A Very Tight Race
State of the race: In a polling update from this morning, Nate Silver reports that “[Vice President Kamala] Harris’s odds have declined slightly over the past two weeks, as she’s gone from roughly a 55/45 favorite to a 45/55 underdog.” There are a few factors at play: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dropping out (helping former President Donald Trump), a subpar performance in Pennsylvania, and the Democratic National Convention (DNC) bump being a bit smaller than expected.
“Harris is, in fact, polling a bit better now than before the DNC—but only a bit better, with a 3.5-point lead in our national polling average as of Sunday versus 2.3 points before the convention,” writes Silver. “The model’s baseline expectation was a bounce of more like 2 points. By the model’s logic, she’s gone from a lead of 2.3 points to a convention-bounce adjusted lead of 1.5 points. That’s not a game-changing difference, but it’s enough to show up in the bottom line.”
Silver makes the good point that, since June 28, there has not been a “normal” news cycle. Instead, we’ve had the DNC boost, the Biden dropping out news cycle, and the strangeness of the way in which Harris ascended. Given this, you could “ignore the polls entirely and calculate ‘normal’ based on other factors—what we call ‘the fundamentals’ around here. Our model’s answer, based on the economy being about average and there being no true incumbent in the race, is that ‘normal’ means a tie in the popular vote but Democrats being underdogs in the Electoral College.”
Meanwhile, new ABC News/Ipsos polling shows just how much a lead Harris maintains with women. “Among women, Harris leads by 13 points, 54%-41%,” reports Axios, while “among men, former President Trump leads by 5 points, 51%-46% (not statistically significant).” The gender gap just keeps growing, in partisan affiliation and in this race’s polling. Speaking of which…
Act normal challenge: A two-year-old video of Republican vice presidential contender J.D. Vance on the Moment of Truth podcast is making the rounds, in which he tries to explain the mindset of the woke: “Clearly this value set [focus on gender inequity] has made me a miserable person who can’t have kids because I already passed the biological period when it was possible and I live in a 1,200 square foot apartment in New York and I pay $5,000 a month for it but I’m really better than these other people, what I’m gonna do is project my racial and gender sensitivities on the rest of them. And the reason that
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