The luster has worn off, the shininess has faded and the honeymoon appears to be over.
And Democrats can’t be thrilled with that.
The 2024 November general election took a sharp turn back in late July when President Joe Biden abruptly shelved his re-election bid — most likely at the behest of Democrat elites like former President Barack Obama and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — following a widely panned presidential debate performance.
(Former President Donald Trump certainly thinks the odd circumstances surrounding Biden’s abrupt withdrawal amounted to a coup.)
Whatever the truth of the matter is, for a while, at least, the swip-swap of Biden with his current vice president resulted in some apparent momentum for the Democrats.
Vice President Kamala Harris, simply by virtue of not being Joe Biden, appeared to ride a wave of excitement and celebrity endorsements to suddenly make what looked like a lopsided Trump-Biden election into a competitive Trump-Harris election.
Indeed, Real Clear Politics’ recent polling found Harris with a 1.6 percent advantage over Trump.
It’s a far cry from a slam-dunk for Dems, but it’s worlds better than the way Biden was polling.
One small (major?) problem with all that giddiness?
It appears to have largely died down already, just days after the Democratic National Convention.
On Thursday, noted polling expert and statistician Nate Silver published a newsletter that bluntly dealt some bad news to Democrats.
“[T]his wasn’t a good day for Kamala Harris in our model, as Donald Trump is the slight favorite for the first time since August 3,” Silver’s update read.
Silver and fellow researcher Eli McKown-Dawson identified Pennsylvania as a likely cause of this sudden reversal for Trump, as Harris has struggled mightily in the Keystone State.
Silver and Dawson did temper expectations a bit. While this is undoubtedly good news for Trump (and yet another sign that all of Harris’ “momentum” has largely been manufactured by the establishment media shills), the newsletter made it clear that it’s still anyone’s race to win.
“[W]e wouldn’t advise worrying too much about the difference between a 52/48 race one way versus a 48/52 race the other way,” the two noted.
They did add, however, that there are still cracks showing in Harris’ facade, no matter what “the vibes” may feel like.
“But the bottom line is that the model has the Electoral College/popular vote gap opening up again, a concern for Harris all along,” the newsletter noted. “There’s now a 17 percent chance she wins the popular vote but not the Electoral College, the model estimates.”
As far as who they think will win it all, it’s completely up in the air.
“Well, honestly, we don’t know,” the two admitted, “but we can give you our best probabilistic guess.”
Their model contains the most recent polling data and “is the direct descendant of the … FiveThirtyEight election forecast and the methodology is largely the same,” according to the report.
The Silver Bulletin polling model adjusts for “whether polls are conducted among registered or likely voters, the presence or absence of RFK Jr., and house effects. They weight more reliable polls more heavily. And they use national polls to make inferences about state polls and vice versa.”
Gathering data in that fashion “requires a few extra CPU cycles — but the reward is a more stable average that doesn’t get psyched out by outliers,” the report concluded.
This recent bit of good news for Trump — and Harris’ continuing struggles with the electoral map part of the election — is a stark reminder that the influence of the establishment media and Democrat apparatchiks only goes so far.
There are countless Americans who are not terminally online or watching the news, and thus are not constantly being bombarded by media propaganda. All that gussied-up hype and excitement doesn’t mean much if people aren’t exposed to it.
Many Americans just want peace, quiet, prosperity and to largely be left alone.
Trump represents their best shot at that life, and no amount of cheerleading from the media, celebrities or Barack Obama will change that fact.
Nate Silver’s latest numbers prove it.
