More Balloons Lift Harris; Voters’ Views Almost Final

VP debate splits evenly

A new election forecast by the revered Economist magazine floats odds of a Harris victory in November even higher than they have been to-date.  In the wake of a VP-candidate non-event, other polls show that this trend will drive through until voting day.

The accumulating evidence that Harris is the winner is critical just now:  At this point in the campaigning, just four per cent of voters are undecided in this election, the smallest share of the electorate in any U.S. contest this century.

I am not commenting on the VP debate last night, because so few people are undecided that I doubt the debate mattered.  CBS polling gave Vance 42% and Walz 41% as winner; a similar CNN flash poll also had Vance up by 1%.  This will not sake the ballot-boxes.  Most of those polled doubted that either would be qualified to be president.  But Vance is so unpopular anyway – he is the least-liked VP candidate since 1980- that he is dragging Trump down every day.

With only 4% of the voters uncertain of who they will vote for, the poll results now are unlikely to shift, so we are looking at the winner of the election of 2024: Harris.

The Economist forecast shows that the vice president is predicted to win in four swing states—Nevada, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin – and while it gives three states to Trump, other forecasts have even those regions in the Harris camp.

The Guardian’s newest poll tracker, based on a range of surveys conducted across a 10-day period, shows that she has lead over Trump of 48.2% to 44.4%.

If Harris won every state where she currently leads the New York Times polling averages, she would easily exceed the necessary 270 electoral votes to claim the presidency.  

Harris is likely to win the popular vote as well as the electoral college vote, as her Democratic predecessors have done for five out of the past six presidential elections in the 21st century.  In those contests, the Republicans managed to snatch a win in half of them (2000, 2004, and 2016), due to the peculiarities of the Electoral College system.  Some two-thirds of Americans want that system changed.

That system could still fumble the election into Trump’s small hands.  "Slim margins in the swing states make this cycle's presidential race the closest in decades—the outcome could be closer than in any election in nearly 150 years," FiveThirtyEight wrote on its website.

While caution never hurts, that nerve-wracking view is not widely shared.  FiveThirtyEight actually shows Harris predicted to win the popular vote and to take the Electoral College with 286 votes to Trump's 252.  And a Harris win is the consensus among most agencies:

A national poll by Outward Intelligence, conducted between Sept 22-26, gives Harris a victory margin of 6 points.

Redfield and Wilton Strategies gives her a national advantage of 3 points.

Survey USA, focused on Minnesota, also gives her a margin of 6 points.

Other agencies attach rising balloons to her cause:  Big Village by 4 points, Echelon Insights by 7 points, Activote by 3, Clarity Campaign Insights by 7, YouGov by 3, Ipsos by 6, CNN by 1, Morning Consult by 5, Outward Intelligence by 6…

Even a leading Republican polling firm, Echelon Insights, which was cofounded by former Republican digital strategist Patrick Ruffini and pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson, put Harris 7 points ahead, 52% to 45%.

Pollster Nate Silver's survey also puts Harris in the lead by 2.8 points, while RealClearPolitics gives Harris a 2-point lead.  Nate Silver himself is of the opinion that Kamala Harris will emerge victorious in the Electoral College elections.

In fact of the 875 polls surveyed by the NYT, NONE of the recent polls give Trump a chance of winning. 

She also remains ahead in every polling aggregator.

Her economic policies are far more popular than Trump’s plans.

To go into a bit of detail, several of the states with large electoral vote counts are predicted to go to Harris by significant margins: ActiVote gives her California by 27 points,  Sienna College puts New York (28 electoral votes) into her camp by 13 points, Pennsylvania (19 votes) is hers by 3 points, according to Suffolk University, The Hill gives her a 99% chance of taking Illinois (19 votes).  Pennsylvania (19 votes) goes to Harris by 3 points according to ActiVote  -  all this adds up to 112 electoral votes even before we consider the smaller states.

 A Bloomberg poll of swing states shows that Harris now leads by 7 points in Nevada, 5 points in Pennsylvania, 3 points in Arizona, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and 2 points in North Carolina.

Trump isn’t even ahead in the remaining swing state, Georgia; Trump and Harris are tied.

And the economy is out-performing in swing states, which is good news for Harris.  Swing states like Georgia and North Carolina have clearly benefited from the Biden administration’s push for new investment in electric-vehicle and other green energy manufacturing plants.    

Even a few long-Republican states are dangerously close to falling into Kamala’s hands. Former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele says she could potentially pick up North Carolina and Florida (16 and 30 electoral college votes respectively).  These would be enough to win the election without the votes of any of the other “swing states”.  Steele expanded:

"This coalition being created right now by Kamala Harris and Tim Walz is not just one to watch; it will be one that the history books will study, when she takes this thing to victory. Florida and North Carolina will fall, along with Georgia."

Harris has even been edging up on Trump in Texas; he now has less than a 5 point lead, according survey from the University of Houston and Texas Southern University.

HBO host Bill Maher is so sure she will win that “I’ve put my marker down on that.”

He predicted that Trump would “definitely” lose. “You can just feel it.”

Steele focuses on abortion as the issue which will alienate traditional Republican voters in the swing states, especially women.

"Abortion is in play. What that does is it draws in center-right voters that would otherwise be aligned with the Republican party. That falls away because of the heavy-handed nature in which Republicans want to control women's bodies. The Right is taking away rights, and that doesn't sit well."

As Trump continues to circle the drain, he has flipped to new and lower levels of deranged accusations.  These cannot be helping his cause.

He accused Harris of the crime of immigration, saying “14,000 CONVICTED thugs and slimeballs who have committed MURDER have been allowed to enter our Country, totally unvetted and unchecked, and roam free to KILL AGAIN…And they will kill again, over and over, and wreak havoc like never seen before,”

Then he called for her impeachment:

“Kamala is a FOOL to have let this happen to our beautiful USA. It is totally unjustifiable, there can be nothing worse! She should be IMPEACHED for what she as [sic] done to our Country!”

A Homeland Security spokesperson clarified that “The data goes back decades; it includes individuals who entered the country over the past 40 years or more, the vast majority of whose custody determination was made long before this Administration. It also includes many who are under the jurisdiction or currently incarcerated by federal, state or local law enforcement partners.”

It means that many of those people entered under Trump’s watch.  While he was building the wall that takes 15 seconds to climb.

And Trump should be an expert on impeachment; he has been impeached twice.

He jumped from that dung-heap to another, accusing Harris of being mentally impaired:  “She was born that way. And if you think about it, only a mentally disabled person could have allowed this to happen to our country.”

He walked into the revolving knives on that one.  The head of the American Association of People with Disabilities shredded him:  “It says far more about him and his inaccurate, hateful biases against disabled people than it does about Vice President Harris, or any person with a disability… Trump holds the ableist, false belief that if a person has a disability, they are less human and less worthy of dignity… These perceptions are incorrect, and are harmful to people with disabilities.”

Trump voters would normally forgive an  attack like that…if they had any sensibilities they would not be Trump voters.  But more and more Republicans are easing out of the tent.

It’s open mic for comedians making fun of Trump.  The “Comics For Kamala” tour is covering a dozen cities.  Comics often make fun of politicians, but to have them get together in a group for a skewer-athon is unusual.

And Trump makes such a great target for ridicule.  He is rigidly serious and unable to take ridicule. As Salon puts it:

“He only managed to win one election in his entire life – and that was a fluke brought about because of a convergence of strange events: The Bernie Bros left Philadelphia angry and ready to either not vote or to vote for Trump because Bernie Sanders didn’t get the nod over Hillary Clinton. Clinton didn’t campaign well in the swing states.”

Trump and MAGA came to power because not enough people were paying attention or treating him seriously.  I can remember on election night in 2016 when George Clooney was a commentator, saying with assurance that “no one will elect Donald Trump.”  Well, guess what.

Trump has been hoping that people will forget about his handling of Covid, his infrastructure rebuilding fiasco, his tax breaks for the rich, and his treatment of women.

But people are remembering.

People are leaving Trump events angry and bored.  And there are not many of them to start with.

Online sentiment digs deeper than a revulsion against Trump.  There is a view that the shadow corporations funding all this need to be uncovered and the players brought up on charges of aiding treason (think giant media companies, billionaires, foundations etc...).

All of this push-back is making Trump determined to hold onto power if he actually gets elected.  He will start with the military:

And Trump is not getting much of a lift from his VP candidate.

One analyst quipped that Vance is only barely more popular than herpes.

It does not really matter who “wins” the VP debate today.  Among the young voters, only 18 percent of respondents had a favorable view of Donald Trump’s running mate.  More of them liked Robinson than liked Vance  -  the guy who says the Holocaust was overblown and Hitler was great, who wants to own slaves, who was a frequenter of backroom porn video booths, and who bragged about banging his wife’s sister.… That guy was able to get to 27 percent favorable with women in North Carolina.

Part of it is that Vance has the personality of a toilet brush, and part is that he shares Trump’s habit of doing no research.  This now-classic moment says it all: Vance complaining about eggs costing $4/doz while standing in front of a sign advertising them for $2.99/doz.

Half of voters in a recent poll found Harris’ choice Tim Walz favorable, against one-third for Vance.

Trump’s new companion Laura “looney” Loomer, a thirty-one-year-old right-wing Jewish activist and influencer, is also not helping his position. She posted this…

…and then true to her wish, she got Covid. 

 She started complaining about the seriousness of her symptoms.  She said it felt like she got "hit by a bus…I had a fever, chills, a runny nose, sore throat, nausea and severe body aches.”

She asked people to pray for her.

The universe has a sense of humor.

Trump’s reaction to his negative press is of course to blame the press.  He is threatening to prosecute Google in his second term, for “showing bad stories about him”.  Back in 2021 he sued Facebook, Twitter and Google over their suspensions of his accounts.  Trump has a magic touch with media.

But with so few people able to change their minds about a candidate choice, the ‘person’ of a candidate matters very much.  A recent New York Times/Siena College poll of three swing states found that around a third of these voters were worried about Trump’s personality and behavior.

I know, you’re shocked.

We are coming up on a new round of shocking behavior after the November election: what will Trump do? 

He can’t rally the mob like he did last time, because he has no control over the infrastructure. 

But that does not mean he won’t try something to keep out of jail!

If you have any thoughts, please share!

In the meantime, prepare to vote: it will be historic!

I am voting myself today. Trump will tremble.