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Great writeup, thanks for this.
I'm modeling the campaign now like this;
A majority of Americans feel the country is headed the wrong direction and are unsatisfied with the economy. The deciding states (some mix of PA,MI,WI,GA,NC,AZ,NV) have a demographic bias not necessarily toward trump but away from Harris. These are structural advantages for Trump. Meaning that pretty much any Republican would have them and they are not dependent on Trump himself.
Anti-Trump sentiment is the motivating factor for about half of the population and the key demographic within that is professional women between 24-50 with and without children, married and unmarried. Pro-choice is a winner there (especially after the epic mishandling of the Dobbs decision by Republicans). These are structural advantages for Harris.
Trump lacks message discipline, but he's now predictably unpredictable. He's not going to say anything so outrageous that it meaningfully pushes away voters. He's already done that. All of the off-the-record messaging from the Trump campaign is how much his adivsors are urging him to stay on message. I think this is because they realize their structural advantage and lack of new voters to be won over. In a sentence, this is "playing not to lose"
Harris is notorious for gaffes worse than Biden and her own version of word salad. She can lose voters by saying something totally out there. Even mainstream media outlets have comment on her lack of major interviews so far. After the hangover from the DNC wears off, I expect this to escalate. Harris' problem is likely that she has too much message discipline and comes off as reading a script. But the risk of her going off script even a little is so high that the optimization strategy has been what we've seen - just don't say much at all.
So you have a high volatility wild card in Trump going up against a contentless line reader who might accidentally self-destruct. And it's over 300,000 votes in 6-8 states. Man am I glad I'm not a campaign person.
The forecasts I'm willing to make off of this are:
The Biden-Trump debate in June was the most consequential Presidential maybe ever. I think the rival would be the OG Kennedy-Nixon TV vs Radio debate. And the Harris-Trump debate in September could be even more consequential I'm confident it will not be a "nothing burger." Harris will show how well she can deal with a full volume Trump off-script. She doesn't have to beat him, but she has to perform in an environment and format that she is notoriously bad in. She has to put on her best performance ever for a tie. Again, woe to the campaign staff.
There's going to be a September or October surprise. Just today, Jerome Powell announced September rate cuts. Nominally, that's a win for Harrris, but if the cuts are coming too late or they don't have the intended effect and unemployment spikes, that's an bad situation. Regardless, Harris is probably going to have to make some sort of speech about whatever the October surprise is with very little prep and, possibly, field live questions from reporters. This is a high risk situation for her.
Trump will either develop a cohesive message or he won't. If he doesn't, he's betting the farm on the demographics and economic perceptions of those 6-8 states. Maybe an RFK endorsement tips the scales and he wins by 1%. A toss up might sound "ok" but then there's the potential down ballot underperformance and the resulting automatic 4 years of lame duckness.
All in, this is a massively stupid campaign (but you already knew that). Both parties are running historically awful candidates with thin policy positions and incongruous platforms. This is why the horse race of the campaign is front and center - it's the only there there.
Trump's pretty bad at debate too. People considered him to have lost most of the debates he was in.
I think as long as Kamala keeps tacking to center she'll be fine. People are taking Trump seriously as a threat. There's little sense of "Ugh we're stuck with a centrist when we wanted Bernie" this year because no primary meant Kamala felt inevitable. That means the left wing of the party has less influence, and Kamala's free to appeal to the swing voters who really matter without risking mutiny.
But ultimately I agree, I feel like this debate will be consequential. I'm holding all my prediction market bets until the debate happens.
I mean, maybe? I imagine that for a lot of people who only have a surface view of politics, the narrative on Trump has moved from 'he's going to put black people back in chains' to 'he seems weird'. That's quite a shift in how big of a threat he is.
I think people have downgraded on how bad it will be if he does take office, but upgraded on how likely it is he'll take office, compared to 2016 and maybe even 2020
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I suspect the people who say that are missing the point, from the Trump campaign's perspective. Perceptions of how Trump does in debates seem very polarized and, even moreso than normal for such things, watching him in debates mostly seems to intensify whatever the viewer already thought about him. And, a small minority are swayed by this charisma he apparently has (which is completely invisible to me) and do switch to him. Maybe not a lot, but it seems to be a lot more than I've heard of moving in the other direction, especially post-2016. So from his perspective they do their job regardless of who the Serious People think won.
Trump is not "bad at debate". Remember the Trump/Hillary debate where the sour grapes response was that if the sexes were reversed Trump never could have gotten away with that? Then they staged a simulation of it with sex-reversed actors and "female Trump" won even bigger against "male Hillary"?
Trump is pretty good at debates, but he is a little less spry at off the cuff comments as he’s aged. The debate is going to be both highly unpredictable as well as highly consequential. And honestly, helpful for voters!
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That play was something else. I still watch the video sometimes. It's amazing how much I want to vote for Fem!Trump.
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