The week that wasn’t
Some things in politics are going to be predictable no matter what. Coming into this week you knew Kamala Harris and Tim Walz were going to continue campaigning in spirited and strategic fashion, and you knew Donald Trump and JD Vance were going to end up making fools of themselves. But in a lot of ways what played out this week was not what anyone was expecting, and it’s a reminder that this truly is an unprecedented election cycle.
For instance, did anyone have Trump getting criminally indicted again this week? He’s been indicted enough times that it never comes as a total surprise. But just when the Jack Smith news trail had gone fully cold, suddenly it turned out he’d been secretly working with a new grand jury to re-indict Trump.
There were also other surprises. After Kamala Harris spent more than a month slowly and steadily rising in the national polling averages, she came out of a rousing Democratic National Convention and… didn’t go up any further in the national polls this week. How is that possible? Polls are increasingly inaccurate, for one thing. And sometimes it’s a matter of your worst polls getting updated one week and your best polls getting updated the next week, resulting in an artificial “pollercoaster” effect.
In any case, Kamala didn’t go down in the polls this week, which is what matters. She’s up by four points in the national polling averages, which means Trump is four points behind and he’s running out of time to catch up. This past week he didn’t make up any ground at all. He wasted another week and now he only has ten weeks left.
That leads us to another development this week, but one which was entirely predictable: Trump caved and agreed to participate in the September 10th debate on ABC News. When you’re behind this late in a race, you don’t have a choice but to try debating your opponent. And you don’t have any leverage for getting any concessions about formatting or networks, because everyone knows you need the debate.
But even as national polls have stagnated this week and we’re all waiting for the impact of the upcoming debate, there is other serious movement in this election. It’s now abundantly clear that North Carolina is fully in play as a swing state. In fact it’s looking like a 50-50 proposition, and Kamala Harris appears to have the momentum there. Georgia is also fully in play, and while Trump still seems to have a slight edge there, Kamala once again has the momentum there.
It’s all a reminder that while blowout presidential elections are won on a national level, competitive presidential elections are won on a state by state level. Kamala Harris visited North Carolina two weeks ago, a clear indicator that her campaign thought the state was coming into play, and now it’s in play. And now Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are on a bus tour of rural Georgia. This tells you where their focus is. Remember, campaigns and political parties have access to the kind of detailed internal polling and demographic information that tells them a lot more about what’s happening on the ground than anything that you and I can get from looking at public polls. So wherever Kamala puts her focus at any given time, I take it as a sign that it’s the next big battleground.
So let’s focus on North Carolina and Georgia this next week, while continuing to take cues from our very savvy candidate. We’ll focus on the states that she’s just designated as being in play, until she does something to signal that other states are also in play.
As of now the 2024 presidential election is going to come down to the “big seven” states: North Carolina, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Arizona. Biden won all of those states but North Carolina. If Kamala wins all seven of them, it’ll make for an Electoral College blowout and it’ll make Trump’s inevitable election challenges look too silly for anyone to even take seriously.
If you live in a place like Florida or Texas, by all means, keep working hard to put your state into play. Whether or not the work you put in now ends up getting you there in 2024, you’ll be laying the groundwork to flip in 2028. As for the rest of you around the nation, focus on the “big seven” states this week, with an emphasis on North Carolina and Georgia. And really, no matter where you live, there’s a volunteer opportunity for you. Let’s go win this! Donate now
