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Kamala Harris and Donald Trump will debate tonight in what may be the only face-to-face encounter of this abbreviated presidential campaign.
Just when we were feeling that Kamala Harris was very gradually inching ahead of Trump in the polls and that tonight’s debate would add to the momentum, here comes the latest New York Times/Siena poll showing the race in a virtual tie again. Whatever bounce Harris got from the energy and unity of the Democratic National Convention seems to have dissipated, at least for now.
Weirdly, a plurality of voters support Trump on many issues, even though his policies range from implausible to incoherent. He holds a 13-point advantage on the economy.
What’s even more disconcerting is that this Trump rebound, however slight, is occurring despite the fact that Trump’s speeches and rhetoric are becoming more and more floridly lunatic. You really have to watch a speech in its entirety and then read the transcript to appreciate just how unhinged he is. Either the ideas and formulations are insane, or he can’t keep his mind from free-associating and floating sideways, or both. And his fantasies also get crazier and crazier, including the idea that children are being snatched from parents to have gender-altering surgery.
In his recent September 7 Wisconsin speech, Trump said this: “Can you imagine you’re a parent and your son leaves the house and you say, Jimmy, I love you so much, go have a good day at school, and your son comes back with a brutal operation. Can you even imagine this? What the hell is wrong with our country?”
It’s the right question. What the hell is wrong with our country … for not laughing Trump off the stage?
To some extent, the media, most notably The New York Times, is to blame for trying to treat Trump as a normal candidate and finding symmetrical things to criticize in both candidates. Here’s a doozy: A recent Times piece was titled “Harris and Trump Have Housing Ideas. Economists Have Doubts.”
Is the Times for real? Harris has proposed extensive new housing construction and a $25,000 subsidy for first-time homebuyers. One can debate how efficient these are and whether they would make major gains in the housing shortage. But they are serious, mainstream proposals. Trump’s major housing plan is increasing deportations of immigrants, which he says would have a side effect of freeing up housing supply.
To treat these ideas as in any way symmetrical, or worth taking with equal seriousness, is to normalize Trump. And the Times does this over and over again. The Post and The Wall Street Journal aren’t much better, and Politico is worse. In the case of the Times, one can blame the editor, Joe Kahn, who has a misplaced obsession with covering the election evenhandedly.
This Trump rebound, however slight, is occurring despite the fact that Trump’s speeches and rhetoric are becoming more and more floridly lunatic.
But in the case of the others, the conventions of “objective” journalism don’t know how to cover a candidate who is objectively nuts. The real story is Trump’s lunacy. The last thing the press should be doing is normalizing it.
It’s also the case that the shortest presidential campaign in modern times, far from being a net benefit to Harris by creating rare party unity, may have backfired by not giving Harris enough time to make an impression on the electorate. In the Times/Siena poll, 28 percent of likely voters said they felt they needed to know more about Harris, while only 9 percent said they needed to know more about Trump.
Harris put a comprehensive issues page up on her website in advance of the debate, perhaps for just this reason. She and Tim Walz have begun to do local media in swing states and have planned a swing-state tour after the debate. The only way to counter the short-campaign effect is to get out there as much as possible, which is the plan after the debate. The nearly half-billion-dollar war chest means that fundraisers don’t necessarily have to be on the menu anymore.
Going into tonight’s debate, the hope is that Harris will demonstrate that she is both normal and trustworthy, and that she has a set of programmatic ideas, values, and aspirations that speak to regular people. The hope is also that she will provoke Trump into displaying his unhinged side, or that Trump, obsessed by the fact that he has to run against Harris and not Biden, will be plenty unhinged with no provocation.
However, it’s easy to forget how uncharacteristically disciplined Trump was in the June 27 debate with Joe Biden slightly more than two months ago (an eternity), which marked the beginning of the end of Biden’s quest for a second term. It wasn’t just that a feeble Biden lost, but that a disciplined Trump won. Trump, having listened to his handlers for once, did not come across as a madman. Grasping the stakes, Trump may do that again tonight.
The other problem is that for Trump’s MAGA base, it doesn’t matter how crazy he sounds—the crazier the better. He channels their rage. I still believe that Harris is likely to be the better debater, but that may not change the poll numbers much.
The most hopeful thing about the Times/Siena poll, paradoxically, is that it polled likely voters. The biggest potential upside for Harris, as I’ve been writing, is among unlikely voters: those who often do not turn out, but who tend to vote for Democrats when they bother to vote at all.
Trump holds the support of a solid 46 or 47 percent of the likely vote. Harris can’t change the numerator much, but she can change the denominator, thus reducing Trump’s percentage. But any election analyst who thinks this will be other than a close election should find another profession.
