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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: What to make of a close race, with the debate looming [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2024-09-09
Will Saletan/The Bulwark:
Is America Ready to Elect a Female President? Here’s what I learned from watching more than twenty focus groups. Racial and gender barriers are real, but they’re not unbreakable. Sometimes people who didn’t like one female candidate are willing to vote for another. Sometimes people who think you’re just a “DEI hire” are open to learning more about you. And sometimes voters want change enough to set aside their prejudices. So don’t give up on that glass ceiling. Eventually, it will shatter. But only if we keep trying.
x New registrations aren’t in the systems yet, so RBS polls can’t account for them. — Natalie Jackson (@nataliemj10) September 8, 2024
A registration-based sampling (RBS) poll like NYT/Siena is different than a Random Digital Dialing poll, which used to be the standard when everyone had land lines. If you want the details, they are here: Comparing Survey Sampling Strategies: Random-Digit Dial vs. Voter Files but see Natalie’s point about new registrations.
x A simple version of story going into first debate:
Harris is doing better than Biden was, via Dem enthusiasm, which essentially evened things. Trump has steady base + macro factors like inflation + voter memory of pre-covid times underpinning. Net = tight race. — Anthony Salvanto (@SalvantoCBS) September 8, 2024
The Economist:
Will the debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump matter? Normally presidential match-ups hardly move the needle—but this is no ordinary year In normal circumstances, it is unsurprising that debates rarely make a difference. Those who tune in tend to be interested in politics already, and polling suggests that partisans are more likely to watch than independents. Many viewers will have already made up their minds. And in most cycles candidates have been campaigning for months by the time debates come around, either in primaries or from the White House. They are already well known to voters. This election is different. Ms Harris became the Democratic Party’s champion very late in the race. She is already well-known to those who follow politics closely—not only from her four years as vice-president, but also from her time as a senator and her unsuccessful bid for the Democratic nomination in 2020. But many Americans are still getting to know her. Research suggests that voters gain the most from debates when they know less about the candidates.
x As a conservative voting for Harris, someone asked what policies of hers I actually liked.
I like the one where she didn’t call to terminate the constitution to overturn an election her own legal team repeatedly told her she’d lost.
Mainly that one. When choosing between… — JP (@DirtRoadPickup) September 7, 2024
The Economist:
The Harris-Trump debate will be a clash of speaking styles Johnson, our language columnist, assesses their effectiveness in charts Ms Harris is the more considered speaker. In her one-on-one debate in 2020 with Mike Pence, the then vice-president, she uttered about 17% fewer words than Mr Pence, despite speaking for almost exactly the same amount of time. She carefully controlled his interruptions with “Mr Vice-President, I’m speaking”. When she had the floor, she often seemed to be back in her old job as a prosecutor, methodically making her case against the Trump administration. The variety of their vocabulary differs, too. By Mr Liberman’s calculations, Mr Trump uses unusually few distinct (ie, different) words when speaking—fewer, in fact, than almost any other public figure he has analysed. In the debates in 2020 it took Mr Trump around 6,000 words to use 1,000 distinct words. Mr Biden, Ms Harris and Mr Pence reached that mark somewhere between 4,000 and 5,000 words. This tallies with Mr Liberman’s analysis, for example, of the Republican and Democratic primary debates in 2015, where Mr Trump again used the fewest distinct words per total spoken (Ted Cruz, a senator from Texas, used the most). Mr Trump’s failure to flash hundred-dollar words should not be automatically equated with linguistic cluelessness. His rally speeches lose nearly all of their coherence when transcribed. But as live performances they have often held his audience spellbound. He repeats himself—often over and over—as befits someone who has made a career as a promoter. That, plus using words that everyone knows and uses frequently, helps his messages stick. Remember “we are going to build a wall and Mexico is going to pay for it”? A big vocabulary may be good for Scrabble, but Mr Trump’s rhetorical style is good at getting his point across. It helped make him president once, and could do so again.
x Polls so far today:
*National*
Trump +1 (NYT/Siena)
*Arizona*
Tie (TIPP with R-aligned sponsor)
*Michigan*
Harris +1 (CBS/YouGov)
*Pennsylvania*
Tie (CBS/YouGov)
*Wisconsin*
Harris +2 (CBS/YouGov)
—
Basically: it’s very close — Adam Carlson (@admcrlsn) September 8, 2024
David French/New York Times:
MAGA Is Nothing Without Trump Last month, I wrote a column that generated intense blowback on the right because I argued that as a pro-life conservative I am voting for Kamala Harris. That was controversial enough, but what really seemed to make people angry was one of my stated motivations: that I am voting for Harris to try to save conservatism from MAGA. Defeating Trump, I said, gives conservative Americans a chance to “build something decent from the ruins of a party that was once a force for genuine good in American life.” The MAGA response was, in essence, you’re fooling yourself. Trump or no Trump, we own the party now. In fact, this argument is one way that MAGA keeps other Republicans in line. Like it or not, they say, this is the modern Republican Party. You can choose it, or you can choose the Democrats, but don’t think for a moment that a different party is possible. But is that correct? We’re nine years into the Trump era of the Republican Party, and we can see a different reality: attempts to mimic Trump succeed in Republican primaries and deep red jurisdictions, but they fail in swing states and purple districts. Trump is MAGA’s most popular figure, and if he loses, then MAGA has nowhere to go but down.
x CBS News Poll: Pennsylvania voters see Harris as mainstream and Trump as extreme. pic.twitter.com/MSCYd0Uxd8 — Geoff Garin (@geoffgarin) September 8, 2024
Steven Reisner/Slate:
How Kamala Harris Can Beat Trump in the Debate It has to do with Freud. If Harris is to fulfill her mandate to bring America back to reality, she must first and foremost find a way to stand apart from the Trumpian circus. The challenge is simple, but difficult: She must deny Trump the pleasure of his aggression by being immune to his weaponry. She must refuse him the attention he craves. She managed this instinctively in her CNN interview, when asked about Trump’s racist goading: “Same old tired playbook. Next question.” That deft sidestepping of the Trump attack worked because it exposed the vulnerability inherent in Trump’s psychological makeup, the narcissist’s one Achilles’ heel: Narcissists cannot tolerate being ignored. But managing Trump in his absence is one thing; ignoring his formidable presence once they are both in the ring will be quite another. Harris must use the skills honed as a prosecutor while never giving up the no-nonsense-but-compassionate maternal archetype she now embodies for the American people.
Margaret Sullivan/”American Crisis” on Substack:
The power of a single word about media malfeasance
It's 'sanewashing' — and it's what journalists keep doing for Trump Giving credit where due, Parker Molloy, Michael Tomasky, Aaron Rupar and Greg Sargent have all written about this perceptively. (There no doubt are others — “don’t at me,” as we say in social-media world as we sink into a defensive crouch.) Tomasky describes Trump’s “half sentences that suddenly veer off toward a distant galaxy, the asides that limn the virtues of Hannibal Lecter.” Maybe you heard his shark speech about battery-powered boats, or even saw the brilliant comic, Sarah Cooper, as she riffed on it. Like whitewashing a fence, sanewashing a speech covers a multitude of problems. The Urban Dictionary definition: Attempting to downplay a person or idea’s radicality to make it more palatable to the general public … a portmanteau of “sane” plus “whitewashing.”
Cliff Schecter on Trump’s incoherence:
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