What to look out for in the post-Labor Day election campaign | WUWM 89.7 FM

For the first time in two months, the presidential elections have actually been decided.

But there are sure to be many more exciting surprises in store for us.

Here are five topics and questions to think about this fall:

1. Don’t stress about the surveys

This time of year, people who already know who they are going to vote for start to get nervous and start becoming amateur horse race observers.

Stop it.

There are polls, and for the most part they’re pretty good. NPR monitors them and even conducts its own polls to get a better sense of how people feel about the candidates, politics, policy and society. But all polls show two things:

1. Harris is doing better than Biden did before Biden dropped out of the race. She has gained between four and six points on average in swing state polls, giving her a boost in the seven major swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania (in the so-called Blue Wall). She has even gained support in the Sun Belt states of North Carolina and Georgia in the east and Arizona and Nevada in the west.
2. The race is very close and that is unlikely to change.

That’s all there is to know about the candidates’ poll numbers for now. No one knows for sure who will emerge victorious, the polls are not intended as predictions, and all have a margin of error of about 3 to 4 percentage points, meaning the results could actually be 3 or more percentage points lower or higher.

That’s a potential 7-8 percentage point swing in good polls. So when the results are this close, you have to realize that the game isn’t played on a computer screen, looking at poll aggregator sites or reading data geeks’ interpretations of crosstabs. It’s about activism, mobilization and, frankly, how Harris does – because opinions about Trump are pretty much set in stone.

2. Will Harris maintain her winning streak and remain stable, or will the dynamic change?

The Democratic Party Convention is over and with it Harris’ acceptance speech. This speech is a milestone in every presidential election campaign.

Harris passed an important, fundamental test last Thursday with her first interview since entering the race five weeks ago. So far, she’s had as good a start as she could have hoped. But up until the interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, almost everything she’d done had been heavily rehearsed.

Now that the induction period is over, Harris’s accomplishments and policy proposals are likely to come under greater scrutiny. The next big test will be the debate with Trump on September 10. Part of her job over the next two months will be to keep her base intact and motivated – and to appeal to the middle. So far, she’s succeeded.

Republicans have criticized Harris’ positions this campaign, which are at odds with her 2019 presidential campaign, when she tried to rally progressives around issues like fracking, immigration and more. She needs to figure out how best to explain her shift, which she began doing in her interview Thursday. We’ll see how clearly she talks about it in the debate.

Will these attacks hold up? That will become clearer a few weeks after the debate, when opinions have calmed down. But they would have a better chance of resonating with voters if she were not running against Trump, who has taken very different positions on many issues.

3. Who performs best in the debate(s)?

The first debate will likely draw a fairly large audience, probably one of the largest of the campaign and perhaps very consequential. Keep in mind that the debate between Trump and President Biden effectively ended Biden’s candidacy for re-election.

While the debate will bring increased scrutiny to Harris’ policy positions and proposals, it also poses significant risks for Trump.

Trump meandered in this first debate against Biden and said a flood of liesBut Biden’s poor performance overshadowed all of this, and Trump largely escaped criticism.

At Trump’s press conference in early August NPR found 162 lies or distortions in 64 minutesmore than two per minute. Harris, on the other hand, made a dozen statements during her 40-minute acceptance speech at the Democratic Party Convention which were either misleading or lacked context.

If Harris has a serious debate, the focus could be on Trump in a way he doesn’t want.

4. Who has the better direction?

The campaigns have already spent more than a billion dollars on ads and knocked on millions of doors to talk to people about who they might prefer and to convince them to vote for their candidate.

But now, after Labor Day, the focus is on mobilization. Early voting begins in a few weeks, and campaign teams will urge their most reliable voters to vote early to secure their support. Then they will focus on the moderately reliable voters and those who may be inclined toward them, trying to get them to cast their ballots by Election Day.

Democrats feel they have an advantage over the Trump team because part of the Republicans’ efforts to increase voter turnout outsourced to Turning Point USAa group with very limited experience or success in this area. Turning Point’s tactics had some professional Republicans The agents are irritable and nervous.

5. What issues motivate voters – or ultimately don’t?

Will views on the economy improve? Will abortion rights bring Democrats to the polls? Will immigration and crime help Republicans gain ground in the suburbs?

These are all valid and important questions, but some wonder how important the politics will really be, given that this race involves Trump, such a polarizing figure.

Biden likes to say, “Don’t compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the alternative.” This is certainly true of US politics, which is largely confronted with binary alternatives.

Even though Trump ran as an outsider in the 2016 election campaign, he has now been on the political stage for almost a decade – and he is 78 years old.

This election will probably come down to this:

Either Republicans will be able to capitalize on their economic and immigration advantages, or Harris will be able to inspire voters angry at Trump’s abortion and democracy issues and actually grab the flag of change despite being the incumbent vice president.

“What we don’t know about this election is whether these issues really matter,” said Jamal Simmons, a Democratic strategist who worked for Harris in the White House for a year. “What might be true is that this election is really about change or about business as usual. And if it’s an election of change, then Harris is the candidate of change and it’s going to be hard to dissuade people from that.”

Copyright: NPR