Kamala Harris’s Frankenstein campaign

Welcome to Thunderdome. When the decision was made to shift from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris, the campaign staff was totally blindsided, with the entire Delaware operation shocked to learn about the president’s decision via social media — leading to the now infamous unnamed Democrat staffer’s line: “We’re all finding out by tweet.” It’s a sign of just how insular the Biden operation was, and how confined to the upper echelons of close, trusted staffers known for their tight lips and protective nature toward the old man.

The Harris operation in 2020 was anything but that — leading to her epic collapse as a candidate and strewing numerous back-stabbing comments from staffers across the media on the way out the door. How the Harris team, many of whom are veterans of the Barack Obama effort, would mesh with this holdover staff from the Biden camp was a question greeted by some nervousness at the DNC. And now it seems they’re ready to spill: things aren’t going super great. Alex Thompson, who’s been a star “behind the scenes” journalist this entire cycle, reports:

New people are remaking the campaign on the fly. The result is a large and at times unwieldy team, with internal worries about cohesiveness when inevitable stumbles arise, six people involved in the campaign tell Axios.

Biden’s campaign was insular, with a few long-serving aides making big decisions. The Harris campaign has become a diffuse “Frankenstein” team with multiple power centers…

“The entanglement of these different entities has led to many people feeling a real lack of role clarity,” one person involved in the campaign told Axios. Another person involved with the campaign said there isn’t “as much tension at the very, very top, where the question is more: ‘Who is the first among equals with the vice president?’” The confusion about who’s in charge is happening more often “two or three rungs down,” this source said.

Now, none of this really matters at this point in the scheme of things. It’s far too late in the game to do anything other than what they’re already doing. But it does seem like the nervousness surrounding tonight’s carefully stage-managed CNN interview with Tim Walz could be part and parcel of the lack of clear direction to the effort. Staffers who viewed Kamala Harris’s lack of press skills as a liability back in March and April are unlikely to feel any different today, even with the well-scripted Chicago “vibe shift.” 

The choice of CNN’s Dana Bash to do the interview, though, could be an opportunity to pass a test that Joe Biden very publicly failed. It’s in CNN’s interest to press for answers to a host of tough questions that both Harris and Walz have dodged to this point. But just for the sake of continuing this run of Democratic confidence, Harris can ill afford another deer in headlights moment like she had with Norah O’Donnell in the run-up to a critical debate in eleven days — especially when her campaign is already trying unsuccessfully to change the debate rules that backfired on them last time around.

It’s a risky game, this tightrope act. You live by the vibes, you die by the vibes.

Old lefties are destroying polling

Ryan Girdusky makes an important point here about the difficulty of dealing with an overeager contingent of the electorate.

By the end of July, it had become clear that Joe Biden was going to lose the 2024 presidential election in a landslide. Democratic internals were not worried about Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania but New Mexico, Virginia and New Jersey. Yet polls remained relatively tight nationally because Biden’s considerable support came from one demographic group: older white voters.

Quinnipiac’s last poll before Biden dropped out had him leading Trump among senior citizens by eight points; the New York Times/Siena and NPR/Marist polls gave Biden a four-point lead with baby boomers and the Silent Generation, Fox News had the 46th president tied with his predecessor. In contrast, the Washington Post/ABC poll gave Trump just a point lead among this crucial demographic. 

So, did Joe Biden have a unique ability to win over these voters, perhaps because of his advanced age? No; it was that older white liberals were answering the polls at a greater frequency than the general public. 

It’s called polling response bias, and it’s the reason that voters were shocked at Trump’s 2016 victory and how close 2020 was despite Clinton and Biden’s monumental leads. Older white liberals’ tendency to become “Karens,” telling anyone within an eyeshot their opinion, is destroying the reliability of the polling industry. 

According to Pew Research’s analysis of the last two presidential elections, Trump defeated Clinton by nine and Biden by 4 percent among voters over sixty-five. Still, in the run-up to the election, pollsters predicted a blue wave led by an army of gray-haired voters.

In the last few weeks before the election, Biden was crushing Trump among seniors in most national polls: Quinnipiac said Biden would win voters sixty-five and up by fifteen points, Emerson by twelve, CNN by eleven, the New York Times/Siena and Fox News by ten, NPR/Marist by nine, YouGov/Economist by four points, USA Today by two, ABC/Washington Post had him up a point. 

This wasn’t the first time this happened. In 2016, key swing states had Clinton outperforming Trump among senior citizens. 

According to exit polls, Trump beat Clinton by twenty-three points among senior citizens in North Carolina, but polls leading up to the election had his victory far narrower. Monmouth and the New York Times had his lead at eleven points, CNN had him up five, and Elon University tied them.

Likewise, in Pennsylvania, Trump beat Clinton by ten points among seniors in exit polls. Still, serious pollsters undervalued his support among this key demographic group in the last few weeks of the election. CNN had Clinton leading Trump by four, as did Monmouth.

While pollsters have worked at updating models after the embarrassment that was 2016 and 2020, the same issue is occurring in 2024. 

Trump’s Arlington Cemetery controversy

I suspect that there’s a Streisand effect going on here, but the degree to which Donald Trump’s appearance — at the request of some Gold Star families — at Arlington National Cemetery has riled up a faction of the same “you’re breaking the rules!” people who are likely to start taking a very serious interest in invoking the Hatch Act the instant the other side takes the White House. Axios reports:

Cemetery officials “told Trump’s team that he could come in his personal capacity and bring personal aides, but not campaign staff,” the Washington Post reports.

The cemetery employee “tried to enforce the rules as provided to her by blocking Trump’s team from bringing cameras to the graves of US service members killed in recent years,” the Post adds. “A larger male campaign aide insisted the camera was allowed and pushed past the cemetery employee, leaving her shocked.”

The cemetery workerwho confronted Trump aides won’t press charges because she fears pursuing the matter could subject her to retaliation from Trump supporters, the New York Times reports. The Trump campaign says it had permission for a photographer.

There’s a huge hypocritical asterisk here considering that Joe Biden repeatedly used images from cemetery appearances in his own ads, but as Guy Benson notes, “Journos — callous toward these grieving families, who invited Trump bc they’re desperate for attention & accountability — will drop this ‘controversy’ as soon as they realize it’s just reminding people of the Biden-Harris Afghanistan catastrophe, which is not helpful to The Team.”

The pro-lifers are split over Trump

So the built-in assumption in Donald Trump’s aggressive spin away from the abortion issue is that he could accomplish it without losing any significant portion of his pro-life base along the way, given both how much they appreciate the consequences of his Supreme Court appointments and how extreme Kamala Harris is on the issue. And while this could still be the case, it’s definitely also true that the pro-lifers are restless:

For years, the anti-abortion activist Lila Rose has pushed the GOP to curtail access to abortion. But now, as Donald Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance conspicuously soften their abortion message ahead of the November election, Rose — who leads the prominent anti-abortion group Live Action — is embracing a more radical strategy: urging her followers not to vote for Trump unless he changes course.

That position — which she teased in a series of social media posts earlier this week — defies both Democratic and Republican common sense about Trump’s strategy on abortion. In the eyes of many Democrats and anti-abortion conservatives who support Trump, a second-term Trump would still be sympathetic to the anti-abortion cause — even if he needs to moderate his message to win in November.

But since Trump and Vance have come out against a number of the anti-abortion movement’s key policy priorities — including a national abortion ban, a crackdown on the abortion pill and restrictions on IVF — Rose, who leveraged her large internet following into influence in the first Trump White House, is no longer confident that Trump is an ally, she told Politico magazine. “It’s disappointing to say — but perhaps he personally lacks principle on this issue,” said Rose.

Rose’s position has inspired fierce resistance from some on the right who argue that a Trump presidency would still be better for the anti-abortion movement than a Harris administration. (Several of the most prominent anti-abortion groups are still backing Trump.)

But Rose said that’s not enough. If the election were today, she’d be writing in a candidate other than Trump or Harris. “Don’t get me wrong… I would love to see him stop saying this nonsense about supporting abortion. But unfortunately, that’s not the case.”

For an alternate view to Lila, this essay from dedicated pro-lifer Ryan T. Anderson on Harris’s heinous positions on their top issue is a strong rebuttal. But in a base election focused on fundamentals, it might be a wiser course for Trump to temper his spin on this issue. Minds are already made up on the matter.

One more thing

At the DNC, the somewhat surprising second star in the killbox after Trump wasn’t J.D. Vance, or Peter Thiel, or Elon Musk, or the Koch machine, or even January 6 — it was Project 2025! Yeah, that giant novelty book got plenty of stage time and even showed up at the Hotties for Harris event emblazoned on condoms. But if the attacks seemed fairly limp and you’re thinking that this is an issue where Trump has somewhat successfully distanced himself from one heavy white paper, don’t worry, there are a host of others! Today Politico has a piece on the work at the America First Policy Institute, where Brooke Rollins and Linda McMahon have been working up their own transition plans. The media’s public guessing game about what a second Trump term will entail has led to multiple amusing “gorillas in the mist” moments to this point in the cycle, and will only continue given their inability to figure out Republican policymaking — which, let’s face it, isn’t that complicated: it’s expensive, it takes place in big buildings inhabited by desperate climbers, and almost none of it ever happens. But to the degree it puts some fear in the minds of bureaucrats, it’s a social good.