Trump Closes Out the Campaign With an Unforced Error
Trump Closes Out the Campaign With an Unforced Error
Putting an insult comic onstage at Madison Square Garden to antagonize Puerto Ricans is classic, non-strategic Trump politics. But will it matter?
As a reminder, I’ll be doing a live chat with Milan Singh about polls, demographics and the election at noon today (Eastern). If you’re live with us, you’ll be able to ask questions! I hope you’ll join. To catch that, open (or download) the Substack App, then search for my name, and the video chat will appear right at the top of your feed once it’s ongoing.
Dear readers,
I never know how to figure out whether these things are going to matter or not.
As you’ve surely seen, one of the opening speakers at Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally this Sunday was roast comic Tony Hinchcliffe, whose set appeared calculated to be as offensive as possible: he called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage,” talked about black people carving watermelons for Halloween, made a lame and ribald joke about ejaculate and Hispanic fertility, etc. Hinchcliffe’s act became the dominant news story about the rally, eclipsing whatever economic message Trump might have hoped to close with.
It’s one of the “Trump outrage” stories that seems to be punching through most everything. As Nate Silver notes, the story got enough attention that Hinchcliffe has (at least briefly) surpassed Taylor Swift in Google search interest. And Puerto Rican activists in Pennsylvania (the state with the third-largest Puerto Rican population, after Florida and New York) seem convinced the flap is going to do real damage to Trump there, which would be a problem for him since his strategy to flip Biden 2020 states relies heavily on improving his performance with non-white voters.
Of course, the reporting about how this will hurt Trump in Pennsylvania relies heavily on quotes from Democratic activists, who want their communities’ politics to stop drifting toward Trump. And yet, for nine years, we’ve seen Trump succeed at reducing the racial polarization of the electorate in spite of his constant racial offenses. It might be true that this time is different — indeed, the image of Hinchcliffe insulting Puerto Rico from behind a Trump podium might be worse than if Trump had made the remarks himself, since Trump has a charisma that lets him get away with saying things that his supporters often can’t — but I don’t really know. What I am sure of is that there was no upside for the Trump campaign in putting Hinchcliffe on that stage. There’s a reason candidates don’t close out their campaigns with edgy insult comics, and as is often the case when Trump zags where others would zig, he’s not showing creative strategic genius; he’s just being undisciplined.1
People keep asking me who’s going to win the election — like, at parties and such — as though I have some special insight or inside information. I, obviously, don’t know. But I do know why this election is so close. That’s fairly simple:
There was a lot of inflation, which has made incumbent political parties unpopular all over the world.
The migrant surge has also been unpopular; while the inflation surge was probably mostly2 inevitable as a downstream result of pandemic economic stimulus measures, the biggest political error of the Biden administration was not acting earlier to both reposition rightward on immigration and implement new measures to discourage migration.
It’s easy to forget about this because Trump is such an extreme personality who has moved the party rightward on immigration, but the Republican Party continues to profit politically from Trump’s choice to moderate the party’s positioning, compared to the Romney era, on issues like Social Security, Medicare and gay marriage.
That said, Democrats have several things going for them that incumbent parties in other countries do not:
The US has had significantly better economic performance than other rich countries. At least we are growing robustly and people are enjoying income gains that make inflation less painful than it has been in, say, the United Kingdom.
Republicans’ position on abortion is highly salient and unpopular.
Donald Trump does all sorts of things to repel voters who might otherwise be drawn to a Republican message about the economy, immigration and crime — for example, trying to steal the 2020 election, or closing out his campaign with a message of “Puerto Rico is gross.”
As I evaluate the Harris campaign, I mostly think she’s played a difficult hand fairly well. I do have strategic objections — I would have put Josh Shapiro on the ticket to appeal a bit more to moderates and to earn a bit of a boost in Pennsylvania, which is likely to be the keystone3 in the electoral map she needs to win; I would have tried to find more ways to get political distance from President Biden; and, if I had a time machine, I would have gone back to 2019 and not taken all the out-there political positions (like sex changes for detained migrants) that are featuring heavily in attack ads against her today.
But Harris doesn’t have a time machine, and I understand her choice to prioritize coalitional unity (and perhaps get a governing partner she’d prefer) by picking Tim Walz, even though it’s not the strategy I would have chosen. In terms of executing on the strategy she did set out, she’s done a lot better than I expected. She’s been likable, and has flexed her policy positions to the realities of public opinion, and she has major gains in her favorability numbers to show for it. Her political skills are stronger than they appeared in the 2020 campaign and stronger than I gave her credit for. In particular, she seems a lot more comfortable in her skin now as the tough, prosecutorial figure she is, than she did when she was playing… whatever character it was that she was playing circa 2019.
That said, Harris did make one really big tactical error that drives me crazy: not having a ready answer for the extremely obvious question Sunny Hostin asked her on The View: “Would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?”. Harris, notoriously, responded: “There is not a thing that comes to mind.” On one hand, I can’t believe she screwed that up — how can you be unprepared for that question? On the other hand, if you answer enough questions, you’re likely to screw up something. Whether the mistake was forgivable or not, it has also become major attack ad fodder for her, and a problem for achieving her key objective of separating herself politically from the unpopular president. It would be a lot better if she hadn’t said it.
Overall, I look at these candidates and this campaign, and I’m not surprised that the race is close. If Harris falls just short of winning, that’s what’s going to make these little issues of strategy and tactics so gutting — it’s possible that a couple of better choices in these little areas could have made the difference between winning and losing. And if she just ekes out a win in Pennsylvania and the Electoral College? Well, then I think we might be able to say Tony Hinchcliffe cost Trump the election.
Very seriously,
Josh
As Marc Caputo reports for the Bulwark, we know the Trump campaign had eyes on Hinchcliffe’s material because they did get him to take one thing out of his remarks that were loaded in the teleprompter — a joke where he was going to use a vulgar and offensive sexual slur to refer to Kamala Harris. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to them that his whole act might be a problem.
The American Rescue Plan should not have been nearly so large as it was, and the Fed should have acted sooner to counteract the fiscal expansion that occurred in 2021, but even with better policy in these areas, there still would have been a large spike in inflation, simply because people had so much money to chase goods and services whose supply necessarily contracted due to the pandemic and mitigation measures aimed at it.
Get it?
I've done everything I can, and I refuse to think about Trump getting into the White House again. I'm just setting that possibility aside mentally so that I can at least enjoy life for five more days.
While I'm just being happy about the potential of a Harris administration, I am thinking about how interesting it will be to see how a capable person with a prosecutorial background performs. We saw how well it served Harris in the debate and in the Fox interview. She's used to dealing with hostile witnesses, and she listens carefully to her opponent and figures out how to lead them to say or agree to whatever she needs for her client -- us! And she has dealt with cartels, etc., and is focused on the necessity of protecting her client.
I tend to think she'll be great dealing with foreign leaders.
Also, in her capacity of attorney general for California, she did need to listen to and serve everyone in the state. I think we can take seriously her pledge to listen to and give a seat at the table to people she doesn't agree with. Moreover, if she wins, she will owe her victory to Republicans who crossed over in order to get rid of Trump and his most harmful aims. I think she realizes that she will need to keep that coalition together for the foreseeable future.
A year from now, we'll realize that winning was the easy part. It's not sustainable for our democracy to depend on Democrats running a perfect campaign in every election while the Republicans go as crazy as possible. We have to put this country back together. I believe Harris has the skills and character to do that.
What's with all the love for Josh Shapiro? He won his gubernatorial race in large part not because Shapiro's a magic man, but because his R opponent was 100% focused on the 2020 election, which voters found tedious and tiresome. Look at Shapiro's performance as governor; give him a couple of years to fix big things, and then see if he's worth the hype. FYI, a week ago, I was in the Philly suburbs, driving on I-476 in the afternoon. Electric sign's message: 17 minute delay. Google Maps showed a 3 mile backup - why? It was the giant mowers weed whacking along the interstate. Very stupid. Shapiro should talk to former VA governor Chuck Robb. Robb had major highway work (junction of I-495 & I-95) done late at night - brilliant! If night mowing isn't feasible, mowing in the early hours of morning is. Bonus: no greenhouse gas emissions from an unnecessary 3 mile backup.