Well, Fitzmas is past. Miers is history. Bush’s next SCOTUS pick won’t be known til next week. For the first time in ages, I don’t have a big day-job or moonlighting weekend project. My wife’s out of town on business. My kid’s away at college. Fall has finally arrived. The day is cool, crisp and windy, what I used to think of in my student days as Nietzsche Weather, when you want to go find an abyss to laugh over.In sum, it is, as Chris Schenkel used to always say, a Fine Day for Football. So in a few hours, I’ll try to find something red and black to wear, and mosey over to the local sports bar to watch the World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party, Georgia versus Florida. Now to yankees and other outsiders, this rivalry probably sounds like the Bud Bowl or something–a drinking contest between two party schools.But it’s a serious thing down there, made more vicious, oddly enough, by the rivalry’s recent pattern of total domination by one team or the other.Back in the 1970s and 1980s, Georgia routinely won, often coming from behind to rout the Gators in the second half. At one point in early 80s, I watched the game with a work colleague who had gone to Florida. As the third quarter ended, Florida had a small lead, but Georgia had begun one of those soul-crushing long ball-control drives that were the hallmark of the Vince Dooley era, and my friend got up and turned off the television. “Don’t you want to watch the fourth quarter?” I asked. “I’ve been watching this fourth quarter for fifteen years,” he wearily replied. Sure enough, Georgia won. In the 90s, with the return to Gainesville of The Evil Genius (a.k.a., the Ball Coach, Steve Spurrier), Florida dominated the series, especially during the tenure in Athens of Spurrier’s polar opposite, the honorable but less-than-cerebral good-ol-boy Ray Goff (“If Georgia had to hire a Danny-Ford-type coach, they should have hired Danny Ford,” quoth one Dawg Fanatic friend of mine). With both universities beginning to establish themselves as regional academic powers, the intellectual gap on the football field was painful for Georgia fans.Now both teams have Genius coaches. Georgia is undefeated, but its quarterback and moral leader, D.J. Shockley, will miss the game with a sprained knee. If Georgia wins, the post-game assessments will write themselves, because Shockley’s replacement is a third-generation Dawg named Joe Tereshinski III, whose major role in his two previous years in Athens was as long snapper on punts. Either way, it ought to be fun. For once, Georgia is playing in the day’s marquee game. I won’t have to beg Mike the Bartender to find an obscure screen on which to watch my team. I can make barking noises on kickoffs without pretending to undergo a coughing fit. Yes, it’s a fine day for football.
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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July 11: If Biden “Steps Aside” and Harris Steps Up, There Should Be No Falloff in Support
At New York I discussed and tried to resolve one source of anxiety about a potential alternative ticket:
One very central dynamic in the recent saga of Democratic anxiety over Joe Biden’s chances against Donald Trump, given the weaknesses he displayed in his first 2024 debate, has been the role of his understudy, Vice-President Kamala Harris. My colleague Gabriel Debenedetti explained the problem nearly two years ago as the “Kamala Harris conundrum”:
“Top party donors have privately worried to close Obama allies that they’re skeptical of Harris’s prospects as a presidential candidate, citing the implosion of her 2020 campaign and her struggles as VP. Jockeying from other potential competitors, like frenemy Gavin Newsom, suggests that few would defer to her if Biden retired. Yet Harris’s strength among the party’s most influential voters nonetheless puts her in clear pole position.”
The perception that Harris is too unpopular to pick up the party banner if Biden dropped it, but too well-positioned to be pushed aside without huge collateral damage, was a major part of the mindset of political observers when evaluating Democratic options after the debate. But now fresher evidence of Harris’s public standing shows she’s just as viable as many of the candidates floated in fantasy scenarios about an “open convention,” “mini-primary,” or smoke-filled room that would sweep away both parts of the Biden-Harris ticket.
For a good while now, Harris’s job-approval numbers have been converging with Biden’s after trailing them initially. These indicate dismal popularity among voters generally, but not in a way that makes her an unacceptable replacement candidate should she be pressed into service in an emergency. As of now, her job-approval ratio in the FiveThirtyEight averages is 37.1 percent approve to 51.2 percent disapprove. Biden’s is 37.4 percent approve to 56.8 percent disapprove. In the favorability ratios tracked by RealClearPolitics, Harris is at 38.3 favorable to 54.6 percent unfavorable, while Biden is at 39.4 percent favorable to 56.9 percent unfavorable. There’s just not a great deal of difference other than slightly lower disapproval/unfavorable numbers for the veep.
On the crucial measurement of viability as a general-election candidate against Trump, there wasn’t much credible polling prior to the post-debate crisis. An Emerson survey in February 2024 showed Harris trailing Trump by 3 percent (43 percent to 46 percent), which was a better showing than Gavin Newsom (down ten points, 36 percent to 46 percent) or Gretchen Whitmer (down 12 points, 33 percent to 45 percent).
After the debate, though, there was a sudden cascade of polling matching Democratic alternatives against Trump, and while Harris’s strength varied, she consistently did as well as or better than the fantasy alternatives. The first cookie on the plate was a one-day June 28 survey from Data for Progress, which showed virtually indistinguishable polling against Trump by Biden, Harris, Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Gavin Newsom, J.B. Pritzker, Josh Shapiro, and Gretchen Whitmer. All of them trailed Trump by 2 to 3 percent among likely voters.
Then two national polls released on July 2 showed Harris doing better than other feasible Biden alternatives. Reuters/Ipsos (which showed Biden and Trump tied) had Harris within a point of Trump, while Newsom trailed by three points, Andy Beshear by four, Whitmer by five, and Pritzker by six points. Similarly, CNN showed Harris trailing Trump by just two points; Pete Buttigieg trailing by four points; and Gavin Newsom and Gretchen Whitmer trailing him by five points.
Emerson came back with a new poll on July 9 that wasn’t as sunny as some for Democrats generally (every tested name trailed Trump, with Biden down by three points). But again, Harris (down by six points) did better than Newsom (down eight points); Buttigieg and Whitmer (down ten points); and Shapiro (down 12 points).
There’s been some talk that Harris might help Democrats with base constituencies that are sour about Biden. There’s not much publicly available evidence testing that hypothesis, though the crosstabs in the latest CNN poll do show Harris doing modestly better than Biden among people of color, voters under the age of 35, and women.
The bottom line is that one element of the “Kamala Harris conundrum” needs to be reconsidered. There should be no real drop-off in support if Biden (against current expectations) steps aside in favor of his vice-president (the only really feasible “replacement” scenario at this point). She probably has a higher ceiling of support than Biden as well, but in any event, she would have a fresh opportunity to make a strong first or second impression on many Americans who otherwise know little about her.