Here Again?
Yeah, I thought yesterday was it for pre-election Senate Campaign Updates, and I was wrong. No apologies. There’s been both poll results and news.
What’s this about Iowa?
One of the better pollsters in the business, who mostly confines themselves to Iowa, is Selzer & Co. (2.8 out of 3 stars from FiveThirtyEight), who publish the Iowa Poll, usually via the Des Moines Register. Iowa was won by Mr Trump in both 2016 and 2020, and was considered a lock for 2024 by just about everyone.
Then came the release of Selzer’s poll results for October: Harris 47%, Trump 44%. Here’s Selzer herself:
The results follow a September Iowa Poll that showed Trump with a 4-point lead over Harris and a June Iowa Poll showing him with an 18-point lead over Democratic President Joe Biden, who was the presumed Democratic nominee at the time.
“It’s hard for anybody to say they saw this coming,” said pollster J. Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Co. “She has clearly leaped into a leading position.”
Sure, the margin of error is ±3.4 points, but in a sense it’s irrelevant. The fact that Harris is this competitive, as measured by a widely respected pollster, in what was supposed to be a bastion of Trump support, really puts a spin on reality for pundits, foretellers, clairvoyants, psychics, and other cousins to woodland ticks: Trump may have reached the end of the line, politically speaking, and, as the flag carrier and inventor of MAGA, that may carry over to his endorsees, his allies, and his base.
Over the next few days, we may finally see the end point of a number of toxic cultural trends. First, there’s the meta-trend of unlimited competition, as leaders of these trends fight for dominance, to be #1. Not that this is unusual, but when this happens between the unlimited self-interested, meaning those who don’t understand the nature of the role of governance, then the collapse of supposed alliances occur, whether it’s politicians breaking alliances, or countries invading each other. Total victory is pursued with little regard for the well-being of those even on your side.
Then, among the cultural trends, we may see the MAGA-heads, libertarianism and their “rational” defense of being self-centered brats, evangelicalism, the militant groups such as Oath Keepers, and others that I forget, all of these shrinking, even collapsing, as intra-group leaders begin fighting with each other to replace failed leaders, and the disillusioned leave in droves.
And that may take down far-right Republicans who’ve allied with these groups. Oh, not all of them. A few will survive, especially those not up for election. That’ll give them time to disavow alliances that might prove fatal to them.
But how about that list of close races or open seats in my last post? Is it possible that every single Republican will lose their race? Oh, I expect Justice will win in West Virginia, so, no. But is it even possible that there are other Republicans that I think are secure that aren’t? Could Senator Cramer (R-ND) lose to Katrina Christiansen (D-ND), for example?
You’d think I’d stop here, but I’m reminded of something Professor Richardson wrote recently about an election about a century back. I very much regret to say I can’t find the entry, but its basics was about an election in which the Republicans, controlled and populated by businessmen, were convinced they would win an election in both branches, and their loss was so brutal that the party went through a reset. They hadn’t seen it coming because they were disconnected from society, only talking to themselves.
I see the same thing here: A Republican Party, notorious for living and talking in an epistemic bubble, meaning no outside ideas or thoughts ingested, analyzed, and respected, thinks it is going to win, ignoring polls (“Every cycle, there’s one idiotic survey“) and opposing arguments while clinging to their quasi-religious tenets of Taxes are bad! and Regulations are bad! and, critically, Abortion is bad!
That last one is the biggest blunder.
The funny thing is that they’ve had plenty of warning, and don’t seem to have picked up on it. I wrote about this here. Americans have had enough, and it may be shaping up into a blue tsunami that sweeps Republicans out of power and discredits all those groups I mentioned above. Trump and his minions may have, en masse, so sickened the voters, that even those that are normally willing to vote Republican so long as they don’t have to do research, have had enough of the negative, even nightmarish, messages.
We may be at a historical inflection point.
Or I could be wrong. But I’m expecting a very interesting Tuesday night and Wednesday.
Oh, You Do Natter On!
Thanks. On to the red meat.
I’m not planning to quote a bunch of polls here. Sure, The New York Times/Siena College (3.0) dropped another collection of polls, as did AtlasIntel (2.7). Tell ya what, I’ll list the surprises, and then move on to the news.
- Morning Consult (1.9) gives Ohio challenger Bernie Moreno (R-OH) a one point lead over Senator Brown (D-OH), 47%-46%. This is a surprise because I take Morning Consult to be more liberal than the general run of pollsters.
Yeah, that’s it. There are plenty of polls, but no real surprises, so why burden you with numbers this late in the game? Here’s the news I’ve run across.
- Montana challenger Tim Sheehy (R-MT) had an interview:
Tim Sheehy, the Montana Republican nominee for Senate, said in an interview with former Fox News host Megyn Kelly that there are no medical records that would prove he did not accidentally shoot himself in the arm in Glacier National Park in 2015. [WaPo]
Kelly pronounced herself confused, and so might be Montana voters. Why did he do this interview, though?
I turned this post into a rant. No apologies.
