What if the media has the election all wrong?

What if Kamala Harris is leaving Trump in the dust, while the media stubbornly sticks to the safer narrative that it’s a horserace going down to the wire?

(Eric Elofson/Harris for President)

Here's a question for you: What if the dynamics of the 2024 presidential election have dramatically shifted -- and the national media has been too busy doing stenography to notice?

What if Kamala Harris -- after a spectacular entry into the race, a stunningly unified convention, and a devastating debate  -- is basically running away with it, leaving Trump in the dust, while the national media -- still mortified by its failure in 2016 to see the extent of Trump’s support -- stubbornly sticks to the safer narrative that it’s a horserace going down to the wire?

But wait, the polls aren’t showing Harris way ahead, you say. At most, they’re showing her with a narrow lead.

Well, polls are garbage these days. And the pollsters, whose arbitrary weightings make a mockery of science, travel in packs. They, more than anyone, are terrified of underestimating Trump support again. So maybe this time they’re overestimating it? (Which they sure did in 2022.)

You could, by contrast, make a solid vibes-and-momentum argument that Harris is winning handily. In an extraordinary turnaround, Democrats now appear even more enthusiastic than Republicans. Harris, unlike Trump, is wooing undecideds and independents. Marquee Republicans like Dick Cheney – Dick Cheney! -- are getting on the Harris train. So are former Trump allies.

The economy, which used to be considered a solid indicator of whether an incumbent would win or not, is booming. Inflation is dead. The stock market is at all-time highs.

By contrast, Trump, by any normal standard, has lost it, mentally and emotionally. His speech – at rallies, and most noticeably at the debate – consists of rambling, apocalyptic, nonsensical, hate-filled rhetoric and lies.

He’s saying crazier and crazier things in order to get attention – which the media is giving him – but it’s hard to see that any of it is winning over more voters.

Harris has effectively undermined the image of Trump as some sort of inevitable strongman, and instead has cast him as a failed rich-kid with no plan beyond turning Americans against each other.

Trump is left mostly with his base, which by most calculations is not nearly a majority of the voters.

Trump’s only other ace in the hole is the national media, which sanewashes his and JD Vance’s diatribes, normalizes his extremist platform, buries concerns about his diminished mental capacity, dings Harris at seemingly every opportunity, covers up the Biden/Harris administration’s extraordinary economic record – and benefits financially from high readership as long as it seems like a close race.

Maybe -- just maybe -- historian Heather Cox Richardson is correct when she writes in her newsletter that "We appear to be in a moment when the reality-based community is challenging the ability of the MAGA Republicans to create their own reality."

Track Records

How could everyone else be so wrong? Well, it’s not like the pollsters and the pundits have a track record of getting it right. Quite the opposite.

Look most recently at 2016, when the pollsters basically called it for Hillary Clinton; and 2022, when the “red wave” that pollsters had predicted with such confidence never materialized.

Historian Rick Perlstein, writing the in American Prospect, explains that for pollsters, getting it wrong “is practically the historical norm.”

As Perlstein points out:

Past performance is no guarantee of future results; but past performance is all a pollster has to go on. That’s why much of the process of choosing and weighting samples is … well, you can call it “more art than science.” Or you can call it “intuitive.” Or you can call it “trial and error.” But you can also call it “made up.”

As for the pundits? Chris Lehmann, writing in The Nation, concludes that “At virtually every turn, this election cycle has proved pundit wisdom stupendously and gloriously wrong.”

Consider, for instance, all the occasions when journalists predicted that Trump was becoming more disciplined – and, after being shot at, more humble. They were wildly wrong.

And then recall how they were sure Harris would pick either Pennsylvania Gov.  Josh Shapiro or Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly to be her running mate, because picking someone as liberal as Tim Walz would sink her campaign.

Lehmann writes:

Walz’s solidly prairie-populist record proved no hindrance to the candidate’s dramatic expansion of the electoral map. The Harris-Walz ticket also reduced Trump’s hold on the white working-class vote, making short work of yet another plank of consensus-minded certitude that has driven a monotonous drumbeat of dispatches from heartland diners for the past nine years.

So if the chattering class believes one thing, you just might be better off assuming the opposite.

Maybe, of course, I’m completely delusional to even suggest this as a possibility. If so, I blame that on SFGate columnist Drew Magary, who put the idea into my head with his tour-de-force piece this week excoriating the New York Times and deeming it irrelevant

The column included a powerful summary of the critique of the New York Times from the left:

The Times cares more about its place in the power structure than in actually affecting that power structure. It gladly cedes prominent column space to bad faith politicians who would like to eradicate whole demographics of the American population. It dabbles in trans panic as a sort of weird hobby. And it scoffs at criticism from the progressive wing of the Democratic Party while going out of its way to heed criticism from a Republican Party that would drop a load of napalm on Times headquarters if ever given the authority.

But he also had this to say:

You don’t have to work terribly hard to sum up this race as it stands: Harris is destroying Trump, because Trump is a deranged old s—tbag. See how easy that was?

But that’s too easy if you’re the Times, an institution that has never met a story it couldn’t water down. Rather than give it to you straight, the paper of record has opted, as ever, to give you its patented strain of prestige clickbait.

Look, I’m in Washington, D.C.; Magary is a San Francisco columnist. Maybe we have no clue what’s going on in the real world. Maybe “the media” has it right, and this theory is hogwash.

But what if it isn’t?