As the Democratic National Convention coronates a nominee unchosen by a single one of the party’s voters, friends on the right need to keep in mind one admonition: Don’t panic. The plain reality is that conservatives still have the advantage heading toward November, and the data and polling out this week all point toward that victory.
This may seem counterintuitive or even irrational at this very moment — and it may seem more so next week, when the usual post-convention bounce numbers come in for the Harris ticket. Those numbers are not irrelevant — especially as the DNC ends, and that bounce happens, just as early and mail-in balloting begins in various states — but we need to keep in mind that they are transient and do not override fundamentals. Those fundamentals remain essentially unchanged since the coerced departure of Joe Biden from the race, and they are unlikely to change by Nov. 5th.
Among those fundamentals is the simple fact that a supermajority of Americans feels the country is on the wrong track. As of this writing, the RealClearPolitics average shows that nearly two out of three Americans believe it. In the Biden-Harris regime, these numbers dropped significantly with the Afghanistan defeat in summer 2021 and never really recovered. It’s true that this datum has mostly been in negative territory for more than a decade, but incumbencies that prevail are able to generate upward movement in those numbers. The leftist regime did it in 2012, incepting a near-twenty-point ascent in right-track sentiment across the year prior to the Obama reelection, and managing only a ten-point rise prior to the 2016 Clinton defeat. In this light, the static numbers are properly worrying for the Harris campaign, as the runway for mass shifts in voter sentiment is effectively gone.
Another fundamental is the persistence of Kamala Harris’s favorability ratings in the negative — again, RCP’s average has her underwater by about four points. But that figure massively understates the depth of her unpopularity, which is near-catastrophic absent the prop of continuous media cheerleading. Prior to the massive regime-media propaganda campaign on her behalf across the past thirty days, she was consistently about twenty points into the red. This is her natural equilibrium, toward which her numbers will inevitably trend. Absent strenuous and coordinated efforts at narrative revision, she is deeply disliked, and — a reality absent in most media coverage — one of the most inept retail politicians of our era. In other words, four points under is the best they can do for her. An apologist might respond that President Trump’s favorability is also underwater — at about eight points to her four — but this actually demonstrates his strength. She has had a relentlessly positive regime-media campaign for her; he has had a relentlessly negative regime-media campaign against him. Her state without media intervention appears to be about twenty points below; his with that intervention appears to be about ten. What he’d achieve without that thumb on the scale is likely prodigious, which is why they press it down hard.
To put it in a phrase: He is buoyant, and she will sink.
The final fundamental of note is the profound unpopularity of the Biden-Harris Administration, which has seen exceptional hardships for Americans, and to which the Democratic nominee is now heir. The approval number for this White House has been negative since the last C-17 departed from Kabul, and it now languishes downward in the fifteen- to twenty-points range. Harris owns much of that record — especially but not only the disastrous border — and the extent to which it is tied to her is the extent to which her prospects will diminish.
The hour is late, and there simply isn’t time for either campaign to change these three fundamentals in the coming ten weeks. The perceived direction of the country, the perception of Kamala Harris and the perception of the White House in which she serves are all effectively baked in. That’s why her major chance is to crank up the apparatus of regime narrative to maximum, with media and allies confecting sentiment as rapidly as possible. There’s an argument that it has worked, although this is probably overstated: Harris likely isn’t assembling a new coalition nearly as much as she is recalling back the elements of the Democratic base that fell away as Joe Biden visibly declined. That effort cannot go full bore indefinitely. It will peak next week with the convention bounce — and then the long autumn will set in, and a probable regression to the mean.
That regression carries with it consequences that redound almost entirely against the Democratic nominee. It’s a hard map for her: of the three contested Great Lakes states in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, she must win all three. The only alternative is swapping Wisconsin for Arizona, an unlikely prospect. Everywhere else we see probable Trump wins, made more likely by his traditional underperformance in polls versus actual balloting. This is not to suggest complacency among conservatives: but it is to note that the win is in sight, even now. What remains is to earn it.
Brooke Leslie Rollins is the President & CEO of the America First Policy Institute and former Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.
