Did Trump Lose the Election On Sunday?
Did Trump Lose the Election On Sunday?
The disastrous "racist carnival"
Pretty much nothing could motivate the vast majority of voters — whether they support Donald Trump or Kamala Harris — to change their minds now. America is that polarized and feelings are that intense just over a week before Election Day.
But if we assume that the race will come down to razor thin margins in seven battleground states, then anything that moves even a half percent of voters in one of those states could tip the race. And on Sunday, Trump risked angering crucial swing voters in several key states with what Politico’s Adam Wren dubbed a “racist carnival” at New York’s Madison Square Garden.
You know things were bad for Trump when aide Stephen Miller proclaiming that “America is for Americans and Americans only,” wasn’t close to the worst moment of the event.
Among the lowlights: a friend of Trump’s called Harris the “antichrist,” while another speaker implied that the vice president had “pimp handlers.” To no one’s surprise, conservative media host Tucker Carlson got in on the act, claiming that Harris was gunning to be ‘“the first Samoan-Malaysian, low IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected president.’”
Former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani declared that Palestinians were “taught to kill us at two years old,” a continuation of his now four year long streak of making things worse for Trump on a regular basis. This remark could damage the former president’s efforts to court Muslim and Palestinian Americans in Michigan, who are angry at Harris over her support for Israel.
But Giuliani’s unhelpful bigoted buffoonery was upstaged by the loser of the day (besides Trump). Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who is far more of a household name on Monday morning than he was 24 hours earlier, managed to include multiple horrifically racist “jokes” in his act. Most significantly, he quipped, “there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. Yeah. I think it’s called Puerto Rico.”
He also joked that Latinos loved making babies. How did he know this? “There’s no pulling out. They don’t do that. They come inside. Just like they did to our country.”
The Puerto Rico remark really couldn't have been worse for the Trump campaign, given that it has heavily courted Latino voters, especially in the critical swing states of Nevada, Arizona, and Pennsylvania. The latter happens to be home to roughly 500,000 Puerto Ricans, including some 300,000 voters. Hinchcliffe’s joke came on the same day Harris visited a Puerto Rican restaurant in Philadelphia and unveiled a plan for aiding the island.
In the hours after Hinchcliffe went viral for all of the wrong reasons, a parade of Puerto Rican stars from music and Hollywood either shared Harris’s plan for the island, Hinchcliffe’s joke, or both on social media. They included the singer and rapper Bad Bunny, who might well be the celebrity with the greatest potential to influence the election given his popularity with young Latino men — a group with whom Harris is struggling. The singer confirmed his support for the vice president later on Sunday, and one has to imagine that her campaign will be begging him to do some sort of event in Pennsylvania before Election Day.
Anyone who wanted to know how bad Hinchcliffe’s act was for Republicans only needed to see the parade of Florida Republicans who rushed to condemn it, worried it might hurt their electoral prospects. Even the Trump campaign distanced itself from the Puerto Rico comment, only to have this effort undermined by Trump’s eldest son Donald Jr., who retweeted a swipe Hinchcliffe took at Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Tim Walz for ripping his racism.
Will the ugliness of Sunday hurt Trump? In the pre-Trump era, such a spectacle almost certainly would’ve damaged the party responsible for it. But Trump has proved to be teflon when it comes to cringeworthy comments and racism, and for many voters, this kind of bigotry from Trump and his allies is something they expect and either support or at least tolerate.
Yet, it’s not impossible given how close we are to Election Day, that the comments offend Palestinians and Muslims in Michigan and Puerto Ricans in Pennsylvania, which could well cost Trump the election. The timing is especially significant, given that throughout his political career Trump tends to experience temporary dips after his worst moments, only to rebound after a few weeks. With Election Day only nine days away, however, he doesn’t have time for such a dip.
Additionally, Trump may be more susceptible this time because the voters most likely to be offended are Trump curious voters — those who have never voted Republican but are disillusioned and have reasons to consider supporting the former president. If they’re still undecided or wavering, such racism could be enough to dissuade them from taking a leap, especially given that many of their friends and family likely support Harris…
Two polls on Sunday that won’t get much attention were also good for Harris — despite showing her losing states significantly. In both Alaska and South Carolina her deficit in the polls is roughly the same as the margin by which Joe Biden lost the states in 2020. This is yet another piece of evidence that unless the polls are wrong, the environment in 2024 isn’t appreciably different than it was 2020, despite a narrative that Trump is gaining momentum and is in better shape than he was four years ago.
Now, it’s possible that a methodology adopted by many pollsters to try to avoid the mistakes of 2016 and 2020 is making polls look more like 2020’s final results. Yet, this change (weighting by recalled vote) is probably inflating Trump’s support, if it’s skewing the polls in either direction.
More broadly, my attitude on polling error is simple: we can’t assume there is a polling error, because if there is one, it could go in either direction, and we have no real evidence as of yet that the polls are wrong. So while it’s important to note that there is a wide range of possible outcomes depending on the accuracy of the polls, they are important evidence of what’s happening and we ought to take them at face value, while also using other information and reporting to contextualize them and form conclusions about the state of the race.