I figured this was as good a time as any to come clean about reasons Democrats are fretting the 2024 election results despite some quite positive signs for Kamala Harris, so I wrote them up at New York:

One of the most enduring of recent political trends is a sharp partisan divergence in confidence about each party’s electoral future. Democrats are forever “fretting” or even “bed-wetting;” they are in “disarray” and pointing fingers at each other over disasters yet to come. Republicans, reflecting the incessant bravado of their three-time presidential nominee, tend to project total, overwhelming victory in every election, future and sometimes even past. When you say, as Donald Trump often does, that “the only way we lose is if they cheat,” you are expressing the belief that you never ever actually lose.

The contrast between the fretting donkey and the trumpeting elephant is sometimes interpreted as a matter of character. Dating back to the early days of the progressive blogosphere, many activists have claimed that Democrats (particularly centrists) simply lack “spine,” or the remorseless willingness put aside doubts or any other compunctions in order to fight for victory in contests large and small. In this Nietzschean view of politics, as determined by sheer will-to-power (rather than the quality of ideas or the impact of real-world conditions), Democrats are forever bringing a knife to a gun fight or a gun to a nuclear war.

Those of us who are offended by this anti-intellectual view of political competition, much less its implicit suggestion that Democrats become as vicious and demagogic as the opposition often is, have an obligation to offer an alternative explanation for this asymmetric warfare of partisan self-confidence. I won’t offer a general theory dating back to past elections, but in 2024, the most important reasons for inordinate Democratic fear are past painful experience and a disproportionate understanding of the stakes of this election.

Democrats remember 2016 and 2020

It’s very safe to say very few Democrats expected Hillary Clinton to lose to Donald Trump in 2016, or that Joe Biden would come so close to losing to Donald Trump in 2020. No lead in the polls looks safe because in previous elections involving Trump, they weren’t.

To be clear, the national polls weren’t far off in 2016; the problem was that sparse public polling of key states didn’t alert Democrats to the possibility Trump might pull an Electoral College inside straight by winning three states that hadn’t gone Republican in many years (since 1984 in Wisconsin, and since 1988 in Michigan and Pennsylvania). 2020 was just a bad year for pollsters. In both cases, it was Trump who benefitted from polling errors. So of course Democrats don’t view any polling lead as safe. Yes, the pollsters claim they’ve compensated for the problems that affect their accuracy in 2016 and 2020, and it’s even possible they over-compensated, meaning that Harris could do better than expected. But the painful memories remain fresh.

Democrats fear Trump 2.0 more than Republicans fear Harris

If you believe the maximum Trump ‘24 message about Kamala Harris’s intentions as president, it’s a scary prospect: she’s a Marxist (or Communist) who wants to replace white American citizens with the scum of the earth, which her administration is eagerly inviting across open borders with government benefits to illegally vote Democratic. It’s true that polls show a hard kernel — perhaps close to half — of self-identified Republicans believe some version of the Great Replacement Theory that has migrated from the right-wing fringes to the heart of the Trump campaign’s messaging, and that’s terrifying since there’s no evidence whatsoever for it. But best we can tell, the Trump voting base is a more-or-less equally divided coalition of people who actually believe some if not all of what their candidate says about the consequences of defeat, and people who just think Trump offers better economic and tougher immigration policies. While the election may be an existential crisis for Trump himself, since his own personal liberty could depend on the outcome, there’s not much evidence that all-or-nothing attitude is shared beyond the MAGA core of his coalition.

By contrast, Democrats don’t have to exercise a lurid sense of imagination to feel fear about Trump 2.0. They have Trump 1.0 as a precedent, with the added consideration that the disorganization and poor planning that curbed many of the 45th president’s authoritarian tendencies will almost certainly be reduced in 2025. Then there’s the escalation in his extremist rhetoric. In 2016 he promised a Muslim travel ban and a southern border wall. Now he’s talking about mass deportation program for undocumented immigrants and overt ideological vetting of legal immigrants. In 2016 he inveighed against the “deep state” and accused Democrats of actively working against the interests of the country. Now he’s pledging to carry out a virtual suspension of civil service protections and promising to unleash the machinery of law enforcement on his political enemies, including the press. As the furor over Project 2025 suggests, there’s a general sense that the scarier elements in Trump’s circle of advisors are planning to hit the ground running with radical changes in policies and personnel that can’t be reversed.

Only one party is threatening to challenge the election results

An important psychological factor feeding Democratic fears of a close election is the unavoidable fact that Trump has virtually promised to repeat or even surpass his 2020 effort to overturn the results if he loses. So anything other than a landslide victory for Harris will be fragile and potentially reversible. This is a deeply demoralizing prospect. It’s one thing to keep people focused on maximum engagement with politics through November 5. It’s another thing altogether to plan for a long frantic slog that won’t be completed until January 20.

Trump has been working hard to perfect the flaws in his 2020 post-election campaign that led to the failed January 6 insurrection, devoting a lot of resources to pre-election litigation and the compilation of post-election fraud allegations.

Though if you look hard you can find scattered examples of Democrats talking about denying a victorious Trump re-inauguration on January 20, none of that chatter is coming from the Democratic Party, the Harris-Walz campaign, or a critical mass of the many, many players who would be necessary to challenge an election defeat. Election denial in 2024 is strictly a Republican show.

If Harris wins, she’ll oversee a divided government; if Trump wins, he’ll have a shot at total power

As my colleague Jonathan Chait recently explained, the odds of Republicans winning control of the Senate in November are extremely high. That means that barring a political miracle, a President Harris would be constrained both legislatively and administratively, in terms of the vast number of executive-branch and judicial appointments the Senate has the power to confirm, reject, or simply ignore.

If Trump wins, however, he will have a better-than-even chance at a governing trifecta. This would not only open up the floodgates for extremist appointments aimed at remaking the federal government and adding to the Trumpification of the judiciary, but would unlock the budget reconciliation process whereby the trifecta party can make massive policy changes on up-or-down party-line votes without having to worry about a Senate filibuster.

Overall, Democrats have more reason to fear this election, and putting on some fake bravado and braying like MAGA folk won’t change the underlying reasons for that fear. The only thing that can is a second Trump defeat which sticks.

“When your enemy is sinking,” the saying goes, “throw him an anchor.” That’s what Kamala Harris is doing to Trump. But in this case the anchor is Trump’s own words, and the required Democratic response is thunderingly obvious.

E. J. Dionne, Jr. riffs on the short-term strategy, in his latest Washington Post column:

Vice President Kamala Harris has an indispensable ally as she closes her presidential campaign. She carries messages from him nearly everywhere she goes. His name is Donald Trump.

At a United Auto Workers union hall in Lansing, Mich., on Friday, she showed video of Trump demeaning the labor of autoworkers by describing them as simply taking parts “out of a box” and putting them together — “we could have our child do it,” he claimed — and declaring his hatred of overtime pay.

….For Republican-leaning voters who can’t stomach Trump but are reluctant to vote Democratic, she has highlighted the threat he poses to freedom and constitutional democracy. Clips of Trump describing his political opponents as “the enemy within” and threatening to use the military against them make the point more dramatically than anything a critic could say.

Those are only two of dozens of examples one could cite, and that’s just recently.  Summing it up nicely, Dionne quotes “Geoff Garin, a Harris campaign pollster,” who “draws the obvious conclusion. “They don’t want him to be seen and we do,” he told me. “Our job is to put him in front of the public in a way they don’t want him there.””

For Democrats, it’s less a planned strategy than an almost pavlovian response. When you are running against Trump, media makes it impossible to not use his own monumentally asinine comments against him. Unfortunately, Democrats can’t ignore his rants to craft and implement a pro-active strategy, because there isn’t enough time in the campaign work day.

The media demands a timely response to Trump’s daily outpouring of bilge and venom. To ignore it would be political malpractice at best and campaign suicide at worst. In a way, it limits Democratic strategy, which is too often determined by the need to react to Trump’s mouth. It almost traps Democrats in “I’m not Trump” as a central message. There is both an opportunity and a price, as Dionne, notes:

For Harris, Trump’s indiscipline offers her the chance to seize back the momentum she enjoyed from three surges: her buoyant emergence after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race, the success of the Democratic convention and her pummeling of Trump in their single debate. Since then, Trump has managed to shift attention to his own attacks on Harris, his dire and deceptive tirades about immigration, and voter concerns about the cost of living. The result is polling suggesting virtual ties in all seven swing states.

Trump isn’t doing this with thoughtful deliberation. His undisciplined temperament requires that he wings it and ends up submitting to the meanness that rules his spirit. It is disturbing that so many voters like it.

Yet, the “I’d rather be us than them” meme is rooted in polling, early voting trends and endorsements at this political moment. One problem, however, is that Republicans often rally in the final days of presidential elections. And Musk is reportedly dumping big money into GOP GOTV, so they can put more warm bodies on porches. But their GOTV door-knockers are going to spend a lot of time playing defense, thanks to Trump’s recent outbursts.

So take heart, Democrats. Harris is playing a good hand, with no major blunders or gaffes dominating the daily news. Her prosecutorial experience really does serve her well in interviews, debates and speaking engagements, and she is very good at honing in on the main issue and striking ‘the cool head in the room’ tone. She could probably use a little rest to complete the marathon in top form. But Two weeks out, her campaign has to pour it on and work like hell.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter and Yuval Levin, director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute and founder and editor of National Affairs, is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

This election couldn’t get any tighter. The New York Times polling average has every swing state within a point, with the exception of Arizona where Trump is ahead by a mighty two points. Nate Silver’s election forecasting model has the election at dead-even, 50-50, between the two candidates.

What can we conclude from this? We can certainly be sure someonewill win—we just don’t know who. And we can be reasonably sure that the election will not resolve the fundamental stalemate between the parties, leaving the country still bitterly polarized and torn apart by political rancor. We can also be fairly sure that [insert winning party here] will claim that a New Era in politics has arrived with a mandate for [winning party] and their plans for the country, no matter how narrow the victory.

Enough! This is madness that voters should not accept. The fact of the matter is that neither party seems truly interested in building the broad majority that might break the stalemate and lead to a healthier, more productive politics. But that is not because such a broad majority can’t be built but rather because neither party is consciously and purposively attempting to build such a coalition.

That is the thesis of our report, “Politics Without Winners: Can Either Party Build a Majority Coalition?,” which has just been published by the American Enterprise Institute. Please do read the whole thing, but here is our basic argument.

In the American political system, the parties’ purpose is to form enduring national coalitions. Look at almost any point in American history, and you will find a majority party working to sustain a complex coalition and a minority party hoping to recapture the majority. Today, however, American politics features two minority parties, and neither seems interested in building a national coalition. Close elections and narrow majorities dominate electoral politics more than at any other point in American history. Our report explores the evolution of the party coalitions, considers their contemporary strengths and weaknesses using fresh data from AEI’s Survey Center on American Life, and assesses which issues Democrats and Republicans can use to build a durable majority.

Once the American constitutional system began, political parties materialized nearly immediately. Yet not until the chaos of the 1824 presidential election were the parties truly formalized and institutionalized. Martin Van Buren and others argued for developing two broad, durable parties to subsume personal ambition and moderate divisions. This party system formed around the intense battles of 19th-century politics and gradually fell into a pattern of shifting majority coalitions.

The realigning election of 1896, which expanded the Republican coalition among diverse groups including urban workers, began a period of Republican dominance that lasted until the Great Depression. Between 1896 and 1913, the economy more than doubled in size, and real per capita income rose by 2.5 percent per year.

In the wake of the 1929 stock market crash, a new governing coalition emerged under Franklin D. Roosevelt’s leadership. The New Deal coalition owed its electoral success to the perception that Democrats were the party of the people—unionized workers, cross-class white Southerners, and ethnic minorities who united against a Republican Party that they perceived as too friendly to business and the wealthy. Even as Dwight Eisenhower captured the presidency, this coalition returned massive Democratic majorities to the House and Senate.

Not until the late 1960s did the New Deal coalition fracture. Democratic leaders embraced a bevy of new social movements, especially the civil rights movement, and white working-class voters began to abandon the party. Combined with the widely perceived failure of Democratic economic management in the 1970s, this led to a new era of Republican dominance.

After resurgences during the Clinton and Obama years, Democrats once again found themselves on a rocky road in 2016. By a massive margin, Donald Trump won support from white working-class voters—including many who had voted for Barack Obama four years prior. In 2020, though Joe Biden narrowly defeated Trump, Democrats up and down the ballot started to slip with black and Hispanic voters, particularly those without a college degree.

Today, the Republican coalition relies heavily on white working-class voters and is increasingly weak among white college-educated voters. The GOP generally does poorly among non-white voters, especially blacks, but is starting to do better among non-white working-class voters. Geographically, Republicans dominate rural and small-town America and perform much better in outer suburbs and exurbs than in more educated, affluent inner suburbs. They get walloped in dense urban areas.

The Democratic coalition, on the other hand, has become increasingly dependent on the votes of college graduates, particularly white college graduates. Its long-standing and worsening weakness is among white working-class voters, still a vast constituency despite their steadily declining weight in the electorate. The burgeoning non-white population continues to vote heavily Democratic, but the Democratic margins here are starting to decline, especially among Hispanic and working-class voters.

Geographically, the Democrats’ support base is highly polarized. They dominate urban areas and run up ever-bigger margins in inner suburbs, but their strength diminishes away from the urban core. And in much of rural and small-town America, their brand is simply toxic.

What the Republican and Democratic coalitions have in common is enough strength to stalemate the other party but not enough to dominate.

As a result, a noxious back-and-forth has defined American politics for a generation. Can the deadlock be broken?

Our analysis, based on a proprietary survey and publicly available data, reveals which issues each party can use to create a majority coalition. Republicans could capitalize on Democratic cultural radicalism—including on immigration, crime, and identity politics—energy realism, and patriotism. Democrats, meanwhile, hold clear advantages with their positions on abortion, health care, and adherence to political norms. But the key issues of economic prosperity and America’s place in the world lack a defining advantage for either party.

Stalemate is not the American party system’s natural equilibrium. Both parties have avenues to build a durable majority, but they must first recognize where they have gone wrong. Only then can each consciously build a dominant coalition.

We conclude:

Our overview of the history of American party politics, today’s two major party coalitions, and each party’s opportunities and challenges has put in stark relief the party system’s broader failure. For a generation, Americans have been in a state of deadlock, with neither party able to attract a durable majority of voters or construct a coherent winning coalition.

This deadlock has not happened because either party lacks opportunities. Nor has it resulted because the party coalitions have been static and unchanging. Today’s Democratic and Republican voters are not yesterday’s. Both party coalitions have churned a great deal, yet neither has broken through to clear majority status.

Surveying the parties’ decisions in one election cycle after another, it is hard to avoid concluding that they are stuck at 50–50 because they choose to be. Both have prioritized the wishes of their most intensely devoted voters—who would never vote for the other party—over the priorities of winnable voters who could go either way. They have done this even as the nature of their most devoted voters has changed. They have not operated as institutions geared to construct broad coalitions and win broad general-election victories. Instead, they have focused on fan service—satisfying their most partisan and loyal constituencies.

Ironically, the fact of America’s 50–50 politics has made it difficult for either party to break out of this pattern. You might think that two minority parties would each feel pressure to expand its coalition and become a majority, but actually, both have behaved as if they were the rightful majorities already. Each finds ways to dismiss the other’s wins as narrow flukes and treat its own as massive triumphs. Indeed, each has responded to close election losses with various forms of denial.

This is sustainable only because elections are so close. Politicians learn big lessons from big losses or big wins, so neither party has learned much in a long time, and neither can grasp that it isn’t popular and could easily lose the next election.

Breaking this pattern must start by acknowledging a truism: Bigger majorities are possible if the parties seek broader support. That sounds obvious, yet it has eluded America’s leaders for a generation, because it requires seeing beyond our age of deadlock. But it remains true.

Deadlock is not the American party system’s natural equilibrium. Durable majority coalitions are not only possible; they are the norm. And we will see them again.

But the next durable majority must result from self-conscious coalition building, which in turn must result from realizing that what both parties are now doing is not working and will not work.

Whichever party first grasps that it has been losing for a generation will have a chance to make itself the next big winner in American politics.

At The New Republic, Timothy Noah reports that “Harris May Finally Be Breaking Through to the Most Critical Voters: A Times/Siena poll shows working-class voters are finally moving in the Democrat’s direction. She may need them to win in November.” As Noah writes, “The New York Times reported Tuesday the good news that Kamala Harris leads in its polling for the first time since she entered the race. The Times/Siena poll is judged by FiveThirtyEight to be the most reliable, based on both its track record and its transparency. It is also one of the more helpful polls when you want to take a deep dive into the electorate, because it makes available to the public detailed responses from key subgroups among likely voters. The crosstabs in this latest Times/Siena poll offer something more surprising than the top line: mild encouragement that working-class voters, about whom I’ve been worrying a great deal, are finally warming to the Democratic candidate….I say “mild” because there’s no evidence yet that working-class voters are warming to Harris in the key swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, which CNN has identified as “the most consistent tipping point in American politics.” During the past 32 years these states went Republican only once, when Trump won all three in 2016. If Harris wins these three, she wins the election. This isn’t her only path to the 270 electoral votes she needs to win (MSNBC has some alternative scenarios here), but it’s the easiest path. And among all seven swing states, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and North Carolina have the highest proportion of blue-collar workers.”

Noah adds, “The Times reported that Harris is leading nationally, and that she’s gained ground among some key constituencies, including older voters, who are hugely important because (if you define “older” as 50 years or more) they cast more than 60 percent of all ballots in 2024. Before he dropped out, Biden was leading with voters aged 65 and over, even though they usually lean conservative. (In 2020 they went for Trump.) But in mid-September the Times/Siena poll showed Harris losing this group to Trump by seven percentage points, 44–51. The latest poll shows Harris winning over-65s by two percentage points, 49–47. Hallelujah….The Times did not report that Harris is gaining nationally among working-class voters, but she is. (Working-class voters are defined here conventionally as voters lacking a college degree.) Harris still lags Trump with this group in the Times/Siena poll, but since July she’s narrowed that gap from a dispiriting 15 percentage points to 11 percentage points. There’s still a lot of work to do, but as recently as mid-September, in a Times/Siena poll taken immediately after the presidential debate, Harris was losing this group to Trump by an alarming 18 percentage points.”

Noah notes further, “Where Harris is gaining some traction is with white working-class voters, a group that, with the sole exception of Bill Clinton in 1992, hasn’t gone for a Democratic presidential candidate since Lyndon Johnson. It’s doubtful that Harris will win white working-class voters outright in 2024, but since July she’s narrowed her deficit from 38 percentage points to 30 percentage points. As with Harris’s gain with working-class voters overall, the improvement is mostly recent; in mid-September, Harris’s deficit with white working class voters was 36 percentage points, and one week earlier (i.e., before her debate with Trump), Harris’s deficit was the same 36 percentage points. I would guess these white working-class voters are women….Because the new Times-Siena poll does not break out results by state, we don’t know whether in recent weeks working-class voters drifted toward Harris in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin to the same mildly encouraging extent they did nationally. An October 8 Wall Street Journal article by Ken Thomas and Catherine Lucey (“Kamala Harris Struggling to Break Through With Working Class, Democrats Fear”) reports that a private poll last week by Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin, who’s running for reelection in Wisconsin, showed Baldwin up two points and Harris down three, with the difference attributed to working-class men.* The same story portrays Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer urging the Harris campaign to spend more time there; Harris’s last Michigan appearance was September 19. A September 30 New Yorker piece by Eyal Press about working-class voters in Pennsylvania has no new polling information and is mildly discouraging….Multiple polls now show Harris gaining on Trump, and sometimes beating him, on the question of economic stewardship. Perhaps that’s why she’s gaining a bit among white working-class voters. There’s growing reason to believe Harris can win enough working-class support to win the presidency. But her pitch to these voters still needs to improve. Perhaps the small encouragement the new Times/Siena poll offers about the working-class vote will inspire her to do so.”

As regards Trump bragging at the Al Smith Dinner about his ‘leading big’ with Catholic voters, the reality is a bit more complicated, as Tom Norton points out at Newsweek: “While Trump leads in some polls among Catholic voters, he is not leading in “all polls” and his claim that he has a “big” advantage is debatable….A poll released this week by New Catholic Reporter showed Trump was ahead by five percentage points in the seven battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin….While Trump led by 16 percentage points among white Catholic voters, the data also showed that seven out of 10 Hispanic Catholics and more than three-quarters of Black Catholics preferred Harris….Data from last month by Pew Research showed similar results. In a survey conducted from August to September, Pew found Catholic respondents overall were likelier to vote for Trump “if the 2024 presidential election were held today,” leading by five percentage points. However, the results split significantly between subgroups, with 61 percent of white Catholics picking Trump and 65 percent of Hispanic Catholics choosing Harris….Conversely, the same month, EWTN News/RealClear Opinion Research showed a Harris lead among Catholic voters polled, with 50 percent supporting the Democratic presidential nominee, 43 percent for Trump and 6 percent undecided….Other data suggests Trump’s lead among Catholics may have declined since President Joe Biden stood down as the Democratic presidential candidate. Pew Research from April found Trump had voter support among 55 percent of Catholic respondents. This fell to 52 percent in Pew’s September 2024 survey….So, while Trump may be able to claim an advantage, its significance seems debatable.” We’ll leave it to others to sort out the significance of such stats in light of Catholic subgroup voter turnout rates in swing counties and states.

I’ve been spending a lot of time mulling the high likelihood of another contested presidential election result, and shared some brief thoughts at New York about Trump’s strategy:

It’s been clear for some time that Donald Trump is laying the groundwork to attempt to deny and challenge an election defeat. But Team Trump is also working to ensure that he won’t have to deny the results — and not just by convincing more voters that his policies are better for America. To put it very simply, the Trump campaign, the Republican Party, and its super-PAC allies are devoting a lot of resources to suppressing the Democratic vote in key states. These strategies include:

1. Insisting on voter-roll purges to eliminate people who don’t respond quickly to official verification inquiries, whether or not they are appropriate. (In the past, overzealous purges have disqualified hundreds of thousands of eligible voters, most notably in Florida in 2000.)
2. Promoting ridiculously strict rules for mail ballots that don’t have anything to do with their integrity (e.g., tossing them out due to extremely minor address or date errors without the possibility of curing them).
3. Flooding the polling places with poll watchers trained to challenge individual ballots that might go to Kamala Harris on a variety of sketchy grounds.
4. An inside-the-tent effort to place MAGA loyalists in key election-administration positions from the precinct to the county to the state level, where they can not only slow down vote counts but increase the odds of Democratic ballots being thrown out.

In addition to reducing the Harris vote (via a combination of ballot-eligibility challenges or heavy-handed intimidation of voters), all these MAGA boots on the ground can help build the post-election case that a Harris win was tainted with fraud. This time, Team Trump’s legal team will be much more organized than Rudy Giuliani’s Keystone Cops ensemble, which tried to capitalize on scattered election-fraud rumors and social-media claims in 2020. With so many campaign operatives working as election administrators or observers, there will be plenty of election-fraud allegations to fuel Trump lawsuits, with or without merit.

All this activity, along with years of Trump claims that Democrats cannot beat him without cheating, will predispose his MAGA base to accept whatever he chooses to claim about the “integrity” of the election. As the initial votes come in on Election Night, he may repeat his premature victory claim from 2020 and demand that vote counting stop with him slightly ahead (if indeed that “red mirage” reappears before it’s dispelled by the “blue shift” of mail ballots). If he does, we could see on-the-ground Trump operatives and volunteers demand that state- and county-election offices “stop the steal.” He will have another moment of truth if the Associated Press and other major media outlets call the race for Harris, which will be deemed conclusive by most people outside MAGA-land.

Trump will ultimately have to decide whether to concede or remain defiant on December 11, the federal deadline for state certifications of the vote. The Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022 was designed to minimize the odds of any challenge to the results after that date.

But whether or not the 45th president has a workable strategy for turning defeat into victory after Election Day, there’s no question his minions are trying hard to twist the system to maximize the possibility that Trump will win without having to stage another insurrection.

Roberta Kwock writes in “How Much Do Campaign Ads Matter?” at KellogInsight that research indicates that “TV ads do influence voter turnout and choices—and that the tone of the ad makes a difference. Based on data from the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, the team found that positive ads encouraged more people to show up on Election Day, while negative ads slightly suppressed turnout. And while both types of commercials affected whom people supported, the negative ones were more effective at swaying voters’ decisions.”

OK, that data is 24 and 20 years old. But it did come from 75 markets areas and 1,607 counties.. And don’t forget that campaign videos have found even more exposure on notebook screens since then, and human psychology hasn’t changed all that much.

However, Kwock adds that “research on voter turnout has produced mixed results. Somestudies that evaluated the overall influence of ads, without distinguishing between positive or negative ones, found that the commercials didn’t affect turnout. Among researchers who analyzed specific ad types, some reported that both positive and negative commercials had little effect; others found that negative ads boosted turnout; and still others that negative ads decreased turnout.

Further, “if ads don’t affect voters much, that would mean that campaigns are wasting billions of dollars on every election cycle. But political teams clearly believe that these commercials are worthwhile.”

The effects can be pretty small. “If a candidate increased their positive advertising by 1 percent, voter turnout rose by 0.03 percent. If they increased negative ads by the same amount, voter turnout dropped, but only by 0.007 percent.” Of course elections can be decided by tiny margins. But campaigns often have limited budgets, and cost-effectiveness still rules ad decisions. Nearly all campaigns will have a mix of positive and negative ads.

In February, Jessica Piper wrote at Politico that “Some political ads work a lot better than others. But nobody really knows what will reliably make an ad click with voters….That’s one of the major findings of a new study from researchers who analyzed data from Swayable, a platform used by Democrats to test the effectiveness of different messages and advertisements.” Further,

However,

What makes it particularly challenging is that trends that appeared in one cycle did not always persist to the next. For example, ads that highlighted issues — broadly, any issue-focused messaging — were more effective than other ads in 2018. But in 2020, issue-focused ads in congressional and Senate races were less effective than other ads, which included spots focused on character or biography. Ads with a positive tone seemed slightly more effective in 2018 and less effective in 2020, although not by statistically significant margins in either case.

But Piper cautions:

Still, the biggest lesson for all campaigns may be to not rely too much on what worked in the past….In 2020, some of the most effective ads tested for the Biden campaign were direct-to-camera video testimonials — featuring everyday voters shot as if they could be on Zoom, rather than slick campaign ads. But the style and substance of ads will likely be dramatically different this year, said Nate Lubin, an ad consultant on Biden’s 2020 campaign, even if the presidential race is poised to be a Biden-Trump rematch.

If you want to get wonky abut it, check out “Political Advertising and Election Results” by Jorg L. Spenkuch and David Toniatti, who write in a footnote and graph-rich article at economics.harvard.edu:

What was probably a minor brouhaha this week led me to make a broader observation at New York about online tunnel-vision:

When I saw a viral video of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer placing a Dorito on the tongue of a woman I could not identify (who turned out to be social-media influencer Liz Plank), I was kind of shocked. To many it looked like a parody, or at least an appropriation, of the traditional Roman Catholic form of administering a Communion wafer. The fact that there was adjoining text about the U.S. Chips Act didn’t mitigate the strangeness of the image. Why would an incredibly smart politician like Whitmer do something like this?

When this video came up in a discussion with my work colleagues, I was informed this was a meme, as though that fully explained it. When there was an explosion of protests from Michigan Catholics (some of it, of course, ginned up by MAGA folk and Democrat-hating traditionalist Catholic groups), Plank irritably explained to the “weirdos” that this was all a well-established joke:

I don’t know about you, but when I watch Jeremy Allen White feed a slice of pizza to Stephen Colbert (who is, as it happens, an observant Catholic), I don’t think Communion, I think Colbert’s being fed pizza by someone off-camera. In the Whitmer-Plank video, the size of the chip, the adoring upward glance of the Dorito recipient, and the positioning of the two women makes it very different.

But in any event, this video was circulated to untold millions of people who had never seen the Colbert-White video and probably couldn’t distinguish a meme from a matzo ball. The fact that Whitmer is wearing a Harris-Walz hat during this strange pantomime, and that Plank is a founder of the group Hotties for Harris, is an incredible gift to the reactionaries who claim Democrats are a bunch of Satan-adjacent baby-killing libertine smart-asses who would close down the churches if given the chance. It’s not just Catholics, by the way, who are a little touchy about the Eucharist. My own liberal Disciples of Christ denomination treats Communion as an indispensable symbol of human equality.

To her credit, Whitmer immediately apologized for having given offense, and she fortunately did not just say “It’s a meme, stupid boomers!” Per the Washington Post:

“Over 25 years in public service, I would never do something to denigrate someone’s faith,” the statement said. “I’ve used my platform to stand up for people’s right to hold and practice their personal religious beliefs. My team has spoken to the Michigan Catholic Conference. What was supposed to be a video about the importance of the CHIPS Act to Michigan jobs, has been construed as something it was never intended to be, and I apologize for that.”

But Whitmer’s staff couldn’t let it go with that and insisted the people complaining just didn’t get it, according to the Detroit News:

“’The governor’s social media is well known for infusing her communications with pop culture,’ Helen Hare, a Whitmer spokeswoman, said in a statement. “’This popular trend has been used by countless people, including Billie Eilish, Kylie Jenner, and Stephen Colbert, and the fact that people are paying attention to a video promoting President Biden’s CHIPS Act proves it’s working.’”

Here’s the thing: Unhip people get the same vote as hip people and can’t really be expected to understand the process by which some moment on social media becomes an all-purpose explanation for whatever you want to do.

Believe me, I understand that Donald Trump and his conservative Christian backers commit more acts of sacrilege every other minute than anything secular liberals have done on social media, beginning with the idea that the 45th president is divinely ordained to lead America, continuing with his endless displays of religious illiteracy, and concluding with the fundamentally anti-Christian MAGA attitudes toward immigrants, people of color, and the poor. But this incident involving Whitmer offers a good reminder that when you are in politics, you really can become “too online” and forget that large elements of the voting public can look at an image and not get the joke.

In “The October Surprise May Be Arriving Shortly: History suggests the decisive moment is still to come,” Jeff Greenfield provides a mini-history of recent October surprises at Politico. These include a Democratic president’s failure to win release of hostages held in Iran in 1980, or put differently, Reagan’s backdoor diplomacy success in negotiating a hostage release deal that would benefit him on election day. For the 1992  elections, there was the Iran-Contra affair, which hurt then President George H.W. Bush, followed by the 2000 revelation of his son’s drunk driving arrest 24 years after it happened – not much of a surprise or game-changer, as was the 2004 revelation by Osama bin Laden, claiming responsibility for the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the U.S. –  Democrat John Kerry blamed it for his ’04 loss. That was followed by a huge October surprise, the tanking of the U.S. financial system in 2008, which benefited Obama. Arguably, the nastiest most deliberate, October Surprise was in 2016 when James Comey made a big deal about the F. B. I. reopening the weaponized investigation of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Greenfield sees no clear October Surprise for 2020. But you could argue that energetic activism brewed one behind the scenes, resulting in Georgia giving its electoral votes to Biden and picking up two Democratic U.S. senate seats in 2020-21. We can hope at least that Georgia’s enormous early voting opening may herald a similar October Surprise for 2024. October surprise or no, campaigns don’t win without being otherwise prepared.

Trump’s “Let’s listen to my cool playlist” town hall rally in Oaks, PA is probably not going to be an ‘October surprise.’ But for a display of raw Trump weirdness, Democrats couldn’t ask for much more. James Bickerton reports it this way at Newsweek: “Some attendees at a Donald Trump town hall event on Monday reportedly began leaving early after the Republican presidential nominee decided to stop taking questions from the audience and instead played music for 39 minutes….The former president attended the town hall in Oaks, Pennsylvania, moderated by South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem.” What, you might understandably wonder, was Kristi Noem doing there – other than  firming up the dog-lover vote for Harris? “Proceedings were paused while two attendees received medical attention, at which point Trump jokingly asked whether “anybody else would like to faint?” He then said: “Let’s not do any more questions. Let’s just listen to music. Let’s make it into a music. Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?”….The incident took place after Kamala Harris questioned Trump’s mental cognizance at a rally in Pennsylvania on Monday, branding her White House rival “unstable” and “unhinged.” In July, President Joe Biden announced he was stepping down from the 2024 presidential contest amid concern about his age and mental capabilities….According to The Washington Post, “some in the crowd began to leave” after Trump said he wouldn’t be taking any more questions at the town hall, and instead told his team to play a succession of nine songs as he at times danced on stage….”Ron Filipkowski, who edits self-styled “pro-democracy” media outlet MeidasTouch, added: “This is absolutely insane. Trump just froze up answering questions, said he wouldn’t take anymore questions, then stood on stage for the next 30 minutes while music played. Will media cover this as something other than a seriously bizarre cognitive episode???”

When a former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff calls the president he served under a “fascist,” that is news that merits further discussion, and it is getting plenty of buzz. As Steve Benen reports at MSNBC, “When Gen. Mark Milley retired last year, following more than four decades of military service to the United States, he delivered a retirement speech that included some language that did not go unnoticed. “We don’t take an oath to a king, or a queen, to a tyrant or dictator — or wannabe dictator,” the retiring general said. Many assumed, of course, that he was referring to Donald Trump, but the phrasing was at least somewhat subtle, and the four-star Army general did not elaborate. At least, he didn’t elaborate publicly at the time….As The Washington Post reported, Milley apparently put subtlety aside when speaking to Bob Woodward for the longtime journalist’s new book.

Amid reports of huge early voting turnouts in metro and suburban Georgia, Kyle Kondik of Sabato’s Crystal Ball strikes a cautionary note, which should stem excessive  exuberance about Democratic prospects:

We still think Michigan is likeliest to be Harris’s best state out of this group, as it was for Biden in 2020, and it generally has been the most Democratic of these seven states over the past couple of decades. We have made these points about Michigan in the past (see the links for more thoughts on the particulars in Michigan).

Meanwhile, North Carolina is the one state among the seven that Biden did not carry in 2020, and we remain somewhat skeptical of Harris’s ability to actually win it.

One thing that is preventing us from being confident enough to move it to Leans Republican is the devastation wrought by Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina, which could have impacts on turnout in what is on balance a Republican-leaning area. In 2020, the 25 counties that FEMA currently considers to be the disaster zone favored Trump by 25 percentage points while Biden carried the rest of the state by 3.5 points. The state has taken efforts to keep early voting on track in western North Carolina; giving voters additional opportunity to make their voices heard in the midst of an unforeseen disaster is probably the best argument there is for offering robust absentee and early voting options.

Trump has generally, although not always, led polling in Arizona and Georgia, the two typically Republican-leaning states that fell out of his grasp in 2020. Forced to choose, one might also be inclined to tilt those states to Trump. It seems possible that a critical mass of “softer” Republican voters in those states who dislike Trump personally are expressing some buyer’s remorse after they took a chance on Biden in 2020. It wouldn’t take all that many of them to flip Arizona and Georgia back to Republicans after Biden won each by less than half a percentage point.

That said, there may be other things afoot—David Plouffe, a senior adviser to Harris’s campaign and an Obama campaign alum, recently argued that Harris could show strength with Republicans and/or Republican-leaning independents, a group that Harris is clearly trying to reach. This is important particularly in Arizona, a party registration state where the GOP edge in registration is a bit better now than it was in 2020 (although there are lots of people not registered with a party, and we are generally leery of using party registration trends as a predictive tool). This possible dynamic is illustrated by comparing a couple of recent polls: the New York Times/Siena College recently showed Trump up 5 points in Arizona, while a Wall Street Journal poll from a bipartisan polling duo showed Harris up 2. Why the disparity? Part of it was that the New York Times found Trump and Harris with similar levels of party unity in the state, while the Wall Street Journal found Harris achieving markedly better party unity and more crossover support from Republicans. If Plouffe is right, the Wall Street Journal poll may be closer to the mark. However, the New York Times poll shows Trump with a bit more loyalty among his 2020 voters than Harris has with Biden voters, perhaps an indication that the state is shifting enough back to its GOP roots to allow Trump to win it.

While Pennsylvania and Wisconsin remain total Toss-ups in our view, we do think there has been a little overhyping of the former over the latter. It’s become common to see the argument that Pennsylvania is clearly the most important state and that the winner of Pennsylvania will win the election. It is of course true that Pennsylvania is tremendously important and that, with 19 electoral votes, it has more electoral votes than any of the other true battlegrounds. But we actually think the state is slightly more important to Harris, because we could see Trump winning the election without Pennsylvania—perhaps losing the state by a hair while winning Wisconsin and the Arizona-Georgia-North Carolina trio by a hair, which would give him victory assuming no other changes from 2020 —whereas we don’t think Harris has a real path without the Keystone State. Mathematically, Harris could do it by holding Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin as well as winning one of Georgia or North Carolina, but that would involve Pennsylvania voting to the right of the other “Blue Wall” states as well as at least two of the Sun Belt states. That does not really pass the smell test for us, although of course the individual states are so close in polling that we cannot totally rule it out.

Moving toward his conclusion, Kondik notes “We’d be cautious when making direct advance voting comparisons between 2020 and 2024, because of course there was a pandemic going on in the former year that changed people’s voting habits.” Read the whole article for a more nuanced analysis.

As Election Day draws closer, I’m joined by my AEI colleague Sean Trende to break down all things 2024. We discuss swing state polling before moving into who we think might be favored to win the White House. Did Democrats make the wrong VP pick? What’s behind Harris’s stubborn leads in the Midwestern battlegrounds? Why are some pollsters suddenly weighting on recalled vote? Who’s favored to win the House and Senate? [If the forward arrow on the red button doesn’t work, click on the YouTube logo.]