Since my last column, remarkably little has changed in the presidential campaign. Observers mostly agreed that Kamala Harris decisively beat Donald Trump in their September 10 debate (Trump, of course, insisted that he had won, and cited non-existent polls to prove it). Since then, Harris’s favorability ratings have continued to rise. But the polling data still suggests an agonizingly close race. Harris leads in the “blue wall” states of Michigan, and Wisconsin, while Trump has pulled ahead in Arizona and Georgia. North Carolina and Nevada remain too close to call. Pennsylvania is also essentially tied in some polls, and moving towards Harris in others. If Harris does indeed take Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and loses the others, she will end up with 270 electoral votes: exactly the number she needs to win (Republicans this week failed to get Nebraska to change its means of allocating electoral votes, which would have reduced the number to 269—a tie, and a likely victory for Trump as House of Representatives would then have decided the result, with each state delegation having one vote).
There are few scheduled or predictable events remaining that might affect the outcome. Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson managed to prevent the government shutdown that Trump had hoped for (Trump generally favors maximum chaos), but that voters would likely have blamed on the GOP. The October 1 debate between Vice-Presidential candidates J.D. Vance and Tim Walz might have an effect, but probably a limited one. Trump has ruled out another debate between himself and Harris.
The wild events in North Carolina in the past week might conceivably give that state to Harris, tilting the race in her favor. On September 19, CNN revealed that the Republican Lieutenant Governor and current gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson had posted offensive messages on a pornographic internet message board. Even for a party inured to outrage and offense by nearly a decade of non-stop Trump, a Black candidate calling himself a Nazi, professing his desire to join the Ku Klux Klan and his support for the reestablishment of slavery would seemingly stretch beyond the pale of acceptability. Robinson’s staff quit en masse and ran for the hills. But Robinson himself has simply denied the (incontrovertible) charges, and stayed in the race. Trump and other Republican leaders have, appallingly but predictably, mostly failed to disavow him. His Democratic opponent Josh Stein now has a ten-point lead, and enough Republicans may now stay away from the polls to give Harris North Carolina’s vote.
So what are the strengths and weaknesses of the two campaigns, less than six weeks from election day?
Harris continues to ride on the momentum and favorable coverage that she has enjoyed since Biden stepped out of the race in July. The rise in her favorability ratings suggests that the more the public sees of her, the more it likes her. Harris has especially appealed to young voters and women, enjoying massive leads in both categories. This gender gap is clearly worrying Trump, who has been trying to woo the female vote with statements that sound less like someone who actually cares about women than like a predator in a Lifetime Original Movie. Women, he claims, are “less healthy than they were four years ago… less safe… more stressed and depressed and unhappy…I will fix all of that and fast”; “THEIR LIVES WILL BE HAPPY, BEAUTIFUL, AND GREAT AGAIN!”
But Harris, despite running an otherwise virtually flawless campaign, has not done enough to get voters to know her. By this, I do not mean that she has failed to issue enough policy statements. Many commentators have leveled that charge, but few voters actually want to read lengthy briefing papers on tax brackets or alternative energy subsidies. But in addition to mobilizing her own supporters, Harris also needs to appeal to white swing voters in the swing states who previously supported Barack Obama and Joe Biden. That group has shrunk considerably since 2008, when Obama could still win states like Ohio and Indiana. Each year that polarization continues, America’s political divides petrify a bit more. But the group still exists, Harris needs to build trust with men and women who have an instinctive distrust for candidates they perceive as “elite,” a category which includes Obama and Harris (although not Biden). Racism and misogyny remain powerful enough for Harris’s race and gender to work against her with them as well. Obama won these voters over with his soaring rhetoric and his promise to break with a failed administration that had led the country into a disastrous war and near-economic collapse. Harris can’t make the same promise, and she doesn’t have Obama’s oratorical skills. But she does have a remarkable ability to appeal to voters one on one, to listen to them, to show she cares for them. And she has not been doing nearly enough events to bring this side of her out. In particular, she has avoided “town halls” in which she takes questions from ordinary voters, probably out of fear of making the verbal flubs and errors she has been prone to in the past, and which, replayed ad infinitum on social media and attack ads, could hurt her poll numbers. But she needs to take the risk.
Trump, meanwhile, can count on the cult-like devotion of his strongest followers, and on the natural tendency of voters to pick the devil they know over the less well-known rival. On the other hand, Trump is as incapable as ever of controlling himself. Instead of trying to pose as trustworthy and experienced to win back the swing voters who deserted him in 2020, his favorite means of campaigning remains riffing provocatively (and often incoherently) before adoring crowds of loyal supporters. In addition, as The Nation’s Chris Lehmann has pointed out in an important article, Trump’s “ground game” remains very weak compared to Harris’s. Instead of deploying hundreds of paid staffers to canvas in the swing states, like her, he has—typically enough for a conservative businessman—outsourced the job to inexperienced political action committees. And because of his fixation on supposed Democratic election fraud, he has diverted much of his funding to the monitoring of polling places, which will do nothing to get his own voters to the polls (although it might conceivably suppress the vote for Harris).
Will there be an “October surprise”? A major crisis, or a scandal around one of the candidates? Trump is unlikely to be hurt by any scandal that fails to reach Mark Robinson levels. As he has proved many times, he is effectively scandal-proof. Indeed, the more outrageous and appalling his conduct, the more his most devoted followers love him, because they see him as someone unafraid to break the rules of a corrupt and oppressive “system.” A scandal around Harris, on the other hand, could wipe away the fragile degree of trust that swing voters are currently willing to grant her. So far, no such scandal has arisen. Trump has been reduced to claiming that Harris lied when she said that she worked at McDonald’s in college. “And these FAKE news reporters will never report it,” he has exclaimed. “They don’t want to report it because they’re FAKE! They’re FAKE! They don’t want to report it.”
McDonald’s-Gate is unlikely to be the decisive factor in the 2024 election. It does not exactly have the weight of the e-mail scandal that helped derail Hillary Clinton. On the other hand, I would not put it beyond Republican operatives to fabricate a scandal out of whole cloth, release the details in the week before the election, and hope that the resulting furor cuts down Harris’s support sufficiently before she has a chance to refute the story. For the party unwilling to part ways with Mark “Black Nazi” Robinson, doing this would not be a terribly tall order.