Not Much Joy For Kamala In The Swing States
I’ve got two links for you and they both say the same thing – as the Nov. 5 election nears, Kamala Harris is fading. Voters simply aren’t buying what she’s selling.
Oh sure, you can find lots of national polls which have her ahead of Donald Trump. Here’s the thing, though – polling as an institution is broken, as pollsters will tell you. Time was, you could reliably call a few thousand people on land-line phones at dinnertime and get enough responses to put a scientific electoral model together and poll within a statistical margin of error with a result you could stand by.
That’s still happening, to an extent, but it’s outrageously expensive to do. That’s why the only polling which is really worth paying attention to is internal campaign polls which aren’t generally made available to the public. Those polls aren’t for show – they actually mean something.
Here and there you can learn something from those media polls the news channels and papers put out, but most of them are a shot in the dark and they’re really only useful – to be charitable – for the trends they show. Sometimes even by that standard they’re largely worthless, because the pollsters will change their methodology midstream.
Polling generally favors Democrats because of something called “response bias.”
Typically speaking, older, white female leftists are going to grossly overpopulate any poll you see. They answer the phone, because they tend to be lonelier and less busy than others. Men are far more likely not to answer calls from people who aren’t in their contacts, and younger people tend to be too busy. Not to mention the younger you are, the less likely you have a land line.
So to balance out a poll sample you have to call a lot more younger people, men and Republicans. And who knows what you’ll end up with.
That’s why everybody on your Facebook feed and all of the callers to conservative talk shows are frustrated and perplexed at how Donald Trump isn’t beating Kamala Harris like this is 1980 or 1988. It doesn’t make sense to them, and to an extent they’re right.
The thing to understand, though, is there are a lot of Democrat voters out there. This is what 30-40 years of the Left fully dominating the culture, and particularly in the cultural institutions which cater to women (and most significantly, single women), will ultimately result in.
You probably also need to understand that while Trump’s first four years were generally pretty good, the disaster of COVID-19 and the terrible governmental response to it notwithstanding, he’s got a prickly personality which isn’t for everybody, and there are votes Trump would otherwise get that he’s going to struggle to close the deal with because there are some fairly shallow voters out there who think that having somebody they’d like to be pals with as president is important.
Those two factors are why a Reagan-style 1980 blowout victory is a really heavy lift right now. If it makes you as a conservative feel better, the Democrats don’t have the ability to engineer that kind of victory, either. The country is that heavily divided, and it will be until there’s a cultural change one way or the other.
But what’s starting to become apparent, even if the media polls aren’t really showing it all that clearly, is that (1) Kamala Harris is not currently in a position to win this election, (2) her camp knows it, and (3) their efforts to fix the problem are not working.
From Axios comes word that the “Sun Belt” swing states of North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada are not really going her way…
The Axios link is behind a paywall, so we won’t subject you to that.
She has a shot in Nevada. Trump is now comfortably ahead in Arizona and Georgia. Media polls are showing a tight race in North Carolina, and the damage Hurricane Helene inflicted on the small mountain towns of the western part of the state have raised questions about GOP turnout, but Trump is essentially camping out in that state and it’s hard to imagine he won’t overperform those polls.
But that leaves the Blue Wall states up north, doesn’t it? If she can’t take any of the southern or western swing states, she’s going to need Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
According to a report in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, prominent Michigan Democrats, including Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, have made appeals to the Harris campaign to focus on the state more as the election draws to a close. They have also warned Harris to sharpen her economic messaging, the report notes, with fears spreading that Trump has done well to court the state’s working class voters.
Harris has struggled to distance herself from past positions that remain unpopular in the so-called “Blue Wall” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, including her previous support for transitioning fully to zero-emissions vehicles by 2035 and a ban on fracking.
Those concerns were also highlighted by an internal poll shared with the Wall Street Journal that was conducted by Sen. Tammy Baldwin’s campaign that showed Harris down by three points in Wisconsin, another key Midwestern state with similar voting habits to Michigan.
Harris’ struggles have also extended to union members, a group that has long been a stronghold for Democrats in the state. However, an internal poll conducted by Teamsters, one of the country’s largest and most influential unions, found that members in Michigan preferred Trump (61.7%) over Harris (35.2%), while national union leaders declined to make an endorsement in this year’s presidential race, despite supporting President Biden’s campaign in 2020.
Harris also failed to gain the support of the International Association of Fire Fighters, which also supported Biden in 2020, though she did gain the support of both United Auto Workers and the Service Employees International Union.
There’s a large and growing disconnect between members of private-sector unions and those of public-sector unions. The rank-and-file in, say, the Teamsters or the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers will likely be solidly Republican these days even if their leadership is not (which tells you there is likely to be a whole lot of internal turmoil within the unions in the next few years). But in unions like the SEIU, or the teachers’ unions, the membership isn’t just Democrat but almost communist.
So thinking of these things along the lines of “unions” doesn’t really work anymore. And especially as the GOP becomes more of a working-class party, private-sector unions are likely going to become embedded in the Republican governing coalition.
Whereas public sector unions will become more and more the enemy. You might even see efforts to break those unions, because at the end of the day, why are government employees allowed to unionize in the first place?
In any event, none of these numbers look like Harris has a great path to victory.
She has to carry all three between Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin if she’s going to win this race, and it really doesn’t look like it.
The trend is not her friend right now, to be sure.
That’s why her handlers have shifted gears and switched her from a basement candidate who wouldn’t do interviews to somebody who’s ubiquitous on TV. She’s doing The View, 60 Minutes, Stephen Colbert…they’re all softball interviews and she’s even flubbing those.
Which they knew she would. That’s why they hid her for the first part of the campaign. The fact that they aren’t now tells you they can’t.
But she can’t. That’s what those interviews are proving.
And in swing state after swing state, it’s beginning to slip away.
We’ll see if that holds up. The one thing about today’s Democrat Party is those people refuse to admit defeat. But right now they aren’t winning. This is becoming clear.
