providers has also driven deaths of despair, and caused many of them to have their parental rights terminated for abuse or neglect, or to have their parental rights marginalized in custody fights, and driven lots of domestic violence criminalizing them.

* Red America has interpreted its failing families as caused by moral failure, gay rights, abortion, and feminism resulting in backlash against "wokeness", when the real problem is that the economy no longer needs many uneducated, unskilled, socially rough around the edges men, leaving them with regular bouts of unemployment and low wages.

* White religious people, living in an increasingly secular society in which they are not thriving economically, and are constantly losing out to educated knowledge workers (an increasing share of whom are non-white women), have ceased to trust the mainstream media, educational institutions at all levels, and the government. Together with the rise of social media and niche Internet media sources, this has left them exposed to ridiculous lies about almost everything going on in the world, which they embraced, initially, to protect their religious worldviews that are at odds with science and reality.

Trump's Messaging

- Trump's campaign has tried, with considerable success, to blame Biden for the short but intense period of high inflation post-COVID, even though it was driven by factors beyond Biden's control (like Ukraine War driven oil price surges and big corporate profit taking greed). This, and Biden's failure to regularly tout his economic successes, means that many conservatives don't realize how strong the economy is doing.

- Trump did his best in the debate, and has in all of his campaigns, tried to demonize immigration and hasn't hesitated to resort to bald faced lies to back that effort. In part this is playing to economic fear, that Red America sees waves of low skilled workers as competing with them in a zero sum game for unskilled work. But more than that, he is focusing on immigrant driven crime (which is contrary to reality because crime is low and because even undocumented immigrants commit less crimes than native born Americans) and on immigrants undermining a white Evangelical Christian nationalist vision for America and its culture. He's also tried to fan completely unsubstantiated claims that fraudulent voting by immigrants who aren't allowed to vote is depriving his backers, the "true Americans" of their rightful control of their country. Never mind that immigrants are particularly scarce in many of the places where Trump's message is most warmly received, like West Virginia.

- The MAGA movement isn't about governing. Trump himself is mostly only weakly interested in policy despite the nefarious and terrifying Project 2025 agenda that has been prepared for him by right wing think tanks. Conservative wonks in think tanks want to govern in a way that transforms the nation with hard core conservative policies to fit their minority vision for the country. But, the MAGA movement and Trump himself, are about persecuting their enemies for disloyalty and out of spite, and about burning down the entire institution of the federal government (and a lot of state and local government) which they believe has failed them and they don't trust.

- A fair amount of the MAGA movement is about older, disgruntled white people in places that have failed economically who mostly aren't thriving themselves, trying to hold onto white male Christian hegemony in an economy where you can be prosperous without education or skills, as the nation steadily becomes less Christian, less white, more educated, and has given more power and rights to women. They want to roll back cultural change including gay rights and feminism. They want to deny the existence of things like climate change.

- They want everyone to buy American and forego international trade. Trump is pushing big new tariffs in his tax proposals. His vision for America is isolationist and anti-globalist. 

-They are attracted by the certainty and manliness of authoritarian leaders internationally. Trump touted support from far right Hungarian leader Mr. Orban in the debate.

- Trump's message is a message of fear and division. Harris is trying to go back to Obama's message of hope and unity.

- The Democratic party's left wing has to some extent fallen for the trap that Trump has created for them, threatening to back third-party candidates due to disillusionment with Biden over issues like Israel's mistreatment of Palestinians that isn't salient to many voters, and focusing on the negative long term perspective on the economy rather than the good news from Biden's administration compared to Trump's administration.