For many conservatives, the stakes of this election are exceptionally high, especially given the ideological extremism of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz -- the most left-wing ticket in American presidential history. It is therefore frustrating for many center-right voters, beyond the hardest-core ranks of Trump fans and sycophants, to watch the one person standing in the way of a Harris presidency squandering enormous, high-stakes opportunities and needlessly pursuing and creating counter-productive distractions. Of course, another lunatic apparently trying to murder Trump may well reframe the news cycle and engender sympathy for what law enforcement officials quickly identified as another assassination attempt. Thank God Trump is okay.
As far as what is within Trump's control, I've already laid out my thoughts on last week's debate, which most viewers saw as a Harris win. By the same token, Trump's lack of preparation and inability to drive home several crucial messages -- instead, repeatedly chasing Harris-unleashed rhetorical squirrels -- may not have hurt him very much. We've relayed a number of mitigating factors and data points, including the Trump campaign's claim that their battleground polling improved after last Tuesday's forum. Some public polling has pointed in the same direction, with Trump gaining in certain national and state polls, like these:
#New General election poll
— Political Polls (@PpollingNumbers) September 15, 2024
🔴 Trump 51% (+3)
🔵 Harris 48%
Last poll (7/23) - 🔴 Trump +2
Atlesintel #A+ - 1775 LV - 9/13
📊 Post-debate NORTH CAROLINA poll by TIPP for @theamgreatness
— InteractivePolls (@IAPolls2022) September 15, 2024
🟥 Trump: 49%
🟦 Harris: 46%
#115 (1.8/2.0) | 9/11-13 | 973 LV | ±3.2%https://t.co/pgCzxoqEL6 pic.twitter.com/rwj76I9ETF
Other polling has looked notably worse, like ABC's numbers giving Harris a sizable lead and garnering majority support (52-46). There's also the well-regarded Des Moines Register/Selzer poll in Iowa, which showed Trump leading Joe Biden by an astounding 18 points back in June. That lead is now down to just four over Harris, per the latest data set in the series:
41-point gender gap in new DMR poll in Iowa. Trump leads Harris by 4, 47-43.https://t.co/cPLycNNXvv pic.twitter.com/OFY2WYW0UJ
— Tom Bevan (@TomBevanRCP) September 15, 2024
If Trump is only leading by four in Iowa, he's got bigger problems elsewhere. Then again, this same poll showed Trump and Biden supposedly exactly tied in the Hawkeye state back in September of 2020. Weeks later, Trump breezed to a comfortable eight-point victory there, roughly matching his 2016 performance. So while Trump's lead is lower in this survey, compared to where it was against Biden, it's actually better than where this survey had him almost exactly four years ago. Regardless, depending on which polls one cites, one can make a credible case that Trump is a slight favorite or a slight underdog in this election. It's very competitive, and very close. The Harris campaign hoped to further capitalize on her debate win by hyping pop star Taylor Swift's endorsement, which was released within minutes of Tuesday's event concluding. But even the Trump-unfriendly ABC survey showed that Swift's nod was mostly a non-event, with an overwhelming majority of voters saying it made no difference -- and more people (13 percent) saying it was more likely to move them against Swift's preferred candidate than in her direction (six percent).
For her part, Swift was relatively relaxed in the message she posted last week, urging her millions of followers and fans to do their own research and draw their own conclusions, and also to register to vote. She appeared to be checking a box, as she did with Biden, rather than going all-in, or pushing her legions of devoted fanatics to mobilize for Democrats. From the Trump campaign's perspective, it could probably have been a lot worse. Trump seemed to have avoided getting sucked into this vortex and poking the bear...until he decided to announce his "hatred" for the hottest musical artist in the country, whose army of fans are passionately loyal. There was no good reason to do this. There were many good reasons not to do this. But he can't help himself:
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News - Trump after Swift endorsed Harris pic.twitter.com/kUrdUCLyMl
— Political Polls (@PpollingNumbers) September 15, 2024
Maybe Swift will shake it off without escalating, her fans will move on from their irritation quickly, and none of this will end up mattering. But with polls showing key states could be decided by tiny movements of votes, actively and gratuitously alienating or inflaming potentially significant elements of the would-be electorate is, to put it bluntly, incredibly stupid. It shouldn't matter what Trump thinks of Swift. It shouldn't matter what she thinks of him. By doing this, Trump is risking actual downside, while achieving no conceivable upside. The 'we hate Taylor Swift because of her politics' contingent is not a swing group. He isn't running against her. Every ounce of energy or time Trump is expending doing anything other than hammering away on his core themes against his actual opponent is a waste. Every ounce of energy or time Trump is expending on side nonsense that has the potential to hurt him for absolutely no reason is self-harm and malpractice.
It's annoying enough that we are having a big "debate" over whether dogs and cats are being eaten by migrants in Ohio, rather than talking out the many, fully verified elements of the Kamala Harris border crisis. Adding a useless proclamation of hatred for a celebrity who is especially popular among young people, some of whom may have been on the fence or unmotivated about voting at all, is another utterly needless misadventure that does nothing to advance the ball, and runs the risk of losing yardage. If the election were not so close, and if there were not so much at stake, perhaps this would all be ignorable and forgivable. 'Trump being Trump.' But the realities are what they are, and the Republican nominee for president is once again demonstrating the sort of undisciplined, self-destructive, foolish impulses that cost him the 2020 election. For the last week, he's been reminding certain portions of the electorate (or potential electorate) of those turnoffs. It's a choice he's making. If he loses, it will overwhelmingly be a result of people's views of him. If he wins the election, which he absolutely still can -- even if he insists on actively undermining his odds -- in some ways, it will partially be in spite of himself. And it will be because of factors like this:
Signs that Americans are struggling to keep up with their bills are setting off alarms on Wall Street. Shares of consumer-lending companies slid this past week after executives raised warnings about lower-income borrowers who are struggling to make payments. Dour remarks from banking executives at the Barclays banking conference rattled investors, who were already on edge about the health of the U.S. economy...On top of soaring prices for groceries and just about everything else, people have been dealing with higher interest rates on their credit cards. The average rate as of May was 21.51%, according to Fed data, up from around 15% in 2019. That helps explain why some are finding it harder to keep up with payments, particularly those who don’t earn so much. Around 9.1% of credit-card balances turned delinquent over the past year, the highest rate in over a decade Investors have been on high alert for any clues that a recession is in store after two years of higher interest rates. The Federal Reserve is expected to start lowering rates at its meeting this coming week, but some investors fear it might have waited too long.
I'll leave you with Trump's opposition being characteristically terrible:
Good CNN piece on something I started noting last month:
— Aaron Blake (@AaronBlake) September 15, 2024
Harris campaign social media account has repeatedly deceived with misleading edits and captions https://t.co/aNuQ8FmF4J
