What if October is... Boring?

It's been a fat-tailed presidential election so far. Will that continue all the way until November 5th?

Photo by Joshua Woroniecki on Unsplash

Between June 27th and September 27th there were an awful lot of Big Events that transformed the 2024 U.S. presidential election. Let’s review!

1. The June 27 presidential debate, which went disastrously for Joe Biden;

2. The ensuing month in which Democratic power brokers nudged Biden aside;

3. An assassination attempt on Donald Trump;

4. Trump selecting JD Vance as his vice presidential nominee

5. The Republican National Convention;

6. Kamala Harris wrapping up the nomination with Biden’s endorsement;

7. Harris selecting Tim Walz as her vice presidential nominee

8. The Democratic National Convention;

9. The September 10th presidential debate, which went pretty badly for Donald Trump;

10. A second thwarted assassination attempt on Donald Trump;

11. Hurricane Helene.

That is an awful damn lot for a presidential election! With the possible exception of New York Mets fans, no group has been whipsawed more by events in recent months than election junkies.

And yet, stepping back, what is striking is how steady the race has been for the past two months or so. Here’s the FiveThirtyEight snapshot of national polls, for example:

Since entering the race, Harris has overtaken Trump in the polling but she has not extended her lead at all over the past eight weeks. There has been almost no movement up or down.

Could anything change this dynamic? With the race this close and only 30 days or so until Election Day, there has been an awful lot of speculation about which October surprises could tip the election one way or another.

This New York Times story by Shane Goldmacher and Reid Epstein from 48 hours ago represents the perfect distillation of this genre of story:

Vice President Kamala Harris has cast herself as a candidate of the future, but she has been yanked back by the problems of the present as the Middle East lurches toward a wider war, a longshoremen’s strike threatens to undermine the country’s economy and Americans across the Southeast struggle to recover from a deadly hurricane.

The confluence of domestic and global traumas combined to knock Ms. Harris off a message that has been carefully calibrated since she took over for President Biden to showcase her as the avatar of “a new way forward,” as her slogan puts it.

The rare moment of turbulence for Ms. Harris interrupts what has been mostly smooth sailing in her two months as the Democratic presidential nominee. It also captures a conundrum of the vice presidency, a prestigious if mostly ceremonial posting.

Goldmacher and Epstein didn’t even include worries about the labor market colling off after last month’s pedestrian jobs report. But you get the idea.

Because Harris represents the incumbent party, it should be unsurprising that most of the October surprises would hurt her campaign. The GOP, being the Panic Party, has an obvious incentive to magnify any negative shock to demonstrate that Democrats cannot govern. See, for example, Florida governor Ron DeSantis’ hyperbolic reaction to the longshoremen strike in which he declared, “unlike the federal government, Florida is taking decisive action to ensure that our economy continues to function and that victims of Hurricane Helene will have access to what they need to rebuild.”

No doubt, a lot could happen that could theoretically tip the race one way or the other. This explains stories like Goldmacher and Epstein’s. Other reports were even more wild-eyed, suggesting that nefarious forces were responsible for events like the longshoremen strike.

But maybe — just maybe — it’s time for the hard-working readers of Drezner’s World to take a breath.

For one thing, go back and look at that FiveThirtyEight chart. Even with all of the shocks of August and September, there wasn’t a lot of movement in either direction.

For another thing, some of the suggested October surprises have already fizzled out. The Longshoremen strike came to an abrupt end, with dockworkers receiving a 62 percent wage increase over the next six years. As it turns out the Biden administration was able to resist invoking Taft-Hartley and pressure management into cutting a deal. Worries about severe disruptions to shipping have dissipated.

As for the Hurricane Helene cleanup, Donald Trump has tried real hard to play up Biden-Harris incompetence. It does not appear to be resonating outside of his MAGA base, however. Trump’s claim of federal inaction have been belied by the governors in the affected states. Both the Republican governors of South Carolina and Georgia — as well as the Democratic governor of North Carolina — have praised the federal response to Helene, defusing it as a political issue. Trump’s criticisms have also highlighted his own politicized response to natural disasters when he was president.

The possibility of a wider war in the Middle East is an entirely different kettle of fish. As I argued earlier in the week, however, foreign affairs is highly unlikely to tip the scales in this election. Oil and gas prices were trending downward prior to the latest escalation. They are likely to trend downward absent an all-out war between Israel and Iran, which is something that even Benjamin Netanyahu does not want.¹

That leaves the U.S. economy, which received a jolt of surprisingly good news earlier today: