If presidential elections were forensic matches, then Kamala Harris would be on her way to the White House. The vice president won Tuesday’s debate on points, baiting Donald Trump into diverting from his core message that Harris is too incompetent and too liberal for the Oval Office. The evening was a missed opportunity for Trump to build on his slight, margin-of-error lead in the latest New York Times/Siena poll. Harris — with help from the moderators — emerged unscathed.
Let’s not go overboard, however. Some Trump opponents are ready to declare the election over, Harris the winner, and the Trump era kaput. They could be right. But they just as easily could be wrong. People have been writing Donald Trump’s political obituary for close to a decade. It’s still not fit to print.
A tossup election can go either way. And a tossup is what we have, nationwide and in the seven battleground states. As CNN’s Harry Enten observes, 2024 is the closest election in decades. Until one candidate opens up leads beyond the margin of error, definitive predictions are acts of intellectual hubris.
At this point in the race both Hillary Clinton, who lost, and Joe Biden, who won, were polling better than Harris polls now. Harris regained support Biden had lost, but she has yet to match his winning numbers among minorities from four years ago. Independents are divided evenly. Trump, while unpopular, is viewed more favorably than ever.
And if past is prologue, polls are underestimating Trump’s appeal. Brookings Institution scholar William Galston notes that “it is plausible to assume that the 2024 polls continue to understate Trump’s support, although no one can say by how much.” In a race this close, a “shy Trump” vote of 1 to 3 points, as in previous elections, could make the difference.
Media accolades for Harris post-debate may push her ahead in the horse race. It’s a question of how long her advantage might last. As I write, there are 52 days to the election. That may not seem like much — and it’s not — but events in October shape outcomes. Think of Comey reopening the investigation into Hillary in 2016 and Trump’s COVID diagnosis in 2020. No one knows what this year’s surprise will be.
Trump’s general election debates have not exactly been the stuff of oratorical legend. His personality and speech don’t change. He eked out a win once, then lost by a hair four years later despite (or because of) this reality. The data point to another close call, and perhaps to a divergence between the Electoral College and popular vote results.
You would think that after a decade of Trump, official Washington would recognize that it understands politics differently than voters outside D.C. As a Beltway elite, junior class, I belong to the consensus that says Harris did a better job than Trump. That’s the view from the bubble. Reporting on undecided voters tells another story. The Times, Reuters, and the BBC found that voters leaned toward Trump after watching the debate. Why? Because Harris remains a cipher. Her economic message was vague, more “concepts of a plan,” as Trump might say, than a substantive program to restore price stability and raise incomes.
These voters have a point. For my sins, I read the transcript of the debate after watching it live. Harris didn’t answer a single question the moderators asked her, no matter the subject. Are Americans better off than four years ago? Why did the Biden-Harris administration wait three and a half years to address the border crisis? Why exactly has Harris junked her socialist policies from four years ago? Does she support a single restriction on abortion? OK, Trump asked the last one. The ABC anchors didn’t follow up.
Harris has had a remarkable run since President Biden withdrew from the Democratic nomination in late July. But she still hasn’t lapped Trump. She hasn’t overtaken him to such an extent that she’s the clear favorite. One reason is her distance from voters, her refusal to speak freely and concretely on subjects of major concern. Another is her current occupation. The vice president of an unpopular White House can’t escape the burdens of inflation, immigration, and failure and indecision abroad. Unless she makes a clean break from her boss. Harris hasn’t.
The Democrats’ mission is far from accomplished. Most likely the winner of the 2024 election won’t be known until election night — and unfortunately we might not know the next president’s identity until well after November 5. This isn’t over.
Nor is the Trump era. The argument that Trump will fade away if he loses has no historical basis. The same line was used after 2020, after January 6, and after Republican disappointment with the results of the 2022 midterms. I was one of the writers who used it. Yet Trump endured. He’s remade the GOP, realigned politics, and dominated the news for half a generation. He’s a historic figure not just because of his personality, but because he identified and offered solutions to the central issues of the 21st century: immigration, working-class stagnation, declining U.S. power, and an out-of-touch college-educated elite. It will take more than one debate to make that go away.
Matthew Continetti is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the founding editor of The Washington Free Beacon. For more from the Free Beacon, sign up free of charge for the Morning Beacon email.
