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Tie Game: WaPo’s Polls and Maggie’s Misinformation

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According to the calendar, there is exactly a month left to the 2024 campaign.

According to math, Donald Trump has less than 5% of his campaign left (31 of 721 days).

Kamala Harris has 28% of her campaign left (31 of 107 days).

The timing is a point raised in this NBC story, which describes that, after having taken the last 76 days to introduce the Vice President to voters, the campaign now plans to ratchet up negative advertising about how unfit Trump is to be President.

Leaning more heavily into negative campaigning is a strategic shift for Harris. While she has routinely been critical of Trump since becoming a candidate in July, and before that as President Joe Biden’s running mate, much of her campaign’s focus has been on defining her and explaining her record to voters.

Harris campaign officials said they intend to continue laying out her policy positions, background and plans if she were to win the presidency — and increasing negative messaging is oftentimes a natural evolution in a presidential campaign as the candidates make their closing arguments.

But emphasizing what Harris campaign officials view as Trump’s major vulnerabilities is seen as possibly one of the only ways to finally win over some voters who haven’t made up their mind in a static race that Democrats want to push in their direction.

[snip]

Harris campaign officials noted that, with less than four months as a candidate, she had to compress what typically would have been a longer introduction of herself before moving more negative messaging to help persuade and turn out voters.

Trump has been running almost entirely negative advertising about Harris for months. She can now, finally, just 76 days into her campaign, start focusing more on how unfit he is.

That’s one of the realities of running a 107 day campaign against a guy who has campaigned for the decade after his reality TV career started to go south. The two candidates are, and have always been, running at different paces.

CNN has a pretty good wrap-up of what’s coming in the next month, broken down into the following sections:

  • Where they’re spending money
  • Turnout
  • Campaign surrogates
  • Improving economy
  • Impact of Hurricane Helene on voting
  • International developments
  • Trump’s attempts to cheat again
  • How to register

WaPo and NYT, however, are having a harder time contemplating what comes next.

WaPo’s story asks whether all the money Harris is spending will make a difference. It has six paragraphs (including the first and last) plus a nifty graphic that focus on polling showing Harris’ monetary advantage has not yet made a difference. It has seven paragraphs, plus another nifty graphic, on advertising, though doesn’t mention the strategic shift that NBC reports.

Yet it takes 22 paragraphs (of around 35) before WaPo gets around to the thing that may make the difference in a race that polls show is a statistically tied race: Turnout.

On this score, Harris’s aides believe Trump has a higher hill to climb, as the political realignment of the last decade has allowed Democrats to make inroads among more habitual voters. That is one of the reasons Democrats believe they outperformed expectations in the 2018 and 2022 midterm elections.

“Trump specifically has an electorate that requires a big campaign in some ways. Part of that is because a lot of the people they need to get are sporadic voters,” said a senior Harris strategist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal data. “They are definitionally harder to reach.”

Trump’s aides, for their part, argue that Harris is the one with the turnout problem.

“They better hope they have a ground game, because they’ve got hundreds of thousands of voters in every single swing state who haven’t cast a vote since the 2020 election in any election and they’re not getting a mail ballot this time,” Blair said.

The Harris campaign claimed in late September to have 330 offices and more than 2,400 staff. They completed 25,000 weekend volunteer shifts on the final weekend of last month, contacting over 1 million voters over three days and completed the 100,000th event of the campaign. Blair said the Trump campaign has more than 300 “Trump Force 47” offices for hundreds of paid staffers. The Trump campaign also claims to have 30,000 highly trained volunteer captains, in addition to other volunteers.

It takes several more paragraphs for WaPo to describe Republicans in three states expressing some concern about field, a central point of Tim Alberta’s profile of the campaign before Biden dropped out, which Hugo Lowell has been describing for weeks, and which Josh Marshal has turned to more recently.

What he has seen from the campaign, he said, is signing up some volunteers to recruit others. “I still think Trump has a slight edge here, so I don’t know if there’s a great deal of concern, but I think it is really close,” Hall said. He said the resource disparity on spending, and the ground game concerns, still give him some pause about the outcome.

There are also concerns in Michigan, three prominent Republicans said, at a lack of volunteers and organization from the Trump campaign. In Arizona, GOP Chairwoman Gina Swoboda has raised concerns privately, but she said in a statement she is now confident.

No one knows how this will turn out. But if the polls really are close to neck-and-neck (something very much in question, for a number of reasons) what will determine the election will be who gets a larger share of their seemingly same number of supporters to the polls. It’s not the polls that matter, it’s the field operation, because voting matters, not polling.

NYT’s version of the same story at least gets that part of the equation correct.

With polling averages showing all seven battleground states nearly tied, many Democrats believe their biggest advantage may be an extensive ground game operation that their party has spent more than a year building across the country.

But it parrots Trump’s claim (Maggie is on the byline) that Bibi Netanyahu’s belligerence and the aftermath of Hurricane Helene will win the race for him.

Mr. Trump’s campaign thinks that recent events — the escalating conflict in the Middle East and deadly hurricanes that have killed more than 200 people across the Southeast — will give them an edge in the final weeks.

[snip]

In contrast, Trump aides see recent events as reinforcing their central campaign message that Ms. Harris is unprepared, weak and incapable of restoring the sense of calm that the Biden administration promised when elected four years ago.

Again, Maggie is on the byline. Perhaps that’s why NYT doesn’t bother to ask — or even point out — that GOP governors throughout the affected region have had high praise for the response of the Biden-Harris team. How would a very competent, bipartisan response to a catastrophe that affected two key swing states hurt Harris, a journalist might ask?

The answer is that Trump and his flunkies have shamelessly used the disaster to spread disinformation, so much so that local conservative officials are begging national right wingers to stop making things more difficult, something CNN (among other outlets, including local ones) has covered. This should be a comment about Trump’s plan to use disinformation; it’s not.

Perhaps relatedly, in the third paragraph of this story, NYT explains why Hillary’s superior financial and turnout advantages in 2016 didn’t result in victory … without mentioning that NYT (as well as a bunch of other outlets) did the work of Russian spies by spending the last month of the campaign talking about John Podesta’s risotto recipe.

In some ways, the two approaches mirror the final days of the 2016 race, when Hillary Clinton’s campaign boasted about a massive, data-driven field organization while Mr. Trump pressed a national message based on stoking anti-immigrant sentiment and improving the economy with a relatively meager staff and almost no field operation in the key states. Mr. Trump, of course, prevailed, helped by the F.B.I. director’s reopening of an inquiry into the Democratic nominee’s emails.

It’s one thing to pretend, as Joe Kahn is, that NYT is not publishing the documents Iran stole because they’re less newsworthy than Hillary’s discussions, years before 2016 but years after 2008, of how she might run in 2016. It’s another thing to simply ignore how useful NYT was to Russian spies in 2016, to pretend that didn’t also weigh down Hillary’s campaign as she tried to defeat ongoing hacks and a flood of disinformation about stolen private emails.

Meanwhile, yet another story bylined by Reid Epstein that insists views on the economy will be determinative doesn’t mention that Trump’s lead on the issue is narrowing, and in at least one poll, has disappeared.

Republicans acknowledge they are being outspent on television and out-organized on the ground in the key states — yet they say Mr. Trump’s strength on the economy and immigration may be enough for him to overcome those structural deficits.

Surveys indicate that Republicans still hold an advantage on economic issues, even as inflation slows, gas prices drop and the Federal Reserve slashes interest rates for the first time in four years. Public opinion on immigration has also swung to the right during the Biden administration, with more Americans saying they support tougher enforcement measures to crack down on illegal immigration.

If it’s true, Reid, that whoever polls better on this wins, shouldn’t you start reporting that polling on this is narrowing?

NYT gets that field may matter. Then it serves as a vehicle for or espouses garbage claims.

Kamala Harris still has 28% of her campaign left to get voters to the polls; even as he’s falling behind on field, Trump has a fraction of that. Which may be why he’s selling the con that that a disaster relief effort that puts all of Trump’s to shame would reflect badly on Harris.

Again, there’s a lot of good reporting linked in this post. Check out CNN. Read the pieces on Republicans fighting back against Republican disinformation. Read Marshall’s assessment of whether Trump’s odd approach to field might work. Or consider the implication of the NBC piece: For some very important reasons dictated by the brevity of her campaign, Harris had to hold off on certain things that you might have seen earlier in a different campaign.

Reid Epstein’s Economic Polling Anxiety

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NYT’s Reid Epstein, who fairly routinely says things that make it clear he misunderstands what he’s watching, recently substantiated a whine that Kamala Harris doesn’t do enough interviews by claiming that Trump faces challenging questions at those things he labels press conferences.

Mr. Trump has, however, held three recent televised news conferences with the mainstream reporters covering his campaign, who posed challenging questions on numerous fronts.

Today, Epstein’s out with a complaint that Kamala Harris’ interview with Stephanie Ruhle was a softball interview with a friendly interviewer. His first piece of evidence to substantiate his complaint is that rather than answering a question about why Trump polls better than her on the economy, Harris instead, “blasted Mr. Trump’s record.”

The MSNBC host’s second was about why voters tend to tell pollsters that Mr. Trump is better equipped to handle the economy.

Ms. Harris responded to the fairly basic and predictable questions with roundabout responses that did not provide a substantive answer.

Instead of offering any explanation for why Mr. Trump polls better on the economy — a matter that has vexed Democrats as President Biden has overseen a steadily improving economy — Ms. Harris instead blasted Mr. Trump’s record. She blamed him for a loss of manufacturing and autoworker jobs and said his tariff proposals would serve as an added sales tax on American consumers.

It was a friendly interview! But it was also more substantive than the press conferences that Epstein has fooled himself into believing presented challenging questions. And her assertions were factually correct (though WaPo says she misstated the manufacturing job loss).

For example, here’s the answer he’s complaining about:

RUHLE: But, still, polling shows that more — most likely voters still think Donald Trump is better to handle the economy. Why do you think that is?

HARRIS: Well, here’s what I know in terms of the facts.

Donald Trump left us with the worst economy since the Great Depression, when you look at, for example, the employment numbers.

RUHLE: It was during COVID, and employment was so high because we shut down the government, we shut down the country.

HARRIS: Even before the pandemic, he lost manufacturing jobs, by most people’s estimates, at least 200,000. He lost manufacturing plants. Ask the autoworkers how he lost auto plants.

We have grown over 20 new auto plants. He has an agenda. Let’s just deal with it right now going forward, not to mention what happened in the past.

He has an agenda that would include making it more difficult for workers to earn overtime, an agenda that would include cutting off access to small business loans for small businesses, an agenda that includes tariffs to the point that the average working person will spend 20 percent more on everyday necessities and an estimated $4,000 more a year on those everyday necessities, to the point that top economists in our country, from Nobel laureates, to people at Moody’s and Goldman Sachs, have compared my plan with his and said my plan would grow the economy.

His would shrink the economy. Some of them have actually assessed that his plan would increase inflation and invite a recession by the middle of next year. So, the facts remain that Donald Trump has a history of taking care of very rich people.

And I’m not mad at anybody for being rich, but they should pay their fair share — but tax cuts for the billionaires and the top corporations in our country, and then not really paying much attention to middle-class families. My perspective on the economy is, when you grow the middle class, America’s economy is stronger.

And there’s empirical evidence to prove my point correct.

Harris listed:

  • The decline of manufacturing jobs under Trump
  • The historic rise of manufacturing jobs under Joe Biden
  • Biden’s investment in the auto industry
  • Several Project 2025 policies that would hurt small businesses
  • Trump’s proposed tariffs, which even GOP economists loathe
  • Her plan to make taxes more fair

Ruhle asked a horserace question (and challenged Harris on the cause of the collapse of the economy under Trump), and Harris responded by listing a bunch of policies — those enacted under Biden, those she plans to do if elected, and those Trump has proposed — distinguishing her from Trump.

Later in the interview, she would observe that Trump is just not very serious on policy issues, in the kind of comment that drives Trump nuts and reassures certain kinds of voters who value overt strength. (I keep wondering whether I’m allowed to say Madam Vice President is dick-wagging, but this is language that resonates with a certain kind of often male voter.)

I — frankly, I’m going to — and I say this in all sincerity. He’s just not very serious about how he thinks about some of these issues. And one must be serious and have a plan, and a real plan, that’s not just about some talking point ending in an exclamation at a political rally, but actually putting the thought into, what will be the return on the investment, what will be the economic impact on everyday people?

Never mind that Harris made a bunch of factual claims that almost never get covered at NYT. In an interview in Pittsburgh, she addressed manufacturing (and her opposition to Nippon Steel buying the local plant in Pittsburgh). That’s transparently obvious smart politics.

She spoke to voters, not Reid Epstein. She told a story about the economy, and poor Epstein is sad she didn’t tell a story about polling. She did what good politicians do: Answer the question that voters care about, not the one that horserace journalists care about.

Meanwhile, Epstein’s colleague Michael Gold wrote another of his sanewashing posts on Trump the other day, with the headline, “Trump Pitches ‘New American Industrialism’ and Luring Foreign Manufacturing.”

Don’t get me wrong: How voters view Harris on the economy is important. How voters view a candidate on their most important issue often predicts the winner. As Gallup explained in a piece arguing that most measures of the election favor Republicans, the party that does better on the issue voters view as most important almost always wins the election.

This measure has been highly predictive of election outcomes in Gallup trends dating back to 1948. The party rated as better at handling the most important problem has won all but three presidential elections since that year. The question was not asked in 2000, and the two parties tied in 1980, when inflation was the top issue. The only time the measure was out of sync with the outcome was in 1948, when Americans believed the Republican Party was better able to handle the most important problem (international issues) but returned Democratic incumbent Harry Truman to office.

Gallup rolled this out with a recent poll showing that the economy remains the most important issue — though their poll results are suspect, given that just 4% of respondents said abortion was their most important issue (it’s probably twice that).

At the end, Gallup suggests that voters will figure out they don’t like Democrats. Gallup doesn’t consider that maybe its poll shows way too many voters rate immigration most important and far too few rate abortion as such.

Nevertheless, the two major party presidential candidates have similar favorable ratings in Gallup’s September poll, echoing presidential preference polls that suggest a neck-and-neck race between Trump and Harris.

It is possible that Americans’ voter preferences may align better with their views of the state of the nation between now and Election Day. Trump led in most presidential preference polls this summer when Biden was the presumptive Democratic nominee and Americans’ unhappiness was focused on the incumbent president. The election results will reveal the extent to which Harris, the incumbent vice president, is saddled with Americans’ frustrations with the current administration or is able to rise above those.

That is, Gallup is sure the voters are wrong, not its own polling.

This is probably a good time to recommend Rick Perlstein’s review of W. Joseph Campbell’s Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in U.S. Presidential Elections, which describes how serially unreliable presidential polling is.

But back to Reid Epstein, who judges Vice President Harris as a weak candidate because she’s speaking to voters, not Reid Epstein.

Polls, from all pollsters, generally show this to be a tight race, with results varying from Trump leading by one to Harris leading by seven.

Where there’s an interesting variation is on just this issue: how voters say the two candidates are doing on the economy.

NYT’s own poll — which is one of two most pessimistic for Harris — shows a significant 13% gap, about where things stood this summer.

But as WaPo reported yesterday, other polls show something different going on: They show that Harris is cutting into Trump’s lead on the economy.

Although voters still favor former president Donald Trump over Harris on handling the economy, his advantage has dropped dramatically in recent weeks. Trump now averages a six-percentage-point edge on the economy, compared with a 12-point lead against President Joe Biden earlier this year, according to an analysis of five polls that measured voters’ opinions before and after Biden dropped out.

A Fox News poll this month, for example, found that 51 percent of registered voters favor Trump on the economy, compared with 46 percent who favor Harris. That’s compared with a 15-point advantage Trump had over Biden in March. Other recent polls — by ABC-Ipsos, NPR-PBS NewsHour-Marist, USA Today-Suffolk University and Quinnipiac University — show similar shifts.

WaPo credits overall economic trends and Kamala’s fresh face on these issues.

Underlying that sea change, analysts say, is the fact that Americans are feeling better about the economy. Prices are stabilizing, interest rates are coming down and wages are rising faster than inflation. At the same time, voters seem to view Harris as a clean slate, unburdened by the rapid run-up in prices that has plagued Biden for much of his presidency.

Plus, political strategists say, she has struck a decidedly different tone on the issue. Unlike Biden, who spent a lot of time trying to convince Americans that the underlying economy was great, Harris has come across as more sympathetic to their everyday struggles. Her economic policies — including a slate of new proposals rolling out this week — have focused on issues important to middle-class voters, including affordable health care, housing and childcare. Harris is scheduled to speak on the economy Wednesday in Pittsburgh.

“She’s been very aggressive about laying out specifics, and that’s what people want,” said Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster. “It also helps that she’s a new face with a new set of life experiences, so people don’t assume her policies will be the same as Biden’s. And on top of that, inflation is abating. The fact that prices have stabilized and seem more predictable — that goes a long way.”

I suspect that it’s not just that Harris has approached this differently, it’s also that her own approval ratings have increased. Voters’ “feels” about Harris have dramatically improved, and as a result, they trust the facts she’s providing about the economy.

Those may be related. That is, voters may like her economic empathy, they may like her emphasis on being raised middle class that jaded reporters like Epstein find shallow.

Whatever it is, a number of polls are showing two key trends: Harris’ approvals are going up, dramatically (Biden’s are inching up), and more voters are beginning to prefer her on the economy.

They may well be showing that Harris’ strategy, including a media strategy that speaks to voters not horserace journalists, that emphasizes both her economic empathy and her wonkiness, is working — that no matter how much Epstein whines, Harris has a better handle on what to do about polls showing voters prefer Trump by shrinking margins on the economy than Epstein does.

It’s like the NYT story on Tim Walz’ trip to Erie, a swing county in the most important state, which twice bitched that Walz didn’t answer questions about a stupid Trump attack, that some of Walz’ cousins prefer Trump.

Mr. Walz also frustrated a handful of reporters as he refused to answer shouted questions.

[snip]

Mr. Walz ignored shouted questions from reporters about news articles that surfaced Wednesday over his own distant Republican relatives pledging to vote for Mr. Trump. But at his rally in Erie, he seemed to nod at those reports as he tied Mr. Trump to a set of conservative policies he described as harmful to democracy, women, workers and the middle class.

“So you tell your relatives because, look, we all got them — we know we got to keep talking to them — he said what he would do,” Mr. Walz said of Mr. Trump. “And I believe him.”

Epstein claims to care about voters’ opinion on the economy, but he’s so wrapped up in making himself the story that he ignored Harris’ effort — an effort that seems to be having some effect — moving voters’ opinion about the economy.

Harris is telling the story that Epstein refuses to.

That is, she’s doing her job.

This really does seem to be the problem with the NYT this year — and by no means just with Epstein. NYT wants the story to validate the horserace as horserace, it wants to validate a self-imagined measure of their own savviness, rather than focus on the voters’ needs and preferences. Epstein quite literally complained that Harris used her opportunity to do something about her (shrinking) deficit in polling on the economy, rather than indulging his needs by emphasizing it.

As Harris says, her mother taught her never to let others tell her who she is, but to show people who she is.

Reid Epstein, whom the NYT pays to cover Harris’ campaign full time, apparently missed that bit.

Michael Shear and Reid Epstein Feign Stupidity about Trump’s Decade-Long Pitch for Authoritarianism

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Here’s what the NYT digital front page looks like for me this morning.

It features Kamala Harris’ rather unremarkable interview with CNN (part one, part two, part three) as prominently as CNN itself (other political outlets are more focused on an upcoming Brian Kemp decision on how Georgia’s election will be run, Trump’s attempt to flip-flop on abortion, and yet another attempt from Trump to delay his sentence in his New York case).

Whatever.

After demanding it for a month, I get that some outlets need to claim this interview was more useful than it was.

But the remarkable thing about NYT’s focus on it is they’ve written two stories substantially about the same thing: The NYT’s own month-long campaign to drive Joe Biden from the race.

Yet in adopting that focus, Reid Epstein and Michael Shear ignored the logic that their own outlet adopted for such an unrelenting push to oust Biden, and in the process, covered up the threat Trump poses to democracy.

Of the seven things Epstein took away from the interview, the first was an overstatement of the degree to which Kamala was “hugging” Biden’s legacy versus the degree to which (for example, on fracking) she will make concessions if it achieves an overall policy goal.

Nevertheless, Epstein is right that Harris was better able to explain the success of Biden’s policies, one of two reasons I was pretty sure, from the start, swapping Harris for Biden would be an improvement, justifying the swap.

As it turns out, Ms. Harris is a better salesperson for Mr. Biden’s accomplishments and defender of his record than he ever was. Perhaps that’s little surprise, given the president’s diminished political skills and trouble speaking coherently in recent years.

Having thus maligned Biden, Epstein then claimed that Harris wants to turn the page on both Biden and Trump. He focused on Harris’ depiction of her opponent not by name, but time period — the last decade — and quipped (I’m sure Epstein thinks this is clever!) that Biden has been prominent over the last decade and a half (treating the two years between when Biden reacted strongly to Charlottesville and the time he actually announced as part of his candidacy).

… but wants to turn the page on him as well as Trump.

What Ms. Harris did do was offer herself up as a continuation of Mr. Biden’s leadership even as she distanced herself from him.

Asked by Ms. Bash if she had any regrets about defending Mr. Biden’s fitness for office and ability to serve a second term, Ms. Harris said she did not and praised the president.

Then, in the next breath, she deftly put both him and Mr. Trump in the rearview mirror.

“I am so proud to have served as vice president to Joe Biden,” she said. “I’m so proud to be running with Tim Walz for president of the United States and to bring America what I believe the American people deserve, which is a new way forward, and turn the page on the last decade of what I believe has been contrary to where the spirit of our country really lies.”

Mr. Biden, of course, has been either president, vice president or a leading candidate for president for most of the last 15 years.

Then Epstein returned to it in his commendation for the boring interview, suggesting that Bash didn’t demean Biden as much as Epstein — or rather, “Republican critics” — want.

Republican critics of Ms. Harris may have wished for a harsher grilling — or for more direct questions about how she felt about Mr. Biden’s aptitude and acuity — but Ms. Bash pressed the vice president when necessary.

Shear did something similar.

His entire post focused on how Kamala answered Dana Bash’s question (three minutes into the third part) of whether the Vice President regretted supporting Biden until he dropped out.

Vice President Kamala Harris said on Thursday that she did not regret defending President Biden against claims that he had declined mentally, saying that she believes he has the “intelligence, the commitment and the judgment and disposition” Americans expect from their president.

“No, not at all. Not at all,” the vice president said when asked if she regretted saying Mr. Biden was “extraordinarily strong” in the moments following the disastrous debate in June that led him to abandon his bid for re-election a month later.

Shear did not, as Epstein did, feign confusion about what Harris meant when she adopted that “last decade” moniker. He explained — perhaps for Epstein’s benefit? — that it was a reference to Trump.

Instead, he misrepresented what she was doing with Biden, temporally, claiming that “she talked about Mr. Biden mostly in the past tense[,] with a kind of nostalgia.”

But she talked about Mr. Biden mostly in the past tense — fondly, but with a kind of nostalgia that made it clear that he no longer represents the future of the country that she hopes to be leading in January.

[snip]

“History is going to show,” she said, “not only has Joe Biden led an administration that has achieved those extraordinary successes, but the character of the man is one that he has been in his life and career, including as a president, quite selfless and puts the American people first.”

Her reminiscing about Mr. Biden’s place in history — she said it was “one of the greatest honors of my career” to serve with him — came just after she said she was determined to “turn the page” on a decade of American politics that has not been good for the country.

“Of course, the last three and a half years has been part of your administration,” Ms. Bash reminded the vice president.

Ms. Harris said she was talking about “an era that started about a decade ago,” an apparent reference to the beginning of former President Donald J. Trump’s first campaign for the White House in 2015. She said the era represented a “warped” idea that “the strength of a leader is based on who you beat down.”

That was clearly directed at Mr. Trump, and she suggested that the warped era would continue if he returned to the White House next year. [my emphasis]

Now, in point of fact, both men misrepresented how the Vice President used that “decade” moniker. She actually used it twice. Once, the instance they focused on, in the last third of the interview, which I’ll get to.

But she also used it in response to Bash’s very first question, the dumb “what would you do on Day One” question that TV pundits love.

I think sadly, in the last decade, we have had in the former president someone who has really been pushing an agenda and an environment that is about diminishing the character and strength of who we are as Americans, really, and I think people are ready to turn the page on that. [My emphasis; after this, Bash snapped back, repeating the, “what would you do on Day One” question.]

That is, Harris defined what she meant by “the last decade” in what was probably her fifth sentence in the interview (possibly even fourth — the woman may use longer sentences than me!), after introducing a focus on the middle class and a return to hope. From her very first response, Harris tied the way Trump (whom she never named) has diminished America to some kind of effect it might have on the middle class.

And the questions that followed that one were focused on policy, which Harris always addressed, whether in the present tense or past, in her role as Vice President. “Well first of all, we had to recover, as an economy,” Harris explained why she (and Biden) had not implemented further steps she’d like to take to help the middle class. “That’s good work,” Kamala boasted, after listing a bunch of Biden’s economic accomplishments. “There’s more to do, but that’s good work.”

In fact, Kamala’s answer to the question NYT dedicated much of two columns on, whether she regretted defending President Biden after he bombed the debate, was in the present tense.

Harris: I have served with President Biden for almost four years now and I’ll tell you it’s one of the greatest honors of my career. Truly. He cares so deeply about the American people. He is so smart and loyal to the American people. And I have spent hours and hours with him, be it in the Oval Office or the Situation Room. He has the intelligence, the commitment, and the judgment, and disposition that I think the American people rightly deserve in their President. By contrast, the former President has none of that. And so, one, I am so proud to have served as Vice President to Joe Biden. And two, I am so proud to be running with Tim Walz for President of the United States, and to bring America what I believe the American people deserve, which is a new way forward and turn the page on the last decade of what I believe has been contrary to where the spirit of our country really lies. [my emphasis]

In a question implicitly about how successful she has been thus far, in the race, Kamala defined who Biden is, present tense, and then explicitly contrasted that to Trump. Biden has, present tense, the intelligence, commitment, judgment, and disposition to be President, and Trump has, present tense, none of that. That’s what she used to springboard from her tenure as Vice President into her candidacy with Walz, a way to turn the page on the last decade that has been contrary to the spirit of the country.

Bash, like Epstein, tried to make this a gotcha, which is when Kamala explained for the second time what she was talking about.

Bash: The last decade — of course, the last three and a half years has been part of your Administration.

Harris: I’m talking about an era that started about a decade ago where there is some suggestion — warped, I believe it to be — that, the measure of the strength of a leader is based on who you beat down, instead of where I believe most Americans are, which is to believe that the true measure of the strength of a leader is based on who you lift up. That’s what’s at stake as much as any other detail that we could discuss in this election. [my emphasis]

But then Harris returned to what she said in that very first question: When she says “last decade” as stand-in for the opponent she won’t name, she means that a different vision of leadership is as important as any of the policy questions.

Where things turn to a past tense in which Harris does not presume herself to have participated — the one that Shear quotes to support his claim that “she talked about Mr. Biden mostly in the past tense” — came in response to her telling of how Biden told her he was going to drop out, which led her to think about how history — people in the future — will regard Joe Biden and the decision he was making, placing this past tense as past to some future time when pundits finally get their heads out of their asses.

The VP told the story: she was interrupted while making extra bacon for one of her grand nieces by a call from Joe Biden. Biden told her his decision, and, “I asked him, are you sure. And he said, yes. And that’s how I learned about it.”

The past tense Shear quoted came in response to a follow-up.

Bash had asked, and pressed a second time, whether Biden offered to endorse Harris right away. Harris responded that Biden was very clear he was going to support her (Kamala didn’t actually answer about the endorsement, but then they may have had earlier conversations), but that that wasn’t her first priority.

My first thought was not about me, to be honest with you. My first thought was about him, to be honest.

She then launched on a reflection about what, “I think history is going to show” about Joe Biden’s presidency, describing it as transformative economically, bringing back American alliances. Then she addressed “the character of the man.”

This is a question that goes back to one of two reasons Biden offered in February why he remained in the race: because he was really good at being President. The other (as I reviewed the day after the debate) was that he believed, in February, he had the best shot at beating Trump.

On July 21 — on the day that Biden was still scrambling to make the prisoner exchange with Russia even as NYT pundits were falsely reporting he was totally isolated — Biden was still very good at being President. With the significant exception of Gaza, he may still be. By that point on July 21, though, it had become clear that Harris is better able to beat Trump. As suggested by Epstein’s begrudging admission that when Kamala lays out Biden’s economic accomplishments, they look pretty good, part of that is defending the things the Biden Administration did to recover from the mistakes Trump made.

But part of it is offering a contrast with Trump. Which, because Harris apparently chose not to name her opponent and not to let silly pundits demand a response to Trump’s latest attention-getting provocation, as Bash did with a question about Trump’s presumption to define Harris’ race, the Vice President is referring to as a last decade. She did it in response to the first question, and she did it a second time in response to the question NYT chose to write about twice.

This is actually a pretty subtle way to do this. Obviously, Harris has befuddled two men who imagine themselves experts.

In their confusion about it, though, Epstein and Shear make a similar mistake to the one their colleague Shane Goldmacher did when he described that Kamala was running as a change candidate. They did so, even though Goldmacher himself referred to what Kamala was running against as Trump’s “decade”-long “bulldozing approach” advocating for “urgent upheaval.”

[S]o much of Trump’s lasting influence is about his lasting attack on rule of law. The insistence that this is about incumbency obscures the real threat Trump poses to democracy, whether or not he’s president.

Take this crazy Goldmacher paragraph.

For nearly a decade, Mr. Trump’s bulldozing approach has been premised on the idea that the nation was staring into an abyss and only urgent upheaval could save the country. The question for Ms. Harris is whether she can frame Democrats keeping power in 2024 as a break from that dark and divisive era.

It is true that Trump has been claiming that “only urgent upheaval could save the country.” But that was a fascist trope. It wasn’t true and even if it were, none of the policies Trump pushed would do anything but enrich people like him. Journalism should do more than observe that he made those false claims; it should explain why they’re false.

In the very next sentence, though, Goldmacher asserts that the challenge for Kamala (again adopting the dumb poll-driven assumption that she’ll only win if she is the change candidate) is by offering, “a break from that dark and divisive era.” What “era”? By reference, Goldmacher must mean that the near-decade in which Trump has told fascist lies is the “dark and divisive era” (though Trump’s racist birtherism started long before that). But it’s not an era. It’s a fascist belief, a means of exercising power, a means of dehumanizing your political opponents, one that had huge influence, but one that with the exception of the political violence it fostered, only held sway over a minority of the country (albeit a large one).

All three of these men — Goldmacher with his treatment of Trump’s tropes about America as an era, Epstein with his confusion about Harris’ (second) reference to a decade, and Shear’s invention of past tense usage that doesn’t exist — struggle because they’re viewing this exclusively about policy, even though Harris described that “the true measure of the strength of a leader” is “what’s at stake as much as any other detail that we could discuss in this election.”

As I noted in the earlier post, when people flatten this out into policies and incumbency, they ignore the ongoing threat that Trump poses to democracy and Kamala’s vision of how to defeat it.

Kamala is running on democracy just as much as Biden did in 2020. It just looks different, because she has more successfully wrapped it in a bipartisan flag. Even there, there’s real continuity (don’t forget that one of Biden’s most important speeches about democracy in 2022, one that had a real impact on the election, was at Independence Hall).

Largely enabled by Trump’s ongoing effect — again, especially on Choice — Kamala has just found a way to make democracy matter more personally, more viscerally.

Kamala is not eschewing the incumbency she has Vice President. On the contrary, she is running on a continuation and expansion of Joe Biden’s successful policies (even if journalists are missing that). And she is running, just as Biden did, on defeating both Trump’s electoral bid but also the threat he poses to democracy itself.

This is precisely why the NYT said the stakes on Biden dropping out were so high as it kicked off a relentless campaign to force Biden out: because, first, Donald Trump was a menace, and second, Biden didn’t have what it takes to hold Trump accountable.

Donald Trump has proved himself to be a significant jeopardy to that democracy — an erratic and self-interested figure unworthy of the public trust. He systematically attempted to undermine the integrity of elections. His supporters have described, publicly, a 2025 agenda that would give him the power to carry out the most extreme of his promises and threats. If he is returned to office, he has vowed to be a different kind of president, unrestrained by the checks on power built into the American political system.

[snip]

He struggled to respond to Mr. Trump’s provocations. He struggled to hold Mr. Trump accountable for his lies, his failures and his chilling plans. More than once, he struggled to make it to the end of a sentence.

These self-imagined pros apparently haven’t thought through how this all works. Epstein, at least, is still looking for his pound of flesh, for further humiliation for Joe Biden. The others are ignoring the two tasks: win an election, and reinvigorate an American dream that — because doing so would prove that democracy can deliver for the middle class — proves the value of democracy.

Kamala Harris is, in no way, disavowing Joe Biden. Rather, even as she’s pitching their joint policy success, she’s renewing the effort to package an American exceptionalism that can defeat Trump’s American carnage.

In 2020, Joe Biden, a member of the Silent Generation, offered a defense of democracy as democracy, which was enough for people who remember fascism and actual communism. In an era when many have forgotten that history and lost faith in democracy, GenX Kamala Harris has to do something more: She has to sell democracy, which Trump has been discrediting for a decade, itself.