Plain English with Derek Thompson - Democrats Are Euphoric. But This Election Is Much Closer Than They Think.

Episode Date: August 23, 2024

Derek offers a short but sweet review of the Democratic National Convention, the science of post-convention bounces, and the reality of the 2024 polling: It's still a toss-up. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. Host: Derek Thompson Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In the fall of 2014, a group of hackers pulled off the biggest Hollywood heist of all time. They broke into computer servers belonging to Sony Pictures and released hundreds of thousands of top secret documents. The attack would cause an international incident, upend thousands of lives, and change the movie industry forever. From Spotify and the Ringer podcast network, I'm Brian Raftery, and this is the Hollywood hack. Listen on the big picture feed. Today, a short but sweet episode, the state of the 2024 election, and seeing beyond the thrill of the political conventions. It's been two weeks since our last 2024 update, and at the highest level, our update is straightforward. Ever since Kamala Harris took over for Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket, she has transformed this election from a race that Donald Trump was moderately leading for months.

to a toss-up that now leans slightly toward Harris. Because the momentum is entirely with Kamala Harris, and because this week, center and center-left media has been absolutely enthralled and entertained with the pomp and drama of the Democratic National Convention, I think there is a palpable sense right now in media that Kamala Harris is a moderate too strong favorite

to win the election in November. And I cannot emphasize this point more clearly. That's simply not true. It is true that polling averages have her slightly ahead in the major blue-wall states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and even tied or slightly leading in Arizona and Georgia. But Donald Trump is a minuscule polling error away from winning in all of these states. And polling errors are typical and common, even if it's hard,

to predict their direction. If you're a Democrat who has watched the convention over the last few nights, the undeniably entertaining and, if you are a liberal, inspiring convention, and you're reading left-leaning news, of course I can understand your enthusiasm, your limbic, hot-blooded certainty that something special is afoot in the Democratic Party. As at the end of August, I think there's an excitement, an optimism, and a patriotic liberalism, a live on the left that has not been on offer since the 2008 election where Obama romped to victory. But it is not useful to conflate those feelings for any kind of prediction. Conventions are designed to do this. They are designed to pump enthusiasm into the veins of the

decided. But as for their effect and the undecided, I would defer to the wisdom of last week's guest David Brockman, the Berkeley political scientist who studies political persuasion. As Brockman pointed out, just a week ago, Republican and Democratic conventions often produce polling bounces. When the cameras are turned off, however, and the event is over and the balloons are cleaned up from the floor, the candidate that receives a little polling bump that lasts several weeks and then it fades away. If conventions are persuasive, their persuasive effects are rarely permanent, and in most cases, the race returns to the status quo anti-convention very quickly. As Nate Silver wrote this week, his election model explicitly accounts for this by applying

what he calls a convention bounce adjustment. That is, his model expects an extra 2 to 2.5 point growth in Harris's numbers over Trump and tries to adjust for this because he expects that post-convention bounces tend to, quote, fade to zero over the course of about three weeks. So this is the case for a bit of Kamala skepticism, or at least Kamala temperance here. Conventions are not effective vehicles for long-term persuasion. And if you look through the headlines to the polls, what we see is an extremely close race, an effective toss-up in a year where incumbent parties have lost ground in almost every major

election throughout the developed world. As I wrote in the Atlantic this week, what many political analysts forecast as the year of democracy in 2024 is turning out to be the year of the insurgent, as ruling parties fall all over the world. After 14 years in power, the UK's Conservative Party faced its worst ever electoral defeat this year. In Germany, the far-right alternative for Germany surged in European Parliament elections, as the German Chancellor Olaf Schultz's social, Democrats suffered their worst ever defeat. France's snap elections saw voters lurching to the far right in an initial round before consolidating behind a left-wing government in the ensuing runoff. All around the world, the most universal theme of these results has not been the rise of far-right

populism, and it's not been the ascendancy of far-left socialists. It has been the downfall of the establishment. Voters of the world are sick and tired of whoever is in charge. And none of that is promising news for an incumbent Democratic Party that faces many of the same problems that those other governments and those other incumbents have faced, like high inflation in the last few years and a general loss of trust in major institutions around the world. And yet, and yet, the bull case for Kamala Harris and the Democrats is not difficult to make. Harris is not a simple incumbent, and she is not merely a fresh face.

She seems for the moment to benefit from both labels without suffering the consequences of either label. She has consolidated the Biden coalition, even as voters don't seem to hold her responsible for their least favorite memories of the Biden White House. Whereas Biden's economic record polled horrendously, Harris is more trusted than Donald Trump on the U.S. economy, according to polling. by the financial times. The political conventions are not predictive of polling, but they can be predictive of something else. Messaging, the way the parties are prepared to litigate their case and talk to the public.

And the Democrats' messaging in the last three weeks has taken a fascinating and positive turn toward an energetic and patriotic and even light-hearted optimism. that is downright more interesting than anything Joe Biden could muster in front of a television for months. Democrats are starting to talk about progressive ideas in new ways, sometimes even with traditional, even conservative frameworks. They're criticizing J.D. Vance for telling people how to live, which has historically been a right-wing critique of the judgy left. They're talking about reducing regulations to allow for housing abundance. I was extremely gratified to hear Obama, get yinbi-pilled in his speech.

They're embracing patriotism, not through some kind of ironic stance, but rather as a point of sincere pride. Meanwhile, at the same time, the Trump campaign was obviously built and organized, designed to take on and defeat Joe Biden, which is frankly a job that it was performing

with extraordinary aptitude up until a few weeks ago. But a little bit like an NFL defense that's designed to stop a passing attack that walked onto the field and suddenly sees the offense has replaced the pocket quarterback with a dual threat-running quarterback, the Trump campaign seems built for a challenge that it no longer faces on the field. Neither Trump nor Vance seem to have a compelling line of attack against Kamala Harris or Tim Walz.

It's not intelligent to overrate messaging alone, but this tonal rebalancing of the campaign is happening in an environment where inflation is falling, crime is falling, and illegal border crossings are falling. The objective fundamentals of the race are brightening for the incumbent party at the very same time that Republicans seem less organized in their attack strategy. I want to close here by reiterating the most basic and important point. It's good to be excited by political invention. It's cool to be excited by politics.

and I'm not trying to pour cold water on the sincere enthusiasm that people have when they turn on their television and are inspired by a politician describing a better future for this country. But don't mistake enthusiasm for clairvoyance. This is a toss-up election in a 48-48 country, and the final 4% will not be decided by four nights of primetime coverage in the second to last week of August. It'll be decided in the next 10 weeks and anybody who tells you they know what's going to happen

is still lying to you. We'll see you next week. Thank you for listening. Today's episode was produced by Devin Boraldi. Our summer schedule for plain English for the next few weeks will be one episode a week on Fridays. We'll see you next week.

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