The past 24 hours may have changed everything

| 9:09 am EDT October 17, 2024
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The thing about October surprises is that most elections don’t have one. In fact most presidential general elections get locked into a certain set of parameters and don’t really change much down the stretch. One candidate is ahead by a certain amount in the final few months and it doesn’t usually change. Both candidates have their talking points and don’t deviate much from them. The media has settled on its narratives and decides to just lazily stick with them until election day. But I suppose this election was never quite going to fall in line with most elections.

Just when the 2024 election was starting to truly get stagnant – Kamala Harris ahead by four points and an addled Donald Trump trying to limp the finish line while hoping the polls are wrong – yesterday happened.

You can’t say that yesterday came entirely out of nowhere, given that Trump’s dementia has been spiraling downward for weeks, and given that Trump’s criminal and sexual scandals are never that far beneath the surface. But in the span less than twenty-four hours, three key things took place that might actually move the needle down the stretch.

The first one got the least attention but might ultimately impact the most votes. Trump did a town hall with Univision, and while he didn’t call the whole thing off and listen to music this time, he did something worse. Trump kept taking questions from Hispanic audience members, about topics like “they’re eating the dogs” and January 6th, and each time Trump had an opportunity to do some clean up work he instead further alienated the person asking the question. This was the first time Trump has spoken directly to a Spanish speaking television audience in this election, and he surely served to cost himself a lot of votes in the process. But of course that was just the beginning.

In the time between when Trump filmed his town hall and when it aired, Kamala Harris appeared on Fox News. This wasn’t a surprise, given that she’s been fairly aggressive with these kinds of things. What was a surprise was that host Bret Baier was clearly under instructions to make the interview as ugly as possible (Fox has a habit of soft balling these kinds of special appearances to try to look “fair and balanced”). Harris responded by totally owning the interview, getting high marks from observers all around. Fox made sure the interview was going to get a lot of attention by instructing Baier to be so nasty to her – and Harris made a point of winning the high profile showdown.

Then the big news day got even bigger when the news broke on Wednesday night that Donald Trump recently tried to buy Stormy Daniels’ silence for the remainder of the 2024 election. Yes, this is pretty much the thing that he just got criminally convicted for, and now he’s been caught doing it again. And so now Trump’s Daniels scandal, and his status as a recently convicted felon, are suddenly back in the headlines with just nineteen days to go in this election.

So is the needle finally going to move in this election? There’s no way to know for sure. But if anything is going to move that needle, it’s a day like the one we just had. Trump cost himself some voters, Harris gained herself some voters, and then Trump probably cost himself some voters again. This is the kind of thing that can move polling averages, and we may soon see that happen. In any case we have to keep treating this race like it’s within the margin of error (or perhaps we should call it the “margin of effort”) and keep working.