When Joe Biden made the historic decision in July to step aside as the Democratic Party's 2024 nominee, Donald Trump was clearly taken off guard. Kamala Harris immediately leveraged a high-dominance leadership strategy, buttressed by positive messaging, to launch a sustained offensive that was immediately reflected in public opinion polls.
It took weeks for Trump and his surrogates to recalibrate and react — and when they did, the Trump campaign launched increasingly racist, authoritarian, sadistic and outright fascistic attacks — not just against Harris and the Democrats but against large segments of American society. In the days remaining before Nov. 5, Trump’s attacks are likely to escalate even further. In all, one could compare this election campaign to a fight inside a phone booth. Harris and Trump appear to have virtually equal odds of victory in what now appears to be one of the closest elections in American history, as well as one of the most important, the bitterest and the most highly combustible.
New polling from Howard University’s Initiative on Public Opinion reports that 84 percent of African-American likely voters in the seven key battleground states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — support Harris. While that is obviously a large majority, it probably isn't enough. In 2020, Biden won 90 percent of the Black vote across the country. Harris will likely need the similar near-unanimous support from African-American voters — who are indispensable members of the Democratic base, generally speaking — to win this election. A new NBC News poll shows that young voters and Black voters, in particular, have low levels of interest and engagement with the 2024 election. Lack of interest among those groups appears to be at its lowest level in 20 years.
Related
A New York Times report published earlier this month adds further context to this electoral problem:
Democrats have been banking on a tidal wave of support from Black voters, drawn by the chance to elect the first Black female president and by revulsion toward former President Donald J. Trump, whose questioning of Ms. Harris’s racial identity, comments on “Black jobs” and demonizing of Haitian immigrants pushed his long history of racist attacks to the forefront of the campaign.
Ms. Harris is no doubt on track to win an overwhelming majority of Black voters, but Mr. Trump appears to be chipping away broadly at a longstanding Democratic advantage. His campaign has relied on targeted advertising and sporadic outreach events to court African American voters — especially Black men — and has seen an uptick in support. About 15 percent of Black likely voters said they planned to vote for the former president, according to the new poll, a six-point increase from four years ago.
Donald Trump continues to experience what appear to be worsening challenges with his speaking, thinking and overall behavior, although his appeal is largely predicated on the notion that he is a vibrant and energetic personality, even at age 78. (If Trump takes office and serves a full term, he would become the oldest president in American history, surpassing the 81-year-old Biden.)
At a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday, Trump’s erratic and frequently offensive behavior — which is a principal factor in the limitless adulation of his followers — reached a new low, even by his standards. Historian Heather Cox Richardson described it in her daily political newsletter, beginning with Trump's "long, meandering story" about golf legend Arnold Palmer "that ended with praise for Palmer's ... anatomy":
He went on to call Vice President Kamala Harris — whose name he deliberately mispronounced — “a s**t vice president. The worst. You’re the worst vice president. Kamala, you’re fired. Get the hell out of here, you’re fired. Get out of here. Get the hell out of here, Kamala.”
As Trump’s remarks got weirder and weirder, the Fox News Channel cut away and instead showed Harris being cheered at a packed, exuberant, super-charged rally in Georgia.
Donald Trump has repeatedly implied or hinted at his desire to be America’s first dictator, and is escalating that rhetoric. Last week, he suggested, not for the first time, that he might invoke the Alien and Sedition Acts to crush “the left” and other “enemies," by using the military if necessary. By implication, those “enemies” include virtually anyone who opposes Trump and his MAGA movement.
M. Steven Fish is a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. He has appeared on BBC, CNN and other major networks, and has published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Foreign Policy and elsewhere. His new book is “Comeback: Routing Trumpism, Reclaiming the Nation, and Restoring Democracy's Edge.”
In the second part of my conversation with Fish, he argues that Harris' "joyful warrior" campaign strategy can be combined with an aggressive,........