Is the 2024 Vibe Shifting Yet Again?

Some thoughts on the last days of the 2024 campaign

Photo by Joshua Woroniecki on Unsplash

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has been spending the final week of the 2024 presidential campaign doing what political junkies usually do during the last week of a general election: looking at the polls and reading entrails tea leaves stories about what the campaigns are thinking and how they are doing. And the last 48 hours has had some interesting reading.

You see, until this week one of the oddities of the past few months has been that both campaigns, albeit for very different reasons, have been saying that Donald Trump was the favorite. The Republican are doing this for obvious reasons. Most candidates want to sound confident of victory. Furthermore, Donald Trump believes he has won every election by a landslide every time — so his campaign very well cannot say that it’s a close race or, god forbid, Trump is trailing.

What has been interesting is that from Labor Day onwards, the Kamala Harris campaign also called Trump the favorite and described itself as the underdog campaign. In all likelihood the campaign is doing this to scare the living shit of the anti-Trump coalition while not sounding overly confident of victory. After all, both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden underperformed compared to their polling. Harris clearly wants to avoid that trap, especially given how the polls show a much tighter race this time around. At the same time, during October it was sounding too convincing. Trump was gaining every-so-slightly in the polls and the early vote looks good for him in Nevada. That, combined with garden-variety second-guessing from Democrats, gave some Harris supporters reason to switch from anxiety to despair.

Another oddity has been that the polling has basically converged toward tied polls in the swing states. The trend is so stark that Nate Silver has out-and-out accused pollsters of consciously herding to avoid looking silly after the election. But with Trump doing a point or two better in national polls over the past month, it’s been easy to believe that pollsters may be skewing their numbers so as to not look egregiously wrong.

Since Trump’s disastrous Madison Square Garden rally, however, the vibes from the campaigns — and to a lesser extent the vibes about the polls — seem to have shifted in Harris’ favor.

For one thing, there’s this terrific Harrison Ford endorsement of Harris:

Damn, Harrison Ford knows how to read an ad!

For another Harris’ guest appearance on Saturday Night Live seemed to go well:

There are more significant factors at play here, however.