The Harris-Trump Endgame Is On: Is It Time to Panic Yet?

These are the hardest few weeks in a campaign, when the race is all but over and the one question anyone wants answered cannot be answered. Contradictory polls bombard us. Kamala Harris is up by three points in Michigan. No, wait, she is down by two. On the same day? Consult the polling average on the Web site FiveThirtyEight. Harris’s lead in the national polls over Donald Trump as of October 10th is 2.5 per cent. Her lead in the national polls over Trump on September 10th? It was 2.5 per cent. Welcome, once again, to the unbudging reality of a nearly fifty-fifty nation.

Of course, that has not stopped both parties from doing what they always do. In Democrats’ case, this appears to be the week when their traditional preëlection panic has set in. Strategists are now warning that Harris has “plateaued,” that she “needs to be more aggressive,” and that she has to reinvent herself as a centrist to “seal the deal.” In recent days, I’ve read articles dissecting her challenges with male voters, Black male voters, Arab voters, Latino voters, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin voters. She also, apparently, has a Biden problem, a Bibi problem, and a hurricane problem.

When it was announced, on Wednesday, that Harris had raised more than a billion dollars for her campaign in the shortest time frame ever—and more than Trump has raised all year—the Washington Post reported on her campaign’s fear that this could be bad news for her, turning off donors who might think that she has already collected more than enough money to win. So many Democratic candidates, from Harris on down, are sending out urgent fund-raising appeals warning that they are about to lose that the Democratic political operative Simon Rosenberg complained on Thursday that “we are running a daily pysop against ourselves.” For weeks, Harris was criticized for failing to answer questions from the media. But, after she launched a media blitz in the past few days, speaking with outlets ranging from the podcast “Call Her Daddy” to “60 Minutes,” a Times analysis focussed on Harris’s “art of the dodge” in her responses to the questions that she was finally taking—though Trump had dodged entirely the same “60 Minutes” interview segment that Harris was dinged for participating in.

If Democratic worrying were a natural resource, there would never be an energy crisis again. And, to be clear, sometimes the freakout is entirely justified. I, for one, took it very seriously when a major national political journalist, who’s been covering Presidential elections since the nineteen-eighties, told me the other day that, if the election were held today, Trump would win.

Republicans, however, suffer from an inverse affliction, a form of congenital overconfidence that comes straight from the leader who has reinvented the G.O.P. in his braggadocious image. In Trumpworld, there are never any bad polls or bad debates. Trump says his lead is “GETTING BIGGER BY THE DAY.” On Thursday, he even posted what appeared to be an internal memo from his pollster, showing him ahead in all seven battleground states. And who’s going to quibble with him on his very own social-media platform, never mind that this week of polling shows, like all the other weeks, that Harris is (very) narrowly beating him. Trump is the only candidate of my lifetime who can make a reliable applause line out of the latest Rasmussen poll. He can be convicted, humiliated, defeated in an election, but somehow he’s always on the attack, never on the defensive.

Right-wing outlets have gleefully followed Trump into perpetual offense mode. On Fox News’ Web site, on Thursday morning, it was a veritable barrage: “VP Harris stumbles through hurricane update.” “This is Harris’ worst week to date.” “Kamala Harris goes full cringe with awkward beer stunt.” “Harris’ struggles with Michigan’s working-class voters provides opening for Trump.” When new economic numbers were released, most news outlets covered it as good news: the annual inflation rate dropped to 2.4 per cent, the lowest level in three years. On Fox, this became another scary tale about the Biden-Harris economy: “Inflation report just released—and prices rose faster than economists even predicted.”

But in truth, the Republicans know the same thing that the Democrats do. It’s too close to call—all of which is to say that the vibestakes, like the veepstakes this summer, will probably have very little bearing on the outcome of the 2024 election.

This is not an argument, by the way, for tuning out, as tempting as that may be. There is a strong case to be made that tuning out is part of what got the country into this trouble in the first place. After Trump lost the 2020 election and tried to overturn the results, many Republicans as well as Democrats believed that the ex-President, defeated and exiled back to Mar-a-Lago, was finished. They tuned out. “Donald Trump will be a sideshow,” Biden’s first White House chief of staff, Ron Klain, confidently predicted in early 2021. This quote, from Bob Woodward’s forthcoming book, “War,” has haunted me since I read an advance copy this week.

The point is, averting one’s gaze from Trump might be good for one’s soul, but it could turn out very badly for the country.

In the interests of not tuning out, I offer a small glimpse of the Trump headlines this week, which range from Trump secretly sending Vladimir Putin COVID testing equipment during the pandemic, via Woodward’s book and confirmed by the Kremlin, to Trump spreading conspiracy theories about the recent hurricanes in hopes of gaining political advantage. His lies about the deadly storms have been both voluminous and false; it will probably not surprise anyone who is paying even the least bit of attention that the falsehoods involved nefarious claims about federal relief money being stolen from good, honest, hardworking Americans and diverted to shady immigrants. Another theme this week—the obvious superiority of Trump’s own genetic makeup and the “bad genes” that were responsible for murders by, you guessed it, shady immigrants.

During a speech at the Detroit Economic Club on Thursday, Trump raged that Harris would turn the country into a hellhole like Detroit itself, then promised that, as President, he would impose enormous tariffs on the rest of the world, even up to “1,000 per cent,” the economic consequences of which could, quite possibly, turn the country into an actual hellhole. Other recent complaints about Harris include that she will destroy Pennsylvania and make it a place of “darkness and despair,” that she is a “totally incompetent and ill-equipped person,” and that she is a liar who never worked a summer job at McDonald’s during college, though she actually did.

Much gaze-averting is required of Republicans—even highly partisan ones—to keep pretending that this is totally appropriate behavior from the man that they plan to vote for in three consecutive elections. But what’s even more remarkable is that they will stick by Trump even when they are paying attention and profess complete horror at what he is doing and saying. The signature disappointment of this election, as compared with the two previous Trump outings, is not so much the shock of the MAGA thousands cheering Trump at his rallies but the quieter awfulness of those who knew better and facilitated his return anyway. I am thinking here of Ohio’s governor, Mike DeWine, native of Springfield, Ohio, and by all accounts a mostly decent and honorable man. DeWine was outraged enough by Trump’s slurs about his home town and the diligent legal Haitians living there to speak up about it. He went on TV. He wrote an op-ed in the Times. He gave an interview. And, at the end of them all, he said, Why, yes, of course, I am still voting for Trump.

I don’t know what will happen less than four weeks from now, but I do know this: When I look back on the 2024 election, I will think of all the Mike DeWines. Where was their panic button? Isn’t it time to hit it? ♦