Campaign Scratchpad: Known Unknowns

Right now Nate Silver’s models modestly favor Trump, while more blue-friendly G. Elliot Morris’s model… also modestly favors Trump (at the time of this writing). My overall view of these forecasters is that, except when people were using them to convince Joe Biden not to drop out of the race, they can be safely ignored. The election is too close (and polling too inexact) for them to be useful. The main use they have is making the outcome a known unknown to anyone that isn’t very motivated in their thinking. There’s a lot of motivated thinking out there, though.

There’s a projection out there that when polls are favorable to Democrats then Republicans become defiant, while when the polls are favorable to Republicans then Democrats become extremely anxious. I think both of these reactions make a good deal of sense. For Republicans, if Trump is behind there is almost nothing anybody can do about it. Trump isn’t going to change his strategy or his tune. It’s just not going to happen. All you can do is hope for the best, and there are some strategic advantages to projected confidence. Not the least of which it will provide you with an excuse later to disregard the results, if you are so inclined (and they appear very inclined). On the other hand, Democrats have a less obstinate candidate in Kamala Harris and if polls aren’t favorable she can and will tune her message or change her strategy by doing things like, say, going on Fox News.

We’re approaching the point, however, where the election is basically set and there isn’t time for Harris to change what she’s doing. We could be passing that corridor as we speak, in fact. At that point, it probably does start to make more sense to project confidence whether you feel it or not or whether it’s supported by the data or not. Make no mistake, though: It’s not supported by the data. For my part, gun to head, I believe that Harris is going to win but when Mom asks I still tell her it’s a 50/50 race. In my gut I believe more optimistically that Harris will win, much as I believed Hillary Clinton would 8 years ago.

Nate Silver has 24 reasons that Harris might win, which I recommend reading if you don’t genuinely think that Trump could win or just don’t understand how he possibly could given… everything.

Notably most of these reasons actually have little to do with Harris herself. I count three that involve decisions she’s made and two or three that she is specifically hurt by more than another candidate would be, but that are out of her control. There are a handful more that could qualify but I’ll put in the “Joe Biden” basket instead. Which is to say this list argues forcefully that whatever challenges Harris faces, it would be harder with Biden. It also argues that replacing Biden with someone else may have been a better move, though my view was and is that it was never going to be anyone but Biden and Harris.

By and large I’ve been reasonably pleased with Harris’s campaign. I thought she would be a power in 2020 but crashed on take-off. When she was selected for VP, I shrugged and thought she was tomorrow’s problem. Perhaps it was motivated thinking because I was anxious to dump Biden after the debate¹, but I presented something of an optimistic case for Harris. She might not be a strong candidate in general, but she was well suited for an abbreviated campaign against Donald J Trump where she didn’t have enough freedom to set her own tone.

My appraisal ended up being wrong. However much she spent 2019 and 2020 stepping on rakes, she completely understood the assignment, had a very clear eye of what went wrong in 2016 and in her own 2020 campaign, and was able to strike her own tone very quickly. She didn’t use the prosecutor voice that I thought was a good fit, but instead took a “looking forward” posture that worked even better. None of this is to say that I think she has run the perfect campaign (I liked her disavowal of 2020 posture but she never came up with an answer to an answerable question) or that she is a great candidate (she’s not great off-the-cuff), but she is a solid “B” or maybe even “B+” when I was expecting a C. And the public really does seem more comfortable with Trump than I was hoping. Unfortunately, it’s also the case that she is facing some stronger headwinds than I had hoped she would. I was never confident that she would win, though. Only that Biden was almost certain to lose.

Will it be enough? I don’t know. I feel about Harris the same way I did about Biden in 2020. He wasn’t my first choice, or my second, but he was the best of the viable options. Biden had to go. There was never any way you were going to skip past the Vice President (and even if they had been she was very adept at consolidating party support). In the end, you go with what you got.

1. Disclosure: My view up to the debate was that Biden’s age was a liability but one voters would get over when it came down to it and it was still preferable to the only alternative, Harris. I could have overlooked the debate but the campaign’s response to it indicated to me that there were hard limits on his ability to campaign and be president at the same time. I had assumed up to that point that Biden would kick campaigning into high gear as the election neared, but as Team Biden talked about earlier bedtimes as the best solution, I came to the determination that the public’s concerns actually had foundation. If the debate were a one-off the public would likely get past it, but the campaign’s response convinced me that it wasn’t and that the public perception wouldn’t change because… it was accurate.