Exactly. Trump is putting out his usual bluster, but he’s scared shitless of facing Harris again. I’m certain that he only did this debate because he’s been desperate ever since Harris replaced Biden and his own poll numbers started sinking.
If there’s another debate it will be another Hail Mary ploy if Harris’s campaign continues to gain momentum. But he knows that another debate would be a big risk, and also, he’s lazy, and debate prep is real work.
The word momentum is often used in these threads, and and I have not tackled it before. It is an analogy to physical processes where a mass remains in motion unless stopped. I do not see applicability in the political context.
Polling averages will likely show a gradual improvement for Harris, in the next two weeks or so, as more and more of the included polls are post-debate. But once averages are completely post debate, the state of the race will not change, beyond small random fluctuations, except due to events. And there is no reason to expect event flow to be positive for one ticket over the other.
I’ll allow an exception for the mild likelihood of Walz winning the October 1 veep debate. Another bounce then is not guaranteed and likely to be small. And, if it happens, it will not have been due to momentum. Perception of political momentum, I think, is as deceptive as seeing momentum in stock prices.
Years from now when they assemble high school history eBooks for students, the moment Trump lost the election will be this. With a ten second video clip. The Daily Show (@thedailyshow) on Threads
I think that’s quite perceptive. Certainly there are trends — periods of time when something (like voter preferences) moves in a consistent direction. But they don’t usually feed on themselves — they can plateau or reverse at any time.
In our locked-in, polarized political era, the negative feedback loops seem to win out over positive ones, usually. In other words, more self-correction and reversion to the mean, rather than snowballing and self-reinforcement.
What will make them understand that is what made Nazis understand it in 1945: the demise of their leader.
For Trump, his “demise” will be defeat in this election, followed by a continuation of his rapid decline, followed by death by natural causes in probably the not too distant future. (One of the worst things that would happen if Trump got elected is that JD Vance would almost certainly finish out his first term; although, to be fair, as odious as Vance seems on the surface, I doubt that he would be as bad as Trump.)
Trump can’t be replaced in his role. He’s the greatest demagogue in American history, making someone like Huey Long seem like a rank amateur. Seeing him mumble and whine after his loss will be deeply demoralizing to them. But their pain won’t cure the malaise of the US and the world, which I think Andrew O’Heir talks about aptly in this article:
Putting all of our fear on MAGA is our own Liberal way of skirting the bigger issue, and thinking the defeat of MAGA clears the way for Utopia is our own species of wishful thinking (not that we necessarily go all the way in such dysfunction, but that tends to be our particular path of least resistance IMHO). IOW, MAGA will be gone, Trump will not be replaced, and another fascist movement will not take its place, but the shit stew will still be simmering on the stove.
Allow me a bit of incredulity here. Sheesh “big mo” in politics dates back to GHW Bush’s 1980 primary race. Of course he lost to Reagan …
Anyway I agree with your assessment regarding its nonapplicabilty. The closest we have to momentum being a relevant analogy is excitement that drives new engagement and turnout among previous nonvoters. I think Obama had that. Now we are more about rising to ceilings and sinking to floors along with turnout.
Young trump supporters are probably mostly incels, and older trump supporters are probably mostly divorced or in loveless relationships, and are channeling their anger and frustration into trumpism.
Reminds me of a joke from just after the last election:
A die-hard trumper dies and goes to Heaven. He is met at the Pearly Gates by God himself. “St. Peter has the day off, so I’m filling in for him” God says. “Welcome to Heaven. Any questions?”
The trumper says “Yes! Tell me the truth-- the 2020 election was rigged, and trump actually won, right?”
God answers “No, Biden won fair and square. trump is a liar and a terrible human being who should never have been President in the first place”.
The trumper thinks to himself “wow, the Deep State goes deeper than I ever woulda thought”.
At the risk of descending into an extremely silly semantic digression, you’ve just described why “momentum” is a very apt description of the status of a political candidate. In physics, momentum is the dynamic property of a moving object that changes only in response to external forces, otherwise it remains the same and perceived variations will be due to measurement errors. It’s associated with the energy of the object and its resilience to retarding forces. One can describe either the object or the political candidate’s status as “gathering momentum” in response to positive (accelerating) factors, or “losing momentum” due to negative ones.
Momentum is explicitly not associated with any sort of feedback or self-reinforcement. Entirely the opposite. In the political sphere, momentum is something you gain from positive perceptions, and lose through negative ones. The more of it you have, the better you can survive setbacks.
10-to-1 sounds about right. That’s about where this election stands right now, barring some October surprise in Trump’s favor.
I don’t think I’d do 20-to-1, but ten to one is where the line would be. (Of course, the Dope prohibits betting, so it’s all conjecture)
(my emphases)
Here’s a good example of how to apply momentum to politics.
Let’s say there were fifty fictional 2015 (two-oh-fifteen – no typo) Republican presidential primary elections the day after Donald Trump descended the escalator. Just that fast – one day he declares his candidacy and the next ALL FIFTY state primaries take place simultaneously.
Do you think Trump’s eventual level of support manifested immediately, and he would have right then and there in summer 2015 won the Republican primaries? Can’t prove a hypothetical, I don’t suppose … but in my opinion there was no way Trump would have won the Republican nomination under those conditions. He needed to build up to it progresssively (no pun), as he did in real life.
That building-up was the accumulation of political momentum. See also Obama 2004-08, and Ronald Reagan 1976-1980. Not that it always requires multiple years to take effect … those were just handy examples.
Rep last post, I agree there is a bandwagon effect AKA momentum in the presidential primary season context. This is because party members want to support the likely winner. I should have specified general elections as where I doubt there is momentum.
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I’d say that momentum is real thing in politics that feeds on itself.
A great debate performance triggers a swift Swift endorsement and Truth Social sell, the Truth Social selloff and people losing money triggers anger at CFSG, and they start whining on social media which triggers others to re-evaluate, the climbing support for Harris triggers people to want to be part of a winning team, which then triggers news of bad polls in Right Wing media …
Maybe not to the stage of the classic cartoon snowball, but it does build…
It doesn’t work if the ballot is secret and the man can pretend to vote for Harris in hopes of getting laid while actually voting Trump.
I am not so sure. Yes, things are hopeful, but let us not get so damn sure of ourselves.
Despite the link to the polling info below, I’m going from memory … but Bill Clinton seemed to come from well behind George H.W. Bush in 1992 – strictly during the general election cycle – to become the Election Day favorite by double-digits in the popular. Clinton was certainly building political momentum throughout that summer and fall.
Re last post, his is a technical poly sci thing that I probably do not really have expertise on.
Was it a real bandwagon effect where people turned pro-Clinton because of everyone else in their household, or was it just that every debate gave Clinton another bounce?
Bush Sr. himself did just the same four years before that. He had been trailing Dukakis by 17% but then came back to win by 8%.
To answer the OP, you can listen to The Focus Group with Sarah Longwell (link takes you to a youtube playlist; you can also listen to her podcast in lots of places).
She is pretty much a Never Trumper, and this is generally what her podcast is about:
Unfiltered, uncompromising, unexpected—The Focus Group is a look into what the average voter thinks about politics, policy, and current events. Sarah Longwell, publisher of The Bulwark, has conducted hundreds of hours of focus groups all across the country. She and a series of special guests will take you behind the glass to hear what real focus group participants have to say.
Her show is basically pick a topic, ask people about it, and then play their unedited comments on the show. I do a lot of focus groups for my job (lawyer/juries). What you want out of a focus group is an unvarnished opinion about a neutral statement (nothing leading or loaded, just thoughts about X or Y; then you just listen and don’t interrupt or correct or educate or anything). You are not trying to change anyone’s mind, but merely to understand what they are actually thinking and why they think it about a particular topic.
The show is helpful to me, because of instead of just a poll saying something - which I intellectually understand, but if it’s something I don’t agree with/understand how that could be, then it never actually sinks in/feel it/believe it; when you listen to people it becomes very real and it sinks in really fast.
A recent episode was, Is Trump’s Play for Minority Voters Working? It’s fascinating, and extremely maddening. (At the 40min mark) There’s a part where three black people who previously voted for Clinton/Biden, but are now leaning Trump explain their concerns for Trump…paraphrasing three different voters:
We know Trump appeals to white supremacists and encourages them…but he’s not a racist, just doesn’t like poor people equally…I have big concerns about J6 and fear what happens if he doesn’t win…etc. etc.
So why are they still leaning Trump? The Economy.
I was a college student at the time, so I was experiencing Bill Clinton’s rise in a different manner than, say, a family man or a politically-engaged 30-something. I remember the campus zeitgeist going from “Who’s Bill Clinton?” to “Bill Clinton’s presidency is now inevitable” in about 7-8 months. He played the sax on Arsenio Hall’s talk show, he toked but “didn’t inhale”, the Super Bowl interview with Hillary at his side about Gennifer Flowers, “I feel your pain” to AIDS activists, etc. A bunch of stuff around and about Bill Clinton just kept happening and his star kept rising.
EDIT: I don’t have specific recall of any of the 1992 presidential debates. but something of interest came to my attention when I looked them up: Three presidential debates and the one vice-presidential debate all took place between October 11-19, 1992. That’s so bang-bang that it all probably played like a single event.
To tie recent non-Trump comments by myself, Philly Guy, and Velocity into the thread’s theme: We are discussing whether Trump’s path to victory may meet resistance from the Harris campaign’s political momentum. Philly Guy wondered if there were such a thing as “political momentum” in a Presidential general election. We are discussing examples of political momentum in past general elections – and indirectly proposing the idea that Harris’ run could play out similarly, impacting Trump’s chances of prevailing.