The Outsider Perspective Issue 406 | The Beltway Outsiders

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Good Friday Morning! Except to the Democratic National Convention, which started Thursday, saying there would be a “big guest” during the convention in one of the blank spots. TMZ broke the news that Beyonce was going to be the special guest. The Hollywood Reporter later responded, saying that wasn’t happening and she was never scheduled to be at the convention.

The first shocking part of this is that TMZ was wrong. When TMZ reported on it, I assumed it was a done deal. As I’m going to print, TMZ has not backpedaled despite the convention being over.

Here is a fun conspiracy theory: I think something happened. The most likely scenarios: Beyonce wanted to sing at the DNC, but they cut her out last minute or never invited/planned for. her, and she responded with the “I was never performing line.” Or, this was a head-fake from Democrats where they were trying to drive up attention on the event spinning up fake rumors. We won’t know until the campaign books come out later – but I suspect there’s more than meets the eye here. I wouldn’t expect TMZ to miss this kind of story.

With the conventions over, I will go over polling for both candidates, and give you a layout of where things stand and where we’re headed in September – links to follow.

Quick Hits:

Here’s a weird thing: the abnormally quiet Atlantic hurricane season. September is the peak of hurricane season, and outside Ernesto, with its impacts on Bermuda and rip tides along the east coast, we’re about to leave August with nothing else. This week last season, there were multiple active storms. Everyone expects September to pick back up. The season kicked off hot with Hurricane Beryl but has quieted down considerably. Long-term models point to the middle of September as the next hot point.
There’s a fun story floating around the college football world about how Nick Saban only hired Lane Kiffin because his agent, the legendary Jimmy Sexton, told Saban it was a good hire. A new book reveals that Saban called Sexton livid about hiring Kiffin and threatened to fire Sexton over the decision. That was one fun angle to the story. Josh Pate told an equally entertaining story about how he watched Kiffin and Sexton field job offers after the SEC Championship during Kiffin’s last season with Bama. After winning that game, Saban and the entire Alabama squad left Kiffin in the stadium because he was talking on the phone with Sexton by his side. Saban saw everything. Pate even shared a photo of the events because he stood there watching it all go down. Saban ended up firing Kiffin before the National Championship game.
RFK Jr. filed paperwork to drop out of the presidential race in Arizona. The big questions is who he endorses and what impact that has in the swing states. It’s hard to analyze this story until we know more. But it’s a given he’s dropping out now, and with him, 3rd party possibilities in this race will plummet. Democrats are locked in an intense legal battle in Wisconsin to kick Jill Stein and the Green Party off the ballot in November.

Where you can find me this week

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Kamala Harris Returns To Flip-Flopping – Conservative Institute

Dr. Leonard Hayflick (1928 – 2024) And The Mercy Of Death – Conservative Institute

Why Did 818,000 Jobs Vanish? The Biden-Harris Administration Has No Idea – Conservative Institute

The End Of The Democratic Convention And Beginning Of The Real Race

We’re finally at the end of the Democratic Convention. Both parties are locked into their candidates, and we’re a few weeks from Labor Day. This point is usually when the real campaign begins for both sides. The last month has been insane. On July 21, Biden dropped out, just a week after the assassination attempt on Trump.

As crazy as everything has been, the race is sitting about where I thought it’d be when Harris replaced Biden. The pro-Harris media blitz has raised her to the top of the ticket and improved her favorability ratings with voters. She’s sitting with a +1.7-point lead in the RealClearPolitics average.

What’s happened?

We’ve witnessed less about Trump losing ground than Harris regaining Biden’s lost ground. Biden was getting hammered in polls, sometimes barely hitting 40% in them, with RFK Jr. eating up a significant portion of the Democratic vote. No one in the press was enthused about Biden, and there were rumblings about kicking him out going back to November 2023, which I’ve documented here.

When Biden dropped out, Harris was sitting at around 44.8% versus Trump’s 47.9%. She’s now averaging 48.3% to Trump’s 46.6%. The significant gain we’ve seen for Harris is that she’s regained Biden’s lost ground while Trump sits roughly where he’s been for the last several months.

Trump hasn’t lost ground as much as she’s re-established whatever was going to be the Biden coalition this race before Joe imploded. I keep coming back to the comparison between this race and 2016 and 2020, and there’s a red flag there for Democrats.

Kamala Harris is running behind both where Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden at this stage of the race.

August 22, 2016: Clinton held a +5.5 polling lead over Trump.
August 22, 2020: Joe Biden held a +7.6 polling point lead over Trump.
August 22, 2024: Kamala Harris has a +1.7 polling point lead over Trump.
2016 Clinton won the popular vote with +2.1 points over Trump
2020 Biden won the popular vote with +4.5 points

In 2016 and 2020, Trump’s support was low early, before there was a significant swing towards him at the end as Republicans and right-leaning voters came home. In 2024, there’s no evidence of a “shy Trump” voter in the polls. Trump’s support is locked in near what you’d expect on election day.

In 2016, Trump won 46.1% of the popular vote
In 2020, Trump won 46.9% of the popular vote
In 2024, Trump is polling at 46.6% and has hit 47% a few times.

I expect Trump to cross 47% of the popular vote this time around. Can Harris win the popular vote at the margins necessary to shift battleground states? That’s unclear.

In other words, we’re sitting here with razor-thin margins after arguably the greatest pro-Democrat media blitz in U.S. history. I fully expected Harris to have a 3-4 point lead on Trump by this point, but that hasn’t materialized. She’s performing marginally better than Biden. The problem for Democrats is simple: they’ve gotten here by shielding Harris from the press and debates. That ends after this convention.

Harris likely can continue hiding from the press, but she’s already failed to launch policy proposals. When the Washington Post Editorial Board calls your lauded price controls campaign a “gimmick,” you’ve imploded at launch. This has always been the Kamala Harris problem: she’s a great candidate on paper who implodes on contact with reality or exposure to the slightest setback.

Both campaigns are entering these debates with different mindsets. Harris will be instructed not to do anything to lose the race. As funny as it sounds, Harris needs the Biden playbook. Biden’s team was terrified of unscripted moments, and Democrats are doing everything possible to prevent unscripted moments for Harris.

I expect Harris to have one set attack piece prepped for the debate. Harris did this against Joe Biden in the primaries. Her campaign ran the segregated bussing attack on Biden, which got her into second place in those debates, and she faded hard after that. If I were on the Trump team, I’d expect one of those attacks and Harris trying to cruise the rest of the way.

If you’re Trump, you also have to expect Harris to know the questions ahead of time and the order. Donna Brazile did this for Clinton in 2016. One of the moderators for the ABC News debate linked Trump to the KKK during a DNC interview. Given the current tilt of the press, which even by standards of the last decade is ridiculous, you’ve got to plan for these things.

But my assumption moving forward is that barring some big event (impossible to predict), I expect them to be around these polling levels come Election Day. The odds either of them can add to their current position in the polls is slim without some October surprise wrecking the race. If we get one of those events, I’ll adjust expectations accordingly.

If Harris continues running behind Clinton’s 2016 levels, I’d expect her to lose. Nate Silver thinks Harris needs to hit at least +2.5 in the popular vote to win the swing states; my number is closer to 3 – 3.5. Democrats need certain margins to win, and they’re running below that. It seems clear Harris can’t hit Biden’s 2020 numbers, so the question is this: how far can Democrats fall below that number and win?

Furthermore, Can Harris close that gap? That’s unclear. But she may be hitting a polling peak now as the post-convention polls start rolling out. As that starts ebbing, we’ll get a better idea of the race as the first debates start closing in.

Last note: where are voters? The America of 2020 is not the America of 2024. Americans are self-sorting at a rapid pace, moving to places that align with their politics. One culmination of this shift is Ron DeSantis and Republicans capturing Miami-Dade County in 2022. On the other hand, I know several Tennessee liberals who moved to California.

This trend began in 2020 and was still underway in 2022. The jobs market has cooled since then, and with it, the great political migration. We don’t have a clear idea how this impacted the Midwest or other swing states. We only need around 50,000 votes spread across these states to flip results. Small population moves on a political basis can change a lot.

The Republican and Democratic conventions provided a brief reprieve for everyone in politics. September is when the whirlpool starts again. Welcome to the 2024 general election.

Links of the week

No, Mr. President, the Protesters Don’t Have a Point: The masked troublemakers screaming about ‘genocide’ in Gaza are not anti-war. ‘They want Hamas to win.’ – Eli Lake, The Free Press

How Long Can Kamala Harris Avoid the Press? The vice president thinks that joy can get her to the White House. We have our doubts. – The Free Press Editors

Party of COVID-19 Authoritarianism Improbably Rebrands as ‘Party of Freedom’: Democrats campaigning both on their pandemic record and minding your own damn business: Pick one. – Reason

Democrats Unburdened by What They Have Done to Chicago: This is what you get when politics is untethered from governance. – Reason

The Democrats Are Having a Convention About Nothing: ‘This is really just a supremely entertaining infomercial.’ Our man at the DNC reports. – The Free Press

The Democrats’ COVID Amnesia: Keeping schools closed for so long was a mistake, and the Democrats shouldn’t pretend Harris is responsible for opening them. – The Atlantic

In Closed-Door Testimony, Jen Psaki Says She Didn’t ‘Challenge or Question’ Biden-Harris Admin’s Inaccurate Information on Bungled Afghanistan Withdrawal: Press secretary turned MSNBC host tells congressional committee she didn’t investigate information that contradicted her public statements – Washington Free Beacon

I Hate Everyone: Election 2024 has no redeeming features whatsoever. – Charles C. W. Cooke, National Review

Walz Praised Chinese Communism as a System Where ‘Everyone Shares’: As social studies teacher, Walz tells students everyone in China gets free rice – Washington Free Beacon

Washington Primary Points Toward Another Nailbiter – Sean Trende, RealClearPolitics

DNC crowd chants ‘thank Joe,’ but for what, exactly? – Boston Herald Editorial Board