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Notes -
I watched the Harris speech this morning and wrote down some scattered thoughts. My apologies if any of them don't make sense without having watched, I was just typing a few things up as I watched.
Nice outfit - fairly warm while still professional.
When she mentioned going to Illinois, there was a small cheer, when she mentioned Wisconsin there was a much larger cheer. No one likes Illinois, not even the people that live there.
Talking about the experience of “injustice” is in such bad taste for the child of professors. These are privileged people that found immense opportunity in the United States. I realize that the whole Democrat schtick is playing up how oppressed people of color are, but it’s ridiculous for Harris.
The phrase, “I’ve only had one client - the people” is a fantastic way to spin never having held a private sector job. Good speechwriting!
The line referring to Trump as an “unserious man” is a good line. Trump’s lack of seriousness is obvious to all but his most ardent supporters. This criticism rings as much more on point than all of the Russia conspiracy and “coup” nonsense ever could.
The claim that Trump has an “explicit intent to jail journalists” is just an outright lie.
The callback to her earlier line with “the only client he has ever had - himself” is great speechwriting. Banger of a setup and punchline. Much like the lack of seriousness jab, this rings much more true than all of the dark conspiracy stuff.
The line that the Department of Education “funds our public schools” is pretty weird. It’s not quite literally false, the DoE does spend ~$20 billion on public school funding, but total American school spending is nearly $1 trillion and the vast majority of it is state and local money. Are people under the impression that school funding is a big thing that DoE does or is it just a bit of rhetoric?
Referring to abortion as “decisions of heart and home” is an interesting tactic. Abortion is a huge winning issue for Democrats, but it’s so frequently referred to with euphemisms rather than in the most literal terminology. I’m basically entirely on the same side as Democrats on the issue, which makes it more interesting to me that it tends to come with alternative phrasing rather than just saying what they mean.
Shoehorning every issue into “freedom” requires some downright Orwellian twists. Abrogating the constitutional freedom of the right to bear arms is inverted to “freedom to live without gun violence”. A massive regulatory state creating arcane rules for everything from flow of showerheads to the powertrains of vehicles becomes “the freedom to live free from the pollution that fuels the climate crisis”. I think the framing probably works for people on that side of those issues though.
Claiming that the recent Senate border bill was the “strongest in decades” is a lie. HR 2 from 2023 passed the House and was much stronger but was unacceptable to Democrats. I do understand that this one has become an accepted truth among Democrats though, so it probably plays pretty well. Continuing to push this one requires a fully complicit media, but she can safely rely on that.
The Israel line is politically palatable, but also pretty hollow. Israel has a right to defend itself, but the Palestinian people will get freedom and self-determination - OK, what’s that look like? As near as I can tell, Palestinian self-determination selects Islamist leaders. Islamist leaders want dead Israelis and the land returned to Palestinians from the river to the sea. You can’t solve this problem if you’re not addressing reality. Someone has to actually lose.
Overall, it was a well-delivered speech that tacks towards the middle on most issues. While I am personally not impressed by teleprompter speeches, her tone and clarity were both quite good. Simply being energetic and eloquent is a good look. If I were a Democrat strategist, I would feel good about the speech and consider it a positive step towards victory.
Great writeup, thanks for this.
I'm modeling the campaign now like this;
A majority of Americans feel the country is headed the wrong direction and are unsatisfied with the economy. The deciding states (some mix of PA,MI,WI,GA,NC,AZ,NV) have a demographic bias not necessarily toward trump but away from Harris. These are structural advantages for Trump. Meaning that pretty much any Republican would have them and they are not dependent on Trump himself.
Anti-Trump sentiment is the motivating factor for about half of the population and the key demographic within that is professional women between 24-50 with and without children, married and unmarried. Pro-choice is a winner there (especially after the epic mishandling of the Dobbs decision by Republicans). These are structural advantages for Harris.
Trump lacks message discipline, but he's now predictably unpredictable. He's not going to say anything so outrageous that it meaningfully pushes away voters. He's already done that. All of the off-the-record messaging from the Trump campaign is how much his adivsors are urging him to stay on message. I think this is because they realize their structural advantage and lack of new voters to be won over. In a sentence, this is "playing not to lose"
Harris is notorious for gaffes worse than Biden and her own version of word salad. She can lose voters by saying something totally out there. Even mainstream media outlets have comment on her lack of major interviews so far. After the hangover from the DNC wears off, I expect this to escalate. Harris' problem is likely that she has too much message discipline and comes off as reading a script. But the risk of her going off script even a little is so high that the optimization strategy has been what we've seen - just don't say much at all.
So you have a high volatility wild card in Trump going up against a contentless line reader who might accidentally self-destruct. And it's over 300,000 votes in 6-8 states. Man am I glad I'm not a campaign person.
The forecasts I'm willing to make off of this are:
The Biden-Trump debate in June was the most consequential Presidential maybe ever. I think the rival would be the OG Kennedy-Nixon TV vs Radio debate. And the Harris-Trump debate in September could be even more consequential I'm confident it will not be a "nothing burger." Harris will show how well she can deal with a full volume Trump off-script. She doesn't have to beat him, but she has to perform in an environment and format that she is notoriously bad in. She has to put on her best performance ever for a tie. Again, woe to the campaign staff.
There's going to be a September or October surprise. Just today, Jerome Powell announced September rate cuts. Nominally, that's a win for Harrris, but if the cuts are coming too late or they don't have the intended effect and unemployment spikes, that's an bad situation. Regardless, Harris is probably going to have to make some sort of speech about whatever the October surprise is with very little prep and, possibly, field live questions from reporters. This is a high risk situation for her.
Trump will either develop a cohesive message or he won't. If he doesn't, he's betting the farm on the demographics and economic perceptions of those 6-8 states. Maybe an RFK endorsement tips the scales and he wins by 1%. A toss up might sound "ok" but then there's the potential down ballot underperformance and the resulting automatic 4 years of lame duckness.
All in, this is a massively stupid campaign (but you already knew that). Both parties are running historically awful candidates with thin policy positions and incongruous platforms. This is why the horse race of the campaign is front and center - it's the only there there.
Trump's pretty bad at debate too. People considered him to have lost most of the debates he was in.
I think as long as Kamala keeps tacking to center she'll be fine. People are taking Trump seriously as a threat. There's little sense of "Ugh we're stuck with a centrist when we wanted Bernie" this year because no primary meant Kamala felt inevitable. That means the left wing of the party has less influence, and Kamala's free to appeal to the swing voters who really matter without risking mutiny.
But ultimately I agree, I feel like this debate will be consequential. I'm holding all my prediction market bets until the debate happens.
I suspect the people who say that are missing the point, from the Trump campaign's perspective. Perceptions of how Trump does in debates seem very polarized and, even moreso than normal for such things, watching him in debates mostly seems to intensify whatever the viewer already thought about him. And, a small minority are swayed by this charisma he apparently has (which is completely invisible to me) and do switch to him. Maybe not a lot, but it seems to be a lot more than I've heard of moving in the other direction, especially post-2016. So from his perspective they do their job regardless of who the Serious People think won.
Trump is not "bad at debate". Remember the Trump/Hillary debate where the sour grapes response was that if the sexes were reversed Trump never could have gotten away with that? Then they staged a simulation of it with sex-reversed actors and "female Trump" won even bigger against "male Hillary"?
Trump is pretty good at debates, but he is a little less spry at off the cuff comments as he’s aged. The debate is going to be both highly unpredictable as well as highly consequential. And honestly, helpful for voters!
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