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As many of you no doubt know already, Donald Trump had a good poll result over the weekend: The very highly regarded New York Times/Siena poll showed him with a national polling lead of 48% to 47% for Kamala Harris.
This is not the only good polling news to have come his way recently. As legendary polling guru Nate Silver notes, there has been very little good news in the state-level polling for Kamala Harris recently, with Trump stubbornly clinging on to – at worst – miniscule deficits in swing states that Harris needs to win. As Silver notes, the data is overwhelmingly “mediocre” for the Vice President:
But there has been a LOT of mediocre data for Harris lately. Don't listen to people on here who constantly whine about which polls are included in which polling averages and so forth. It's just partisan motivated reasoning and they don't know what they're talking about.
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) September 8, 2024
The case for Trump optimism heading into tonight’s debate then, is fairly clear: Trump’s simplest message – my four years were better than your four years – is sufficiently potent and simple that you’d imagine that he should be able to hammer it home relentlessly. Harris’s message, by contrast, is more complicated, requiring her to convincingly land multiple attacks on Trump on issues like abortion, respect for election results, and competence – while at the same time defending a Biden economic record that leaves a lot to be desired.
Tonight’s debate, by most consensus, will be the only debate between Trump and Harris, which raises the stakes considerably. It will be the only time that American voters see their two candidates side-by-side, which can leave a lasting and essential impression. If one candidate wins it bigly, then the other will obviously demand more debates, but the victor will have no incentive whatsoever to agree to them. In addition, though polling day is still seven weeks away, early voting in many key states opens next week.
At this juncture, something important should be remembered: In 2020, polling overwhelmingly showed that Donald Trump lost both Presidential debates to (a younger and more vigorous than he is today) Joe Biden by margins of 60% to 28% and 53% to 39% respectively. Meanwhile, in that 2020 campaign, Kamala Harris debated Mike Pence, the then Vice President, and polls showed she won that. In addition, one might make the case that in Trump’s most recent debate with Joe Biden, his victory was more the result of his opponent’s mental collapse than it was a consequence of Trump’s own performance.
In other words, those who are tuning in tonight expecting a Trump walkover should remember that they might well be over-estimating their guy, and under-estimating Harris.
One of the problems Trump has, polling shows, is that he has simply been around too long to be a convincing “change” candidate. He has now been at the forefront of US politics since 2015 – longer than any two-term President would be. That poses two specific challenges: First, it is much harder to change perceptions of yourself when you’ve been around that long. Second, it is much more difficult to argue that you represent some kind of fresh start.
That weakness in Trump’s candidacy is and has been the reason that Harris – absurdly – has been presenting herself as the change candidate in the race. She, not he, is the candidate talking in that dreadful Americanism about “turning the page” and “moving on”, and her oft-repeated slogan about “we’re not going back” is specifically calculated to appeal to people who are looking for something different. On the face of things, it’s a ridiculously shameless attempt to dupe the electorate into thinking that the sitting Vice President represents change. The thing is, she’s running against literally the only candidate against whom she can make that claim.
Thus Trump’s job tonight comes down to the line mentioned in paragraph three above: My four years were better than your four years. If for no other reason than simply to remind voters that Harris has already had four years. Harris would like to present the election as a choice between the past and the future: Trump must make it into a choice between the present, and the recent past.
What he can’t do – but what I fear he will – is to instead take the bait. He is, for example, guaranteed to get a question on whether he will respect the outcome of the election – and he is guaranteed, since leopards don’t change their spots – to take the bait. Aside from that, extended soliloquys about Harris’s racial heritage and so on would clearly be counter-productive, as would the extended warbling about golf scores that should have cost him the last debate – and likely would have, if Biden hadn’t spent that debate drooling.
There’s another risk for Trump tonight as well: He is going to be attacked for being too conservative on policy, and on issues like abortion. There is every chance that Trump – not being a man renowned for his ability to argue complex issues – will simply shrug and declare himself a moderate on abortion, a moderate on gun rights, in favour of legalising drugs (he’s now voting to legalise cannabis in Florida) and opposed to any and all spending cuts. But Trump has two flanks to worry about: In 2020, he underperformed the Republican vote in several swing states. Run too hard to the centre, and some portion of Republicans may well have the excuse they need to stay at home.
Harris’s vulnerability as a candidate is simple: The current US administration is the Biden-Harris administration. Trump should simply use that phrase as many times as he can, and talk almost exclusively about its failings compared to his own. In a tight election, that’s the conversation Kamala Harris is desperate to avoid. If Trump is talking about anything else, he’s asking for another crucial debate loss.
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