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Monday, August 05, 2024
Opinion For Democrats, there’s cause for rational exuberance. (Eugene Robinson, WaPo)
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OpinionFor Democrats, there’s cause for rational exuberance
Harris should show up to the ABC debate as planned, even if Trump doesn’t.
Former president Donald Trump at the first presidential debate of the 2024 elections against President Biden on Thursday, June 27, 2024. (Kevin D. Liles/For The Washington Post)
If Donald Trump is too rattled and off-balance to debate Vice President Harris, so be it. Let him bark all he wants. The caravan moves on.
Trump’s decision to back out of the scheduled Sept. 10 debate is not really surprising, given how perplexed he is about how to run against Harris. And I would bet that it is also not final. If the next five weeks are even remotely like the last two, Trump may conclude that he needs a televised faceoff more than she does.
And no, the fact that Trump would be up against Harris instead of President Biden does not somehow nullify the existing debate agreement. The terms of the encounter — which is, or was, set to be held on ABC — do not name the participants. Instead, the agreement specifies the minimum levels of polling support and state ballot access required for eligibility.
Harris is right to ignore Trump’s unserious counter-offer of an alternative debate on Fox News, his comfort zone, in front of a “full arena audience” he can pack with boisterous supporters. It’s understandable why he would prefer a contest of decibels rather than ideas, but that’s not what he negotiated. Harris says she’ll be at the originally appointed time and place. Trump can show up if he wants to, or he can give Harris a ton of free time on network television, all to herself. His choice.
Meanwhile, Harris is on a roll. David Axelrod, former president Barack Obama’s longtime political guru, warned his party Saturday against “irrational exuberance,” and of course he’s right. But a measure of perfectly rational optimism, and even a bit of giddiness, is surely in order for Democrats.
A month ago, in the wake of the Biden-Trump debate, polls showed the Democratic Party’s prospects in free fall. Trump was opening a clear lead in the presidential race, with his longtime pollster boasting that Trump had so many pathways to the necessary 270 electoral votes that “we literally stopped counting at 25.” The hill Democrats needed to climb if they were to hold the Senate and win the House looked dauntingly steep.
oday, it’s a changed landscape. Trump’s lead over Biden in the RealClearPolitics polling average, which was roughly three points when the president withdrew, has all but vanished. Harris trailed Trump by less than one point in Monday’s RCP average; and the latest single high-quality poll, released Sunday by CBS News, had Harris ahead by a point.
And now it is Harris, not Trump, who threatens to expand the electoral map. Georgia, for example, which Biden won by approximately 11,000 votes in 2020, seemed out of reach for the president this time. But Harris’s support among African American voters, her campaign’s deep pockets and her party’s lavishly staffed ground game have put the state once again up for grabs. The CBS survey showed Harris just three points behind Trump in Georgia, which is within the poll’s margin of error.
At a rally in Atlanta on Saturday, Trump seemed to go out of his way to help Harris win the state. He spent at least 10 minutes of a rambling 90-minute speech attacking two of the most popular Republican officials in the state, Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, for disobeying his command to “find” enough votes to overturn Biden’s 2020 victory. The last time Trump threw this divisive tantrum, Georgia — hardly blue; more like reddish-purple — elected two Democratic senators.\Harris is right to ignore Trump’s unserious counter-offer of an alternative debate on Fox News, his comfort zone, in front of a “full arena audience” he can pack with boisterous supporters. It’s understandable why he would prefer a contest of decibels rather than ideas, but that’s not what he negotiated. Harris says she’ll be at the originally appointed time and place. Trump can show up if he wants to, or he can give Harris a ton of free time on network television, all to herself. His choice.
Meanwhile, Harris is on a roll. David Axelrod, former president Barack Obama’s longtime political guru, warned his party Saturday against “irrational exuberance,” and of course he’s right. But a measure of perfectly rational optimism, and even a bit of giddiness, is surely in order for Democrats.
A month ago, in the wake of the Biden-Trump debate, polls showed the Democratic Party’s prospects in free fall. Trump was opening a clear lead in the presidential race, with his longtime pollster boasting that Trump had so many pathways to the necessary 270 electoral votes that “we literally stopped counting at 25.” The hill Democrats needed to climb if they were to hold the Senate and win the House looked dauntingly steep.
Today, it’s a changed landscape. Trump’s lead over Biden in the RealClearPolitics polling average, which was roughly three points when the president withdrew, has all but vanished. Harris trailed Trump by less than one point in Monday’s RCP average; and the latest single high-quality poll, released Sunday by CBS News, had Harris ahead by a point.
And now it is Harris, not Trump, who threatens to expand the electoral map. Georgia, for example, which Biden won by approximately 11,000 votes in 2020, seemed out of reach for the president this time. But Harris’s support among African American voters, her campaign’s deep pockets and her party’s lavishly staffed ground game have put the state once again up for grabs. The CBS survey showed Harris just three points behind Trump in Georgia, which is within the poll’s margin of error.
At a rally in Atlanta on Saturday, Trump seemed to go out of his way to help Harris win the state. He spent at least 10 minutes of a rambling 90-minute speech attacking two of the most popular Republican officials in the state, Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, for disobeying his command to “find” enough votes to overturn Biden’s 2020 victory. The last time Trump threw this divisive tantrum, Georgia — hardly blue; more like reddish-purple — elected two Democratic senators.
As for the three “blue wall” states that Democrats believed Biden would have to win to defeat Trump, the CBS poll found Harris tied with Trump in Pennsylvania and Michigan and trailing him by one point in Wisconsin. The poll also found margin-of-error contests in Arizona, Nevada and North Carolina. No single poll should ever be taken as gospel, but trend lines do tell you something — and right now, they’re saying that Harris has momentum.
Trump’s cranky, sour mood may have to do with the fact that crowds at Harris’s campaign rallies have been so enthusiastic and so big. Crowd size matters to him. A lot.
He and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), haven’t yet come close to finding an effective way to attack Harris. Plan A, laughably, was claiming that a woman whose father is Black and whose mother was South Asian has no right to identify as Black. Plan B is yet to emerge.
Trump’s demand to unilaterally change the debate rules and format is nothing more than a weak attempt to reclaim the initiative. Axelrod said on CNN that this remains “Trump’s race to lose,” and that is how Democrats should approach the campaign. Now, however, it is also Harris’s race to win.
Eugene Robinson writes a column on politics and culture and hosts a weekly online chat with readers. In a three-decade career at The Washington Post, Robinson has been city hall reporter, city editor, foreign correspondent in Buenos Aires and London, foreign editor, and assistant managing editor in charge of the paper’s Style section.Twitter
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