Election Essentials - August 25th: The crucial two things that *didn't* happen this week
Plus: Harris' fiery speech, the RFK Jr dividend, Obama polling, ad wars, abortion pivots, the lost generation, and a restrained Trump
Welcome to the fifth edition of Election Essentials. I’ll be sharing the moments and patterns I’ve seen out there, as well as looking to the week ahead.
Moment of the week
Kamala Harris gave her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The speech was light on detail and lacking in empathy. Instead it looks like the Harris team made the judgement that communicating strength was most important.
They were right to do so: whether a candidate is strong is the biggest driver of people’s decision-making in this election, second only to how they voted in the past. The most fiery part of the speech on foreign policy made Harris look confident, strident, and assured. For the first time, she looked like she could take the fight to a Putin or a Xi. Here’s the relevant segment courtesy of DW: if the Harris team have any sense, they will clip it into their TV ads.
Her ‘forward not back’ messaging also worked, in an attempt to frame herself as the change candidate and Trump as the candidate for continuity.
That moment was then followed by another - Robert F. Kennedy Jr dropping out of the race, leaving the ballot in ten key swing states, and endorsing Donald Trump. I wrote yesterday on why that could end up being more significant than anything at the DNC.
Two moments that didn’t happen
The Israel-Gaza protests that threatened to overshadow the Democrats’ convention ended not with a bang but a whimper. It already looked like Harris has taken the steam out of the Gaza issue, and recovered critical ground with younger voters, especially younger women. That balance could have been threatened this week but it did not.
With jokes about Trump’s penis size from Barack Obama, the latter’s wife calling Trump a “racist”, and a cacophony of insults from the DNC directed at the former president, something odd happened: Trump did not rise to the bait and instead decried the Democrats for being personal. Though he told a rally he will carry on with personal attacks himself, his response this week has been muted (“Adversarial relationships are not good in politics!”). It is the right choice for a public wary of the division and drama he might bring back with him. But can he really keep up the restraint all the way to the first debate on September 10th?
Poll of the week
Obama might have gone for the jugular, but he still has an appeal to voters. An old poll resurfacing, but instructive nonetheless: in June 2023, Gallup found that Barack Obama had the highest retrospective job approval of any living president (63%), with only George H.W. Bush (66%), Ronald Reagan (69%) and John F. Kennedy (90%) performing better. Trump is down on 46%, with Nixon bringing up the rear on 32%.
Eyebrow-raiser of the week
This story in The Atlantic quoting Dr Don Levy of Siena College (the New York Times’ pollster) is notable:
Levy told me that, in 2020, the people working the phones for Siena frequently reported incidents of being yelled at by mistrustful Trump supporters. “In plain English, it was not uncommon for someone to say, ‘I’m voting for Trump—fuck you,’” and then hang up before completing the rest of the survey, he said. (So much for the “shy Trump voter” hypothesis.) In 2020, those responses weren’t counted. This time around, they are. Levy told me that including these “partials” in 2020 would have erased nearly half of Siena’s error rate.
Graphic of the week
This comparison of the presidential campaigns’ ad spending in the swing states by the Wall Street Journal. Trump and Harris are effectively tied in spend in the crucial state of Pennsylvania; Trump is spending more in Georgia and Arizona, while Harris has the spending edge in Michigan and Wisconsin.
Statistic of the week (1)
Data from the Federal Reserve has found that people between the age of 45 and 54 today have 7% less wealth than baby boomers did at the same point in their lives. It is also the only age group that has experienced a drop in median wealth between 2007 and 2022.
Statistic of the week (2)
Harris got more donations in the 10 days after she entered the race than Biden did in the last 15 months.
Pivot of the week
The Trump Vance campaign has had two interventions this week in an attempt to soften their position on abortion. First, Trump posted on Truth Social that his administration would be “great for women and their reproductive rights”. Second, today Vance said Trump would not bring forward a federal abortion ban and (this is the new bit) he would veto one if it were passed by Congress.
With abortion on the ballot in many states, the campaign is trying to disassociate itself from the most conservative voices of the pro-life movement: my sense is that’s going to be a hard ask, and it’s best for the Trump campaign to just keep quiet about the issue and hope voters are thinking about something else come the day. That’s not to say talking about it does damage to Trump: some pro-lifers are angry, but with Trump’s record on Supreme Court appointments, it is hard to see those activists voting for anyone else.
Look ahead
The upcoming week runs into the Labor Day weekend - and it’s a week in which many in politics try and take a break before the madness of the final sprint. Not for our candidates though: Kamala Harris will be doing a run through Georgia, and Trump will be running numerous events in swing states throughout the week. They have no time to lose: in just under two weeks (Friday September 6th) the first ballots in North Carolina get sent out to voters.