Last night Kamala Harris gave one of the best acceptance speeches I've ever heard from the presidential pick of the Democratic National Convention. I've watched them all since the 1960s, I'm pretty sure.
Harris was virtually flawless in both the substance and delivery of her speech. And I've added "virtually" not because I found anything not to like in what she said, just because no one is perfect.
If you haven't seen it, do yourself a favor and watch the 38 minute speech.
Which is relatively short by acceptance speech standards, way shorter than Trump's. NPR reports that Harris' speech was the 12th-shortest in modern history, while Trump's 2024 speech was the longest at 92 minutes. Trump also gave the second and third longest speeches, showing that he just doesn't know when he should shut the fuck up.
Speaking of "fuck," Nate Silver, the accomplished political analyst who holds forth on his Silver Bulletin web site and substack posts, which I gladly pay $10 a month to get, noted in a post today ("Kamala Harris is not going back to the failed politics of 2016") that the word Harris smiled about in her speech indeed was fuck.
This is a woman who doesn’t have time to fuck around. Indeed, the bio clip that introduced Harris included a [bleeped] f-bomb, from a speech Harris gave in May where she recalled her mother saying sometimes you “need to kick that fucking door down.”
That set the tone for the rest of the speech. It was competitive — something out of the River, not the Village. It was patriotic – at times, aggressively so. Harris spoke approvingly about how America has the “most lethal fighting force in the world”. Lethal! Not usually a word you’d expect to hear in a convention speech! A precise and deliberate choice, not triangulated and focus-grouped like Clinton.
Silver is a championship poker player who doesn't mince words when he thinks a politician isn't playing straight with the public. His career is founded on analyzing probabilities and making forecasts, predictions if you like, though Silver doesn't use that term, based on facts rather than fantasy.
So his highly positive take on Harris's acceptance speech means a lot to me. It fits with my own impression of the speech, but I'm not capable of the sort of analysis that Silver can come up with.
I didn’t watch Kamala Harris’s convention speech live last night due to a book tourevent that ran late, instead coming back to my hotel after a quick drink with my cousins to view the replay and take notes with a relatively fresh pair of eyes. I’ve found that watching speeches after everyone else has gone to bed is sometimes helpful in avoiding groupthink. For instance, I thought Joe Biden’s State of the Union address this year was quite mediocre and that he was being graded on an extremely generous curve by the media.
This time, I’m more aligned with the generally favorable pundit buzz for Harris’s speech, but if anything I don’t think it goes far enough. I thought this was an excellentspeech, delivered by someone who’s become a pretty good — maybe even very good — politician. As friend-of-the-newsletter Matt Glassman reminds us, the difference between a good speech and an excellent speech may not mean that much in terms of immediate impact in the polls. But it suggested a strategically smart campaign, one that really wants to win and has a plan that it can execute with quite a bit of precision.
...This was a remarkable speech, in the sense of being both very good and unusual. It’s not the color-by-numbers approach you usually get at a convention.
Look, I don't know what (if any) bounce Harris is going to get out of it in the polls. We’ll wait and see what the model says. But here’s an optimistic framing for Democrats that I find somewhat credible. Hillary Clinton was an awful candidate. And Hillary Clinton almost beat Donald Trump, coming 80,000 votes away in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. Kamala Harris is a much better politician. Surely she can get over the bar?
Unfortunately for Democrats, it’s not quite that simple, because Trump is actually quite a bit more popular than he was in 2016 so the bar is higher. But instead of Clinton’s complacency, Democrats have a candidate who knows she has a fight on her hands, and the instincts to go for the jugular.
Silver also commented in a separate post on the likely effect of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dropping out of the presidential race today as an independent candidate and endorsing Donald Trump. As would be expected, Silver analyzed this in a dispassionate manner that makes a lot of sense. In short, probably this won't make a big difference in the Harris-Trump battle for votes.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was never going to be my cup of tea, but as someone who would like to see more electoral competition, I always root for independent candidates to at least not embarrass themselves. But from dead bears to brain worms, RFK Jr. has pretty clearly failed that test.
And whatever slim chances Kennedy had of a Ross Perot-like rise in the polls was further undermined when Democrats smartly replaced Joe Biden with Kamala Harris, reducing the number of pox-on-both-houses voters. Third-party candidates often lose steam as the election approaches, but Kennedy’s trajectory has been particularly ignominious. In three-way polls against Biden and Trump, he initially polled at 10 or 11 percent, then gradually faded to 8 (save for a bounce just after Biden’s awful debate). In the Trump-Harris matchup, though, he’s dropped to about 4 percent.
....In polls that test the ballot both with and without RFK, which our model diligently tracks as part of the adjustment it makes for his presence on the ballot, we find Trump losing an average of 3.0 points when Kennedy is included, and Harris losing 2.4 points. In other words, he takes more of his votes than Trump (about 55 percent) than Harris (45 percent).
...So that means RFK dropping out will swing the polling averages by 0.6 points toward Trump?
I’m glad you were paying attention — 3.0 less 2.4 is a net of 0.6 points toward Trump. However, the answer isn’t quite that simple, and the impact will probably be less.
One reason is that those figures represent an average of all Harris-Trump-Kennedy polls in our database — but RFK was previously polling higher than he was now. Given that he has just 4 percent of the vote now, having Trump regain 55 percent of those votes would only make a net difference of 0.4 points instead.
And there are some other complications. One is that polls that include RFK Jr. usually also include other third-party candidates, like Jill Stein and the Libertarian Chase Oliver. Some of RFK’s votes would probably go to those candidates instead, rather than one of the major party candidates.
...How much would an RFK endorsement of Trump swing the numbers?
So far, everything I’ve written here doesn’t account for the fact that Kennedy is not only potentially dropping out but also possibly endorsing Trump. Polymarket now shows Trump as a 53/47 favorite, basically the opposite of what our model does. That’s not too big a difference — both models and markets are basically saying the race is 50/50 — but it’s possible that this reflects a belief from traders that an RFK endorsement could be moderately impactful.
That isn’t a crazy theories by any means, but I’m a little bit skeptical. One reason is because RFK’s campaign is already a lost cause, so the 4 percent of voters still saying they’d choose him aren’t doing so strategically but mostly because they dislike both Harris and Trump. In other words, the remaining RFK voters have already rejected Trump in some sense — and rejected Harris — and they might sit out the election or pick a different third-party candidate rather than migrating to Trump.
Also, the endorsement, especially if there were some sort of quid pro quo, might make RFK look like he sold out his principles and could be regarded suspiciously by these voters, who are a suspicious lot to begin with. Look, I’m sure there are some voters who would follow the endorsement — it’s a big country — but I’m not sure it would be as linear as Trump might be hoping.
Overall, this is a net downside risk factor for Harris, and a reason to think our model slightly overrates her chances, but it’s unlikely to be a game changer.
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