The "undecided" or "waivering" voters have no idea what's going on and do not understand cause and effect. Consider this from the latest NYT polls showing an essential tie in the key Northern battleground states:
The polling results fit a recurring theme with voters in battleground states: Many tend to believe that Mr. Trump’s time in office helped people like them, and they worry that Ms. Harris’s policies would hurt people like them.
For these voters, economic correlation is causation: if the economy was good under Trump, Trump caused it. In fact, Trump's policies were not good for people of average income, but to know that you'd have to know something about his actual policies (e.g., his tax cuts). (Interestingly, voters give Trump a pass on the pandemic: they know he didn't cause that. On the other hand, they apparently don't know how badly he handled it, but, again, that would require actually paying attention to his malign influence on health policy.) (Achen and Bartels in Democracy for Realists discuss various cases in which correlation is treated as causation by voters, including some pretty bizarre ones.)
Conversely, because substantial inflation occurred under Biden, he caused it: correlation is causation and thus responsibility. The role of the pandemic and the disruption in supply chains in producing inflation is a consideration unavailable to the ignorant.
The problem for Harris is that every time voters walk into the supermarket they are reminded that prices of most stuff they buy is 15-20% higher than under Trump. (I'm not an especially alert shopper, but even I am astonished at times.) As the NYT also reports, "As for the issues that matter most to swing voters, pocketbook economics is No. 1 by far." There's just no way around that, and it may be enough to return the monster child to office. Harris's pitches to the prudent wing of the capitalist class won't change this.
The NYT has been running a series of articles and interviews with "ordinary" voters, and as a sociological document of sort they are quite interesting, although they repeatedly confirm the spectacular level of confusion among voters. Here, for example is a lobster fisherman in Maine:
He believes in climate change, isn’t worried about immigration and considers the former president to be something you won’t hear Jessica Fletcher say in reruns of “Murder, She Wrote.” But it is likely, at this point, that he’ll cast his vote for Mr. Trump. “I like Trump’s decisions on stuff that he did,” Mr. Black told me. His two sternmen are, at this point, inclined to do the same, citing the rise in gas prices and the high cost of housing.
Did Biden cause the high price of gas and housing? Did Trump cause lower prices? The answers to both are obviously 'no.' But it doesn't matter. In the world of magical thinking in which these voters live, correlation is causation
I enjoy Thomas Edsall's well-informed columns at the NYT, but on the "mystery" of why Trump is doing so well, he's off-the-mark. It would be a mystery, of course, if most educated voters with leisure time to follow politics were supporting him, since, after all, as Edsall writes, "The litany of Trump’s liabilities is well known to the American electorate. His mendacity, duplicity, depravity, hypocrisy and venality are irrevocably imprinted on the psyches of American voters." The problem is that it's just false that this litany is "imprinted on the psyches of American voters" as distinct from journalists and those with the time to follow Trump's antics and misconduct. No doubt Edsall identifies other factors that help Trump, although disentangling, "racial resentment" from economic distress is far more complex than these studies seem to realize.
Given how close the polls are, and given their historic inability to measure Trump support in particular, I'm not optimistic about the outcome. Maybe the abortion referenda in states like Arizona and Nevada will tilt the balance to Harris in those states, but even then, it won't matter if she can't prevail in Pennsylvania. On top of the sheer horror of the monster child returning to the White House--this time with well-prepared fascist henchmen at his disposal--November 5 and its aftermath are also almost certain to be a horror of its own, with the results unknown for days, and Trump riling up his minions. There will be much ugliness, even if he wins in the end; and if he loses, that ugliness will continue into January.
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