Kamala is the Favorite
Hey all, we are still in the typical August Slowdown™ but I had a few thoughts on Kamalamentum.
What is even happening right now?
Kamala’s entry has fundamentally changed the race. A few weeks ago I said to hold off and wait for polls to normalize before assuming she has a lead. Well, it has been a few weeks and Kamala has a lead. A significant one. The New York Times’ polling outfit - previously an extremely favorable poll for Trump - says it is big.
In fact, not only does she have a lead, but virtually every metric shows her improving: Her favorability numbers are up; she is trusted more on the economy than Trump; and voters say they trust her more on their key issues than Trump. Even Nate Silver now says she is favored to win the election, which is significant given his previous bullishness on Trump. Betting markets (which I must stress are not good predictive measures) are now fully swinging toward Harris.
Anyone remember Matt Drudge? Here is his summary:
So, she has to be happy with the data. And then there’s the…other stuff.
J.D. Vance is a drag on the ticket.
A few weeks ago I talked about how Vance was a historically weak pick and that only seems to have gotten worse. He is now viewed the most unfavorably out of the “four” candidates in the race, and his direct rival - Tim Walz - is viewed the most favorably.
The hardest thing about Vance is that the more he talks, the more people don’t like him. After his full round of Sunday shows this week, Semafor showed up with this story, which essentially says that the Democrats have succeeded in branding Vance as “weird.”
The main shift in how respondents viewed Vance: He’s become more and more identified with his particular brand of conservatism and less with his famed biography as an author, veteran, and politician. Presented with a list of options to describe Vance in August, the most common answers were “conservative,” “anti-woman,” and “weird,” while more positive options like “young,” “smart,” and “businessman” declined from July. The percentage calling him “extreme” shot up 13 points.
The Trump Campaign has also been attacking Walz’s military service, although they have seemingly let up over the past few days. There is a good summary of his service and the Campaign’s attacks here, but I think the nature of these attacks actually speak to the Trump Campaign’s weaknesses.
We’ll have to go on a little trip here, but bear with me. Twenty years ago, Senator John Kerry was running for president and his military service in Vietnam (including his receipt of a Purple Star) became a centerpiece of his Campaign. To counter this, George W. Bush’s team attacked Kerry’s military service by rounding up a bunch of people who claimed to have served with him on the Navy’s Swift Boats and had them criticize his service. None of it was true, but it ultimately worked.
If you want to understand how insane the political commentary was back then, just watch this clip:
For the record, that is commentary from:
Chris Matthews,1 who was quietly pushed out from MSNBC after a long history of sexist comments caught up with him.
Michelle Malkin, who now pals around with White Supremacists.
Willie Brown, who Donald Trump just recently mistook for Nate Holden, another black politician from California (we’ll come back to this).
The early 2000s were the Wild West. Anyway, fast-forward to 2024 and “swift-boating” has become a well-known term for launching a smear campaign against a political opponent.
Why is it relevant? The originator of the swift-boating strategy was Chris LaCivita, who is now the head of Trump’s Campaign. So, LaCivita is going back to the old hits, and it illustrates what a pickle Trump is in right now.
Having spoken with a couple people who previously worked with LaCivita, the general consensus is that he is indifferent as to whether or not Trump wins or loses. He is simply doing his job (for which he is being extremely well-paid) and putting in the exact amount of effort that is required. So, re-running an old campaign strategy from 2004 fits right into that attitude.
This isn’t to say he’s doing a bad job; the Republican National Convention was remarkably well done, at least up until Trump got up to speak. But I think Trump picked a seasoned and well-known campaign guy because he was available, and that guy is doing exactly what is expected of him.
What that means is that LaCivita does not have any grand strategy to beat Kamala and probably isn’t all that motivated to come up with one.
So, Trump is in trouble?
I led this Jackal by saying Kamala is the favorite, and that is true. But, Hillary Clinton was the favorite in 2016, and she still lost. Things change and it is possible that the polls could swing back toward Trump. It’s also possible that the polls are still underestimating Trump’s support (you’d think that after 8 years pollsters would be able to get it right). The election is pretty fluid and it’s still only August! Trump absolutely still has a chance to win and may even be favored by the time early November comes around.
However, there is another thing that has been bugging me, especially after last night. In case you missed it, Elon Musk interviewed Trump yesterday evening on Twitter. Actually, there is a good chance you missed it, because the interview process itself was a technical disaster, and apparently no one watched it. But even leaving that aside, Trump sounded…bizarre. He rambled a bunch, was slurring his words, and had a lisp that he couldn’t shake.
Maybe it was something as simple as his dentures falling out,2 but he didn’t sound good at all. Add that into some other evidence that Trump is clearly losing it mentally (he recently said a giant pro-Kamala crowd was “A.I.”) and it has me revisiting some of my past statements about Trump’s mental acuity.
Almost a year ago I referenced a rumor that originated from Ron DeSantis’s camp during the GOP primary: Trump is battling some sort of terminal illness that he is hiding from the press. I ultimately dismissed it, and then I dismissed rumors about Trump’s cognitive decline in a post from earlier this year.
I am now wondering if I was too hasty. He is slurring his words in interviews, he cannot form a coherent thought, he is misremembering the details of traumatic events (almost dying in a helicopter with Willie Brown Nate Holden), and his team has not released a single medical record related to the assassination attempt on him. I also think there has to be some genuine concern about his psychological recovery from the assassination attempt. Something that traumatic is bound to cause PTSD, and we should all be hoping (from just a human standpoint) that Trump has been able to make a full recovery. He significantly reduced his rally schedule and does not have any additional ones planned (right now) for the rest of the month. I think that has to be related to the assassination attempt.
To drive the point home, Trump also has an element of self-interest here: There are still major doubts in left-wing circles about whether or not Trump was hit with a bullet or the fragment of a bullet (or debris) related to the attempt on his life. Why can’t he just release the medical records to clear this up?
It’s just…weird. 👀
Catch you all at some point soon.
I will express every caveat possible about Chris Matthews and then say I think he is very good here, and that cable TV would greatly benefit if the questioning was done more like this today.
Spoiler: Lots of politicians wear dentures, including Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi.