One of Obama’s top strategy and data guys, Patrick Dillon, has written a statement today that I think you may want to read. It’s not just phony Hopium, it’s based on educated analysis, experience and possibly some inside knowledge.
Anyway, I don’t know if this will be real or not and he admits he doesn’t know either. But this is his best guess. An excerpt:
My texts are full these days of “are we gonna be okay?” and, then, a beat later, “are you really sure?” Over and over, my answers are basically “yes” and “as sure as I can be.”
I also used to get paid to make big presentations this time of year to tell clients what was going on and what might happen. That process forced me to be rigorous in assessing every bit of data I could lay my hands on, and keep myself honest.
That said, I’m no Nate (neither Silver nor Cohn.)3 I still believe at the end of the day campaigns are more art than science. Call it 51% gut / 49% data.
And I believe the pool of modern, comparable presidential elections is such a small sample that each is sui generis: from which we may draw lessons, but not much in the way of hard and fast rules.
So, to save some time and in the spirit of “to hell with it,” here in one place is what data and my gut tell me I believe: she’ll win and outperform the polls. Trump will be rejected, as he has been in every election since he first became president – 2018, 2020, 2022, 2023 – either where he was on the ballot directly or by proxy through candidates closely identified with him, including in multiple of the same swing states we’re all obsessing over now.
His campaign’s relentless focus on anti-trans ads will come to be seen as an epic strategic blunder, in addition to unforgivably morally repugnant. We’ll acknowledge that the supposedly disciplined, well-planned campaign to beat Biden never quite found its footing ever again once the candidate changed. We’ll remember that his one and only, and very close, win in 2016 came when he was, despite controversy, new and fresh and funny (to his people at least – and no small amount of journalists.) He was energetic, went EVERYWHERE, and was able to at least occasionally give the impression of being in on the joke and enjoying himself. In 2016, he had an underrated strategic ambiguity on what kind of Republican he was, whether promising to protect Social Security or maintaining a wink-wink ambivalence on abortion, aided by voters’ inability to truly imagine him doing the most outrageous things, or the horror of Roe being overturned. In his own way, he had a kind of disciplined, positive and constructive message about what he would do: make America great again, build the wall, drain the swamp. In 2024, he has none of it, much less the vitality and clarity of eight years ago.
We’re going to see afresh what’s been staring us in the face since 2022: Dobbs was a political earthquake, with aftershocks still reverberating out. It wasn’t just digested and processed in 2022 and now behind us. As much as Roe catalyzed a new movement for its opponents, brought in new groups of voters (many crossing old partisan lines), and energized activists for decades; Dobbs is doing the same here and now.
To the extent poll error happens, I believe it is likelier to be in her favor than his after eight years of pollsters obsessively focused on how to not miss Trump supporters. We are all understandably so traumatized by 2016’s loss, and so many were surprised by 2020’s margin (though notably, not the Biden campaign itself) that, even though there are fairly convincing theories for how each happened, we’ve become hostages of superstition and anxiety – even when we can’t quite articulate a good theory for why it would happen this time. And all this despite the various modeling geniuses gently and repeatedly reminding us there’s no iron law that every error happens in the same direction cycle after cycle, indeed that it might be a little weird for it to happen three cycles in a row.
In particular, while his gains with voters of color and young voters are real and absolutely need long-term attention, I believe we will find that they were nonetheless meaningfully overstated in polling for a variety of reasons; including that these groups are hard and getting harder both to poll and to turn out.
We will also find, like Democrats in Virginia in 2021 when we were painfully shown that we could fall even further in the rural reaches, the floor even lower than we imagined, that Republicans in 2024 had further to fall in the suburbs and among college-educated voters – and did.
The almost comically late and slapdash, make it up as we go along, build the plane in the air, field effort run by people with more money than political or managerial sense (ahem, Elon) will, unsurprisingly, fail at the one thing they admit they very much need: sufficiently getting his low-propensity supporters to the voting booth. And it will be substantially outclassed by the massive, well-trained and targeted first-Biden now-Harris field operation that has been building on the ground all year.
We’ll also realize all the rush to analyze early vote returns on here and extrapolate to unsupported conclusions, and the attendant panics, was off base because 2024 is not like 2022 is not like 2020. And for either campaign to win, they’re simply going to need to have won some number of what will initially look at first like votes for the other team.
I’ll keep saying what I’ve been saying for months. To me, an obsessive political observer, this feels more like 2012 than 2016. At this point in that campaign the Republicans were measuring the drapes and I just didn’t see it. In fact, Obama won by four. Of course, 2016 changed me as it did everyone else and I’ve never trusted my gut since then. But if I had it would have told me that the Democrats were going to overperform in every election since then and they have.
So, for what it’s worth, I think that’s true again this time. Trump is a fasacist, criminal imbecile and while it shakes me to the core that so many of my fellow Americans seem to love that about him, I’m just not convinced that there are enough to put him back in the White House.
I would also read between the lines in this Ron Brownstein analysis of where the Harris campaign says they are. I’ve been listening to David Plouffe out there saying over and over again that the race is razor thin and they aren’t taking anything for granted. I’m sure that’s true. But I also think there’s just a bit of spin on that and not in a bad way. I detect just the tienies bit of confidence in his statements. (Of course that may just be what I want to see ….)
Brownstein’s analysis is very good. Way better than refreshing 538 once an hour.
