A new Morning Call/Muhlenberg College poll has Kerry up by 5 in Pennsylvania among RVs (48-43). The poll shows PA voters turning against the Iraq war, undoubtedly a factor in Kerry’s current lead.
Speaking of swing states, here’s some useful weekend reading. First, check out a new feature on The American Prospect website, “Purple People Watch“, which they say they will post weekly. It’s a roundup of political developments, polls, etc., from the swing, sometimes termed “purple”, states. It looks like it should be quite useful, though it seems oddly hard to find on their website. I also noticed that, in a state or two, the poll they cite is not actually the latest one. Still, a very useful feature and I recommend it.
And, if you haven’t already, you should scoot over to the DLC’s website and check out Mark Gersh’s article on “The New Battleground“. Gersh, the data guru to countless Democrats, has an interesting take on which of the swing states are most truly in play and, commendably, figures into his assessments how a given state has changed demographically since the last election. I don’t agree with everything he says, but it’s food for thought in all cases.
TDS Strategy Memos
Latest Research from:
Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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July 26: The Obama Coalition Revisited
It’s pretty obvious Kamala Harris’s candidacy changes the 2024 presidential race more than a little, and I wrote at New York about one avenue she has for victory that might have eluded Joe Biden:
During her brief run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019, Kamala Harris was widely believed to be emulating Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign strategy. She treated South Carolina, the first primary state with a substantial Black electorate, as the site of her potential breakthrough. But she front-loaded resources into Iowa to prepare for that breakthrough by reassuring Black voters that she could win in the largely white jurisdiction. She had the added advantage of being from the large state of California, where the primary had just been moved up to Super Tuesday (March 3). For a thrilling moment, after her commanding performance in a June 2019 debate, Harris seemed on track to pull off this feat, threatening Joe Biden’s hold on South Carolina in the polls and surging in Iowa. But neither she nor Cory Booker, who also relied on the Obama precedent, could displace Biden as the favorite of Black voters or strike gold in the crowded Iowa field. Out of money and luck, Harris dropped out before voters voted.
Now Kamala Harris is the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee for 2024 without having to navigate any primaries. But she still faces some key strategic decisions. Joe Biden was consistently trailing Donald Trump in the polls in no small part because he was underperforming among young and non-white voters, the very heart of the much-discussed Obama coalition. Can Harris recoup some of these potential losses without sacrificing support elsewhere in the electorate? That is a question she must address at the very beginning of her general-election campaign.
There’s a chance that Harris can inject a bit of the Obama “hope and change” magic into a Democratic ticket that had previously felt like a desperate effort to defend an unpopular administration led by a low-energy incumbent, as Ron Brownstein suggests in The Atlantic:
“Polls have shown that a significant share of Americans doubt the mental capacity of Trump, who has stumbled through his own procession of verbal flubs, memory lapses, and incomprehensible tangents during stump speeches and interviews to relatively little attention in the shadow of Biden’s difficulties. Particularly if Harris picks a younger running mate, she could top a ticket that embodies the generational change that many voters indicated they were yearning for when facing a Trump-Biden rematch …
“In the best-case scenario for this line of thinking, Harris could regain ground among the younger voters and Black and Hispanic voters who have drifted away from Biden since 2020. At the same time, she could further expand Democrats’ already solid margins among college-educated women who support abortion rights.”
Team Trump seems to believe it can offset these potential gains by depicting Harris as a “California radical” and a symbol of diversity who might alienate the older white voters with whom Biden had some residual strength. Obama overcame similar race-saturated appeals in 2008, but he had a lot of help from a financial collapse and an unpopular war presided over by the party of his opponent.
Following Obama’s path has major strategic implications in terms of the battleground map. Any significant improvement over Biden’s performance among Black, Latino, and under-30 voters might put Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and North Carolina — very nearly conceded to Trump in recent weeks — back into play. But erosion of Biden’s support among older and/or non-college-educated white voters could create potholes in his narrow Rust Belt path to victory in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
These strategic choices could definitely affect Harris’s choice of a running-mate, not just in terms of potentially picking a veep from a battleground state, but as a way of amplifying the shift produced by Biden’s withdrawal. Brownstein even thinks Harris might consider following Bill Clinton’s 1992 example of doubling down on her own strengths:
“The other option that energizes many Democrats would be for Harris to take the bold, historic option of selecting another woman: Whitmer. That would be a greater gamble, but a possible model would be 1992, when Bill Clinton chose Al Gore as his running mate; Gore was, like him, a centrist Baby Boomer southerner—rather than an older D.C. hand. ‘I love Josh Shapiro and I think he would be a great VP candidate, but I would double down’ with Whitmer, [Democratci consultant Mike] Mikus told me. ‘I don’t think you have to go with a moderate white guy. I think you can be bold [with a pick] that electrifies your base.’ I heard similar views from several consultants.”
Whitmer’s expressed disinterest in the veepstakes may take that particular option off the table, but the broader point remains: Harris does not have to — and may not be able to — simply adopt Biden’s strategy and tweak it slightly. She may be able to contemplate gains in the electorate that were unimaginable for an 81-year-old white male incumbent. But the strategic opportunity to follow Obama’s path to the White House will first depend on Harris’s ability to refocus persuadable voters on Trump’s shaky record, bad character, and extremist agenda. Biden could not do that after the debate debacle of June 27. His successor must begin taking the battle to the former president right now.
Andrew Sullivan is gloating about this FoxNews poll which claims Kerry is trailing “Shrub” in the battleground states by 37% – 43%
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,120492,00.html
Ruy doesn’t normally comment on reader feedback, but I would appreciate his views on this subject.
MARCU$
I’m just finishing a trip to southern Arizona. While Tucson and the southwest corner of AZ are the most Democratic parts of the state, I’m encouraged by some of the conversations I had with Democrats and Republicans.
A few things to note:
* McCain swallowed his pride in ’00 and supported Bush. But in ’04 many Republicans here are not happy about the treatment that McCain has received from the Rovians. That could turn into a backlash.
* I talked with several Republicans who were disillusioned with the war. These would probably fall into the group of voters who sit out the election.
* For what it’s worth, many of the MPs in the Abu Ghraib scandal were trained in southern AZ and people here aren’t happy about that. My guess is that there’s some defensiveness and embarrassment, but over time it will be an even worse issue for Bush here.
I’m pretty optimistic about AZ.
–Dan
I think his analysis of Ohio has missed one point. As chronicled in the NY Times magazine article (The Multilevel Marketing of the President), the president’s campaign committee has a massive GOTV operation going on here. This operation is targeting the exurbs that Gersh mentions as susceptable to GOTV efforts.
The moribund Ohio Dem party has no chance of mounting an effort to counterbalance this in the urban areas much less in the rural southeast. Kerry’s campaign HQ in Columbus wasn’t fully staffed as of a month ago (I don’t know about now.)
Statewide polls continue to show Ohio to be tight. The election here will almost certainly be decided by turnout. On this score, Bush’s GOTV efforts could neutralize his negative poll numbers here.
Shorter version: Kerry needs to get off his arse and organize Ohio.
Mr. Gersh’s article also seems a pretty dated in one respect. He says Bush’s approval rating hovers around 50 percent. In the last several weeks, his approval rating has ranged from 42-48 percent; that’s not “around 50 percent.” BTW, the only poll that shows Bush’s approval higher than 46 percent is Fox, which has it at 48.
I agree with Patrick. Illinois is among the ten states most likely to go Democratic in November. So are California and New Jersey, recent outlier polls to the contrary notwithstanding. Various organizations including Gallup and Faux News have identified a group of 15 to 17 battleground states. Illinois, California, and New Jersey are not on any of their lists. I can’t believe that Bush will put resources into any of them.
The most contentious thing I saw in that article was labeling IL as a “leaner.”
If you look at the primaries this year, the election results in 2000 and 2002, IL is as much a gimme as most of New England when it comes to state-wide elections.