This conversation will make you smarter about 2024

A chat with Damon Linker about where we are -- and where we're going

We are 50 days out from the 2024 election. So, where are we?

I put that question — and lots of others — to my friend Damon Linker. Damon, who writes the terrific “Notes from the Middleground” Substack, is, to my mind, one of the most intellectually honest people thinking and writing about our current political moment.

Damon tells it like it is — not how he wants it to be or how he thinks will get him more subscribers. Speaking of subscribers, if you don’t subscribe to “Notes from the Middleground,” you absolutely should.

And if this sort of content is up your alley, I hope you consider subscribing to this newsletter as well.

My conversation with Damon — conducted via email and lightly edited for clarity and flow — is below. One note: This conversation was conducted entirely before the 2nd assassination attempt against Donald Trump.

CHRIS: The last time we talked — ok, emailed — you said that you thought that the country was going to elect Donald Trump.

Of course that was 10 days after Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance — and Democrats were still insisting he didn’t need to drop out of the race and that he was the strongest possible candidate for them.

So….stuff has changed. HA.

I wanted to start by asking you whether you’ve revised your thought on a narrow Trump win given that Democrats have a new nominee and one who is running even with Trump.  If so, why? If not, why not?

DAMON: I’d have guessed we did our last discussion more recently than that, but we’ve had like eight major political news events since then, so it only feels like hardly any time has passed. In any case, happy to be back for this.

You’re right that I thought Trump would win. That conviction only got stronger as the days dragged into weeks and Biden refused to step aside. By the time we got to the eve of his withdrawal, I was fairly certain Trump would win his highest popular vote tally ever—certainly a plurality, and possibly even a majority, while easily sweeping the Electoral College. That was not only because of Biden’s atrocious debate performance, but also because the press was getting stuck in a feedback loop, where the only political story in the country was WHY IS BIDEN NOT QUITTING WHEN EVERYONE KNOWS HE CAN’T WIN AND WANTS HIM TO GO? That would have become a self-fulfilling prophecy, with the Biden campaign incapable of actually waging a campaign, even aside from the candidate’s incapacity to perform the normal functions of a presidential candidate due to age-based incapacity. 

But very quickly after he did step aside, we got the massive vibe shift, as demoralized Democrats became ecstatic that they now had a young, charismatic, verbally articulate woman of color to rally around. Instead of having to force themselves to show up dutifully on Election Day (which plenty wouldn’t have done), they were suddenly unburdened by what had been. And the result was a massive reset of the polls and expectations.

So where are we now? If we had a less quirky electoral system—one in which we elected the head of executive branch on the basis of a straightforward nationwide majority vote, I’d be fairly certain Kamala Harris would win, and probably by a comfortable margin. But of course that isn’t the electoral system we have. Instead, we have the Electoral College—and as everyone knows, the Electoral College very strongly favors the Republican Party in this era. We don’t know if it would be quite so lopsidedly biased against the Democrats with another Republican. But Trump manages to attract and repel just the right combination of voters to maximize that bias. Joe Biden won the popular vote by about 7 million votes (or 4.5 percentage points) in 2020 and yet still came within about 43,000 votes in 3 to 4 states of losing. If that degree of bias happens again, Harris will need to win by roughly as big of a margin this time as Biden did last time. That’s hard!

That’s why, in my view, the race right now is a dead heat heading toward a photo-finish-style result in which the outcome could go either way, even though the three most professional polling aggregators show Harris leading by between 1.5 and 2.8 points. Again, Biden finished 4.5 points ahead of Trump and nearly lost. That puts Harris a couple of points behind where Biden ended up—and so therefore losing narrowly, albeit with three conditionals: if the race were held today; if the Electoral College bias works out identically this time; and if the polls are accurate.

I’ve already talked about the Electoral College. But the accuracy of the polls is something else the Democrats have to worry about. Biden won by 4.5 points in 2020, but the final polling aggregation at Five Thirty Eight on Election Day had him leading by 8.4 points. Biden came in 0.5 points below where the polls predicted he would, but Trump came in 3.4 points above his polling level. The polls in 2016 similarly underestimated him. 

The question, then, is: Have the polls been fixed so that they’re now accurately measuring Trump’s support? If so, then Harris is ahead by roughly 1.5 to 2.8 points. But what if the polling error hasn’t been corrected? If that’s the case, the race could be even tighter. Or Trump might even be a little ahead. Though of course it’s also possible pollsters overcompensated for past inaccuracy and are now under-measuring Harris’ support and/or inflating Trump’s. We just don’t know. 

Put it all together and I’ll say that I think the race is tied right now—almost absurdly close. (The swing state polls, all of which are within or nearly within the margin of error, certainly confirm this.) It really could go either way. Neither outcome would surprise me.  

CHRIS: The point on polling error (or not) is critical. 

I have been fixated that Trump over-performed national polling averages in 2016 and 2020.  You might think after 2016 the polling industry adjusted appropriately for the Trump bump. But no.  In fact, Trump over-performed national polling averages by MORE in 2020 than he did in 2016. 

By the by, I thought this breakdown on whether the polls are wrong again by Patrick Ruffini was terrific.

And just so I am on the record, I tend to see the race as slightly leaning toward Harris at the moment — although if I were her campaign I would be very very focused on Pennsylvania. I think that’s the one state where Joe Biden (pre-June-debate version) would have been a better fit as a candidate than Harris is.  And, it also happens to be the state she needs more than any other if she wants to win.

I want to pivot just slightly from that though. We have talked ad nauseam about Trump over the last decade.  Harris has only been the Democratic nominee for two months. So I want to spend some time on her.

My first question: How the hell do you explain her going from an unpopular vice president to a Democratic phenomenon as the party’s nominee— all in the space of a few weeks?  I am (still) amazed by it.

DAMON: If you focus on her unpopularity as vice president, I agree that Harris' surge in popularity now is hard to understand. This is how I make sense of it: How many Americans hear even one story a year about what any vice president is doing? I’d say it’s barely more than the readership of the top newspapers, websites, and magazines, and viewers/listeners of cable news and talk radio. In the scheme of the country, that’s not very many people. For most Americans, any VP is invisible, with popularity roughly tracking with the president’s approval. You can see this with Kamala Harris: She started above water, with Biden; she sunk into negative approval territory within a month of Biden; and then she followed him slowly down over the next three years, reaching new lows within a few days or weeks of him along the way. 

Once she launched her independent campaign, she became her own person — and millions of demoralized Democrats were free to project their political hopes and desires onto her. I don’t want to take away from her political accomplishment: She’s been very good in public events. Her ad campaign has been smart. Her VP choice has worked out well. (We can debate whether PA Gov. Josh Shapiro would have been a smarter pick, as we both thought before she tapped MN Gov. Tim Walz, given the crucial importance of Pennsylvania.) Her pivot toward the moderate middle has been deftly handled and powerfully reinforced by the tone and message of the DNC and echoed in the debate last week. Overall, she’s been running a solid, even impressive, campaign so far. 

But I also think we can see a pretty consistent track record over the past four presidential cycles: Barack Obama won 52.9 percent of the nationwide popular vote. He was re-elected with 51.1 percent. Hillary Clinton lost with 48.2 percent. And Joe Biden won with 51.3 percent. That’s a range of less than 5 points (actually just 4.7). I think it’s highly likely Harris will win something in that range as well — and likely that any competent, appealing candidate would do the same. The country is very deeply but also very closely divided. Indeed, if the polls are to be believed, the divide is narrower than ever this cycle, with polls often showing the candidates within the margin of error of each other, both nationally and in the seven swing states. What that means is that as long as the Democratic nominee isn’t incapable of forming coherent sentences, defending policy commitments, and criticizing his or her opponent, that nominee will fall within that < 5-point range of national support. That’s the percentage of the country ready to vote for a Democrat for president. As I discussed last time, in a simple nationwide majoritarian electoral system, that would be enough to win decisively. But the Electoral College makes it more uncertain. 

To put the point in slightly different terms, Harris is benefitting from being the Generic Democrat of the moment. That’s mainly what we’ve been seeing: between 48.2 and 52.9 percent of the country is excited to cast their vote for a Democrat against an opponent they despise. 

I don’t want to downplay too much the good job Harris is doing. I just think all the fretting we saw from Democrats (and sometimes myself) about what a weak candidate Harris would be was mostly misplaced. I mean, sure, if she’d renewed her support for banning fracking and the other things she ill-advisedly championed in her ill-conceived primary campaign of 2019-2020, that would have made her maximally vulnerable to Republican attacks. But was it ever likely she would run as a leftist? I doubt it. In general, I think we pundits might underplay the structural dimension of politics, especially when it comes to public opinion. Put a fresh face up there to play the part of a Generic Democrat in the post-George W. Bush 21st century, and he or she will win something within a couple of points of 50 percent of the nationwide popular vote.

This isn’t written in stone. It will be true until it no longer is. But looking at the polls right now, I see no evidence we’re about to break into a new era of politics in early November.

CHRIS: I am going to send this last response of yours to the next person emails me and says something like “How can the race be THIS close????” (They are almost always Democrats who don’t understand how Trump can be in range of winning.)

The way I usually explain where we are as a country goes like this: We could nominate my coffee cup as the Republican nominee and my headphones as the Democratic nominee and each of them would, almost immediately, be at 46% of the vote. That’s how tribal things have become.  (My headphones and my coffee cup were the first two things on my desk I saw as I was typing!)

One other stat that reinforces the point: There were 69 Senate races on the ballot in 2016 and 2020. In 68 of them, the winner was the candidate whose presidential nominee carried the state.  The lone exception? Susan Collins in Maine.

It’s just who we are — or at least who we have become.

I know I said I didn’t want to talk too much about Trump. But I do want to pick your brain on him for a second — and specifically his support.  Lots of Democrats like to lump all Trump people together as dumb and racist — or both.  I disagree — judging from conversations I have had with people backing Trump who are neither dumb nor racist.

How do you split up the pie of Trump support?  

DAMON: Good, and tough, question about Trump. Here’s how I eyeball it (with that metaphor serving to indicate that these are rough estimates):

I’d say there are three broad categories of Trump voters: Trump True Believers; Pragmatic Trumpians; and Reluctant (Negative) Trump Voters.

The True Believers are roughly 50 percent of the Republican electorate. These are the roughly 50 percent who supported Trump in the months leading up to the 2024 Republican primaries, when there were a range of normie and populist options available to voters. These were the people who supported Trump throughout his presidency, even when he was at his least popular, throughout 2017, when his overall approval rating sank to 36-37 percent for months at a time. These are the people who respond to his myriad legal troubles by assuming his innocence and the malign intentions of prosecutors at the federal, state, and local levels. These are the people who would stick with Trump if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue in New York City. Many of these voters are conservative white evangelical Christians, many did not graduate from college, most live in rural and exurban parts of the country. 

The Pragmatic Trumpians are roughly 30 percent of the Republican electorate. These people find Trump amusing but are also a little embarrassed by him, but they respect his status as a prominent businessman and think he’ll be good for business, as he was (they think) during his first term as president. He’ll cut taxes and regulations, he’ll appoint conservative judges, he’ll avoid getting into costly wars. He’s a normal Republican, in other words, except that he speaks in a downmarket way to reach more voters. They don’t love Trump, but they’re fine with voting for him. They just wish he’d pipe down, “tweet less” (as some put it during his first term), and get on with the business of making the U.S. good for business. These voters tend to be upper-class or wealthy, tend to have college degrees, run small businesses, or work as middle-managers in the corporate, finance, and banking sectors. I’d also put Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and venture capital types in this bucket.

The Reluctant (Negative) Trump Voters are roughly the 20 percent of the party who continued to vote for Nikki Haley even after she had dropped out of the primaries. They overlap ideologically with the Pragmatists on economic policy, but they care much more about foreign policy and American presidents committing the nation to high moral purposes. These folks are the people deeply attached to Reaganite rhetoric about America as a city on a hill, a beacon freedom to the nations. Whereas the pragmatists are open to America playing a smaller role in the world, the Reluctants see that as a betrayal of our national mission. They can’t stand Trump’s baseness and coarseness and vulgarity. They’d love to vote for just about any other Republican. But there’s one thing they hate even more than Trump — and that’s the thought of voting for a Democrat. When the Trump campaign attacks Democrats, they activate negative partisanship, and this otherwise unreliable faction is receptive to that message. It’s why we’ll hear a lot of that negativity in the final week of the campaign heading into Election Day — to keep these voters from either staying home, demoralized, or casting reluctant ballots for Harris. The idea is to get them to cast reluctant ballots for Trump. If Trump loses, it will be, in part, because people in this bucket — most of whom have college degrees, some of whom have advanced/professional degrees, and most of whom live in suburbs — were persuaded to hold their noses and vote for Harris, hoping she governs the way she’s been campaigning, or to stay home in disgust at the prospect of electing Trump to the presidency again. 

That’s roughly how I see it anyway.

CHRIS: I love this. So succinct. And, I think, right.

And it leads me to this: So 50% of your groupings are NON “True Believers.” They are reluctantly for Trump — some more so than others.

So, what happens to these voters — who are roughly half of the Republican Party! — if he loses in November? I mean, I know he will never concede and he will insist it was stolen and the 50% of “True Believers” will, well, believe that.  But that’s only half the party!

Does the other half look at the last 8 years and say “Yes, we won the White House in 2016 but we’ve now lost the White House twice more with Trump — and we lost our Senate and House majorities along the way too”?  Because that seems to me to be a compelling argument!

And yet, it didn’t work — or, if I am being honest, the argument didn’t even get made! — in the 2024 Republican primary.  Trump walked to victory!

So, would it change in 2025? Like, would the 50% rise up?  Or will they — still — be scared of the other 50%, which represents the base of the party? And how long can the Republican Party go on/ function with a split like this?

DAMON: The problem is that the Pragmatic Trumpians really are (for now) perfectly fine voting for him, so you end up with a situation like the one we saw in the GOP primaries this year: Fifty or so percent love and want Trump; the remainder would prefer someone else, but there are (inevitably) multiple options, so this non-Trump vote is split; and as soon as Trump starts winning primaries with his half of the party, the pragmatists begin coming on board without much of a fight. That’s how things played out this year. Trump won Iowa with 51 percent, and then New Hampshire with 54 percent, and then South Carolina with just under 60 percent. And then everyone else, aside from the Reluctant 20 percent who moved over to and then stuck with Haley, migrated to Trump. In almost every primary after that, Trump won at least two-thirds of the vote, and often around 80 percent, depending on the state and region of the country. (The real-estate mogul from Queens is most solidly popular in the Deep South.)

As long as the party gets divided up this way, Trump has a lock: Half want only him, and another 30 percent are fine with him. That’s 80 percent — not really a 50/50 split. 

Now, of course, if Trump loses yet again in November, it’s possible these shares will shift. It’s true that fewer people are showing up at his rallies, and plenty of people seem bored and are leaving early. The Trump Show is in its ninth season, and it’s not as fresh as it used to be. Plus, the man himself is showing signs of age. At the debate, he got tripped up at several points, unable to find the name of an official he wanted to invoke, with him falling back on absurd displays of hyperbole (the greatest, the worst, the most wonderful, a disaster). That’s only going to get worse as time goes on. The idea of the guy we all saw on stage this week sticking around for another four years to run yet again in 2028 just doesn’t seem plausible. That means something will change between now and then, with the GOP settling on a post-Trump alternative. 

Though as long as Trump himself is sentient, he will be in the role of kingmaker and kingslayer. That will narrow the list of possible successors, and probably keep it heavily loaded with moronic extremists — the kind of candidates Trump keeps endorsing in downballot races and who go on to lose. So, really, the GOP won’t truly be post-Trump until the man becomes incapacitated or dies. 

And at that point, who knows. Though I will venture a prediction that whatever happens to the post-Trump GOP, it won’t be returning to the Bush/McCain/Romney orientation that defined it between Reagan and Trump. That high-minded form of conservative ideology has partly migrated to the Democratic Party and partly gone into the wilderness in the GOP, where it’s represented by a modest minority of voters. Whatever comes after Trump will be right-populist in orientation. Whether that means Ron DeSantis or Tom Cotton or Mike Lee or Josh Hawley or Marco Rubio or (more likely) some person not currently on the political radar, it won’t be Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, or anyone else who’s taken a grand moral stand against Trump. I respect those people for having done this, but I’m a Democrat, not a Republican, and certainly not a median Republican — you know, the people who will actually be making the decision about who will take over the party after Trump.

CHRIS: Ok so I think I found a place where we disagree!

If I am reading you right, you think if Trump loses this November, he is done as a candidate. 

I disagree — mostly because Trump is Trump. He will never give up power voluntarily. And he can never admit to himself (or anyone else) that he has ever lost anything.  Which makes me think that he is likely to insist he won in 2024 (as he did in 2020) and just keep running (as he did the last four years).

And who stops him? Does Hawley or Rubio or any of those people actually decide that they will take him on directly and say his time has come and gone? Judging from the last nine years, it seems the answer to that is “no.”

Obviously if there is some obvious physical and or mental episode or decline, that could change. But I guess I feel like until Trump dies, he is going to be a candidate — and THE candidate for Republicans.

I’ll give the last thought to you….

DAMON: I agree it would be nice for us to find something on which we firmly disagree, just for the sake of keep things lively in our exchanges! But I’m not sure we’ve hit on it here. I think I’m merely assuming Trump’s cognitive decline will proceed at a somewhat faster rate than you seem to be saying. I agree Trump will never admit he lost — though unlike some, I don’t worry about that scenario all that much, because we’d be dealing with a Democratic administration handing off power to another Democratic administration. That’s less fraught than Trump having to step aside and hand things over to the other party, which is what made the 2020 transition so dangerous. I worry a bit about violence in the streets after a Trump loss in November. But there are limits to how much such unrest can accomplish from outside the halls of power. 

My assumption is that after the Biden-to-Harris transition is accomplished, Trump will continue to rant and rave about another stolen election. But one reason why he will have lost, in this scenario, is because he’s already a little off his game. My prediction is that this sense of his palpable decline will continue and accelerate through 2025 and beyond. 2028 is a long, long way away. Trump will be 82 by then and, I think, much less capable of holding his own at rallies, let alone in debates and press interviews. 

Then there’s the fact that public opinion does sometimes change. The fifty percent of Republican voters who love Trump—or at least a sizable portion of them—could stop giving him the benefit of the doubt. How many times can the guy claim to be the victim of election fraud before even his most loyal supporters begin asking, “When are you going to stop being overmatched by your enemies?” I imagine at least some of them beginning to think, “You know, if we keep voting for this guy, he’s going to keep being prevented from ascending to office, which means we’re going to keep losing, too. That doesn’t make sense.” 

So maybe this is one topic on which we do disagree. Or at least have somewhat different hunches about what the future will bring in the event of a Trump loss seven weeks from now.

As always, we shall see!